Service

Australian Liberals saw themselves first and foremost as good citizens, and they firmly believed that it was on their virtues as citizens that the quality of the nation and, beyond that, the Empire was based. The previous chapter has argued that the Australian Liberal conception of citizenship, with its stress on independence of judgement, on loyalty, and on the subordination of self-interest to the national good, was based on Protestant conceptions of virtues in which Australia's Irish Catholics were regarded as deficient. Already suspect at the time of the formation of the party system and generally identifying with the only non-sectarian party on offer, Australian Catholics' alliance with the Labor Party was consolidated by the conflicts of World War I. While the polemical thrust of the previous chapter was to expose the patterns of sectarian thought and feeling Australian Liberalism brought to the formation of the Australian party system, it had another, more positive implication. Sectarianism in Australia before World War II was not mainly about fighting Catholic vices, but about affirming Protestant virtues. Most of the time, when anti-Catholic feeling was latent, Protestantism was still at work in the Liberal imagination, giving weight to Liberalism's promotion of the political, social and economic virtues of independent individualism and responsible citizenship against Labor's class-based understandings.

War Bonds

A 1922 Nationalist election pamphlet titled ‘The Savings Snatcher’ depicts a cigar-smoking Communist boss snatching a mother's bank passbook with one hand and a man's war-bond certificate with the other. Reacting to a threat by Labor leader Matt Charlton to reduce interest on war loans proportionate to any fall in the cost of living, the caption reads: ‘The same argument applies to savings bank interest. Hundreds of thousands of earners of small incomes have money in both war loans and savings banks. They can protect their savings only by voting National and “Safety First”.’ When they promised to put Safety First, the Nationalists were not just promising safe streets and industrial order; they were also promising safety for the nation's finances. The class-based model of the Australian party system has given pride of place to economic self-interest as the basis of party identity and electoral support. Here surely is its proof. People with property voted Liberal, Nationalist, UAP and Liberal again because these parties promised to protect their homes, businesses and savings from the greedy, extravagant or incompetent hands of Labor governments. If, in the final analysis, politics is based on hip-pocket nerves, then this shows Australian Liberals' claims to moral virtue for what they are – excuses by mean-spirited, anxious people to hang on to their money.

There is of course something in this, for financial self-interest is a powerful motive; but it is not by any means the whole story.

Labor was in office from 1983 to 1996. This was the longest Labor had ever held power, and by 1990 as the Liberals lost their fourth election on the trot commentators were starting to think that Labor may have supplanted the Liberals as the natural party of government. The Liberals lost again in 1993, an election they thought was unlosable, after Paul Keating had ousted Hawke from the Prime Ministership. When the party Menzies had formed in 1944/45 celebrated its fiftieth birthday in 1995 it had been out of office for more than ten years. The Liberal Party responded to their lengthening period out of government with a rapid turnover of leaders: as each leader failed to topple Labor – or was thought to be about to fail – he was himself replaced in what became an almost farcical revolving door: Andrew Peacock, John Howard, Andrew Peacock, John Hewson, Alexander Downer and finally John Howard again.

Both Peacock and Howard were experienced politicians, though neither was experienced enough to moderate their rivalry and ideological differences for the sake of party unity. When they failed, the party turned to two untested newcomers. The first was John Hewson, an academic economist who had been an adviser to Howard when he was Treasurer in Fraser's governments and who was a passionate believer in neo-liberal economics. He proved too narrow, with little competence outside economics, and was easily portrayed as a dogmatic zealot.

