Quarterly Essay 20 A Time for War by John Birmingham

Author:John Birmingham [Birmingham, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Australia & New Zealand, Military, Afghan War (2001-)
ISBN: 9781921825194
Google: xtBO6WbFOIIC
Publisher: Black Inc.
Published: 2005-12-01T03:16:35+00:00

RELAXED AND

COMFORTABLE

Correspondence

David Kemp

Judith Brett has once more shown herself to be one of the foremost commentators on the Liberal Party’s political role. It is really the fact that her essay is so good that has prompted my response, because it would be too easy to take Relaxed and Comfortable as an assessment of the Howard years, which it is not. There are important aspects of the Howard record that are omitted or, I believe, misinterpreted, and it seemed useful, perhaps, to put some of these on the table for future discussion.

Brett herself is quite explicit about her purpose. Her essay, she says, is basically directed at the left, and aims to defend the Australian people from unfair charges levelled against them from the left because of their support at several elections for the Howard government. Part of her defence of the electorate is that the Howard government is much more in the mainstream of the Australian Liberal tradition than its critics from the left are often willing to concede. In this I agree with her, and welcome her sensible decision to recognise that there is such a Liberal tradition, and that it simply will not do in this day and age to keep talking about “non-labour” parties, as if the parties so characterised were not as central to the Australian political tradition as Labor.

Brett is clearly correct in her general assessment that the Liberal Party and the political tradition it represents has long seen itself as representing the national interest over sectional interests. This was the stated position of the first Federal Liberal Party formed after the Fusion of 1910, and it has been a consistent theme ever since. Indeed, Brett undervalues the importance of the Liberal organisations and liberal thought of nineteenth-century politics – the organisations and ideas that produced the Australian Federation.

Yet, not surprisingly, the article still carries intellectual baggage from the left, and I thought it would be useful to identify some of this baggage as a contribution to pushing along the debate about the Liberal Party’s role in the national life.

First, at the risk of seeming to niggle, there are times when Brett seems unwilling to concede active agency to the Liberal Party in influencing national life for the good – when good outcomes happen, it is not Liberal policies that are responsible. When Australia prospers under the Menzies government, her comment is that “history has been kind to the Liberal Party”, not that Menzies’ policies contributed to prosperity. Or that his education policies expanding the university system were a key factor in the rise of the “new class” of the tertiary-educated, or that his school policies helped to bring an end to sectarianism. Horne’s comment from The Lucky Country is to the same effect – that “little of what [Menzies] did seems to matter much …”

It hardly needs saying that a completely different interpretation is not only possible, but also more plausible – that Menzies’ reassertion of an economic system based around private enterprise and limited government was absolutely key to the Australian experience after 1949.

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