Introduction Of The Hawke-Keating Era

The introduction of the Hawke-Keating-Howard reforms were necessary at the time as a result of Australia’s situation in the 1970s and early 1980s. These few years before the Hawke-Keating government saw Australia experience a downturn in their economy influenced by the Whitlam government’s decision to persist with an exchange rate that was overvalued, which reduced the foreign demand for exports and switched domestic demand from local goods to imported substitute goods (McLean 2013). This was also accompanied by huge real wage increases as well as stagflation, where there was a rise in inflation, a steadily high rate of unemployment and a slowing economic growth. As a result of this 1982 saw Australia enter a recession, ending with a large budget deficit for the Fraser government. This budget deficit and dire economic situation was inherited in 1983 by the newly elected Prime
In order to lift Australia out of their current economic situation, the Hawke government introduced policies, or reforms, aimed to restore the country’s economic growth by reducing the high rate of unemployment and inflation that had occurred in the previous years. The aim of the reforms that the Hawke government wanted to implement were to lift the growth rates in the medium – long run as opposed to an immediate short run gain (McLean 2013). In order to do this, the Hawke-Keating era saw the government aim to open up the Australian economy to increase economic prosperity. They’re intentions were to increase economic efficiency and raise productivity through domestic market liberalization (McLean 2013), which would relax government restrictions on the domestic market, and opening up the domestic Australian economy to the world (Quiggin 2002) through international competition. The main