Names

What are we to call the political tradition which is the subject of this book? Liberal, conservative, anti-labour, non-labour? This is a fraught question, and there is no easy answer. The question is one that has exercised the party itself as it has re-formed throughout the century. In contrast to the Australian Labor Party (ALP) which has had a continuous organisation since 1901 and a coherent national structure from shortly after, the Liberals have re-formed four times: at Fusion in 1909 when Alfred Deakin's Victorian based Liberals and George Reid's New South Wales based free traders-turned-conservative and anti-socialist came together to form the first united non-labour party; in 1916 when Billy Hughes and other proconscriptionists left the Labor government to join with the Opposition and form the Nationalist government with a Nationalist Party quickly following; in 1931 in the depth of the depression when the Nationalists remade themselves as the United Australia Party with Joe Lyons as leader; and in 1944 when the Liberal Party was formed, finally stabilising non-labour's party organisation. Is it liberalism or conservatism that holds this party tradition together? Or, as the term ‘non-labour’ suggests, is it the opposition to labour which provides the strongest glue?

John Howard has argued that the Liberal Party is the trustee of both the classical liberal and conservative traditions; that it combines a liberal economic policy and a conservative social policy.

When Deakin launched the Commonwealth Liberal Party at the Melbourne Town Hall in 1909 he stood in front of a map of Australia to help his audience imagine the vastness of ‘the 3 000 000 square miles of territory which is your possession – for whose present and future you and you alone are responsible’. Deakin was not using the map to draw attention to Australia's long coastline, nor to its isolation from Britain, but to its internal differences and divisions. Within the vastness were eight or nine distinct centres, ‘each speaking with its own voice to its own surroundings’, but the men and women in his audience needed to keep their eyes on the map to remember that the proposals they were about to hear were to be applied right across it.

Deakin and his Liberals were nation-builders attempting to develop policies that would transcend local and geographically based loyalties and draw Australians into a heightened awareness of themselves as citizens of a national polity. Theirs was the language of citizenship, of independent men and women bound together by their recognition of reciprocal rights and obligations and their loyalty to the symbols and institutions of the state. But in the decade since Federation a new way of imagining the divisions of Australia had been gaining ground – one which saw Australians as divided not by state and regional loyalties but by differences of class and economic interest.

Robert Menzies and the Formation of the Liberal Party

In 1944, Menzies and other leading Liberal politicians moved to reform the fragmented non-labour political organisations into a new national party. As Menzies told the first of the conferences on party re-organisation:

By comparison with the Liberals, the ALP was born national, with its origins in the national organisation of the new unionism and the radical nationalism of the 1890s. The Liberals' organisational roots were deep in colonial political experiences and their state organisations with their supporting leagues and committees still acted on assumptions of state sovereignty which made the national polity a secondary consideration. World War II, however, changed all that. Alan Davies has argued that one of the key moments in Australian political history is when the national polity displaced the states as the focus of political attention and energy. The psychological impact of the national emergency and the national war effort is part of the story, but of more lasting importance are the national institutions of governance which resulted from the war, and in particular the strengthening of the national economy.

Labor's Challenge

For a political party based on commitment to independent individuals and their freedom of expression and action, political organisation is a constant problem. On the one hand it is necessary for effective political action; on the other, too much organisation risks destroying the very individuality and independence which the political action is attempting to defend. This was the Liberals' organisational dilemma as they confronted a tightly disciplined Labor Party attempting, as they saw it, to turn parliamentary politics into an arena for class warfare. One student of political parties has argued that modern political parties are distinguished far less by their program or the class of their membership than by the nature of their organisations. In considering the way Australian Liberals have distinguished themselves from Labor, organisational issues have been crucial as they have tried to balance their distinctive organisational values with their recurring organisational weakness. They did not achieve organisational stability until the formation of the Liberal Party in 1945.

When Menzies was working to persuade Australian Liberals that a new and better organised party was needed, he had two competing models of party organisation in mind. The first was the Australian Labor Party. Menzies was keen that the new party should emulate some aspects of the ALP, in particular its strong branch structure and organisational coherence.

For All of Us

John Howard became leader of the Liberal Party in January 1995 after Hewson's successor, Alexander Downer, resigned. Hewson had hung on for fifteen months or so after the March 1993 election, but his leadership was fatally wounded. As the election post-mortems had argued, he did not have the depth of political skills needed to rebuild the party's electoral plausibility. His successor, Alexander Downer was, if anything, worse and he collapsed under the merciless pressures of the job into embarrassing gaffes and displays of ignorance. Howard was drafted into the job by a desperate party, and fourteen months later, on 2 March 1996, he led it back into government. He has since won two more elections, in 1998 and again in 2001.

