Only in Australia: The History, Politics, and Economics of Australian Exceptionalism Hardcover – 7 July 2016
by Coleman (Editor)
5.0 out of 5 stars 2 ratings
This edited volume is about the Australian difference and how Australia's economic and social policy has diverged from the approach of other countries.
Australia seems to be following a 'special path' of its own that it laid down more than a century ago. Australia's distinctive bent is manifested in
- a tightly regulated labour market;
- a heavy reliance on means testing and income taxation;
- a geographical centralization of political power combined with its dispersal amongst autonomous authorities, and
- electoral singularities such as compulsory and preferential voting.
In seeking to explain this Australian Exceptionalism, the book covers a diverse range of issues:
- the strength and weakness of religion,
- democratic and undemocratic tendencies,
- the poverty of public debate,
- the role of elites,
- the exploitation of Australian sports stars,
- the politics of railways,
- the backwardness of agriculture,
- deviation from the Westminster system,
- the original encounter between European and Aboriginal cultures, and
- the heavy taxation of tobacco.
Bringing together contributions from economists, economic historians, and political scientists, the volume seeks to understand why Australia is different.
It offers a range of explanations from the 'historical legacy', to material factors, historical chance, and personalities.
Review
This edited collection of papers by prominent, mostly conservative writers provides a lot of thought-provoking analysis of Australian exceptionalism and whether it was of its time in the past or is continuing. ― ANDREW PODGER, Economic Record
Review
This edited collection of papers by prominent, mostly conservative writers provides a lot of thought-provoking analysis of Australian exceptionalism and whether it was of its time in the past or is continuing. ― ANDREW PODGER, Economic Record
From the Publisher
William O. Coleman is a Reader in the School of Economics at The Australian National University. He has written extensively on monetary policy, political economy, and the contested position of economics in society.
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Product details
Publisher : Oxford University Press UK (7 July 2016)
Language : English
Hardcover : 320 pages
MHunt
5.0 out of 5 stars Insights into the uniqueness of the Australian characterReviewed in the United States on 27 July 2017
This was recommended to me by an Australian friend with whom I frequently talk about the challenge of Americans and Australians understanding each other. The book is academic in approach and it provides a wide and useful understanding the history that shapes the Australian psyche.
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Only in Australia. The History, Politics and Economics of Australian Exceptionalism.
June 2016
Edition: 1stPublisher: Oxford University PressEditor: William O. ColemanISBN: 978-0-19-875325-4
William ColemanWilliam Coleman
Research Interest Score
5.0
Abstract
This book is about the Australian difference. It is about how Australia in economic and social policy has diverged significantly from comparable countries. It is concerned to confront the defining contours of ‘Australian Exceptionalism’: the tight regulation labour markets; a heavy reliance on income taxation and means testing; the endurance of a cadaverous federation and a pervasive bureaucracy; and a readiness to resort to compulsion in contexts ranging from saving to voting. What makes Australia so different? This volume brings together economists, historians, and political scientists to canvass the explanation. In delving into the question, the book spans a wide range of issues: Australia’s simultaneously democratic and undemocratic tendencies; the poverty of her public debate amid a powerful media; the undertow of religion in a supposedly secular country; the unexpected role of her railways as a seedbed of political and administrative cultures; a puzzling laggardness in the development of her agricultural wealth; the regulation of Australian sport to the benefit – not its workers – but its management; as well as the original encounter between European and Aboriginal societies. The book suggests that the 'special path' that Australia has followed for over a century is the product of physical circumstances, historical accidents, fateful choices, and the unique personalities thrown up by a strange land.
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Aussie exceptionalism
Home » Commentary » Opinion » Aussie exceptionalism
Jeremy Sammut
September 3, 2016 · The Spectator
only in australia mapOnly in Australia: The History, Politics and Economics of Australian Exceptionalism, Edited by William O. Coleman, Oxford University Press, RRP $69.95.
It would have once been uncontroversial to suggest nations have characteristics that not only distinguish them from other countries, but that are also worth understanding — if not celebrating — especially by those who might wish to help guide those nations destinies along alternative paths.
But with the cultural aversion to all things ‘chauvinistic’, together with the post-modern turn towards deconstruction of all such ‘constructs’, discussion of national character has fallen out of favour. Interestingly, the unwillingness to treat the nation seriously as a social, economic, and political entity is shared across the political spectrum in Australia.
Many on the Right feel this way because they are alienated from many of the core values that constitute our nation’s defining — and left-leaning equalitarian and collectivist — characteristics. But in democratic countries, ideas about the nation set the parameters of public discourse, and the nation is thus the ultimate political reality.
For members of the Right to consider the nation an ‘imagined community’ in the pejorative sense of being fake is to simply wish away a whole host of political, economic, and social problems. Even worse is the tendency for the Right to cast a pessimistic eye over the nation’s established economic, social and political order, and decide it will be ever so.
Refreshingly free of these constraints and limitations, however, is the new collection of essays edited by the distinguished ANU economist William Coleman. Only in Australia: The History, Politics and Economics of Australian Exceptionalism seeks to describe, explain and analyse the set of distinctive values and characteristics that, for better or worse, set Australia’s national culture apart from other countries.
That said, I am not sure I agree with Coleman’s contentious proposition in the introductory chapter that Australia’s reliance on the state is unique compared to other Anglo-Sphere countries — the United States’ dependence on public debt and the United Kingdom’s immovable commitment to the National Health Service suggest otherwise.
However, the book offers much more than comparative national history. The better description is an exercise in scholarly pamphleteering of sorts.
