Reports of my retirement are somewhat premature for we live in interesting times and they promise to get more interesting that both state and federal level. For my sins, I am going to break a self-imposed rule and talk briefly about the Liberal Party at a federal level. During my time at university, I was regarded as something of a guru when it came to the affairs of the Liberals. In fact, I wrote what was regarded as a seminal paper on the future of the Libs back in 1973, when they had been sat firmly on their backsides by an electorate that was well and truly sick of 23 years unbroken rule by the coalition and heartily disillusioned with the leadership (if it could be called that) of William MacMahon, Frank Packer’s puppet, known fairly widely as “Billy big-ears” and more accurately by Gough Whitlam as “Tiberius with a telephone.”
I had studied Australian politics pre-Federation until the 70s and looked at the problems of non-Labor parties, and while I could not resist chuckling at a book on Australian Government which was prescribed reading for the course, written by L.F. (Finn) Crisp, a distinguished public servant, political scientist and academic (Foundation Professor of Political Science at the ANU). I still have a copy somewhere and it is a remarkable book because it discusses politics in Australia since settlement and up to the 1960s. The tone is not surprising as his life was greatly affected by the world-wide recession of the 1920s and he was a lifelong member of the ALP. Not once does he mention the Liberal Party by name: the ALP is given due recognition and so too the Country Party, which I remember being described as the “agrarian socialist and peasants party done up in capitalist clothes,” by one of the more cynical lecturers. Naturally enough, most of the lecturers were small-m Marxists and one of the finest in that tradition was the least biased in presentation and critically, evaluation of our papers.
I don’t typically want to bore readers but my conclusions were fairly basic. For all his faults, Bob Menzies took the remains of the United Australia Party, which foundered on the rocks of competing interests and reconstituted the wreckage as the Liberal Party of Australia in 1944. Five years later, he was Prime Minister and retained power from 1949 until he retired in 1966. Mention of Bob Menzies can still evoke powerful feelings in certain quarters. All the old hatreds remain but with the death of enemies, mention of his name is not likely to keep the children awake at night. In some respects, Menzies got a bum rap but I won’t elaborate at this stage. I felt after reading about him and especially the claims that he was “British to the boot heels” became somewhat tiresome. Yes he loved cricket and enjoyed visiting the UK, meeting Royalty and when he became Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, the sniggering lingered.
My summation of his contribution to Australian politics started by reading a basic document and indeed, I think every politician irrespective of party should read the Forgotten People speech of 1942 (http://www.liberals.net/theforgottenpeople.htm) and I emphasise that in this context we are not talking about apologies to indigenous people, battered wards of the state and the like. It was and still is a powerful and evocative speech, made when victory in war was by no means certain. He had recognised that the big end of town had undue influence on the old UAP and the speech centred on the aspirations of the middle class and he was by no means a class warrior such as certain Labor leaders. One particular part of the speech held my attention:
”…The great vice of democracy – a vice which is exacting a bitter retribution from it at this moment – is that for a generation we have been busy getting ourselves on to the list of beneficiaries and removing ourselves from the list of contributors, as if somewhere there was somebody else’s wealth and somebody else’s effort on which we could thrive.
To discourage ambition, to envy success, to have achieved superiority, to distrust independent thought, to sneer at and impute false motives to public service – these are the maladies of modern democracy, and of Australian democracy in particular. Yet ambition, effort, thinking, and readiness to serve are not only the design and objectives of self-government but are the essential conditions of its success. If this is not so, then we had better put back the clock, and search for a benevolent autocracy once more.”
Menzies was not without fault and the sobriquet “Pig-iron Bob” dogged him for years, the price for advocating the export of iron to Japan, which we later received back in a different form. However, he can never be seen as an appeaser of tyranny in any form and personally, I believe 23 years of unbroken rule by one party is extremely unhealthy for democracy. In his later years, he was widely disillusioned by what the Liberal government and Liberal party had become, namely slaves to the vested interests that he despised. He held the party together by a combination of political savvy and the identification and removal of challengers to his position. Yet at the end of the day, he and his alleged arch enemy Arthur Calwell, could quietly retire and have a drink together without rancour or bitterness.
