What Were They Thinking : 150 Years of Political Thinking in Australia 9781742232485, 9780868409719

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What

were

they

thinking?

James Walter is Professor of Political Science in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University. One of the leading writers about politics in Australia, he has published widely on Australian politics, history, biography and culture.

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What

were

they

thinking? The Politics of ideas in Australia J a m e s Wa lt e r with Tod Moore unsw press

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A UNSW Press book Published by University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA www.unswpress.com.au © James Walter 2010 First published 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Author: Walter, James, 1949– Title: What were they thinking?: the politics of ideas in Australia/James Walter, Todd Moore. ISBN: 978 086840 971 9 (pbk.) Notes: Includes index.        Bibliography. Subjects: Political science – Australia – History           Australia – Politics and government – History. Other Authors/Contributors: Moore, Todd. Dewey Number: 320.994   Design Di Quick Cover image James E. McDonough Printer Ligare This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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Part I The way we live now 1 A seismic shift? 2

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Part II Democracy by degrees 35 2 ‘Really respectable settlers’ or ‘most furious democrats’? 3 Defining interests 60 Part III The ‘new liberal’ agenda 85 4 A true Commonwealth? 86 5 Parallel visions: the settlement in question? 6 A civic order, by Tod Moore 133 Part IV Reconstructions: policies for prosperity 7 Building the ‘modern’ nation 176 8 Unintended consequences 209 Part V The American songbook 247 9 Life is not meant to be easy, by Tod Moore 10 A veto on politics 289

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Part VI Reconsiderations: the way we live now, reprise 333 11 Conclusion: political reasoning and political action 334 Guide to sources Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgments

The initial research on which this book is based was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (A00103761, 2001–2004). Its gestation was much more long term, beginning in a collaboration with Brian Head in the late 1980s, which led to a jointly edited book Intellectual Movements and Australian Society (1988). Some who were involved in that original endeavour – Stephen Garton, Chilla Bulbeck, Pat Buckridge – as well as colleagues and friends from my lengthy attachment to Griffith University in Brisbane – Malcolm Alexander, Judith Allen, Mark Finnane, David Carter, Kay Ferres, Ian Hunter, Pat Weller, Glyn Davis, Geoff Stokes, Lyndall Ryan, John Kane, Haig Patapan – continued to influence my thinking on this topic, in ways most will now have forgotten. Others, whose conversation, insight and scholarship have also been an influence include Stuart Macintyre, Judy Brett, Tim Rowse, Paul ‘t Hart and Murray Goot. I owe a particular debt to Tod Moore, who joined this project as a Research Assistant, worked indefatigably for two years to assemble a substantial bibliography that is now largely behind the scenes, and contributed so much that he deserved a part in the publication: I invited him to write chapters 6 and 9. Tod was also my link with (indeed became ‘embedded’ in) Monash University’s Rare Books collection, which has been a wonderful resource. On returning to Melbourne in 2002, my political science colleagues at Monash University, especially Paul Strangio, Dennis Woodward, Nick Economou and Brian Costar, were a supportive cohort while the work was completed. My return to Melbourne also brought me back among old friends, deep readers but non-academics in the

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main – Jenny Little, Robert Osborn and David and Myrna McRae in particular – whose companionship and quizzical enquiries reminded me who I should be writing for. Murray Goot provided a forensic reading of the first eight chapters of the draft; while Paul Strangio and Lindy Edwards gave valuable commentary on the other chapters – none can be blamed for my remaining failures, but it is a better book for their generous comments. Phillipa McGuinness, at the University of New South Wales Press, maintained her faith in (and hence my commitment to) this book despite many delays and missed deadlines: her enthusiasm and generosity have been much appreciated. As ever, the critical support of my partner, Robyn, has been essential. Her challenges to my ‘specious specificity’ are bracing. Her reminder that ‘there’s more to life than books’ may provoke my grumpy retort ‘but not much more!’ – yet our fabulous children (and now their partners and children) provide the obvious riposte. — James Walter Having assisted Professor Walter with some of the ARC-funded research connected to this project it was very agreeable to be asked to contribute two chapters (6 and 9). Our styles are dissimilar but the topic themes and key ideas remain consistent. I have adopted an approach to political ideas that concentrates on texts and contexts, where even quite minor writings can have something important to tell us. It has been difficult adequately to capture the breadth of the extant literature – let it never be said that Australians have produced no political ideas – but as this is the first book of its kind, omissions can, I hope, be remedied in the future. Finally it should be noted that James Walter has made a few contributions to my chapters and I have made some small contributions as well in the other direction. Thanks to Murray Goot for excellent critical and editorial suggestions on the toughest part of chapter 6. — Tod Moore

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Introduction

If, in the midst of this general disruption, you do not succeed in connecting the notion of right with that of private interest, which is the only immutable point in the human heart, what means will you have of governing the world except by fear? (Alexis de Tocqueville, 1831)1 He thinks that if he puts a few baubles in the right places … government will just fall into his lap. I believe that there’s always got to be a road map for Australia, there’s always got to be belief, and there’s always got to be passion. (Paul Keating, 1996)2

Nothing is more important in understanding politics than recognising that it deals in ideas. It is, at the most fundamental level, all talk. ‘Politics and history are alike’, as one insider put it, ‘in that the craft of both is storytelling’.3 Political activists talk to confirm their positions. Often, as we will see in this book, they appear to ‘find themselves’ in what they say. They argue with others to prove their point. They tell stories to us to persuade us to see things their way, to connect our ‘private interest’ with what (they believe) is ‘right’. If we accept the ‘road map’, as described above by Keating, we can be steered towards the future he decides. If we can be persuaded to accept certain propositions, we can be expected to act in predictable fashions. If we can be brought to think alike, it will be that much easier to decide how to live together – for it is the purpose of politics to negotiate the terms on which we will live together. Politics relies on ideas to mobilise us in support of a program, a cause, ‘the national interest’. It is not, then,

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simply eccentricity when – confronting a global crisis – a prime minister sits down to write an essay, as Kevin Rudd did in 2009: he had to think through what was to be done; devise a new agenda; persuade us of a fresh course of action. My purpose in this book is also to provide a road map of a sort – this one a rough guide to the principal currents of debate in Australian politics since the emergence of modern parties and the institution of parliamentary democracy. A rough guide because this is a large and complex terrain and I cannot give an overview while also mapping every tributary and byway. Any book on political thinking has to be concerned with the individuals and interests who adopted particular lines of argument to further their own causes. This will not be a survey of theory, but of people trying to make sense of their world, trying to establish the principles governing the way institutions are built and run, justifying their own perspectives. The questions are, who runs with (particular) ideas, and why, and what do they do with them? This becomes a story of winners and losers, and of how ideas and power are linked. Twenty years ago, when, with Brian Head, I made an initial foray into exploring Australian political ideas, there was little enough to guide us.4 Much has changed. There are now many excellent books and articles on specific aspects of this story. But this development has come to replicate Lytton Strachey’s view of history5 – you can sail out over this ocean of publications, and let down your net and pull in a fantastically interesting specimen. But there’s no chart showing how they are each linked, identifying the gaps or showing how it all connects with the way we live now. Not only do we lack a narrative, but also there is little attempt to show that ideas do not develop in isolation, but in dialogue and battle, and within a specific context. It is not feasible to analyse the ideas of, say, the left (in terms, for instance, of a tradition of labour history) without understanding

