a bonobo humanity?

five Australian PMs, from 2010 to 2019

I don’t like the USA very much. I suppose that’s putting it mildly.

I’m not a nationalist. I was for some years involved in the humanist movement, attended meetings and gave, I recall, three talks to humanist groups, one on the free will issue, one on the decline of Christianity here in Australia, and one on the rise of internationalist organisations over the past century or so.

Lately, like many, I’ve become – I don’t know what to call it, concerned, transfixed by the USA, not wanting to know, not wanting to miss anything, a mixture of horror and schadenfreude. But generally, I find it more valuable to listen to those outside looking in, than to US commentators, with their ‘how have the mighty fallen’ fantasies.

This is generally a sound approach. As I’ve written before, if you want to know what an individual is like, don’t take it from the horse’s mouth, because she’s understandably (and healthily) biased. So you ask the people around her, who’ve had dealings with her, some friendly, some not so. This is ‘solid science,’ as they say. And the same goes for countries, generally.

So the most appropriate countries to compare the USA with are, surely, the other English-speaking democracies. That’s to say, Britain, the ‘mother’ of them all, and Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It’s important to note that Australia and New Zealand became separated from Britain more or less amicably, while the USA did so via a war of independence. Canada’s history lies between these two extremes. These facts help explain the differences in their polities.

So, to start with Australia, and I’ll try to be brief. It started in 1788 when a British flag was hoisted in what is now known as Sydney Harbour, claiming, rather outrageously, on a ‘finders keepers’ basis, that all of the surrounding land, the extent of which was largely unknown, now belonged to that small densely populated island on the far side of the globe. It all seemed perfectly cromulent to the colonists, and to be fair they had no idea quite how massive the land area was. Later, in spite of the rather obvious presence of non-British humans in the region, the land was declared ‘terra nullius’. Whether this was a convenient fiction, or simply a joke, is anyone’s guess.

The colonists used this harbour region as a prison camp for some decades, adding other camps in the north and south. Crime and punishment was rather fetishised in this period, to the detriment of the so-called lower classes. But further into the 19th century, after the Australian continent became more fully surveyed and explored, free settlements, or separate colonies, developed along the eastern and southern coasts, and in Tasmania, each governed by officials tied to the motherland. The Aboriginal population, more sparse and scattered than the Maori population in New Zealand, and considerably less given to warfare, tended to be brushed aside in the early decades.

The important Sydney region began its transformation from a struggling and near-failing farming and rum-guzzling community into a more civil society under Lachlan Macquarie, governor from 1810 to 1821, yet this seemed to encourage the motherland to send out more of their unwanted. The colonial population rapidly increased, and farming, often conducted illegally (squatting) became quite lucrative for some. Settlements grew beyond Sydney, as well as in modern-day Melbourne, Hobart, Launceston and Adelaide.

So, jumping to the late 19th century, the colony was more or less thriving in spite of a serious shortage of women, especially in the early years. This actually led to supportive treatment such as assisted migration and favoured settlement and employment terms. A mid-century gold rush boosted the population while further contributing to the gender imbalance, as well as racism.

Voices for independence were being raised from the 1830s in Australia, and even in Britain by the 1850s. The self-government process developed in different regions, and was less a national than a colony-based development, since each region had already created governmental systems. Constitutions were created in NSW, Victoria, Queensland, Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania and South Australia and approved in Britain by the end of the 1850s. Western Australia was officially self-governing by 1890.

So with constitutions came legislative councils for each of the far-flung colonies. With variations they created lower and upper houses, with the upper houses being based on a very limited property-owning male franchise. My home state, South Australia, was the first to introduce universal male suffrage in the lower house in 1956. It was also the first electorate in the world to introduce female suffrage, and the right to stand for office, in 1895. Only for ‘white’ women, of course.

So Australia’s move towards complete independence from Britain was piecemeal and peaceful. 1901 was the year that it became a national federation of states, with a governor-general and state governors linking it to the motherland and its constitutional monarch, but with all legislative power in the hands of the federal and state governments. On the federal level it operates largely under a two-party system, with smaller parties on the left and right fringes, sometimes forming coalitions with their corresponding larger parties, and independent members of various types. The head of government, the Prime Minister, is not elected directly by the people, as is the case in the USA, but by the elected members of her or his party, and she can be removed from her position by a vote of no-confidence from those elected members. The opposition leader attains her position by the same process. New legislation is introduced by the incumbent government, debated and voted for in the lower house (the House of Representatives), after which it passes to the upper house (the Senate) for confirmation.

