In the lead up to ANZAC day this year, breakfast television host and podcaster Karl Stefanovic jumped on board with a certain genre of AI-generated Instagram nostalgia that’s everywhere right now.
AI nostalgia slop as it’s sometimes known, tends to look like soft focus footage of the 1970s and 80s, often including white children riding bikes on quiet suburban streets, and family life looking a whole lot slower and simpler than it is today.
Stefanovic says the nostalgia video he posted is a depiction of what it was like to grow up, as he did, in the outskirts of Brisbane in the 70s and 80s.
Crucially, Stefanovic’s video, and others like it, always portray Australia to have been a less complicated and political place than it is today.
“I love this country. That’s why I won’t stop talking about what’s destroying it,” Stefanovic wrote in the caption alongside the video.
“We have to remember what it was like.”
There are thousands of comments under Stefanovic’s video, mostly of people agreeing that the 70s and 80s were better times. One commentator wrote: “Hey @albomp — this is Australia… and you’ve absolutely destroyed it.”
While it’s easy to look back on those decades through a nostalgic lens, it has to be acknowledged that while the pace of life was slower (largely due to a lack of technology), it was also one of the most politically and socially transformative times in modern Australian history.
Far from being less complicated or apolitical, Australia in the 70s and 80s was being reshaped at a structural level. Many of the rights and freedoms we now take for granted, especially for women and minorities, were fought for in that exact period.
The changes that came through during this time were seismic.
Below we take a look at some of the major social and political moves that defined the period – they offer a pretty different perspective than AI nostalgia slop tends to do.
A country living in the wake of the White Australia policy
While the first measures to end the White Australia policy were introduced in 1966 by the Holt government, it wasn’t until 1973 that the Whitlam government definitively renounced the divisive migration policy. In ending the policy and embracing migrants from a greater variety of places and walks of life, Australia was transforming itself and replacing a default of racial exclusion for migrants with a notion of multiculturalism.
Until then, the White Australia policy had dictated who migrated to Australia, restricting non-white migrants from entering.
Women’s lives were being reshaped
In the 70s and 80s, a number of key policies improved women’s lives by giving them more autonomy and economic freedom. Some of these included:
- Equal pay decisions that lifted wages in female-dominated industries
- The 1975 Family Law Act made divorce accessible to women without proving fault
- Single mothers gained more recognition and support
- Childcare funding started to emerge as a public responsibility
- The Sex Discrimination Act made it illegal to discriminate based on sex, pregnancy, or marital status
First Nations land rights
In the 70s and 80s, the first inklings of land rights for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders began to take shape. The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 was a key reform that saw the government legally recognise the Aboriginal system of land ownership.
It paved the way for land rights cases, including the Mabo case which came a bit later, in the 90s.
Healthcare and education were transforming
When Gough Whitlam’s government introduced free university education and universal healthcare (then known as Medibank), there was a massive expansion of accessible services, giving women more ability to take control of their lives and participate in the paid workforce.
The social gains paved the way for the gender equality improvements women today continue to benefit from.
The economy
Under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating’s governments, Australia’s economy was taken to a new level. The dollar was floated, tariffs were reduced and the financial system was deregulated.
Australia became part of the global economy and many new industries were created. It saw more women enter corporate and professional roles.
An era of social progress
The 70s and 80s were an era where social progress was being backed into the fabric of Australian society. Environmentalism, feminism and LGBT+ activism were working to make Australia a more socially progressive place. Unlike what’s depicted in videos like Stefanovic’s, Australia in this era was a complicated place taking big steps towards globalisation and local social progress.
We mustn’t forget that long-fought activism by many everyday Australians played a major role in many of these reforms taking shape.
For women and minorities, politics was the very thing that made life better.