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how they were shaped in conflict with the ideas of the right. It is not possible to explain why Australian ideas of conservatism, or of liberalism, differ from those that apply in the United Kingdom or the United States without exploring the contexts in which they were adopted and adapted. It is difficult to understand why socialism could appear a promising option (even to some liberals) in 1900, and yet was ‘unthinkable’ in mainstream political debate a hundred years later, without looking closely at social change. And it is impossible to understand these processes without relating them to those people who introduced, picked up, ran with, reinterpreted or fought against particular ideas. What were they thinking? This is a book that looks at those ideas that, when one looks back, can be seen to have dominated their times. This is not to ignore those who disagreed, for dominant ideas emerge from contest and we cannot understand why they won without understanding what the alternatives might have been (and why those lost). Nor is it to ignore the parallel visions of those who continued to dissent, or whose story once seemed to dominate but has now fallen away, for these constituted a resource that could be taken up anew in future conflict and might then constitute new beginnings. Thus, for instance, Kevin Rudd would resort to pillaging the past, reviving Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a theologian of the 1930s) and John Maynard Keynes (an economist whose most influential work was published in 1936, though it had a decisive impact between the 1940s and the 1970s) as his guides to how we must act in 2009. My main target, however, is the ideas that became – for most – the ‘taken for granted’ principles of politics: for these framed the ways in which we saw the world and shaped the institutions that governed our lives. But why was it so? And why, eventually, did they fail? For we are at an interesting juncture: the ideas that we’ve been told for the past thirty years were immutable and undeniable, that

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governed the way government ‘must’ be conducted, seem, at the time of writing, to be eroding in front of our eyes. A policy regime is in turmoil. But this is not the first time this has happened. The political and economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s had been developed as the ‘corrective’ to the Keynesian ‘consensus’ that had prevailed from the 1940s to the mid-1970s, and that was seen thereafter, until very recently, as a comprehensive failure. The Keynesian approach, in its time, had been seen to supersede the insufficiently rigorous ‘new liberalism’ that had led to the ‘Great Depression’ of the 1930s. And the ‘new liberalism’ championed by Alfred Deakin (and at the core of the so-called ‘Australian settlement’) had in its turn been profoundly influenced by the crisis of the 1890s. Beneath it all, at every turn, was a dilemma about what the ‘liberty’ in a liberal polity was to mean: was it preserved by leaving individuals alone; or was it delivered by an active state? So successive policy regimes circled around this dilemma, they rose and they fell, and yet as we’ll see we find a family resemblance between the proponents of state intervention in 2009, their free-market opposition, and the precursor advocates of these positions in 1909. This is a general history and confronts the predicament of all such works: it must skim across the surface, trying to capture the lineaments of topography without delving deeply into particularities. It is, as the title is intended to suggest, a history of what ideas meant to their advocates, which is to say, it is not a review of the extensive literatures many of these ideas have subsequently generated. It is not, then, a book for specialists, each of whom will know more in her area of expertise than I can afford to detail: every scholar of, say, feminism, or green politics, or labour history, or particular parties, or social movements (and so on) is likely to criticise it for not ‘knowing’ enough about their special cause, and for not citing texts that they feel to be integral to their debates. The more generous among them

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might recognise that in arriving at a relatively ‘simple’ story, much has gone on beneath the surface. It is more important, though, that it provide an intelligible map for the general reader, for that is the aim. I have tried, for the most part, to let the actors speak for themselves, or to give the sense of what they were thinking, as they engaged with the questions they had to resolve. So this is also a book that avoids much explicit engagement with other useful systems of analysis – Australia as a ‘fragment’ culture; the utilitarian mindset; the pervasiveness of patriarchy; the settler society thesis; current theories of politics and narrative; normative analysis of ideals; language and power; governmentality; discourse; and the like.6 All of these approaches have generated insights, and no doubt influence my interpretations,7 but they are not the ways in which our subjects conceived of their political projects themselves, and these are what I am concerned to recover. Finally, and again in the interests of telling a manageable story, this is a book that focuses on politics at the national level. I do not assert that every state is the same, that there are not regional and state-level cultural and political differences,8 but I do think that in a broad sense there is an identifiable pattern – a shared political culture – across the country. Further, since federation, the national parliament has arguably become the primary site of opinion aggregation: this is where the fights about what it means to be Australian have come to rest.

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Part I : The way we live now

Pa r t I

The way we live now

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1 A seismic shift?

From time to time in human history there occur events of truly seismic significance, events that mark a turning point between one epoch and the next, when one orthodoxy is overthrown and another takes its place … [Such] changes are underway, fault lines yielding to fractures which in time may yield to even deeper tectonic shifts. Kevin Rudd, February 20091 Ultimately politics is a battle of ideas. Those who triumph politically are those who have not only superior arguments but also the capacity to present those arguments in a compelling fashion. John Howard, February 20092

What do you do when the ground shifts suddenly beneath you? Reach for support; try quickly to gain a new footing. In the Australian summer of 2008–09, governments worldwide fumbled for a new footing in the face of what was then dubbed a financial crisis to rival the Great Depression. Most of us sought relief from the relentless barrage of bad news by retreating to the beach, a book or the cricket. The Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, sat down to write an essay.3 He would explore the causes of the current crisis. He would reach for support to a reinvigoration of ‘social democracy’. He would assert that an era, a policy regime, had ended; leadership that could pull us out of the mire demanded a new approach. In a climate of deep uncertainty and grave concern, he would demonstrate the primacy of ideas. What was he thinking? His aim was to explain the causes of our current predicament and, by sketching a different approach to our

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problems, to represent himself as the leader best placed to solve them. Policy alone, ad hoc action, would not do: first, the intellectual framework that must guide policy and action had to be clarified. It was at once a predictable political response, and an expression of beliefs. Its elements – a critique of contemporary orthodoxy (described as ‘neo-liberalism’), an argument for a greater role for the state, and an outline of ‘social democracy’ as the philosophical framework for government action – had been woven together from his maiden speech in the federal parliament (1998), through two significant essays outlining his position as Labor leader (late 2006)4 to the publication of this provocative essay (February 2009). Circumstances now provided the opportunity for him to craft his message as a new beginning not just for Australia, but also for liberal democratic politics.

