(This was written more than two years ago. Some things have changed, but most have not, regrettably. Had I re-read this more carefully, picking the US election would have been a simple matter. Interesting Times....)
Whatever Happened to the Liberal Party?
Parturient montes nascetur ridiculus mus might be a suitable epitaph for what is left of the once-proud Liberal Party of Australia. (Mountains will labour: what’s born? A ridiculous mouse!) To an incautious observer this requiem may appear premature. Liberal/Coalition governments rule most of our states and territories as well as federally. Many were voted in with landslide majorities. Yet the single-term regime in Victoria is a warning blast fired across their bows. Some see it as merely another exemplar of trans-Murray exceptionalism. Victoria has always ploughed its own furrow in Australian politics. But this is the merest Panglossia: the sober truth is that the outgoing Napthine regime was relatively well-liked by the electorate. Yet out they went, despite the Opposition being itself in extremis. Labor’s poor performance in the upper house is also an unwelcome missile into its superstructure. Put up such dubious has-beens and never-weres on your list and watch your support crumble away. But if Napthine’s electoral rejection assumed the status of an unexpected burst water-main, what is coming the federal party’s way elsewhere might resemble a tsunami. The voters are in a truculent mood just now, and looming in the middle distance may be discerned the merest outline of pitchforks.
How else to explain the nine-days’-wonder of the John Frum Party? On his good days an amusing fellow in his own idiosyncratic way, yet for all his alleged billions Clive Palmer has experienced a sudden shipwreck; and now finds himself on a lee shore in his underpants being catcalled by a retired corporal who appears to have grasped that she doesn’t need him any more, and might easily find herself re-elected on her own ticket in five years’ time. But how on earth did he ever manage to take Fairfax, and a trailing assortment of senatorial hangers-on, in the first place? His political platform was the merest cargo-cultism founded on whimsy and ill-temper. Until these excitingly postmodern days his political enthusiasms would have been laughed out of the saloon bar. No blame whatever attaches to the Liberal branch which rejected his egotistical demands. They could do no other without running up the white flag forthwith. Yet the political climate which enabled his improbable ascension is a minatory lesson for all political parties. Nothing may be taken for granted any more, and the mythical safe seat is now as one with the gryphon and the manticore.
It is time to speak of the Prime Minister. As he lurches almost daily from malapropism to fiasco it cannot be any comfort to him to realize that he must bear the blame for much of this revolutionary spirit. His grotesque errors of judgment are too well-publicized to require recapitulation. What is forgotten in these amnesiac times is how he ever found himself in the job in the first place. Despite a few Catholic moments he was generally held to have been a fine Health Minister in the Howard government. He is one of the few members of the House of Representatives to possess an economics degree. At a moment when his party took time off to tear themselves apart in Opposition he washed his hands of them and took himself to Cape York to teach English to Aboriginal children. He successfully concealed the fact that he was a self-effacing volunteer firefighter for many years. He wrote a book which was admitted even by opponents to be a cogent conservative manifesto. Well may we have said, upon his ascension to party leadership, what’s not to like of this diligent miles Christi?
No sooner did he become Opposition leader than he transformed himself into a populist attack dog of the most virulent temper. In so doing, he violated one of the most cherished conservative doctrines. God, Queen and Empire may be less prominently displayed on the letterhead than formerly, but one thing which never changes is the black letter sign reading, in full, Do Not Feed The Beast. Many a Tory government has suppressed the passions of the mob. Many have overreacted in doing so. One thing no Tory has done in living memory is whip the mob into a frenzy, as this Prime Minister did. He was successful in tearing down the last Labor government partly because no-one could bring themselves to credit what their eyes and ears were telling them. Is this really Tony Abbott the Rhodes Scholar speaking entirely in catchpenny slogans? One might as well picture Tim Winton working in advertising.
