Opposition, 1978–1983

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.^[6]

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.^[5]

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.

Attorney-General, 1983–1984

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.^[7] 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.^[8]

Resources, energy, transport and communications, 1984–1988

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^[5] 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,^[5] 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.^[9]

Minister for Foreign Affairs, 1988–1996

Evans was appointed Foreign Minister in September 1988,^[5] after his predecessor Bill Hayden retired to become Governor-General. He held the position for seven years and six months, the longest-serving Labor minister in that portfolio. He became a well-known Foreign Minister and highly regarded internationally, and continues to be regarded as one of Australia's most successful.^[10][11] The Hawke and Keating governments were committed to shifting emphasis from Australia's traditional relationships with the United States and the United Kingdom to increased involvement with Asian neighbours, particularly Indonesia and China, and were strongly committed to multilateral diplomacy both globally and regionally.

Evans brought a strongly structured and analytical approach to foreign policymaking and is credited with significant innovative thinking in his articulation, in particular, of the concepts of middle power and niche diplomacy, "good international citizenship" as a national interest, and cooperative security (see "Contributions to international relations thinking", below).

His most widely acknowledged successes as foreign minister were his initiation of the UN peace plan for Cambodia,^[12] and the roles that he and Australia played in bringing to fruition the International Chemical Weapons Convention and establishing both the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). Major contributions to international agenda setting, though not bearing much immediate fruit, were his book on UN reform^[13] launched in New York City in 1993, and his initiation with Paul Keating of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.

Evans famously became the first person to drop the f-bomb in the Australian Parliament, interjecting "for fuck's sake" during a speech by Senator Robert Hill.^[14] Despite his reputation as a negotiator he was widely reputed to be in possession of a short-temper with a particular intolerance for elected representatives of the Australian Greens.^{[15][16] [17][18]}

Evans (left) with United States Secretary of Defense Les Aspin (right) in 1993.

Evans ran into significant controversy on two major issues: relations with Indonesia over East Timor and French Nuclear Tests in the Pacific. Evans continues to be strongly criticised by many commentators – most prominently Noam Chomsky and John Pilger^[19] – for supporting Australia's recognition of Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor following its military invasion in 1975, negotiating (and celebrating "replete with champagne") with then Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas the Timor Gap Treaty, and describing the 1991 Dili massacre as "an aberration, not an act of state policy". Evans has replied at length to these charges in various forums,^[20] acknowledging that the Indonesian military's behaviour had been appalling and conceding that Australia had been too optimistic about its capacity for redemption, but arguing, that de jure recognition by Australian (and other) governments had never denied the continuing right of the East Timorese to self-determination; that he personally had worked hard (as subsequently acknowledged by José Ramos-Horta)^[21] to achieve real autonomy for East Timor as the only realistic option before the events of 1997; and that independent East Timor had fully inherited the benefits of the Timor Gap Treaty. The Timor Gap Treaty was replaced by the Timor Sea Treaty after East Timor's independence in 2002. However, after the Australia-East Timor spying scandal came to light, East Timor terminated the treaties, which were favorable to Australia. In 2018, the treaty in force today was concluded, which is far more favorable to East Timor.

When in June 1995 the resumption of French underground nuclear tests at Moruroa Atoll was announced, Evans generated a storm of press and public criticism for remarking that while Australia deplored the decision "it could have been worse". This was strictly accurate as the test series was limited in number, and France promised to then permanently close the test facility and join the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty negotiations, but it politically damaged Evans and his party.

Leader of the government in the Senate, 1993–1996

In 1993, as a member of the Keating government, Senator Evans became Leader of the Government in the Senate,^[5] replacing the retiring John Button, whose Deputy he had been since 1987. In this position 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. In what was described at the time as "perhaps the finest moment in his political career",^[22] he played the leading role in getting the government's Native Title Act 1993 through the Senate in one of the Parliament's longest-ever debates^[23] following the High Court of Australia's decision in Mabo v Queensland.

Return to opposition, 1996–1999

Evans had long desired to move from the Senate to the House of Representatives, where he hoped to pursue 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 elected at the 1996 election. He was elected Deputy Leader of the Labor Party, defeating Simon Crean, and appointed Shadow Treasurer by Leader Kim Beazley. As Deputy Leader Evans led a major policy review in every shadow portfolio area, and during 1997 orchestrated in secret the defection to the Labor Party of the popular leader of the Australian Democrats, Senator Cheryl Kernot, who resigned from the Senate in October and became a Labor House of Representatives candidate at the 1998 election. The political triumph of the defection was, however, soured by the later revelation – by Laurie Oakes in his column in The Bulletin in 2002 – that Evans and Kernot had been having an affair at the time.^[24]

Evans, after eighteen years in the Senate, found the transition to the very different lower house environment not easy to manage, and – with Australia sailing comfortably through the 1997 Asian financial crisis – also found it difficult to get traction with his own economic policy brief. He also did not enjoy the move to opposition after thirteen years in government, coining the expression "relevance deprivation syndrome", which – while he was criticised more than applauded for his honesty at the time – is now entrenched in the national vocabulary.^[25] His biographer, Keith Scott, commented that "Overwhelmingly, Evans's period as deputy leader and shadow treasurer – from March 1996 to October 1998 – was his least successful in federal parliament".^[26] 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 causing a by-election, which was later won by Labor candidate Anthony Byrne.

