Gareth Evans (politician)

Gareth John Evans, AO, QC (born 5 September 1944), Australian politician, served as Attorney-General and Foreign Minister of Australia during the Hawke and Keating Labor governments.

Early life

Evans was born in Melbourne, Victoria, the son of a tram driver. He was educated at Melbourne High School, Melbourne University where he graduated in arts and law, and Oxford University where he took a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. In 2004, he became an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, his alma mater at Oxford.

He practised as a barrister in Melbourne, specialising in representing trade unions. From 1971 he was a lecturer and then a senior lecturer in constitutional law at Melbourne University. He became one of Australia's leading constitutional lawyers. In 1977 he published "Labor and the Constitution 1972-75", a survey of constitutional issues during the Whitlam government. He became a Queen's Counsel in 1983.

Evans was active in the Australian Labor Party from his student days, and was an unsuccessful Labor candidate for the Australian 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). [cite web
title=Home|publisher=Liberty Victoria|url=http://www.libertyvictoria.org.au/|accessdate=2007-01-25]

Parliamentary career

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 election, 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. Evans' use of RAAF planes led to his earning the nickname "Biggles", after the famous pilot-hero of a number of books by Captain W.E. Johns. [ [http://www.abc.net.au/stateline/tas/content/2003/s890008.htm Stateline Tasmania, ABC] 27 June 2003] [ [http://www.aph.gov.au/SENATE/pubs/pops/pop04/pop4.pdf Papers on Parliament 1989] "In preparing the Commonwealth's case for the inevitable High Court challenge by Tasmania, Evans earned the popular title of 'Biggles' for arranging to have Royal Australian Air Force planes fly 'spy flights' over the dam site to collect court evidence." (p27)]

In December 1984, Hawke moved Evans to the less sensitive portfolio of Resources and Energy. 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 portfolio 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 administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush saw him as unsympathetic to their policies. He was likewise unsuccessful with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for the same reasons.

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 the Grawemeyer Award 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 decision in "Mabo v Queensland".

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 so, 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.

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-centred 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.

Labor's defeat at the 1998 election led to Evans's resignation from the Opposition front bench, and in September 1999 he resigned from Parliament.

Life after politics

After he left Parliament, there was some speculation that Evans would become Secretary-General of the United Nations, which earned him the name "Gareth Gareth Evans" (in reference to the then-Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali), but this was never a serious possibility as Australia did not have enough international backing for a bid. 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 deadly conflict.

In 2000 and 2001, 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 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. He is an endorser of the Genocide Intervention Network and serves on the International Editorial Board of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

Evans is also member of the Board of Advisors of the Global Panel Foundation. In June 2008, Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd appointed him co-chair of the International Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Commission. In July 2008, Gareth Evans was selected as an inaugural fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs.

Personal life

Evans is married to Professor Merran Evans, of Monash University, Melbourne, with whom he has two children.

Evans conducted a long-running extramarital affair with then-fellow politician Cheryl Kernot. At first Kernot was leader of the Democrats but spectacularly defected to join Evans' Australian Labor Party in 1997. While this affair was reportedly well known within Canberra political circles, it was not known to the general public until reported in 2002 by Laurie Oakes in his Bulletin magazine column. [cite news|url=http://www.australianpolitics.com/news/2002/07/02-07-03.shtml|last=Laurie|first=Oakes|title=Cheryl Kernot And The Unreported Story|publisher=The Bulletin|date= 3 July 2002|accessdate= 2007-04-01]

Evans considers himself a Humanist, and accepted the Australian Humanist of the Year Award in 1990 by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies.

References

External links

* [http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=1398&l=1 International Crisis Group profile] (includes links to an extensive biography)
* [http://www.un.org/News/dh/hlpanel/evans-bio.htm United Nations biography]
* [http://www.globalpanel.org/ Official Website of the Global Panel Foundation]

Persondata
NAME=Evans, Gareth John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
SHORT DESCRIPTION=Australian politician
DATE OF BIRTH=5 September 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH=Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
DATE OF DEATH=living
PLACE OF DEATH=