Argument and response The financial crisis was not, Rudd argued, just another political event; it marked ‘a turning point between one epoch and the next, when one orthodoxy is overthrown and another takes its place’.5 The orthodoxy that had ‘triumphed’ in Western polities for the past thirty years was ‘neo-liberalism – that particular brand of free-market fundamentalism, extreme capitalism and excessive greed which became the economic orthodoxy of our time’. Now it had failed; ‘the greatest regulatory failure in modern history’. ‘It is’, the prime minister wrote, ‘a financial crisis which has become a general economic crisis; which is becoming an employment crisis; and which has … produced a social crisis and in turn a political crisis … It is a crisis which is at once institutional, intellectual and ideological’. What was to be done? It was time now for ‘social democrats to save capitalism from itself: to recognise the great strength of open, competitive markets, while rejecting

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the extreme capitalism and unrestrained greed that have perverted so much of the global financial system …’ Rudd’s explanation of what had actually gone wrong was competent and, despite the criticism it would generate, in accord with much of the analysis from both liberal (The New York Times, The Age) and conservative (The Financial Times, The Australian) commentary. The faith in free markets had led to a breakdown in their oversight. In America, in particular, the removal in 1999 of the Chinese wall between commercial banks and investment banks – imposed by F.D. Roosevelt’s Glass-Steagall Act in 1933 specifically to prevent the speculative frenzy that had led to the 1930s Depression – had allowed high risk conglomerates to emerge. Again, reflecting the 1930s, speculation on an enormous scale by their investment arms exposed commercial banks to massive debt. This was now fuelled by ‘innovative’ financial instruments – derivatives – which allowed loans to be sliced, diced and repackaged then sold on in ways said to spread risk (or shift it off the banks’ balance sheets), but which in fact separated the task of assessing risk from the entity originating loans. That task devolved, in Rudd’s words, to ‘flawed credit-ratings processes and the banks own “self-regulated” internal assessment models’. Interbank lending and easy credit were fundamental to world trade: in the event of a failure that threatened the confidence on which this relied, investment flows would freeze. Implicit government guarantees to sustain confidence in commercial banks were integral. The outcome: such combined entities became systematically too important to fail, yet were allowed to engage in speculation … so great as to imperil the finances of any government that had to bail them out … [T]he massive exposure to risk of these private financial conglomerates has resulted in a parallel exposure of the government, given the scale of possible government intervention in the event of bank failure … massive profits were privatised and prospective losses socialised through the operation of implicit banking guarantees.

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When the collapse came, it would affect not only the United States – because the financial conglomerates were global and their investment outreach impacted on every market – but it meant that ‘the state (not the market) would be left carrying the can’. Hence, ‘ironically, it now falls to social democracy to prevent liberal capitalism from cannibalising itself’. It was in this last step that Rudd turned a description (of regulatory failure) into a political mantra – a critique of the alleged excesses of ‘neo-liberalism’ became a justification for the revival of ‘social democracy’. Rudd represented social democracy as a rejection of both state socialism and free market fundamentalism: ‘social democrats maintain robust support for the market economy … with a role for the state as regulator and as a funder and provider of public goods’. Social justice was said to be an essential component, ‘founded on the argument that all human beings have an intrinsic right to human dignity, equality of opportunity and the ability to lead a fulfilling life’. The advantage of social democrats in the current crisis was that they had ‘a consistent position on the central role of the state’. Neo-liberals could not find ‘non state actors or non state mechanisms to defray risk and restore confidence, rebuild balance sheets and unlock global capital flows’. The necessary tasks, ‘credit market regulation, intervention [to stabilise banks] and demand side stimulus in the economy’ were, Rudd implied, the natural tasks of social democrats. Economic stimulus would draw on ‘a long-standing Keynesian tradition … [T]he central role of the state in maintaining aggregate demand, both for consumption and investment spending, at a time of faltering growth … is classic Keynesianism, pure and simple’. The challenge for the new Keynesians is … to ensure that this stimulus is targeted, timely and temporary. As private consumption and business investment recover, fiscal stimulus should be reduced commensurately, so as not to push up inflation … [T]he central

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tenet of Keynesian economic management … [is] the need to balance budgets over the course of the economic cycle … Increases in public investment and direct transfers to households will stimulate the economy, but they will have to be paid for in the future, when strong economic growth has resumed.

Finally, said Rudd, there would need to be international co-operation and co-ordination. The global financial system had not distributed the risk, it had intensified it; financial markets had not self-corrected; the challenge was on a global scale and demanded a global response: Three cardinal principles emerge: first, national financial markets require effective national regulation; second, global financial markets require effective global regulation … [since] the quantum of global financial transactions is now capable of overwhelming most national economies standing alone; and third, the means of achieving effective regulation in both can only be achieved by national governments operating together.

In sum, the world at large was now the terrain for the social democratic solution. Rudd’s essay, for the most part, dealt with general principles and with what could be discerned as a global crisis: only at the end did he turn to the domestic arena, and focus his attack on his predecessor, John Howard, and Howard’s Liberal–National Party Coalition Government (1996–2007), which he described as ‘the political home of neoliberalism in Australia’. The Howard Government, he said, had reduced investment in key public goods, including education and health; refused to invest in national economic infrastructure; set about the comprehensive deregulation of the labour market; failed to prevent the accumulation of market power through creeping acquisitions; refused effectively to regulate consumer credit or credit ratings agencies; overseen an unprecedented increase in household and national debt; and sought to reduce the agency of the state in private markets.

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How could it possibly now be argued that the minimalist state of which the neo-liberals have dreamt could somehow be of sufficient potency to respond to the maximalist challenge we have been left in the wake of this most spectacular failure of the entire neo-liberal orthodoxy?

This was, remember, a political intervention – not simply an intellectual exercise. Rudd’s elaboration of the ‘social democratic’ task borrowed much from the so-called ‘third way’ that had been advocated by Tony Blair’s advisers (and was said to have been adapted from Hawke and Keating). His rhetorical ploy was to paint opponents of both left and right as adherents of extreme positions that few would accept, leaving his as the only approach that anyone in their right mind would take. His representation of neo-liberalism was very narrow, focusing on finance but ignoring other aspects such as privatisation, to which his and other Labor governments remained committed. And it was wilfully inaccurate: it was untrue that the Howard Government reduced investment in public goods, or refused infrastructure investment, or abandoned labour market regulation (though it redirected all of these in ways that Labor and its supporters disliked). Rudd’s was the opening salvo in a political debate about the future, the role of the state and the very conduct of government, and the response, as he must have expected, was immediate. Those most closely associated with the orthodoxy he had identified and sought to discredit leapt to the barricades. Many ignored the bulk of his essay – its concentration on ideas and on the world scene – and construed it solely as an attack on Howard and the Liberal Party. And by turning his attention to Howard, Rudd had exposed himself to an obvious retaliation: that governments of all persuasions, many of them claiming to be progressive (for instance, the administrations of Clinton, Blair and, not least, Hawke–Keating), had followed the lead of those arch neo-liberals, Thatcher and Reagan.