All this came at a terrible cost. When you sow the wind, reaping the whirlwind comes more or less as a matter of course. It is impossible for this writer to escape the conclusion that something atavistic broke out in his soul at the moment he knifed his own leader in the back and took his job. Hatchet jobs of this sort are the rule rather than the exception in politics. Normal folk take in these things easily over their morning coffee. Tony Abbott is anything but normal. It is even doubtful whether he wanted the job at all. The suspicion wafting through the wintry fug over Northbourne Avenue was that neither he, nor Julia Gillard, ever really wanted to be leader. Both were it seems talked into it by senior Party commissars. Historical irony in excelsis. The devoutly religious shrink from such things in the ordinary way. Is it too much to suggest that in slipping the stiletto into his then leader he has taken unto himself the political analogue of a mortal sin? To see his lamentable attempt to speak French to a bunch of bewildered school-children (look it up on You-Tube, if you can bear the national embarrassment) was to experience Aristotelian pity and terror commensurate with the last act of Oedipus the King. Only thus, perhaps, can we make head or tail of the befuddled mishmash that passes for his government’s policies. If they are indeed to be dignified as such.
Consider also the absurd tale of Burqas In The House. Like everything else in this reign of dullards it ended in fiasco. But it need not have come to that. Had he a mind to buy into such a contention the Prime Minister need only have said that hijabs are every bit as welcome as any other form of headgear; but niqabs and burqas are not permitted, since those wearing them cannot be separately identified. One would not require much of a jurisprudential brain to have come up with that. Was it a dog-whistle? This is a popular interpretation, and may well be correct. But the art of the dog-whistle is a perilous one. Sooner or later, the canine puts in a personal appearance and demands something from you. If you deliver it, the benefit disappears and you appear weak and open to blackmail. If the doggy treat is not forthcoming, there may be torn trousers before bedtime.
Wrenching our eyes away from the diurnal trivia of the Parliamentary rinse cycle, a number of disturbing verities crystallize in the middle distance. There is the curious fact that this government of alleged classical liberals has chosen to intervene in the market-place on a scale undreamt-of by their predecessors. Very few journalists can even bring themselves to speak of the government’s Direct Action plan, except to ask Prime Minister if he is out of his mind. It is one thing to attempt to brazen the matter out. He could say ‘I don’t believe in climate change and all these scientists can go to hell.’ Or he could obfuscate and pretend to do something, as most other world leaders have chosen to do. To stand there with his socks full of feet, holding a metaphorical lump of coal as a votive object, and try to bribe big business into abating their profits is to leave the electorate simply unable to believe its ears.
The details of this government’s intention to undertake a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich have been extensively canvassed elsewhere. A great deal of criticism has had as its foundation Well, they would, wouldn’t they? I would rather ask why this must be so. Is this a thing that Tories do? If the Prime Minister really thinks of himself as a Tory, I would invite him to consider a certain statue in Piccadilly Circus, Soho, London, W1. It is generally known as Eros, but it was erected in memory of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, for his many Factory Acts and other humanitarian agitations. The noble Earl was an evangelical Christian who thought that social Darwinism was contrary to the laws of God and must be, and will be, suppressed or ameliorated.
Perchance they are Whigs after all? Whiggism was the foundation of the English Liberal Party. They distinguished themselves during the Years of Empire by amassing a great deal of property and telling the poor that they must make do with the crumbs from rich men’s tables. Pious platitudes rolled from the bewhiskered lips of these grandees, but most of the heavy lifting in feeding the poor was done by Tory Evangelicals and their Quaker admonitors. Until the Asquith government, which is another story entirely. For all that, it would be more true to observe that Australian Liberalism is a tender plant with shallow roots. Insofar as modern-day Liberals are aware of our British forebears at all, most only remember as far back as Margaret Thatcher – then, as now, an incurably controversial figure.
We need not rehearse the reasons for her successful counter-revolution overmuch. Suffice it to say that the United Kingdom under the quietly likeable Jim Callaghan had reached an economic dead end. Whether it was quite necessary for her to drive Boadicea’s scythe-wheel chariot through the ranks of her opponents is a matter over which historians will argue for decades to come. History has vindicated her vision, up to a point. Her legacy is generally bracketed with that of Ronald Reagan, though this writer finds the comparison mind-boggling. We need to recall that while Thatcher saved the British Treasury, Reagan for all his dazzling successes plunged his nation into an abyss of debt from which it is yet to recover.
