A decade of democratic decline: how Australians understand and imagine their democracy

With the first Hawke Government, the then Canberra College of Advanced Education (CCAE), in association with the ACT Division of the then Royal Australian Institute of Public Administration, published a joint book, Australian Commonwealth Administration 1984: Essays in Review. Since then, the University of Canberra has developed a tradition of examining each federal government administration, making a total of eleven volumes representing a significant part of Australia’s contemporary political history. These volumes are listed as an Appendix. This is the twelfth volume in the series, now produced by the University of Canberra’s Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis. The approach to this volume is similar to that taken in the previous books in the series. Each chapter chronicles the important events, changes and associated issues relevant to the topic being covered (what happened?); provides an explanatory analysis and identify the pressures and influences involved (why did it happen?); and gives readers a sense of the significance of the issues, by discussing implications (what was the broad significance of the issues?)