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

An equally compelling reason for the Liberal party’s failure to appreciate its own history is that its perspective is foreshortened. Invariably, we date our existence from 1944. Yet the Liberal party did not just spring from the mind of Menzies like Athena from the brow of Zeus. Great though Menzies’ achievement was in reconstructing the non-Labor side of politics, what he created was a new party structure, not a new set of political values. The Liberal party is the continuation of a political tradition dating back to the 19th century — Menzies himself was first prime minister of a UAP government, and was originally a member of the Nationalist party. The Liberal party may have been created in 1944, but Liberal politics was not. In neglecting everything which went before, Liberals miss some of the richest and most successful years of our history. Even the fusion in 1909 was not the beginning. There had been Liberals in all of the colonial parliaments and it was they who were the authors and champions of the Australian federation: a movement either spurned, or actively opposed, by the colonial Labor parties.

As last week’s neglect of the merger centenary showed, Liberals’ appreciation of our own history is at a low ebb. The departure from parliament at or around the 2007 election of John Howard, Alexander Downer and Rod Kemp was an immense loss to the collective memory; the retirement of Petro Georgiou next year will deplete it further. There are still a few Liberal parliamentarians who are steeped in the party’s lore and traditions, including Peter Costello and Tony Abbott. There are a small number of others, among them the South Australian MP Andrew Southcott, who published a journal during the Howard government, Looking Forward, which connected the contemporary Liberal party to its history; the Queenslander Brett Mason, and the young Victorian senator Scott Ryan. But they are too few, and insufficiently appreciated.

Liberals gave Australia its first prime minister, Barton; the architect of its economy, Deakin; its greatest prime minister, Menzies; together with the greatest historian (Hasluck) and the greatest barrister (Barwick) to have participated in Australian public life. Ours was the political movement which was the very progenitor of the nation, and we have had the stewardship of that nation for more than two thirds of its history. There is no point in railing against the Left for its victory in the history wars if Liberals neglect their much richer legacy and vacate the field.

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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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