Curating the National Estate: Equality, Environment and the Whitlam Government

Six months before the Whitlam government was elected in December 1972, the United Nations Conference on Human Environment (UNCHE) marked the first meeting of world governments to contend with the ecological consequences of industrial modernity. Attempting to reconcile the Global North and Global South's competing priorities for environment and development, international experts devised new concepts to comprehend this problem: 'eco-development,' 'human settlements,' 'outer limits,' and later, 'sustainable development.' Gough Whitlam was not known as an environmentalist. But a few years earlier, in a speech in 1969, he devised his own approach addressing these tensions: 'The Commonwealth should see itself as the curator and not the liquidator of the national estate'. It was to be a profound if little remembered commitment of Whitlam's dramatic administration. Australian governments, willingly or not, have similarly reckoned with that choice ever since. New policy agendas begin with new policy histories. How the political past is narrated informs contemporary priorities, problems, and possible futures. For the past 40 years, Australian policy histories have focused on the economic dramas of crisis, reform, and neoliberal globalisation. This narrow economic focus is now proving untenable, as the existential threats posed by fossil-fuelled civilization continue to be little reflected in mainstream histories of Australian politics. By recovering Whitlam's national estate, this essay sketches one alternative narrative that better reflects these realities, not in terms of familiar conflicts between states and markets, but economies and ecologies. The Whitlam government has long been recognised for pioneering key environmental policies. Yet curating the national estate amounted to more than protective legislation. It registered the first Australian attempt to centre ecological thinking in governmental practice, integral to Whitlam's visions for positive equality. It encompassed an equality of location in urban life, equality of environment between generations, sharing in the wealth of Australia's natural resources, and recognising self-determination for Aboriginal peoples – collectively amounting to a new 'politics of land.' For Whitlam, these ideas first germinated in 1950s debates about improving 'quality of life' through urban planning; were tempered in the 1960s by emerging concerns about the 'limits to growth'; and tested in the Whitlam government in three new departments —the Department of Urban and Regional Development; Department of Environment and Conservation; and Department of Minerals and Energy—that navigated the bureaucratic infighting, fractious federalism, and dogged vested interests that have now long-challenged and often defeated ecological politics. Recovering this story reminds how long tensions between development and environment have been a feature of Australian politics, and the deep history of many policy tools – impact statements, export controls, heritage listings, polluter charges, tax incentives, national standards – that continue to be debated in climate politics today. But it also recovers ambitions lost to contemporary politics, including the tethering of ideas of environment and equality, the necessity of internationalism, the promise of urban planning and imaginative possibility of bold, unifying concepts like the 'national estate.'