The point is not trivial, and in an Australian context it matters a great deal. In Jeffrey Kennett we had a Thatcher of our own writ small. Latter-day Jeff has become an agreeable fellow, and listening to him quietly excoriate his successors is always instructive. Kennett (ably assisted by his wily Treasurer Alan Stockdale) restored his state’s finances. Perhaps we should listen to him more often. The Liberal Party, state and federal, would be well-advised to do so. At the very least it would help if they cast their minds beyond the workaday trivialities of what they are pleased to call their political philosophy.
If they are neither Whigs nor Tories, are they classical liberals? There is little doubt that some at least think they are. It would be a fine thing to think that their education rose beyond a commerce/law degree from an indifferent college. One would like to picture Christopher Pyne reading John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith and the like. Unfortunately the image keeps snapping out of focus. He wishes to bring back Latin, apparently. This perhaps is the only thing he has said in public since assuming his high office which has not been instantly risible. Somebody needs to explain to him what really happened to our universities and why they are so short of money. Any academic who has witnessed the managerialist takeover of recent decades could expound the problem, using very short words that even he would be able to comprehend. Universities were once communities of scholars. Now the scholars are ill-used peons subject to the daily whims and exactions of an armada of half-witted bureaucratic tyrants. A classical liberal would assist the scholars against the commissars. But since this would involve closing one’s mouth occasionally and listening to somebody else, this is clearly far too hard for the modern Cabinet minister.
A classical liberal would also wonder why so much of the budget is devoted to paying for other people’s club goods. Why are my taxes being diverted to pay for other children’s private schooling? Other people’s private health insurance? Other people’s negative gearing? Rich people’s childcare? What in creation is going on here? I do not object to paying taxes for public goods. If you do, then you are certifiably crazy. Defence of the realm is an obvious case. So is justice. Education is probably a public good. Even welfare is. It is also arguably a public evil; but it fails the test of excludability. Tell the underclass that all welfare is to cease and see what ensues. There are countries where the middle classes live in guarded fortresses. Ask someone who comes from one of these places (South Africa springs to mind) and they will tell you that it isn’t as much fun as you might think. There are many other public goods to which nobody in their right mind would object. Adam Smith himself had a long list of them. He would spin in his grave were he to witness our middle-class welfare revolution.
Let us now speak of the Liberal Party’s founding father Sir Robert Gordon Menzies, Knight of the Thistle, Constable of Dover Castle, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports and many other gaudy Yuletide decorations. We may forgive him his taste for baubles. Most world leaders possess a streak of Red Dwarf’s Cat in them, and they love their shiny things. His self-identification with all things English has been over-written. His ANU biography contains the following quote from his private letters: 'You've got to be firm with the English. If you allow yourself to be used as a doormat they will trample all over you'. Quite. John Curtin has been justly praised for standing up to Churchill. Menzies did the same, at times. The warlord of Whitehall didn’t mind in the slightest. He loved a debating foe who would stand up to him.
Like most of his hapless successors Menzies embarrassed us mightily when he attempted to bestride the world’s stage. His friend Harold MacMillan tried to explain the winds of change to him, but he never quite grasped the nettle with sufficient firmness. The legacy of some of his foreign policy disasters is with us to this day. But at home he served us well. Australia was slow to reap the benefits of increasing national income. It is almost certainly true that free trade would have given us much more than the circumscribed consensus that he forged. Gradualism has howbeit many virtues entirely lost on his heirs. He never forgot his humble origins in Jeparit; and as soon as he felt he could afford to do so he made available a large number of Commonwealth scholarships for bright children to continue their studies. It is true that the bulk of them were taken by the wealthy; yet many a poor student was awarded a ticket on the train to freedom thanks to his largesse. Those now wishing to follow in Menzies’ footsteps must first complete a college degree before entering the hallowed portals of at the great man’s alma mater. They will work part-time in low-paid casual jobs, and even if they do everything right they will graduate in their mid-twenties with a mountain of debt. If the plan is to keep the top end of town cleansed of lower-class riff-raff, then it is working; even though some of the indigent still manage the precipitous journey.