Fair to say that virtually all the (all male) authors are ideologically disposed towards the Right, and would generally support policies that would free up markets, de-regulate industries, and reduce the size of the state.
Hence, many of the essays offer critiques of national policies that have deviated from those ideals, and are dominated by the antithetical precepts that determine the shape and substance of the nation’s most important institutional pillars. This includes, to note just three examples, the industrial relations system, the compulsory superannuation system, and our highly-centralised federation.
But as enlightening as each contribution dealing with a particular subject is, the heart of the book — and its overall thesis and contribution — lies in the more interpretative chapters, which together offer a general survey of Australian exceptionalism.
This includes the two essays on the topic of Australia’s ‘special path’ by Coleman; Henry Ergas’ typically penetrating chapter contrasting Alexis De Tocqueville on America and Keith Hancock on Australia; and J. R. Nethercote’s exploration of Australia’s ‘talent for bureaucracy’ — an ostensibly dry subject which, in these hands, is revealed as central to the process by which the core national economic and social policies have been entrenched in seeming perpetuity in the architecture of government.
But the lessons for those concerned about the future direction of the nation with respect to economic and social reform are less to do with the historical explanations — be they cultural or environmental — ventured for the origins of the nation’s special path. The real insights are yielded by the alternative account of Australian exceptionalism that is offered.
Acquiring these insights requires the book to be read against the tone of pessimism that tends to pervade the chapters. Perhaps this tone is inevitable when a group of Right-thinking writers come together to storm the barricades of Australia’s socialisme sans doctrines.
Not surprisingly, Only in Australia asks whether the era of reform in the 1980s and 1990s — which opened the Australian economy to the world and degraded the protectionist mindset and policies that had been the key to Australian social and economic exceptionalism since Federation — was merely a shining aberration. Not a sea-change in the national mood, but a “temporary and passing” phase before the “customary gods” resumed the “same old story”.
This conclusion is hard to argue with, given the state of national politics in 2016. Yet the book’s more constructive insight into our present malaise lies in pointing out that Australia’s exceptionalism does not simply lie in its essentially leftist characteristics, but is instead grounded in a kind of shrewd conservatism: “the good sense in obeying the reverberating edicts of past events until new events countermand.”
This alternative account of Australian exceptionalism presents a challenge to the Right and its ingrained pessimism. The challenge is to be vigilant and vigorous in the development of new ideas, so as to be ready when the proverbial ‘events’ beget opportunities for change and renewal. When the old ideas are found wanting, the hard thinking and preparation needs to be have been done beforehand so the new answers are at hand.
Hence one of the most telling chapters in the book is Phil Lewis’ account of the Howard government’s Work Choices fiasco, which explains why the reforms failed. The blame for this signal policy and political disaster is attributed not to the industrial relations system defaulting back to the status quo of a tightly-regulated labour market after a brief reformist interlude as if by fate, but to the fact the implementation of the revised system “was taken as act of faith with little reasoned analysis of the benefits to the economy, such as more jobs, higher productivity, and lower unemployment.”
In the 1960s, Donald Horne thought Australia was second-rate because it was run by second-rate people. In the twenty-first century, the danger is that we on the Right might convince ourselves that Australia’s performance on reform will always be second-rate because second-rate ideas have always, and will always, win out in the battle of ideas.
The “contrary foundation” of Australian exceptionalism outlined in Only in Australia disputes that self-defeating take. If properly interpreted as a call to create the right ideas for the right times, this account can serve as a source of optimism for future reform. But only if those on the Right can perceive its true significance — and shake off their own characteristically pessimistic belief that Australian economic, social, and political exceptionalism is immutable.
Dr Jeremy Sammut has a PhD in Australian History and is a Senior Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. Only In Australia will launched by Peter Costello in Sydney on 8 September.
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Australia’s Industrial Relations Singularity
Phil LEWIS
Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society
Research output: A Conference proceeding or a Chapter in Book › Chapter › peer-review
Abstract
This chapter deals with the perhaps most distinguishing feature of Australian exceptionalism: while Australia’s has an open, market-based, service-orientated economy, its industrial relations system remains an historical anachronism. For all that, support for the system is entrenched in the Australian psyche, and attempts at its reform have proved to be highly hazardous politically. This chapter traces the origins of the current system to ‘compulsory arbitration’ instituted in the first decade of the twentieth century. It argues that while the system was considerably relaxed between 1987 and 2007 it has since been significantly reregulated. It explores the implications of the enduring approach to industrial relations with respect to important issues facing the labour market, and contrasts it with the systems found in the UK, the USA, New Zealand, France, Germany, and Japan.
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Type: Book chapter
Title: Socialism in six colonies: the aftermath
Author: Pincus, J.
Citation: Only in Australia: The History, Politics and Economics of Australian Exceptionalism, 2016 /
Editor: Coleman, W.
Responsibility: Jonathan Pincus
Abstract: This chapter deals with the legacy of ‘Colonial Socialism’. In 1890 the Australian colonies collectively operated by far the largest government-built, government-owned, and government-operated railway system in the world. The chapter examines the consequences in the twentieth century for the state railway system created by the nineteenth century. It is argued that the propping up of declining railways over the last hundred years has been the occasion for an array of anticompetitive practices and policies. The system was also significant as providing a template for the ‘independent statutory authority’ that has been so pervasive in modern Australia. The state railways also proved to be a seedbed for the growth of the Labor Party.
Keywords: Anti-competitive practices; Colonial Socialism; independent statutory authorities; Labor Party; railways
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