Early in 1995 it was clear that Labor under Paul Keating was in trouble. A by-election in the ACT electorate of Canberra delivered a massive 16.2 per cent swing against the government, and in May the popular Queensland Labor government had its majority reduced from twenty-one seats to one. Keating's second period of government, the one he had won in his own right, was dominated by cultural issues. With good reason, Keating believed that the economic reforms of the 1980s were starting to bear fruit.

The Dismissal

The Whitlam governments lasted scarcely three years. Australia's first Labor government since 1949, and its first modern social democratic government, was caught up in a series of crises caused by a combination of domestic and international factors. Domestically its failure to win control of the Senate was the key, as an Opposition, unwilling to accept Labor's legitimacy, held the new government hostage. Internationally, the long boom ended, and the Australian economy started to falter, as did every other economy in the western world. The appearance of ‘stagflation’, in which rising levels of unemployment are accompanied by rising inflation, showed that the usefulness of Keynesianism in managing national economies was over. The inexperienced Whitlam government became increasingly desperate and accident prone as the economy spun from its control, and at the end of 1975 the Opposition brought it down, as its belief in the new government's incompetence was given daily vindication by ministerial scandals and a deteriorating economy. The Liberal Party returned to government under a new leader, Malcolm Fraser, believing that now the right people were back in power, and that Whitlam had been revealed as arrogant and foolish and his government as an inexperienced rabble, all would be well. The economy would right itself, the Liberal Party would quickly re-establish the moral ascendancy it had held during Menzies' days, and it would be clear to all that the Whitlam government was nothing but an aberration.

Class, Religion and the Australian Party System

The great majority of Australian Liberals were Protestants, and, even when they were not, the virtues on which they based their claims to govern were Protestant virtues. Australian Liberals were independent, they were loyal, and they did not pursue group-based sectional claims. Roman Catholics were welcome in their parties, but only if they displayed and adhered to these virtues. But even when Catholics tried their hardest it was difficult for them ever to be entirely free of the suspicions which dogged their religion. When John Cramer won preselection for a winnable Liberal party seat at the 1949 election, he was aware that he ‘was something of a freak, as it had seemed in the whole of Australia almost impossible for a Catholic to win preselection for a safe seat in the Liberal Party’, as indeed had been the case in the United Australia Party (UAP) and the Nationalists before that. In a preselection marred by terrible sectarian bitterness, he had been asked by one member of the selection committee whether he owed allegiance to the Pope or the King. And after winning the seat he still felt branded. Whenever he entered the room Menzies would remark ‘be careful boys, here comes the Papist’: ‘For some reason I cannot understand it always seemed uppermost in his mind that I was Catholic and therefore in some way different from the others’.

Midway through the twentieth century the Liberal Party published a little booklet called ‘We Believe’. Comprising seventeen short paragraphs it was a creed for Liberal Party believers. Item 3 read ‘We believe in the Individual. We stand positively for the free man, his initiative, individuality, and acceptance of responsibility’. In 1954 the party was less than a decade old, but its catechism of beliefs looked back to the formation of explicitly non-labour parties in the first decade of the century, and beyond to the nineteenth-century British liberalism the settlers brought with them to the new land of opportunity beneath the southern skies. It also looked forward, to the uncertain postwar future, confident that, whatever lay ahead, the party's fundamental beliefs would be sufficient guide.

The Liberal Party of Australia was formed in 1945, and although this marked a new beginning, a re-organisation after the low point of the 1943 federal election, it was also the continuation of a political tradition which has been central to Australian politics since Federation. This book is about that tradition. It begins with Alfred Deakin in the first decades of the century, and it concludes with John Winston Howard at the century's end. It is not a detailed history of the various party organisations, their periodic collapses and reformations; nor is it a history of these parties' fluctuating electoral success; nor of the various governments they have provided, though it will touch on such matters.