In all of this there’s, unsurprisingly, little difference between the Australian system and the British one. There’s a two-chamber parliament that meets regularly, all made up of locally elected members. Those members choose their leader – the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader, and they in turn choose their ministerial and shadow ministerial ‘teams’, e.g the Treasurer, the Foreign Minister, the Education Minister, the Attorney-General, the Deputy Prime Minister and so on. This collection of ministers is called the Cabinet. Australia also has a Constitution, like the USA, but unlike the USA, it virtually never gets mentioned. It basically explains how the government or parliament is constituted, and there seems to be general agreement about it.

The important difference between Australia’s Westminster-based system (and those of Canada, New Zealand, and of course Britain) and that of the USA is the absence of anything like a President, or immunity from prosecution for any member of government. Pardoning powers are in the hands of the Attorney-General, in consultation with the Cabinet, and are very seldom used. The seven-person High Court of Australia is the equivalent of the USA’s Supreme Court, but nowhere near as controversial (very few Australians would be able to name anyone who’s on it). Mandatory retirement age for its Justices is 70, and new members are selected by the Attorney-General in consultation with the  Cabinet.

New Zealand’s democratic or political history (I suppose I’m trying to say ‘white’  history without sounding racist – of course its Maori history was full of politics in the broad sense, as was Australian aboriginal and native American history) can be dated to 1840, the year of the Treaty of Waitangi, and the declaration of British sovereignty over the islands by its first governor, William Hobson. The Maori people, Pacific Islanders who first settled on the North Island some 12,000 yers ago, were generally much more difficult to deal with in these early years of white colonisation than Australia’s Aboriginals. Given to tribal warfare before the whites arrived (much like the whites had been in Europe for millennia), they were well prepared to make life tough for the newcomers. This led to serious warfare from the 1850s to the 1870s when, for some odd reason, many Maori groups refused to accept that their 12,000-year island home now belonged to Britain – or possibly Australia. The British government, which by the mid-19th century had become somewhat overwhelmed by the burden of its own colonial enterprises, generally left developments in New Zealand, which mostly centred around the Bay of Islands at the very northern region of the North Island, to those ‘over there’ who thought they knew what they were doing.

This was generally a good thing. The New Zealand Constitution Act of 1852 led to the first elections in 1853. There was a property qualification, of course, but it was more liberal than that of Britain at the time, and a large number of Maori chiefs could vote. All Maori men over 21 could vote by 1867. This was way ahead of anything in Europe or North America. However, by the early 20th century, Maori had been stripped of almost all of their land. Unsurprisingly this led to uprisings and plenty of violence.

New Zealand adopted a Westminster-based system of course, with a ceremonial Governor-General representing the British monarch, a Prime Minister, and two major parties, Labour on the left and the Nationals on the right. There have been a number of minor parties and independents over the years and recently coalition governments have been more common than not. Here’s how Wikipedia recounts it:

In 1996, New Zealand inaugurated the new electoral system (mixed-member proportional representation, or MMP) to elect its Parliament. The MMP system was expected (among numerous other goals) to increase representation of smaller parties in Parliament and appears to have done so in the MMP elections to date.

New Zealand’s judicial system has been independent and largely uncontroversial, though there have been some important recent changes.  A body called the Supreme Court of New Zealand came into being in January 2004, replacing the right of appeal to the London-based Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. There was a certain amount of opposition from monarchists about this change, of course.

Although religion played some part in the politics of Australia and New Zealand into the 60s, both countries have been ‘losing their religion’, i.e Christianity, quite rapidly since that time, in contrast to the US. This is one of many factors separating the US from the Westminster-based English-speaking nations, as we shall see.

In the next post I’ll take a look at the USA’s unfortunate neighbour, Canada, which also has a Westminster-based parliamentary democracy, as well as the USA itself, as briefly as possible.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Australia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Australia

https://www.hcourt.gov.au

Keith Sinclair, A history of New Zealand, 1969

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_New_Zealand