The Unmaking of the Australian Party System

The Unmaking of the Australian Party System

Frank Bongiorno: Inaugural Professorial Lecture

This lecture is about how an appreciation of Australian political history might assist us in understanding the apparent present unravelling of a party system that came into existence, in fits and starts, between 1877 and 1923. That system, based on competition for executive power between two sides, survived federally through to the 2025 election. After years of decay, it now appears to be collapsing. Are we witnessing a new critical juncture in the evolution of the Australian party system – perhaps the first since the federal two-party system emerged in 1909? This is a lecture in applied historical and political studies, an effort to interpret the present state of Australian democracy in the long run. It will argue that if we wish to gain insights into the apparent unravelling of the party system, one place we should look for clues is to the years of its formation – and the conditions that brought it into existence. 

Biography:

Frank Bongiorno AM is the inaugural director of the Vice-Chancellor’s Centre of Public Ideas and Donald Horne Professor of History and Public Ideas at the University of Canberra. He is the author of several books on Australian history, including Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia (2022) and The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia (2015). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Academy of Humanities, a Distinguished Fellow of the Whitlam Institute within Western Sydney University and President of the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

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Guest arrival from 5:15 pm. The lecture will commence at 5:30 pm.

Reminder

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