More than anything else Menzies was an Australian; far more so than he himself imagined. He exemplified the federation of compromises: a land united in pragmatic acceptance of diversity beneath a boisterous patina of blokedom. Modern sentiment finds much to criticize in his stifling picket-fence provincialism. Yet his national vision was at bottom inclusive, according to its lights and the times in which he found himself. And there are far worse things than taking one’s social cues from Buckingham Palace. Had Menzies found himself still PM, you cannot imagine him speaking aloud of his discomfort with male homosexuality, as the current incumbent has done. He may have felt even thus, but upon witnessing his Sovereign tapping Elton John on the shoulders he would have bowed a reverent head and concluded that it must be all right if a gay pop star can also be a knight of the realm.
After the interregnum of nonentities we then experienced the Fraser Years. This writer is unable to say whether those who romanticize him are deluded, or simply have bad memories. Those who lived through his administration can find virtually nothing to commend. Of the Howard regime all we can safely say is they were years of plenty. There were rivers of gold, most of which were poured down the drain. Worse, Howard’s unwise largesse fostered a perilous sensation of entitlement in the wealthy which is our nation’s most intractable present-day challenge. Future generations may remember him for his stance on gun control. It is to be hoped that Rob Borbidge is also remembered with honour. Both men put their jobs on the line after Port Arthur and said No More! Howard kept his job, though Borbidge was duly booted out, with – as far as we know – no regrets whatever.
Howard may also be remembered for standing up to the bullies of talk-back radio. He may well have been everything the small-l liberal media thought him, but he had the moral courage to face down the shock-jocks and go on radio himself. The media czars thought they were getting a pet lamb for a Prime Minister. They were mistaken. All he wanted was a microphone; and if they would not provide him with one he would go elsewhere. What he was saying is that the people of Australia wanted to talk to the organ-grinder, and not to the monkey. And this is why he kept winning elections. Seeing the current administration attempt the same media strategy is a mortifying experience. To a Ministerial elite who think that Australia stops at the Pyrmont Bridge, the world outside seems strange and filled with terrifyingly unfamiliar folk. Already the Howard Years look like a golden age. Or at the very least an age of pyrites.
One wonders where the Jim Killens of yesteryear have gone. The choleric Queenslander was a character all his own. The Fraser government esteemed him highly, even when they struggled to find a venue suitable for his talents. During dull sessions in the House, it is related that he and Gough Whitlam would pass each other notes in Latin. Killen knew exactly why he was in politics. He would tell anyone who listened of the great virtues of Edmund Burke. For an Australian Liberal, his hero was exceptionally well-chosen. For Burke was a Liberal who famously sided with the Tories after the French Revolution. He stood at the Enlightenment’s parting of the ways and chose freedom rather than slavery; order over chaos; and the rule of law over mass genocide. Many contemporary thinkers failed the test, notably Tom Paine. If Australian Liberalism is to have any meaning beyond the kleptocracy of the present day, there can be no better role model than Burke.
Killen’s only modern heir is the Honourable Member for Leichhardt. Warren Entsch is best-known for supporting gay rights, but there is much more to this admirable man’s story. Not only did he serve in the RAAF, he has also been a maintenance fitter and welder, real estate agent, farmer and grazier, and company director. It is no secret that the Liberal Party is overwhelmingly a party of privileged white males. If they are to escape irrelevance in the future, they need people drawn from a far wider social spread. And they need people who have experienced life outside the hothouses of wealth, power and inherited privilege. Where is the new generation of Warren Entsches? Where are the tradies? Where are the small businesswomen? Even wealthy female bankers would be preferable to the endless parade of gormless men who infest the party. There are a few, but most it seems can hardly be bothered with party politics in this country. It is probable that we have the wrong member of the Hockey family presiding over the Treasury. But if she finds herself too busy for politics, I doubt any of us would blame her. And where, for that matter, are the Aboriginals? The Party boasted Australia’s first indigenous Senator in Neville Bonner; but that was a long while ago.
