Ours is the party that forgot its past

Wednesday, 3rd June 2009

George Brandis laments the fact that the Liberals have overlooked their most important anniversary

If there were any lingering doubt that Labor continues to beat the Liberal party hands down in the history wars, it should have evaporated last week. 27 May marked the 100th anniversary of Alfred Deakin’s announcement to the House of Representatives of the merger of the two warring anti-Labor parties, Deakin’s Protectionist party and George Reid’s Free Traders. Six days later, Deakin’s third government — the first Australian government formed by a party calling itself ‘the Liberal party’ — was sworn in.

The union was an occasion of even more lasting significance than Menzies’ reconstruction of the Liberal party in 1944; it was the seminal event which has defined the architecture of non-Labor politics ever since. Yet its centenary was allowed to pass uncelebrated and unremarked. The contrast between the Liberal party’s lack of interest in their history, and Labor’s almost obsessive preoccupation with their own, could not be more stark.

Although Liberals spent the past week in blissful ignorance of their own centenary, eight years ago, on the other side of politics, it was a very different story. In May 2001, the ALP nearly hijacked the commemoration of the centenary of the first sitting of the Commonwealth Parliament in Melbourne by announcing that it was also the centenary of the first meeting of the Federal Labor Caucus. Senator John Faulkner, Labor’s peerless historical impresario, managed to parlay this largely adventitious ‘centenary’ — it was not, after all, the anniversary of the creation of the party, but of a commonplace meeting which was bound to coincide with the first meeting of the new parliament anyway — into a major historical occasion, complete with a centennial dinner attended by some 1,600 people, at which every living Labor leader was fêted. Faulkner also teamed up with Labor’s favourite historian, Stuart Macintyre, to publish a commemorative history, True Believers: The Story of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party. Ironically, the production of this handsome, self- congratulatory volume was partly funded by the Howard government through a Centenary of Federation grant. As if to underline the Liberal party’s indifference to its own history, it is somehow bizarrely fitting that a Liberal government used taxpayers’ funds to help the Labor party celebrate theirs.

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stephen holt

June 5th, 2009 4:14am Report this comment

The oblivion suffered by past Liberal leaders is not as a complete as Senator Brandis says. In recent years there have been good biogs of Holt (Frame) and Gorton (Hancock, a Liberal himself I believe).

John Kidd

July 3rd, 2009 2:28am Report this comment

Well said, George. As you may recall from your university days, I have long been a Conservative supporter (indeed I am also proud to be described as a Tory, seemingly a term of abuse nowdays). An ex Pom, I used to actively support the English Conservative Party (campaigning, speaking etc). That was, and hopefully remains, a Party well versed and proud of its long history reaching back to Edmund Burke, the Pitts, Disraeli, Baldwin, Thatcher to mention just a few. As you write, the Australian Liberal Party, although lacking as yet the long history (there is a "tory" in that word!) of its English equivalent, has good reason to be equally proud of its past. What is needed surely is a well written and readable historical record of its past and traditions. That perhaps disqualifies the "professional" historians of our left-leaning academies. But what of your good self? Work commitments pemitting of course, but that was not a factor which deterred that splendid non "profesional" historian, Winston Churchill, from entering the authorship fray.

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