Throughout his time as a member of both houses of Parliament, Evans served in three of the four leadership positions, deputy Senate leader, Senate leader and deputy leader in the House of Representatives.^[5]

International Crisis Group

In 1994, while Foreign Minister of Australia, Evans committed his government to donate $500,000 as initial funding^[27] for Brussels-based conflict prevention and resolution organisation, the International Crisis Group (ICG).

From 2000–2009 Evans was president and CEO of the ICG, which during his tenure grew in staff from 25 to over 130, in budget from $US2 million to over $15 million, and in operating area from a handful of countries in the Balkans and Central Africa to over 60 across four continents, and published 784 worldwide-distributed reports.^[28]

Evans at the London School of Economics as the guest lecturer on human rights in 2000.

The ICG made important contributions during this period in early-warning bellringing in cases like Darfur and Ethiopia-Eritrea, supporting conflict mediation in situations like Southern Sudan, Kosovo and Aceh, making path-breaking recommendations on Israel-Palestine, Iran and Burma/Myanmar, analysing the different strands of Islamism, and generally providing timely and detailed field-based analysis and recommendations to policymakers on hundreds of separate conflict-related issues.

Although subject to occasional attack for the positions it has taken,^[29] the ICG was firmly established by the time of Evans's departure, and has remained, the preeminent international NGO working on the prevention and resolution of deadly conflict, praised by leaders across the spectrum from Condoleezza Rice to Hillary Clinton, and regularly being identified as one of the world's most influential think tanks.^[30]

The responsibility to protect

In 2000–2001 Evans co-chaired, with Mohamed Sahnoun, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), appointed by the government of Canada to address the issue of genocide and other mass atrocity crimes, which published its report, The Responsibility to Protect, in December 2001.

The co-chairs then wrote an article on this matter: a state's sovereignty is also under question in times of mass murder, in terms of legitimacy. Sovereignty is dependent upon the state's responsibility to its people; if not fulfilled, then the contract between the government and its citizen is void, thus the sovereignty is not legitimate. In that crucible lies the genesis of the Responsibility to protect (R2P) doctrine.^[31]

The core idea of the R2P doctrine, as endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit, is that every state has the responsibility to protect its population from genocide and other mass atrocity crimes; the international community has a responsibility to assist the state if it is unable to protect its population on its own; and that if the state fails to protect its citizens from mass atrocities and peaceful measures have failed, the international community has the responsibility to intervene with appropriate measures, with coercive military intervention, approved by the UN Security Council, available as a last resort. The concept was expressly designed to supersede the idea of "humanitarian intervention", which had failed to generate any international consensus about how to respond to the 1990s catastrophes of Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo.

Evans has been widely acknowledged^[32] as playing a crucial role in initiating, and advocating the international acceptance of, the concept, first as Co-Chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty which introduced the expression in its 2001 report of that name, and subsequently as a member of the UN Secretary-General's High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, Co-Chair of the Advisory Board of the Global Centre on the Responsibility to Protect, and as the author of the Brookings Institution-published The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All and many other published works. He has made innumerable speeches and presentations on the issue, including in July 2009 participating at the UNGA in an interactive dialogue with Noam Chomsky.

Other international panels and commissions

He was a member of the UN Secretary General's High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, whose report A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, addressing mass atrocity crimes and many other UN reform issues, was published in December 2004.

Evans also served on the UN Secretary-General's Advisory Committee on Genocide Prevention.

Evans had previously served as a member of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict (1994–97), co-chaired by Cyrus Vance and David Hamburg. He was also a member of the International Task Force on Global Public Goods, sponsored by Sweden and France and chaired by Ernesto Zedillo, which reported in September 2006.

He is a member of the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative Advisory Council, a project of the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis to establish the world's first treaty on the prevention and punishment of crimes against humanity.

Nuclear issues

On nuclear issues, he was a member of the Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction sponsored by Sweden and chaired by Hans Blix which reported in June 2006; and the Commission of Eminent Persons on The Role of the IAEA to 2020 and Beyond, chaired by Ernesto Zedillo, whose report Reinforcing the Global Nuclear Order for Peace and Prosperity was launched in June 2008. From 2008 to 2010 he co-chaired (with former Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi) the Australia and Japan sponsored International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament: its report Eliminating Nuclear Threats: A Practical Agenda for Global Policymakers was published in December 2009.