One other figure is worth mentioning in passing. Alexander Downer was the nearest thing we ever had in this country to a hereditary aristocrat. His family ruled South Australia for decades. He never wanted to be Party leader at all, but blossomed late in life to find a successful career as foreign minister. He may well have talked down to us. But foreign governments found him agreeable and pleasant company. He was, as well befits a dyed-in-the-wool Tory, a huge admirer of Disraeli. During many of his more delicate missions, it is not hard to imagine him channeling the long-departed ghost of Viscount Beaconsfield.
One thinks immediately of William Hague. David Cameron is the current Tory supremo: a cunning, crafty patrician underestimated at one’s peril. Then there is Boris Johnson, a Regency rake from the Napoleonic wars born into a latter time. Boris is the most brilliant Tory writer of our day, and his newspaper columns are eagerly anticipated and rarely disappoint. Yet Hague is in many respects a far more interesting fellow. He first rose to improbable notice delivering a memorable address to the Tory Conference as a sixteen year old schoolboy. It must have looked, and sounded, like the second coming of William Pitt the Younger. He urged Her Majesty’s Government to invade Ian Smith’s Rhodesia. At the time it sounded like lunacy. The victims of the latter-day vampires of Harare must now wish his words had been heeded. He duly rose to Opposition leader in his early thirties, where he crashed and burned, partly because the times were out of joint for someone perceived as a young fogey; and partly because he ought to have sacked his advertising agency long before he did. Pitt the Younger as a lager lout in a baseball cap did not work, and never could. Now he is Foreign Secretary, and representing HMG abroad with panache and skill.
Why does a man like Hague go into politics at all? We need not speculate any longer, because he has written a life of his hero William Wilberforce. It is as fine an exemplar of the art of biography as anything produced in living memory. Wilberforce was famously talked into staying in politics rather than the Church so he could free the slaves. And abolish the slave trade he duly did (within the British Empire) as narrated in the mostly factual film Amazing Grace. Hague is driven by the same Tory Evangelical spirit, and every now and again his impassioned speeches resound through the world’s chancelleries.
I would now ask why do modern Liberals go into politics? What do they hope for? What kind of world do they want? Or is it merely about power and the dispensing of privilege? To answer that question, I fear we must invoke the spectre of postmodernism. Briefly summarized, postmodernism was made possible by the logical failure of reason and philosophy. It became necessary for Marxist academics who had seen their utopian dreams crumble in real life because it gave them a weasel way by which they could pretend that it didn’t matter. The mischief began with Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason offered a vehicle wherewith reason and faith could exist side by side in parallel worlds. Postmodernism took hold in French academia and spread worldwide, for reasons which now seem incomprehensible. It has become apparent that even in academia postmodern theory is running on an ebb tide. The privileging of emotion over reason could only last so long before it became embarrassing. Not to mention the cringeworthiness of the goose-stepping Martin Heidegger and his fellow-travelling Nazi collaborators. What has escaped notice until quite recently is that at the same moment that PoMo was being quietly abandoned by its traditional adherents, it was taken up with alacrity by the least likely people imaginable: the Republican Party of the United States of America.
It is difficult at first sight to accept the Tea Party as the spiritual heirs of Michel Foucault. This is hardly surprising. Yet all of Foucault’s concerns are there: the obsession with power and violence, the insurrections of suppressed knowledge, the incurable obfuscation, the moral posturing, and the refusal to face one’s opponents in fair debate. Well, maybe not the last one. Foucault famously ran away from Habermas’ challenge to debate his theories of power. Tea Partiers are always ready to debate. The difficulty is understanding what they are trying to say. Foucault always prevaricated over whether he was a postmodernist or not. But his bizarre theorizing was only made possible by the postmodern revolution.
