Gareth Evans (politician)
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Gareth John Evans (born 5 September 1944), Australian politician, was Foreign Minister of Australia during the Hawke and Keating Labor governments.
Evans was born in Melbourne, the son of a tram-driver. He was educated at Melbourne University, where he graduated in arts and law, and at Oxford University, where he took a masters degree in politics, philosophy and economics. He practised as a barrister in Melbourne, specialising in representing trade unions, and was a lecturer and then a senior lecturer in constitutional law at Melbourne University from 1971. He became one of Australia's leading constitutional lawyers, and published Labor and the Constitution 1972-75, a survey of constitutional issues during the Whitlam government, in 1977.
Evans was active in the Australian Labor Party from his student days, and was an unsuccessful Labor candidate for the Senate in 1975. A member of the right-wing Labor Unity faction, he was a supporter of Bob Hawke's ambitions to lead the party after the fall of the Whitlam government. He was also a strong civil libertarian, and was Vice-President of the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty Victoria (http://libertyvictoria.org.au/index.asp)).
In 1977 Evans was elected to the Senate, and was elected to the Opposition front bench in 1980, becoming Shadow Attorney-General. He took an active part in the campaign to have Hawke replace Bill Hayden as Labor leader. This happened shortly before the 1983 federal elections, which Hawke won. Evans then became Attorney-General, with a large agenda for law reform on a range of issues. He immediately ran into controversy, however, by arranging for the Royal Australian Air Force to take surveillance photos of the Franklin Dam project in Tasmania, which the Hawke government was pledged to stop, over the objections of the Tasmanian Liberal government. The Hawke government was accused of misusing the RAAF for domestic political purposes, and Evans earned the nickname "Biggles," much to his annoyance.
In December 1984 Hawke moved Evans to the less sensitive portfolio of Resources and Energy, which he privately dismissed as the "ministry of posts and holes." In 1987 he moved to Transport and Communications, in which he also showed little interest, although he was always the master of any Parliamentary brief. His ambition to succeed Hayden as Foreign Minister was ill-concealed, and he finally obtained this post when Hayden was appointed Governor-General of Australia in September 1988. Evans was Foreign Minister for seven years and six months, and made a major and lasting impression on Australia's foreign policy.
The Hawke government, and even more so the Keating government, aimed to shift the emphasis of Australia's foreign policy from Australia's traditional relationships with the United States and the United Kingdom to Australia's Asian neighbours, particularly Indonesia and China. To this end Evans travelled tirelessly in the region, and built up good relations with his counterparts in most Asian countries. He was less successful in maintaining close relations with the United States, where the Reagan and Bush administrations saw him as unsympathetic to their policies.
Among Evans's achievements in foreign policy were helping to develop the United Nations plan for the rebuilding of Cambodia after helping create pressure to end the Vietnamese occupation, which led to free elections in 1993, the negotiation of the International Chemical Weapons Convention, and helping to establish the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). He also initiated the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, although little ultimately came of this project. In 1995 he received Grawemeyer Prize for Ideas Improving World Order for his Foreign Policy article "Cooperative Security and Intrastate Conflict."
In 1993, under the Keating government, Evans became Leader of the Government in the Senate. In this position, despite his heavy workload as Foreign Minister, he led the government's domestic legislative agenda in the upper house, where the government did not have a majority and every bill had to be negotiated with the minor parties. He played a leading role in getting the government's native title bills through the Senate following the High Court of Australia's Mabo decision. He was a tirless debater, earning the nickname "garrulous Gareth."
Evans had long desired to move from the Senate to the House of Representatives, where he hoped to pursue his leadership ambitions. His first attempt to do, in 1984, had been thwarted by the Socialist Left faction, but in 1996 he gained endorsement for the seat of Holt, in Melbourne's eastern suburbs, and was easily elected at the 1996 election.
The Keating government was defeated at the election, and Evans thus entered the House as an Opposition member. He was elected Deputy Leader of the Labor Party, defeating Simon Crean, and Leader Kim Beazley appointed him Shadow Treasurer. This appointment did not prove to be successful. Although he had earned a reputation in the Senate as a master parliamentary tactician, economics was not Evans's field, and he met his match in the Howard government's Treasurer, Peter Costello. He was also saddled with the Keating government's legacy of a A$10 billion budget deficit, which he first denied and then dismissed as irrelevant.
During 1997 Evans orchestrated in secret the defection to the Labor Party of the Leader of the minority Australian Democrats party, Senator Cheryl Kernot, who resigned from the Senate in October and became a Labor House of Representatives candidate at the 1998 election. This was seen as a great coup at the time, but backfired when Kernot's erratic and self-centered behaviour became a matter first of concern and then of alarm in the party, and ridicule in the media. It later emerged that Evans had been having an affair with Kernot during the negotiations for her defection, something he had not revealed to his party colleagues, and had denied in Parliament.
Labor's defeat at the 1998 elections led to Evans's resignation from the Opposition front bench, and in September 1999 he resigned from Parliament. His career was seen in retrospect as in some ways brilliant, but weakened by episodes of very poor political judgement. There was some speculation that he would become Secretary-General of the United Nations, but this was never a serious possibility. In January 2000 he became President and Chief Executive of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, an independent non-governmental organisation which works, to prevent and resolve international and civil conflict.
In 2000-01 Evans was co-chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), appointed by the government of Canada, which published its report, The Responsibility to Protect, in December 2001. He was also a member of the of the UN Secretary General’s Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, whose report A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, was published in December 2004. He is a member of the Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction sponsored by Sweden and chaired by Hans Blix, and of the International Task Force on Global Public Goods, chaired by Ernesto Zedillo.
Despite the revelation of his affair with Kernot, Evans remains married to Professor Merran Evans, Director of Planning and Academic Affairs at Monash University, Melbourne, with whom he has two children.
| Preceded by: Bill Hayden | Foreign Minister of Australia 1988–1996 | Succeeded by: Alexander Downer |
| Preceded by: Kim Beazley | Deputy Leader of the Australian Labor Party 1996–1998 | Succeeded by: Simon Crean
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