Segueing forward to 1973, it was pretty obvious that the Liberal party in opposition was a rabble and how many times have we read that in the press lately. I’m not sure but I’m half convinced that The Australian newspaper has finally realized that the ALP won the last election but to read some of their columnists, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. In 1973, a politician I knew well, Billy Snedden, led the Libs. Billy was many things but never a serious candidate for Prime Minister. I wrote that the Liberal party would only regain power when it turned to the right and gained an authoritarian leader who would stamp out organized resistance. Lacking a defining ideology, the Liberal party tends to pull in all directions and only strong leadership holds it together. There is no genuine conservative party in this country, in the best sense and definition of the word. There is no shame in being conservative: true conservatives have a strong sense of conservation, which is a surprise to some, and they also believe in most of the things embodied in the policies of the Rudd government.
I would argue with anyone, anywhere and anytime that after Malcolm Fraser, whom I confidently predicted would replace Billy Snedden, that in the face of a strong ALP government led by Bob Hawke and later Paul Keating, the party would again descend again into factional fighting and the words used in the papers today can be retroactively applied to the 1970s, the 1980s and until the election of John Howard and the establishment of an Australian Brutopia.
In the past few weeks, I have fairly sizzled with anger combined with mirth at various media statements. In one column in The Australian, a lead writer had the temerity to say that since the paper was first published in 1964, it had not supported any particular party. Tell that to those of us who read the dreadful rag throughout the Howard years and since: pure unadulterated bullshit and I make no apology for using that word. Secondly, while nursing an early evening drink and being a creature of habit, watching the 7:30 report on ABC-TV, I was absolutely gobsmacked to hear Kerry O’Brien talking to a Liberal about the leadership struggles and he uttered the phrase I shall never forget: “surely this is an argument about the soul of the Liberal Party.” It is impossible to know whether this was puckish humour or an intended observation.
With great regret, I have to say that the Liberal Party of Australia has no soul. But to a point, I exclude the Tasmanian Division, where moderates are graciously permitted to live until the reactionaries have the numbers. Federally, there are no decent respectable conservatives left in its ranks, and while John Howard did his best to eradicate the moderates, often known as ‘the wets’ the sole guiding principle of the Liberal Party of Australia is to obtain government and keep it by whatever means necessary. The so-called conservatives are reactionaries of the worst type. I do not have a great deal of regard for Malcolm Turnbull, having had some dealings with the man but in choosing Tony Abbott as leader, with his reshuffle, he has moved the party to the right and later this year, his policies will be tested against those of Kevin Rudd. I do not believe Abbott to be a particularly bad or evil person – he’s surrounded by those, but once again, the Libs are set (un) fair to play divisive politics. I smell the whiff of fascism and racism or at least, xenophobia among some of the resurrected corpses from the Howard years. The immense gain in influence of a certain Tasmanian senator makes me wonder what he would do with industrial relations if the Liberal Party regains power. It evokes dark visions of civil conscription and labour camps.
Many people in the ALP dismiss the Abbott leadership at their peril. It was not so long ago that strange people carried so much influence in this country. We saw it starkly presented in the “Joh for Canberra” campaign, which frightened the daylights out of the Liberal leadership and many in the ALP. We saw Pauline Hansen with a naked appeal to to baser instincts and for those of us studying the form guide, we could see quite clearly how her influence was negated by John Howard, who in the finest traditions of Australian Liberalism hijacked her policies. It was not a particularly glorious chapter in our history.