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theirs was a pragmatic response to the problems they faced: worsening stagflation, the erosion of work incentives, inflexible labour markets and the manifest failures of public enterprises. For left and right-wing governments alike, liberalisation was central to restoring economic growth … a remedy, not a religion.6

In fact, Rudd had explicitly identified neo-liberalism as an orthodoxy stretching over thirty years, drawing on Robert Skidelsky and Arthur Schlesinger Jr to relate it closely to a historical-economic cycle, and it is in the nature of orthodoxy to capture most decision-makers, to become the taken-for-granted framework for action. By implication then, even on Rudd’s terms, it engaged not just the Howard Government – although Rudd invited attack by excusing Hawke and Keating as economic modernisers, while painting Howard’s term as the high point of the neo-liberal phase. Rudd’s critics next accused him of over-simplification, pointing out accurately that the supposed heartland of neo-liberalism, the United States, had not pursued small government or budget surpluses (it maintained enormous deficits); did not eschew protectionism (especially for its agricultural products); and the repeal of the GlassSteagall Act was more a manifestation of system corruption (big money and systematic lobbying buying a favourable legislative outcome) than of an ideological bias.7 Howard’s government had not deregulated Australia’s banking system in a manner that encouraged the excesses evident elsewhere: Australia’s banks remained among the strongest anywhere as a result of what Rudd’s Deputy, Julia Gillard, described as ‘a world class financial and prudential regulatory system’. That system, embodied in the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), had been established by the Liberal Treasurer, Peter Costello, in 1997 as an outcome of an inquiry he had initiated (the Wallis Inquiry) into the Financial System. There was little evidence of reversion to a ‘night watchman’ state: in most countries ‘public spending continued

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to rise rapidly, as did tax revenues. Moreover, in many areas – the environment, corporate law, labour market discrimination – the government presence increased greatly’.8 Having identified Rudd’s over-simplifications, the critics then indulged in over-simplifications of their own. Henry Ergas, a consultant who had been employed to write the Liberal Party’s tax policy, took a lead. He downplayed Rudd’s vigorous commitment to markets; suggested that Keynes offered not a philosophy but a ‘technical tool for aggregate demand management’ while – in seeming contradiction – arguing that Keynes (the technician?) jumbled ‘aestheticism, 19th century liberalism and unabashed collectivism’. Ergas staged a specious elision between Rudd and (British social democrat) Anthony Crosland who was said to have assumed ‘that the distribution of income can be controlled as readily as the price of postage stamps and that the machinery of government is an inherently beneficent way of providing socially desirable goods’. He pointed to the alleged failures of social democrats in Sweden, Norway and Germany to ‘achieve the social democratic utopia’; and all the while ignored Rudd’s exposition of a philosophy and his argument for a constrained role for the state in ‘credit market regulation, intervention and demand side stimulus in the economy’.9 Then leader of the Liberal Party, Malcolm Turnbull, reiterated many of Ergas’s claims, but took on Rudd’s economic analysis more directly, arguing that rather than the financial crisis being a result of deregulation and ‘letting the free market rip’, it arose from ‘too much cheap money being available for too long’.10 The source was China, which ran huge trade surpluses, constrained domestic demand, and lent these surpluses to the developed world – enabling Americans to purchase more goods from China, but also financing a bigger and bigger asset bubble. Interest rates were kept too low for too long, fuelling higher and higher levels of debt. Large government-backed mortgage

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finance companies in the United States, intent on promoting the government aim of home ownership, used credit to finance a housing bubble. Because housing prices rose, loans were made not because the lowest grade of borrowers could repay them out of their cash-flows, but rather out of the sale or refinancing of the properties. But those loans, sliced and diced into new financial instruments (derivatives), made the crisis worse: banks were holding assets not only worth less than their book value, but also whose complexity made it impossible to determine what they were worth. The link between the value of assets and preparedness to advance credit was lost. In some respects, this argument was the same as Rudd’s, except that in Turnbull’s account government was implicated: ‘In the US a mortgage market in which government played a central and directing role blows up. In Australia, where government’s role is simply to provide an efficient and prudential regulatory framework, the mortgage market remains sound’. On these grounds, Turnbull dismissed Rudd’s thesis as ‘delusional nonsense’, the fantasy of a man trying to ‘cast himself as a great socialist hero, carrying the banner of social democracy and striking out against the wickedness of neo-liberalism’: social democracy, he insisted again, was merely a euphemism for socialism. But he went further, describing Rudd as having turned himself ‘from the cautious, responsible economic conservatism of Howard into a slightly more genteel version of a foaming-at-the-mouth radical such as Hugo Chavez’. This was an image hard for a reader of Rudd’s essay, let alone anyone who had seen him in dour, managerial prime-ministerial mode, to sustain. Then, in what was intended as the coup-de-grace, Turnbull accused Rudd of hypocrisy: referring to the success of Therese Rein, Rudd’s wife, who had built a successful labour placement business as a result of the Howard Government’s outsourcing of employment services to the private sector in 1998, he asserted that ‘there is not one person in the parliament who has been

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delivered greater affluence and personal benefits through neo-liberal policies than himself’. How could we trust a man who was complicit in exploiting ‘neo-liberal’ advances for private gain, while bruiting the benefits of ‘social democracy’ in public? Turnbull went on to counter Rudd’s argument about social democratic values with his own narrative on liberalism and freedom. [T]he most effective economic stimulus is more freedom, not bigger, more intrusive government. As the financial crisis sends our opponents fleeing back to their socialist roots, clamouring for bigger and bigger government, we stand firm for more freedom and for more choice … not simply because we know that freedom walks hand-in-hand with prosperity, but because it is morally right.11

Rudd, ‘the quintessential bureaucrat’, he said, had ‘finally nailed his ideological colours to the mast of dominant state power … He wants to pretend that the only source of virtue in our society comes from government – or more particularly, social democratic government’. What, then, was Turnbull’s counter to Rudd’s ‘social democratic’ solution? The next Liberal government, he said, would stimulate economic growth. Only strong economic growth will ensure that businesses are confident to invest and create jobs, that older Australians will be able to enjoy their retirement free from financial anxiety, that younger Australians will be able to have a career of their choice, buy a home and bring up a family … We will ruthlessly remove regulations which either no longer fulfil a necessary purpose or which can be replaced by less burdensome rules to achieve the desired goal. We will lower taxes as much as we can afford to do … and … eliminate inefficient taxes which impose a heavy deadweight cost on businesses and households … [W]e will refocus [government] spending away from cash giveaways to investment in economic infrastructure – roads, railways, communications, water and power

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networks – that enhance our productivity and prosperity in the years to come. And we will never forget that lower taxes within a more efficient tax system are as effective an investment in the economic structure of our country as even the best targeted government spending. In short, as Labor lurches further and further back in time towards Whitlamesque big government, we will ensure that a Liberal Government enables Australians … to do their best … to make their investments, hire employees, take risks … [to] enable the engine room of our economy to do what it wants to do and what we need it to do, the vital work of creating jobs for Australia.12

