During the 1980s and 1990s it became almost an article of faith for Australian governments — Commonwealth and State, Labor or Coalition — that governments needed to refocus and align their efforts with their ‘core business’. Nation-building, it seemed, was not core business, at least not in the traditional sense of iconic infrastructure projects or the creation of new institutions. Policy mixes emphasising deregulation, commercialisation, corporatisation, downsizing and privatisation suggested that, as far as Australian governments were concerned, the time for active nation-building has passed.

Even so, the Hawke and Keating Labor governments made policy forays that might, retrospectively, be seen as broadly nation-building in their intent. For example, the Hawke Labor government’s monetary and fiscal reforms of the early 1980s could be characterised as having established a new frontier for nation-building in which policy instruments and structural reforms take the place of bricks and mortar. These were durable reforms that transformed the national economy and provided the bedrock for Australia’s strong economic performance to the present day.

In 1991, the Hawke Labor Government allocated $816 million over five years to the Building Better Cities Program under which the Commonwealth, State and Territory Governments would work co-operatively to improve urban development processes and the quality of urban life through improvements to urban planning, service delivery and co-ordination within and between the various levels of government. By the mid 1990s the Keating Labor government was making largely symbolic nation-building gestures in the form of grand policy statements, such as One Nation, Working Nation or Creative Nation. Although these employed the rhetoric of nation-building, they mainly amounted to a ‘re-branding’ of existing programs without significant new investment.

Although these latter efforts might be legitimately cast as attempts to weave or strengthen the fabric of contemporary Australia, it might be said that they failed somehow to capture the public’s imagination — possibly because they lacked the audacity and vision of past efforts. Apart from the significant structural reforms of the Hawke era, these initiatives did not survive the election of the Howard Coalition government in 1996. Not only had they failed to achieve the political or institutional momentum that would see them continue under a new administration, they had become inextricably associated with the Australian Labor Party’s ‘brand’ and so, could be jettisoned without a backwards look by the incoming Howard administration.