To my friends in the ALP, I say don’t underestimate Tony Abbott and his henchmen. The Rudd government, in my humble opinion, has done well and sufficient to earn a second term. Its Achilles heel is an indecent obsession with climate change and Australia leading the world. It would do well to re-examine the scientific arguments and try to explain what the Emissions Trading Scheme actually means to the average voter, while we continue to export the greatest pollutant in the world – coal – in record amounts. The average voter needs to know what it will cost each household, not more sanctimonious moralizing by the highly intelligent but po-faced Senator Penny Wong. The message isn’t being heard, let alone understood and the old Green slogan of thinking globally, acting locally has a great deal to commend itself to us all. We can learn a lot and I saw much in New Zealand to lead the way but who would listen?
In some respects, this situation of Australia somehow trying to muscle-up and lead the world is akin to a rerun of the early days of deregulation in the economy or as Paul Kelly has coined the phrase and the book: “The End of Certainty.” He got that right. The economic rationalists lead by the Federal Treasury and aped by state governments privatized, downsized, right-sized, resized government functions and left us at the mercy of travelling gurus such as “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap, notorious for stripping companies and winding them up. And then of course, the clarion cry was taken up by the Liberal leader of the time, John Hewson. I have no doubt that Dr. Hewson is intelligent but he was no match for Paul Keating who won the unwinnable election. Dr. Hewson also had other problems and left politics, probably for the greater good. And then came Howard.
Even in his retirement, John Howard won’t go away. Apart from the adulation accorded him by many on the right and most of the Liberal party, the definitive account of his tenure has yet to be written. The self-serving hagiographic books produced so far do not inspire confidence. Once again, like Malcolm Fraser, whom he repudiated, he was strong with the weak and weak with the strong. He sought to destroy the trade union movement and failed to recognize that many of the freedoms we enjoy were won by the ALP and organized labour. Under him, we had a transmogrification of language. Not content with eco-managerial speak which is virtually incomprehensible to most people (and if you don’t believe me try reading mission statements and annual reports of government departments) he added the worst Americanisms.
I have no great problem with using some American terms. I know for a stone cold fact that the Kakoda trail was called just by diggers in WWII until rising nationalism turned it into the Kakoda Track, which is alleged to be more Australian. Whether we like it or not, American spellings made their way into the universities and the public service during the 1970s and expand slowly. I don’t mind dropping certain letters in spellings especially “u” in many words but I don’t like reversing the Australian re ending to some words. Centre will always be spelt that way despite the best attempts of word processing packages to spell it as center. Much of this comes from Australia being a derivative culture which until World War II, took its lead from home i.e. Great Britain. I was most amused to hear Australians who had never left the country refer to the Old Dart as “home.” On the other hand, I was rather annoyed to find that several government departments with which I dealt, were heavily Anglicized and the notion of an Australian national interest was very weak indeed in the 1960s and 70s.
So John Howard turned Social Security into welfare and unemployment benefits into the dole with the negative connotations that these words have. When I studied industrial law and industrial relations at Victoria State University, I learned a great deal about the history of industrial relations in this country and also about the problems of employment and unemployment. It was a given that around 3% of the population were unemployable in the conventional sense and another 2% usually between jobs. I have not had the time to research whether there are any agreed levels of employability and unemployment at present but we know full employment is a chimera. Coming as I do from left of centre, I believe that it is our duty to look after those who cannot look after themselves. Sometimes reference is made to those who fall through the cracks and that is a reasonably apt description. Unless you are handicapped by poor eyesight, it is impossible to miss them and I don’t intend to elaborate further here. I have made my views very strongly to federal and state ministers about the need for hostels and overnight accommodation for the homeless, where they can get a shower, a meal and a bed. Is this too much to ask of the rich country? I might also note in passing that while there is no shortage of money for battered women and children and rightly so, the same does not apply to the male of the species. I have met any number of battered men, including one who had 42 stitches in his head after a frenzied knife attack by his wife. I took him in and we cared for him for a few days until he regained equilibrium.