If one read Turnbull carefully against Rudd, there was very little difference in their objectives. Their principle difference related to methods, and to the core question that Rudd posed. The question was, if the objective is ‘to enable Australians to do their best, to make their investments, hire employees, take risks,’ how is that to be achieved when failure of confidence freezes investment, a drop in demand eliminates the prospect for growth (and hence hiring), and withdrawal of credit undermines the capacity to take risks? Rudd’s answer was that we must find ‘mechanisms to defray risk and restore confidence, rebuild balance sheets and unlock global capital flows’ – given the failure of market or non-state actors to provide any such mechanisms, the state must step in. Turnbull’s answer – and it was one that departed little from what the Howard Government had said for a decade – was that government must get ‘out of the way’ to allow individuals the freedom to make the decisions that would fire up ‘the engine room’ of the economy once more. Yet that rhetoric was belied by action: Howard’s was a high-taxing, big spending government, as we will see, where certain sorts of ‘free choice’ were encouraged by state subsidies and tax concessions, and labour market ‘deregulation’ was to be managed by highly prescriptive legislation. In fact, matching action with words, Rudd proceeded to ‘fire up

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the engine room’ of the economy by a series of economic stimulus packages in late 2008 and early 2009 – cash handouts in the short term to encourage spending, plus infrastructure and skills investment over a longer period in what he called the ‘Nation Building for Recovery’ program. In this he was following the advice of Treasury Secretary, Ken Henry, to ‘go early, go hard and go households’.13 In conjunction there were bank guarantees (to ensure deposits) and the rapid lowering of interest rates by the Reserve Bank. Rudd was also incessantly active in global conferences, especially the G20, arguing for co-ordinated planning of a timely exit from the ‘intervention’ phase; rebalancing of the global economy and reform of the institutions of global economic governance: ‘There is a yawning gap between the capacity of global institutions designed to deal with the challenges of the past but insufficiently mandated, resourced or representative of emerging power realities to deal with the challenges of the future’.14 The Opposition response was constantly to criticise the scale and the reckless profligacy of stimulus spending – warning that the indebtedness that Rudd was imposing would cripple future generations. They scoffed at his efforts to influence global debate. Yet this was a message that had no traction. It appeared that Rudd was succeeding as a mediator in global deliberation.15 If one ignored his invocation of social democracy as a philosophical frame, Rudd’s action, in the context of the crisis, was not radical: it was in accord with what most of the major economies were undertaking. It was a direction urged by the International Monetary Fund. It was supported in principle by respected senior economists – one of whom, Max Corden, published a paper around the time Rudd was writing his essay arguing that ‘there is a desperate need now for a coordinated – or even uncoordinated – fiscal expansion’, and that ‘since the probable alternative is a massive and permanent loss of output, an increase in the national debt for this purpose would not be a disaster’.16 And by

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mid-2009, it seemed to be working. Internationally there were signs of recovery, and Australia in particular appeared to be well ahead of the game. ‘Australia’, Rudd never tired of claiming, was ‘performing better than most other economies, with the fastest growth, the second lowest unemployment and the lowest debt and deficit of all the major advanced economies. And we remain the only advanced economy not to have gone into recession’.17 His views had some significant support. The IMF congratulated the government for a ‘timely policy response [that] has effectively cushioned the impact of the global financial crisis on the Australian economy’.18 The OECD also praised the Australian stimulus measures.19 Rudd’s popularity continued to rise: he had transformed the crisis into an opportunity and the evidence was that most Australians supported his handling of it, while Turnbull’s ratings remained in the doldrums. Against this background, in July 2009, Rudd upped the ante – he published another essay that reiterated the gist of his argument about the causes of the crisis, warned that despite initial successes ‘the economic recovery … will be a long, tough and bumpy road with many twists and turns’, but mounted an even harsher denunciation of the Opposition for its signal failures of policy perspective: the neo-liberals of the political right now refuse to accept any … political responsibility for the fruits of their own ideological handiwork, the current global recession … [T]hey attack the range of policies that have been put in place by governments of the responsible centre to deal with the consequences of the crisis, in complete denial of the impact of the resulting recessions on the jobs of working Australians … [And] they mount the remarkable argument that because there are tentative signs of global economic recovery (and in Australia’s case that we are doing better than most other economies), none of the national and global interventions that have underpinned this improved performance were necessary in the first place.20

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Stung by these assertions, Turnbull was deflected from the core of Rudd’s argument (an outline of his ‘Nation Building’ program) into a defence of the past actions of the former coalition government, and a reiteration of the recklessness of Labor’s ‘debt gamble’.21 The first tactic, though both understandable and justified, left him looking like he had nothing to say about the present. And neither the public, nor most economic commentators, were now persuaded that government expenditure at a time of crisis was either unmanageable or reckless. The tenor of most commentary was that the Opposition could not rely simply on reasserting its own former success in economic management or sweeping complaints about the unfairness of Rudd’s criticisms: it must find its own reform message.22 And every time that Rudd twisted the knife – for instance in a later tendentious representation of the Howard era as years of indolence and reform failure – Turnbull fell into the same trap, a defensive retort without any substantive articulation of an alternative.23 Rudd was winning the battle of ideas.

Understanding terms The pivot, Rudd’s point of attack, was ‘neo-liberalism’. Turnbull would disingenuously claim that he had never encountered the term until Rudd accused him of being one: a respondent then demonstrated its currency by pointing out that an internet search turned up 4 million hits.24 In fact it was a term that had arisen in the period Rudd was discussing to capture the belief in the primacy of individualism and free markets (and a concomitant scepticism about government action) as both manifestations of liberty and drivers of economic growth. ‘Neo’ can be taken to signify not only ‘new’ liberalism (as opposed to post-war Keynesian liberalism) but also ‘revival’ (of the ‘classical’ liberal tenet that freedom relates directly to individual liberty, signified

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by freedom of choice). Indeed, though Rudd was far from the first to define it pejoratively, neo-liberalism had been a badge of pride for the proponents of free markets – since it was a return, in their view, to the real definition of liberty. Rudd’s purpose – echoing critics from at least the early 1990s – was to show that it had not enhanced freedom; it had promoted inequality, picked away at the social fabric and now threatened to destroy a large part of the world’s economy. His critics, including Turnbull, then accused him of being unclear about what he meant, and of presenting a ‘conspiracy’ theory of politics. In fact, as we have seen, Rudd had offered his definition of neo-liberalism at the outset, as that ‘particular brand of free-market fundamentalism, extreme capitalism and excessive greed which became the economic orthodoxy of our time’ and spent most of the essay detailing what he claimed to be its effects. Nor did he mention ‘conspiracy’: certainly there had been active promoters of neo-liberalism (the Howard Government chief among them), but it was out in the open, so successful that it became an ‘orthodoxy’, unchallenged until the ‘seismic’ events emerged that represented its failure. What Rudd failed to mention was that Labor, too, had been party to this orthodoxy. Then to the contention about ‘social democracy’, whose virtue according to Rudd was that it had a consistent position on the role of the state. Notice how careful Rudd was to define ‘social democracy’ against both ‘neo-liberalism’ and ‘socialism’ – he represented it as a philosophy of the middle ground, rejecting both market fundamentalism and the command economy, the extremes of the right and the left. In fact, social democracy (a term that originally signified a rejection of Marxist revolution in favour of incremental democratic reform as the road to equity and social justice) has not had much currency in Australian politics. A self-designation more frequent among reform-minded intellectuals than among politicians, it was revived in the 1970s by Labor prime minister, Gough Whitlam (1972–75) and gained currency among

