The 1980s were also a period of intense political and social upheaval. The 1970s had seen the onset of a New Left, opposition to the Vietnam War, women's liberation and so forth, but the extent to which such changes were and became mainstream has been open to debate ever since. Prior to the dismissal of the Whitlam Labor Government, though, notions that the state could play a proactive role in social engineering were relatively common. With the advent of the conservative Fraser Liberal Government there was a growing belief that welfare and income maintenance by governments was an intrusion into the body politic. If generalisations can be made about the decade, one would be that a social climate developed which was becoming intolerant of ideological alternatives to the marketplace. Globalisation started to become the buzz word in popular discourse; in the economic substructure, it meant the onset of free trade across the world, which became shorthand for the triumph of the transnational corporations. Locally, the workplace was beginning to be restructured, and casualisation became commonplace across sectors other than retail and agricultural production.

The 1970s had seen an expansion of state promotion of the arts through the creation of The Australia Council by the then Government, modelled on the structure of the Canada Council. Whether support for the arts would achieve bipartisanship into the 1980s would be fascinating to watch. Needless to say, the arts became an industry of sorts during this decade after the experiments of the 1970s. Of the 1980s, Paul Kelly has suggested:

Kelly was of course acknowledging capitalism's ability to revolutionise the means of production and the extent to which such changes infiltrate the prevailing culture. Even so, state intervention often has modernised shifts in the means of production. In this case the social engineering encouraged by Whitlam in the 1970s became bolder and more respectable in the 1980s in Australia as markets grew larger and more heterogeneous. Some writers such as David Malouf and Peter Carey were on their way to establishing international reputations.