The worst legacy of the Howard years varies according to your standpoint. Many point to the antiterrorist laws, others to the sinking of the SIEV IV and boat people, the commencement of draconian action against organized labour, masked as “Work Choices” and I must confess that those policies irritated me greatly. There are people in the Liberal party who would cheerfully see the unemployed conscripted (which is constitutionally illegal) by administrative fiat. What next I wonder? Camps, poor food and one blanket on a hard wooden bed? Some of the people that I have heard thinking out loud along this line don’t qualify as humans beings in my book.
However, for me the worst aspect of the Howard years was the insistent notion, imported after the end of the Cold War along with Reaganomics and Thatcherist ideas that there was no such thing as society, just individuals trying to make their own way. And in those words, the concept of humanity did not apply. It was of course arrant nonsense because for all our faults, Homo sapiens erectus is a social animal and despite the worries I have about the effects of high technology on behaviour and possibly on brain development, we are societal beings. My old friend and sometime mentor has written in Tasmanian Times about civics and lamented the decline in civility, humanity and I would add decency and gentleness. It seems almost axiomatic that the more labour saving devices we have, the less inclined we become to talk to our fellow man and I use the term man in a nonsexist sense!
The problem with this notion as pushed by Howard and Bronwyn Bishop in particular is that some people were foolish enough to believe it and the concomitant policies of the Liberal government were to divide the community: Liberals thrive on division and dissent when they govern – wedge politics is the dignified term and these qualities come back to bite them on the backside after an election defeat, which is poetic justice. However, it does not in any way make up for the attitudes that they inculcated into the public service and in dealings with business. Australia has been described by Donald Horne as “the lucky country” and indeed, that is the case. Despite the attempts of rabid revisionist historians, we have never had a revolution; nor thanks to John Curtin’s call to the US in World War II were we invaded. And so far, we have been lucky that the much derided counterterrorist authorities have forestalled any plot before it reaches fruition. Sometimes however, it makes you wonder how long as a country, we can continue to roll Lucky sevens at dice because that is what it seems to be at times.
The problem with this notion as pushed by Howard and Bronwyn Bishop in particular is that some people were foolish enough to believe it and the concomitant policies of the Liberal government were to divide the community: Liberals thrive on division and dissent when they govern and these qualities come back to bite them on the backside after election defeat, which is poetic justice. However, it does not in any way make up for the attitudes that they inculcated into the public service and in dealings with business. Australia has been described by Donald Horne as “the lucky country” and indeed, that is the case. Despite the attempts of rabid revisionist historians, we have never had a revolution; nor thanks to John Curtin’s call to the US in World War II, were we invaded. And so far, we have been lucky that the much derided counterterrorist authorities have forestalled any plot before it reaches fruition. Sometimes however, it makes you wonder how long as a country, we can continue to roll Lucky sevens at dice because that is what it seems to be at times.
My biggest regret with the Rudd government is that there has been little perceptible change in the departmental culture of Centrelink, Comcare, Veterans Affairs and so on. The mindless filling up of forms by the precariously employed and the unemployed continues as though the government had not changed hands. I was looking for a kinder, gentler Australia. Another good starting point would be to reexamine the lessons of the past two decades and come up with a genuine notion of national sovereignty, strategic resources, which should be retained in our hands (not to be flogged off cheaply to the Chinese or any one else). There are other issues at stake in connection with population, migration and multiculturalism and do we need any more starters? I think Kevin Rudd would be well-advised to spend more time at home and show he’s the person in the PM’s chair because Tony Abbott and his revanchists will prove to be a much tougher opponent than Malcolm Turnbull.
Abbott himself doesn’t have much to lose – and he knows that the sound of knives being sharpened still permeate the backbench and Liberals are ruthless with unsuccessful leaders. So the leadership coterie is out in the electorates, the outback, boondocks making expensive and strange promises. (How many times in the last 40-odd years have I heard about plans to divert rivers back from the sea into the inland?) this If the electorate can get desperate enough, interest rates increase (of course, no one mentions the rises in 2007 under Howard); petrol prices run amok again and we get hit by an aftershock of the recession we think we avoided as some predict? The feral right is salivating already and the curse of living in interesting times continues.