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his advisers, usually as a signal that they did not subscribe to ‘socialism’; it rarely figures in memoirs of the left (and certainly not in that of Bob Hawke); and it appears only intermittently in speeches by Paul Keating. Nonetheless, it was, at least in post-war usage, a constant foil to more radical leftists’ views of how reform was to be achieved. And it had, as Rudd asserted, a consistent position on the role of the state: freedom could only be achieved in conditions of equal opportunity and social justice; unrestrained markets (and unconstrained privilege) would promote inequity and attendant social problems; the power of the state could legitimately be used to address these problems; it was ‘not an issue of man against the state, but of man working through the state as an instrument of social organisation to achieve personal and social fulfilment’.25 It was useful for Rudd, of course, as a tool for reclaiming political control in the face of what he analysed as systematic market failure. Notice, too, however, how insistently Rudd’s critics sought to drive him back to socialism – for which, claimed Turnbull, social democracy was simply a euphemism – in order to assert that he stood for ‘bigger and bigger’ government. The tenets of socialism had been fatally undermined by the collapse of the command economies of the USSR and Eastern bloc countries in the late 1980s; the arguments of socialist supporters had been resisted by the ALP’s parliamentary leaders since the early 1900s; Rudd had explicitly disavowed socialism – and yet his claim for a role for government evoked this automatic response. Both Rudd’s pre-emptive defence against this charge, and the vigour with which his critics nonetheless pursued it, tell us how deeply ingrained anti-socialism has become in our political discourse. But it was also a strike against Rudd’s claim to speak for the future: anyone who could be persuasively linked with the failures of socialism would be seen as irretrievably backward looking. An important subtext revolved around the meaning of conservatism.

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The Liberal Party, under Howard, had claimed to be the custodian of both the liberal and the conservative traditions in Australian politics, a claim that Turnbull was eager to re-assert. Yet Rudd had capitalised on his credentials as an ‘economic conservative’ since assuming leadership of the federal parliamentary ALP, and especially during the 2007 election campaign. Many felt that it was no more than a ploy to wrest Howard’s mantle as a ‘responsible’ economic manager away from him. Was Rudd’s championing of social democracy a renunciation of his conservative professions? Certainly Turnbull argued this to be the case: on his account, Rudd had turned from ‘the cautious, responsible economic conservatism of Howard’ into ‘… a foaming-at-the-mouth radical such as Hugo Chavez’. But Rudd continued, in the face of Turnbull’s assault, to insist that his was an economically responsible, centrist government: ‘conservative’ in the best sense. And Rudd had made the argument for the connection between social democracy and conservatism long before Turnbull’s charge. ‘Classical conservatism’, he argued in 2006, has always expressed reservations about the impact of unrestrained market capitalism. Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, argued that society should be seen as an organic whole, based on reciprocal rights and obligations … not a market of individuals but rather a ‘social fabric’ in which the individual members are interwoven like threads.

According to Rudd, the dominant school of British conservatism – from Disraeli until Thatcher’s advent in 1979, and including Winston Churchill – saw conservatism as a halfway house between unfettered capitalism and state socialism. It is this tradition of conservatism that always sought to temper the excesses of market capitalism. Contemporary British conservatives such as Michael Oakeshott have starkly warned against a ‘brutopia’

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of unchecked market forces. Equally, American conservatives, such as … George F. Will have cautioned that capitalism unrestrained is a ‘solvent’ that can dissolve the social fabric.26

While traditional conservatism might be a hedge against market excess, this abstruse argument has little resonance in Australia where such claims have been infrequent since 1909, when George Reid, then leader of the Free-Trade Party, railing against the description of antiLabor forces as ‘conservative’ had expressly denied that his party was conservative. It was, he averred, a ‘progressive party’ – indeed, he went on, there was no such conservative party in Australia (see chapter 4). Conservatism did not disappear from the political lexicon, but it came to mean something distinctly different from the British tradition within Australia, which underscores the novelty of Rudd’s debating tactic. My purpose here is not to assess the merits of either side in this debate. It is, instead, to draw attention to the way ideas were deployed: this was a significant crisis; these were the ideas dominating the public exchange at the time of writing; this was how the world we must adjust to was being explained to us; policy decisions of great moment – since they would determine the allocation of resources and the chances of recovery – hung on such ideas. Rudd, a new prime minister, facing a crisis that some had predicted, but whose dimensions were unexpected, was taking an initiative, making a forceful break from his predecessors. His opposition, struggling to regroup after losing government in 2007, equally confronted by the severity of the financial crisis, was caught flat footed, forced into a reactive position (but one common to centre-right parties in the United Kingdom, the United States, and much of Europe) where it could do little more than contest the detail of the economic collapse, and retail much of the message that had sustained its decade in government. The positions advanced here by each side beg questions. How

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important has neo-liberalism been? Should we accept Rudd’s definition? What is its connection to liberalism? What is the evidence that there has been an ‘orthodoxy’ (and if so, to what extent has it failed)? Have there been previous orthodoxies? Why is socialism such anathema? What does social democracy really mean, and is it a solution? Is freedom best served by getting the state ‘out of the way’, or is it only achievable when conditions of equal opportunity (to exercise freedom) have been achieved? And are those conditions dependent upon state action? Is the acme of free-choice the exercise of market freedom? Is there a connection between market freedom and democracy? Does market fundamentalism threaten democracy? Do our leaders even mean the same things when they use cues like ‘freedom’, ‘liberal’, ‘democratic’, ‘socialist’, or ‘social democratic’: take the case of ‘conservatism’ for instance? My argument – indeed the entire purpose of this book – will be to show that we can better address such questions, can more fully appreciate what is going on here, when we understand more broadly the history of the way such ideas have developed in Australia. It is not accidental that conservatism has come to have a different meaning in Australia than in Britain, that social democracy has had a greater influence in Berlin than in Canberra, that ‘liberal’ has connotations in America that it never acquired here. Ideas have a history; they undergo transformations within the particular contexts in which they are used; and they are ‘adapted to purpose’ by political activists when they are used as tools to explain action, justify policy and mobilise opinion. One way to demonstrate the resonance of history, in relation to something as contemporary as the Rudd/Turnbull exchange, is to ask: just how much of a seismic shift is really in play here? Consider for instance, these statements: 1 [H]aving induced politicians to discard the old programme ‘the devil take the hindmost’ … [we] would now inculcate a new teaching with

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regard to the poorest in the community, that all should have what was their due. By fixing … wise … legislation, wealth would be prevented from taking unfair advantage of the needy, and the latter would be saved from living wretched and imperfect lives. 2 Our …Party has … sought for social justice by means of progressive measures … it has learned to seek these ends by a free use of the agencies of the State … 3 Citizenship … implies a constant conflict between selfishness and selfsacrifice … Unlimited freedom means unlimited selfishness. Robinson Crusoe, alone on his island, had unlimited freedom, but lost it the moment that Friday appeared. The appearance of Friday put obligations on Crusoe that curtailed his freedom … The doctrine of laissez-faire has broken down. It was a doctrine of gilt edged selfishness. 4 Anyone who has been watching the evolution of … [Labor] in Australia cannot help seeing that they have resolved upon a policy of … socialism, of a destruction of individualism and private enterprise, and of making the country one huge Government establishment … 5 The future of humanity in Australia lay not in curtailing its freedom … nor limiting its opportunity, but in allowing the genius for competition, for excelling, for acquiring, to reach its utmost altitude … 6 The Ideal Government … [is one] whose power is ever exercised to improve the opportunities of the people and never exercised to interfere with their personal liberty.

