Gareth Evans (politician)

Gareth John Evans AC, KC (born 5 September 1944), is an Australian politician, international policymaker, academic, and barrister.

He was educated at Hawthorn West Central School (1950–57); Melbourne High School, where he was school captain (1958–61); the University of Melbourne (1962–67) where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws with First-Class Honours, sharing the Supreme Court Prize, was a Member of the Melbourne University Law Review and was President of the Students Representative Council from 1964 to 1966; and Magdalen College, Oxford (1968–70), where he attended on a Shell scholarship and graduated with a Master of Arts with First-Class Honours in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE).

From 1971 to 1976, he was law academic at the University of Melbourne, teaching crime, torts, civil liberties law and federal constitutional law, and becoming a prominent commentator on legal issues, especially at the time of the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975.

During the Whitlam Labor government, he acted as a consultant to Aboriginal Affairs Minister Gordon Bryant, advising on Indigenous land rights and legal services issues, and Attorney-General Lionel Murphy, where he was closely involved in drafting the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 and the (unsuccessful) Human Rights Bill 1973.

He was appointed by Murphy as a foundation member of the Australian Law Reform Commission, chaired by Justice Michael Kirby, and was primarily responsible for the commission's 1975 report on Criminal Investigation.

Evans joined the Australian Labor Party while at University of Melbourne and became actively involved after his return from Oxford in 1975, joining the centrist Labor Unity faction and working closely with its leaders including Clyde Holding, Peter Redlich and Ian Turner – and Bob Hawke, whose ambition to lead the party he strongly supported.

He was an unsuccessful Labor candidate for the Senate in 1975, but was elected in 1977 and took his seat in 1978.

From 1976 to his entry into the Parliament he practised full-time as a barrister, specialising in industrial law, and appellate argument, and became a Queen's Counsel (in Victoria and the ACT) in 1983.

Evans was active in civil liberties issues from his student days on, campaigning on issues such as censorship, capital punishment, the White Australia policy, apartheid and abortion law reform.

He was a long-serving vice-president of the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty Victoria), and an active executive member of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service.

In 1977 he edited Labor and the Constitution 1972–75, a collection of essays on constitutional issues arising during the life of the Whitlam government, and later co-authored Australia's Constitution, arguing for major constitutional reforms.

He represented the Labor Party in the Senate and House of Representatives from 1978 to 1999, serving as a Cabinet Minister in the Hawke and Keating governments from 1983 to 1996 as Attorney-General, Minister for Resources and Energy, Minister for Transport and Communications and most prominently, from 1988 to 1996, as Minister for Foreign Affairs.

As a young backbencher, Evans was one of the two parliamentarians chosen to sit – along with international architects I. M. Pei and John Andrews – on the Parliament House Competition Assessment Panel which in 1979 chose the winning design for the new Australian Parliament House.

In his first years in the Senate, Evans focused strongly on legal and constitutional reform issues, attracting early attention with his series of attacks on Sir Garfield Barwick, for potential conflict of interest between his role as the Chief Justice of the High Court and his involvement in his family company Mundroola.

After the October 1980 election he was promoted to the Opposition front bench in 1980, becoming Shadow Attorney-General.

Evans played an active part in ALP National Conferences during this period seeking to modernize the party's platform, in particular the language of the "socialist objective", and within the Parliamentary Party in developing a detailed "transition to government" strategy.

He supported Bob Hawke's leadership challenge against Bill Hayden in 1982 which led ultimately to Hayden resigning just hours before Malcolm Fraser announced the March 1983 election and Hawke leading Labor to victory.

As Attorney-General, Evans undertook a large agenda for law reform on a range of issues.

He immediately ran into controversy, arranging for the Royal Australian Air Force to take surveillance photos of the Franklin Dam project in Tasmania.

The Hawke government was pledged to (and ultimately did) stop the project, over the objections of the Tasmanian Liberal government, on the ground that it endangered a World Heritage listed area.

The Hawke government was accused of misusing the RAAF for domestic political purposes, and Evans's use of RAAF planes led to his earning the nickname "Biggles", after Captain W. E. Johns's fictional aviation hero – a self-inflicted wound, following his remark to journalists at the time "whatever you do, don't call me Biggles".

This incident also led to Evans coining the expression "streaker's defence" (i.e. "it seemed like a good idea at the time"), which has entered the Australian vocabulary.

More serious controversy surrounded the Government's handling of national security issues including the Combe-Ivanov affair and the attempted suppression of publication of leaked documents by journalist Brian Toohey, and the allegations of impropriety made against High Court Justice Lionel Murphy, all of which created stress for Evans as an avowed civil libertarian.

He achieved a number of reforms, including the establishment of the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions and the National Crime Authority, the strengthening of the Family Law and Freedom of Information Act, and some business regulation changes, but failed in his attempts to achieve uniform national defamation law, a legislative bill of rights, and constitutional reform.

In a demotion following this mixed record, Hawke moved him to the less sensitive portfolio of Resources and Energy after the 1984 election.

In the two major industry portfolios he held over the next five years, Evans was generally perceived as playing himself back into the government mainstream.

As Minister for Resources and Energy from 1984 to 1987 he won industry support for his role in rescuing from possible collapse of the huge North West Shelf gas project, managing the Australian fallout from the crash in world oil prices in 1986, and seeking to strike a workable balance, between resource sector and competing interests, on uranium mining, the environment and Aboriginal land rights.

As Transport and Communications minister in 1987–88, he was involved in some controversy with the Australian Broadcasting Commission over funding guarantees and charter reform, but primarily concerned with issues at the heart of the government's micro-economic strategy: major airline deregulation, and the reform of government business enterprises in the telecommunications and other sectors, designed to corporatize their commercial practices, as a necessary prelude to the privatisation that later followed.

Evans was appointed Foreign Minister in September 1988, after his predecessor Bill Hayden retired to become Governor-General.

He was Leader of the Government in the Senate from 1993 to 1996, Deputy Leader of the Opposition from 1996 to 1998, and remains one of the two longest-serving federal Cabinet Ministers in Labor Party history.

After leaving politics, he was president and chief executive officer of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group from 2000 to 2009.

He has served on a number of major international commissions and panels, including as co-chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2000–01) and the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (2008–10).

Evans has written extensively on international relations and legal, constitutional and political affairs, and has been internationally recognised for his contributions to the theory and practice of mass atrocity and conflict prevention, arms control and disarmament.

In 2004, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, his alma mater at Oxford.

On returning to Australia he was appointed in 2009 honorary professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne.

From 2010 to 2020, Evans was the Chancellor of the Australian National University (ANU).

He was appointed an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the ANU in 2012.

He currently is a member of the Board of Sponsors for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Evans was born in Melbourne, Victoria.

His father was a tram driver, and his mother, who had been a wartime Woolworths store manager, ran a small baby-wear business from home.