Other organisations

His other recorded affiliations with internationally focused organisations include:

• Asia Pacific Leadership Network on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (APLN), Convenor
• Asia Society, Member of the Global Council
• Aspen Ministers Forum (chaired by Madeleine Albright), Member
• Aurora Prize, Member of the Selection Committee (since 2015)^[33]
• Australian Institute of International Affairs, Fellow
• Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, Chair of the International Advisory Board
• Global Leadership Foundation, Member
• Global Panel Foundation-Australasia, Member of the Board of Advisors
• Independent Diplomat, Member of the Advisory Council
• Institute for Economics and Peace, Member of the International Advisory Board
• International Luxembourg Forum on Preventing Nuclear Catastrophe, Member of the Supervisory Council
• Nuremberg International Human Rights Award, Member of the Jury^[34]
• World Economic Forum (WEF), Member of the Global Agenda Council on Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Weapons
• Global Panel, Member of Global Panel Worldwide

Academic career and published writing

Before entering Australian politics Evans was a lecturer, then senior lecturer, in law at the University of Melbourne, teaching constitutional and civil liberties law, crime and torts, from 1971 to 1976. In 2009, after his retirement from politics and his subsequent career as head of the International Crisis Group, he returned to academic life as an honorary professorial fellow (later professorial fellow) in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, teaching a graduate course on international policymaking in practice in 2011 and 2012.

He was elected as chancellor of the Australian National University from 1 January 2010,^[35] replacing Kim Beazley following Beazley's appointment as Australian Ambassador to the United States. Evans was installed by Governor-General Quentin Bryce at a ceremony in Canberra on 18 February 2010.

He is also an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford; a Distinguished Fellow of the Australia India Institute; Chair of the International Advisory Board of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament; and Member of the Advisory Boards of the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy, Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy and Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, and the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

Evans has written or edited 13 books, most recently Incorrigible Optimist: A Political Memoir (Melbourne University Press, 2017).^[36] His other major works include The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All (Brookings Institution Press, September 2008, paperback edition 2009),^[37] which was awarded an Honorable Mention in the US Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award 2009 as one of the best three books on international relations published in the previous year, as well as Australia's Foreign Relations (with Bruce Grant, Melbourne University Press 1991, 2nd ed 1995), Cooperating for Peace: The Global Agenda for the 1990s (Allen & Unwin, 1993), Australia's Constitution (with John McMillan and Haddon Storey, Allen & Unwin, 1983) and the edited collection, Labor and the Constitution, 1972–1975 (Heinemann, 1977). He co-edited the annual Labor Essays series from 1980 to 1982.

Evans has also published nearly 150 chapters in books, monographs and articles in refereed and other journals – and many more newspaper and magazine articles – on foreign relations, politics, human rights and legal reform.^[38]

Good international citizenship

Evans introduced the idea of "good international citizenship" in his first major speeches as Australian foreign minister, and repeated and refined it in subsequent writing.^[39] The core notion was that "being, and being seen to be, a good international citizen" should be seen not as the "foreign policy equivalent of boy-scout good deeds", but as a distinct component of any country's national interest, "quite distinct from the familiar duo of security and economic interests":

The interest in question here is more than just the pleasure of basking in approbation. There are many direct reciprocal benefits to be gained in a world where no country can solve all its own problems: my assistance for you today in solving your drugs and terrorism problem might reasonably lead you to be more willing to help solve my environmental problem tomorrow. But the reputational benefit does also count. The perception of being a country willing to take principled stands for other than immediately self-interested reasons does no harm at all – as the Scandinavians in particular seem to have well understood – when it comes to advancing one's own commercial or political agendas.^[40]

The concept of "good international citizenship" has been specifically attributed to Evans in academic writing; its "idealistic pragmatism" has been seen as a way of bridging or transcending rival doctrines of realism and idealism in international relations theory; and the idea has been advanced as mapping a possible "third way for British foreign policy".^[41]

Niche diplomacy

"Niche diplomacy" was identified by Evans as one of the characteristic methods of the larger and more familiar concept of middle power diplomacy which has traditionally characterized the approach to international relations of Canada (especially during the Pearson years) and Australia (especially under the Labor governments of Hawke, Keating and Rudd).^[42] He defined it as "concentrating resources in specific areas best able to generate returns worth having, rather than trying to cover the field. By definition, middle powers are not powerful enough in most circumstances to impose their will, but they may be persuasive enough to have likeminded others see their point of view, and to act accordingly".^[43] The concept is now familiar in academic discourse, and has been specifically attributed to Evans.^[44]

Cooperative security

Evans won the 1995 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order (following Mikhail Gorbachev the year before) for his fall 1994 Foreign Policy article, "Cooperative Security and Intra-State Conflict", which was cited as presenting ideas that, following the end of the Cold War "could quicken the process ... to help maintain a new world order". He described "cooperative security" as being a single conceptual theme that effectively captured the essence of three more familiar concepts in international security discourse, viz. comprehensive security, common security and collective security. Its defining – and attractive – characteristics were that "the term tends to connote consultation rather than confrontation, reassurance rather than deterrence, transparency rather than secrecy, prevention rather than correction, and interdependence rather than unilateralism".^[45]