Who might have made such comments? Is it too much of a stretch to identify the first three with the philosophy outlined by Rudd; the second three with the position adopted by Turnbull? In fact they were made a hundred years earlier, and all by figures now claimed as pioneers of modern Australian liberalism: the first two were statements by Alfred Deakin (in 1895 and 1906); the third by Peter Board (NSW Director of Education, in 1919); and the last three were all by George Reid (in 1905 and 1906). Contemporary debate is always 21

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hostage to history, even when unconscious of it. But its omissions are equally instructive: the overt champions of socialism, the challengers to Deakin and Reid (Billy Hughes, or Tom Mann, for instance – see chapter 4) have left little imprint one hundred years later, while the sentiments of social liberalism, once firmly identified with Deakin and his Liberal Party (chapter 4) are now akin to the program of ALP leader, Kevin Rudd. Why have some ideas persisted, some gained ground, some become characteristic of a different party – and some become unthinkable?

Ideas and activists In politics, ideas make a difference. Politics is, of course, about ‘who gets what, when, how’27 – responding to interests, promising concrete advantages, offering material improvement. But it is also about more intangible things. How will we live together? What is the nature of an individual’s entitlements, and obligations? What are the limits of authority? What are the elements of the good life? How is community to be sustained? How is achievement to be rewarded, and failure to be penalised? In the end, what principles matter? Every leader, implicitly or explicitly, plays on such themes. They do so, in some respects, because they actually believe in principles and seek ways effectively to act upon them. But they also do so in order to appeal to others who share similar outlooks – they seek to mobilise a following on the path to power. The gifted leader can not only stimulate a constituency to action (Gough Whitlam’s crystallisation of an agenda for the post-war, tertiary-educated meritocracy in 1972, for instance), but also create a constituency, articulating what followers ‘knew’ but had heretofore been unable to express (as in Robert Menzies’ 1944 appeal to ‘the forgotten people’ – those crushed between ‘big business’ and ‘organised labour’ – as the moral core of the nation and the natural supporters

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of his new Liberal Party). Will Rudd or Turnbull have similar success in shaping an agenda for the present? Shaping public opinion drives public action. ‘Speculative thought’, said John Stuart Mill, ‘is one of the chief elements of social power … It is what men think that determines how they act …’28 Ideas are important then for a practical reason: ideas are tools in the achievement and exercise of power. If we are to understand why leaders succeed or fail, why people follow one cause rather than another, why certain decisions were taken (that have created the world as it is), we must understand the ideas that drove them. All this becomes much more evident when a policy regime is crumbling, when ideas that once served to define action and to describe the way we live now appear to have failed. It is just such a moment that Rudd tried to seize in early 2009. In Australia, there was a longstanding argument that ideas were relatively unimportant in politics. The tradition was strikingly expressed at the turn of the twentieth century. It was then that Alfred Metin coined the influential description of Australian politics as ‘socialisme sans doctrines’, James Bryce offered detailed description of our pragmatic temperament, and Beatrice Webb’s characteristically acid depiction of NSW Premier George Reid – intended to typify Australian politicians – condensed the message: He has throughout his life lived in common surroundings; has enjoyed food, drink, sex; has never felt a religious aspiration or puzzled over an intellectual problem: art, music, science, philosophy are completely closed to him; all his desires are material, and all his intentions practical and utilitarian.

Keith Hancock’s brilliant polemic Australia (1930) perpetuated the view of Australian politics as simply utilitarian. Peter Loveday testified that this remained the dominant opinion in the 1970s, asserting that Australian politics is characterised by an emphasis on the practical

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and a lack of concern with ideas: ‘there have been no fixed positions in Australian politics and no great debates on fundamental political philosophies either in party conferences or elsewhere’.29 This was never a satisfactory description. For instance, despite Webb’s dismissal, Reid was a creative exponent of free-market liberal thought, and, despite Loveday’s reservations, a participant (with William Holman) in a famous debate on the differences between liberalism and socialism, as we will see (chapter 4). The politically engaged figures of intellectual stature contemporary with Reid, such as Alfred Deakin, H.B. Higgins and Samuel Griffith, did not excite the same degree of interest in Sidney and Beatrice Webb: none of these could have been used to sustain their complaint of lack of intellectual leadership. In time, the tradition was strenuously contested. Manning Clark raised the battle cry with his ‘Rewriting Australian History’ (1956), which insisted that Australian history was shaped by the contest of the ‘great’ systems of thought emerging in post-Reformation Europe – an argument that he subsequently dramatised in his multi-volume A History of Australia. The tradition was deconstructed by Bob Connell in an influential article ‘Images of Australia’ (1968) and more extensively by Tim Rowse in Australian Liberalism and National Character (1978). Geoff Serle mapped our cultural elites in From Deserts the Prophets Come (1973).30 Since the 1980s a rich and diverse literature on the currents of ideas in Australian politics has emerged. Yet there is no general history drawing these threads together, filling in gaps, showing how one doctrine relates to another, or how contingencies, context and contest have modified habits of thought. It is my purpose here to offer such a history, a road map across the terrain of political ideas. That Australia is a Western polity, sharing in and drawing on broad traditions of Western political thought – liberalism, socialism, conservatism, feminism, environmentalism, and the like – and this in a rapidly globalising world, might give one momentary pause. If there

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are existing histories of these bodies of thought, as there are, of what use is a local history? My response is simple: when Australians use any of these terms, they mean something different to what a person in, say, France, Britain, or the United States would understand. We saw one instance earlier, in the flurry over whether Rudd could claim to be a conservative. For another example, notice how carefully Robert Menzies – who was sometimes described as ‘British to his boot-heels’ – differentiated his Liberal Party from its British counterpart: The Liberal Party in the United Kingdom … continues to make an intellectual appeal in University circles, for it … represent(s) a state of attractive philosophic doubt: to expound its ideas in general, but seldom to condescend to particulars … It casts itself for the role of a third party, hoping … to represent the balance of power. But … a party which aims at power in its own right … must formulate its own policies of action … When … we decided to call the new and united party the Liberal Party, we were adopting no analogy to the Liberal Party in the United Kingdom. On the contrary, we were aiming at progress and political power in our own right. We took the name ‘Liberal’ because we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary but believing in the individual, his rights, and his enterprise, and rejecting the Socialist panacea.31