Most people think PoMo is all about cultural relativism. This is only how it begins. My theory of reality is just as valid as yours at inception; but it never ends there. It may be only an alternative reality, but in the blink of an eyelid it has become the dominant episteme. Witness the bizarre superstitions of the anti-vaxxers. Rubbish science with tragic consequences. Or the detoxers, taking shameless advantage of the West’s calamitous decline in scientific literacy. Or the scarcely believable rise in Creationism, complete with pretend science textbooks and dinosaur theme parks. We may be thankful Clarence Darrow (who successfully defended a teacher of evolution against the proto-Tea Partiers) did not live to see such times.
One thing you will not read in a Creationist science course is the phrase ‘This is just a theory.’ Ask Ken Ham and his friends how they know their theories are right, and the answer is invariably ‘I just know.’ Because of the Bible, which they imagine to have been dictated by the Lord God of Hosts, in person, in twentieth-century American. I wish it to be true, therefore it is true. Traditional Christians who believe in reason find the whole thing as bizarre as anybody else. The lesson to be learned is not to allow pseudoscience a foot in the door. It is a parasitic growth unable to feed itself without the nutrients and language of the real thing; yet is unable to survive the scrutiny of scientists. But the parasite is killing its host. Science is dying in the West, and so are the human victims of its demise. Our postcolonial inheritors in Asia probably think this is hilarious. They will believe in its benefits when we no longer do so.
What a great moment in history this is for a federal government to slash spending on science. They pretend to be in favour of it, but obviously its practitioners must work more closely with industry. This isn’t how science works. CSIRO’s most celebrated recent discovery was the invention of wi-fi. This didn’t happen because a group of scientists had meetings with the Gigantic Internet Corporation. This magical flowering occurred because someone fell to thinking about the special properties of Discrete Fourier Transforms. And by definition nobody can see this sort of thing coming. So CSIRO gets a massive funding cut because they haven’t invented anything new in days; while business-suited idiots in Canberra need to attend more meetings and be paid massively for doing so. Only in a world of postmodern make-believe would things like this pass for normal.
We do not currently know how much the Liberal Party hungers after Tea Party pretend verities. We hope for better from them. But those who point across the waves to the USA have disturbing evidence on their side. We must cut welfare! We must reward our friends and adherents! There is a budget crisis! We must spend more on ourselves before all the money disappears! All this we have seen, and the government is little more than a year old.
Ere I end: a brief word about so-called Trickle-Down economics. Just so everyone knows, there is no such theory. It was nothing more than an optimistic ambit claim by the Beltway elites in the USA. They must have been astonished to be granted all their wet dreams at once. The Laffer Curve is real. Keep putting up tax rates and sooner or later revenue declines instead of increasing commensurately, hence the Thatcher counter-revolution. But so far as I know, no economics textbook pretends that giving all the money to the rich will benefit the poor. Wishing it to be true is the merest postmodern moonshine.
It is clear enough what the Liberal Party needs to do in order to repair its budget. Slash middle-class welfare, stop playing crony capitalism, cut income and company tax rates to the same level, delete most tax deductions, stop eviscerating the Tax Office, stop paying people to go to meetings all day and encourage everyone to get back to work. We used to be rather good at this in Australia. We do not generally allow the unemployed to turn into hereditary mendicants. Nor do we turn them out to starve. This is not what we do here. The way forward is at hand, but the Treasurer has commissioned yet another review. It is hard to escape the reflection that he is too lazy and stupid to do what is needed.
If mending our broken tax system is too hard, and portraying an even slightly coherent governmental vision is also too hard, then what remains? I would offer them a long-forgotten Liberal hero for their homework study. Nick Greiner was once premier of a state in which corruption was institutionalized at every level of public administration. By a tragic irony, he was himself enmeshed by technicality in the machinery he set up. But what he said was this. I am tired of corruption in this state. I am setting up an independent commission and they will be tasked with going after the crooks and nailing them. I don’t care how many people on my side of the House go to jail, and the same goes for members opposite. Fiat iustitia; ruat coelum.
Now there is an election slogan worth fighting for. I would vote for it without hesitation. Gentlemen, and lady, what say you now?
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