Greening the Commonwealth: the Australian Labor Party government's management of national environmental politics, 1983-1996

Deposited with permission of the author. © 1998 Nicholas Michael EconomouBetween 1983 and 1996, the environment emerged to become a major political issue in Australia to which a series of national public policy decisions was directed. In examining these policies, this thesis argues that the association of environmentalism with the politics of policy-making reflected the primary role played by the Australian Labor Party as the major political party in Government at that time. It reflected the Labor Government’s primary role in determining the nature and direction of the debate between 1983 and 1996. Of particular importance was a period in which the Labor Government sought to undertake institutional innovation in order to contain the environmental debate within the institutionalised policy-making process - a period described here as the ‘Accordist’; phase of Labor’s management of the environmental debate. The thesis challenges theoretical approaches that argue that relations between social democratic trade union based parties and the environmental movement have the potential to tend toward mutual antagonism. It also challenges the argument that environmentalism, as a manifestation of the ‘new politics’, necessarily involves a qualitative transformation of politics associated with new social movements. Rather, the thesis argues that the debate in Australia went beyond simply addressing controversial specific issues when they arose, to instead become an examination of the capacity for agencies and departments to incorporate environmental values into their decision-making, and about ways in which competing interest group demands could be reconciled through newly created government-led forums. (For complete abstract open document