Political practitioners have long understood the importance of local difference. The foundational ideas in Australian politics arrived in the baggage of settler peoples. They referred to their cultures of origin, and paid little attention to the mental universe of the Indigenous population, in fashioning the institutions that still (largely) rule our lives. We must attend to the broad genealogy of dominant ideas. Yet immigration does not transfer a full cross-section of society to new lands, tending instead to select particular sub-groups and thus to emphasise the subset of ideas such groups carry with them. Some ideas, freed

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from the full array of competition in the ‘homeland’, may flourish in unexpected ways.32 Further, the demands on the settler population, to establish the material infrastructure and cultural institutions of society from scratch, differed significantly from those exacted of their metropolitan peers, and the intellectual heritage itself could be refashioned. Conceptions rooted in tradition and habit had to be reconsidered in the new context. As we will see, old ideas were turned to new ends and inflected in new ways. The common stock was added to and refreshed by successive waves of immigration. Australians developed a remarkable capacity to borrow, adapt and apply – and in the end to say something new and distinctive. This, too, is what Rudd was attempting in early 2009. In dealing with political ideas, we inevitably deal with political elites. Political ideas do not well up, unbidden, from ‘the people’. Why? Because most of us are too busy living our lives to think of political processes and collective government. As Walter Lippmann once said: nowhere is the sovereign citizen … given a hint as to how, while he is earning a living, rearing children and enjoying his life, he is to keep himself informed about the progress of [the] swarming mass of problems … The individual … does not have opinions on all public affairs. … He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen. I cannot imagine how he could know … For the man does not live who can read all the reports that drift across his doorstep or all the dispatches in his newspaper … If all men had to conceive the whole process of government all the time the world’s work would obviously never be carried on.

Lippmann was popularising the conclusions of elite theorists such as Max Weber, Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca and Vilfred Pareto. And lest one think these theorists long outmoded, contemporary researchers, such as the political scientist John Higley, or the social psychologist H.C. Kelman, have continued to show that idea shifts and opinion

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change depend upon leaders who can move groups: any such transition ‘always represents a combination of historical realities and deliberate mobilization’. They illustrate that modern societies function through complex systems of task differentiation. It falls to only some among us to do the ‘ideas work’ – inventing, borrowing, adapting, translating and articulating the explanatory frameworks that legitimise interests and give meaning to social experience. Call them what you will – opinion leaders, the intelligentsia – it must be acknowledged that particular classes of people engage in the intellectual function in politics (though virtually none would own to being an intellectual). Understanding political ideas involves exploring their work.33 Where do they come from and why do they do it? Eighty years ago there was an illuminating concordance between Lippmann (an American conservative) and the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci. In elaborating the views mentioned above, Lippmann challenged the ‘false ideal’ of the ‘omnicompetent, sovereign citizen’ coming together with others in democratic deliberation to direct public affairs. Since most of us cannot be expected to have the knowledge, or even to keep track, of the complex issues that must be resolved in managing modern society, there emerge insiders and outsiders, and the course of public affairs is determined by accommodations between insiders who – only at elections, or when a resolution between themselves cannot be achieved – attempt to educate outsiders so as to enlist public opinion in their cause. Indeed, according to Lippmann, there is no ‘public’ until particular groups are brought together by the appeal of a certain message crafted by these insiders. Lippmann depicted opinion formation as driven by media stereotypes, arguing that expert intervention was crucial to control and adjust the flow of information to the people in order to keep the ‘pictures in their heads’ in line with the realities that only an expert few could properly understand.34 Gramsci focused more resolutely on those who control ‘the pictures

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in our heads’. He wished to clarify what was going on by disposing of the confusion between ‘traditional’ intellectuals – supposedly autonomous critics able to stand aside from particular interests and to speak for the social interest as a whole – and ‘organic intellectuals’ – the thinking and organising elements of a social class, an organisation or a cultural formation, who are produced within it and speak for it, giving it homogeneity and an awareness of its function, articulating its interests and their relation to broader society. The former, frequently in universities, often self-nominated, usually carry the flag as intellectuals (today we might call them public intellectuals – think of, say, Geoff Blainey or Robert Manne). The latter not only are frequently not regarded as intellectuals, but also would usually deny the title, even though theirs, too, is a domain of ideas work (think of, say, the boosters of business, media commentators or any of our more vociferous union leaders). Traditional intellectuals profess to see the ‘big picture’ (even to speak for humankind); organic intellectuals speak for a cause, both to persuade the like-minded of their collective interests and to register a position in, and a claim upon, their society. Gramsci’s underlying point is that all are organic intellectuals, since all emerge in response to the needs of specific organisations or contexts and speak for a social or cultural interest.35 It is the congruence between these insights of Lippmann and Gramsci that is strikingly recovered by contemporary social psychologists, like H.C. Kelman, in their work on leadership and the shaping of opinion.36 In 1964, Hugo Wolfsohn translated similar perspectives into the Australian context in a sketch of ‘the ideology makers’. No fan of the left – he intended to debunk ‘power elite’ analysis – his assertion that Australia was a ‘multicentric society’, characterised by ‘separate publics and special elites able to appeal to them’, was nonetheless important. Drawn from the ‘higher circles’ of these separate publics, however, was one group ‘who direct their appeal to the nation as a whole’.

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[I]t is as final arbiters on national issues and as producers of political, social and moral norms that they stand out from the rest of their peers …The ideology makers are perhaps seekers of that most elusive of social goods – the national consensus. And it is their outstanding achievement that if they cannot find it they are least [sic] in a position of temporarily manufacturing it.

Wolfsohn identified ‘judges, leading clergymen, some business leaders and military men, and a small band of university professors’ as constituting the ideology makers, but conceded that his case was impressionistic and needed more detailed study. Sol Encel, one of the initial targets of Wolfsohn’s ‘corrections’, followed with an analysis of postwar elites, providing the detail Wolfsohn lacked and adding a significant study of the influence of leading bureaucrats within the ‘higher circles’. While I believe that Gramsci’s attention to the ‘organic’ origins of the ideology makers is more important than Wolfsohn allows, and I will be suggesting revisions to the arguments of both Wolfsohn and Encel, their insights opened up the field for this sort of study. And ‘the ideology makers’ is an apt enough designation for those to whom we must attend.37 We can see their traces in the argument between Rudd and Turnbull. Rudd was very attentive to the people behind ideas – he represented Dietrich Bonhoeffer as his intellectual hero, and he concentrated much of his analysis of ‘neo-liberalism’ on the work of Friedrich Hayek. But he also drew support for his position from Keynes, George Soros, Nicholas Stern, Joseph Stiglitz and Australians such as David McKnight.38 His essay (in early 2009) ended with acknowledgment of the contributions ‘by staff, advisers and others with a common interest in the ideological origins of the current crisis’.39 But the interaction with organic intellectuals does not end there – it remains reciprocal and dynamic. This is illustrated, as Dennis Glover perceptively noted, by

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one more dimension to Rudd’s essay … his decision to publish it in The Monthly … the magazine [that] has made itself into the salon for an important section of Australia’s progressive academic, literary and journalistic community. While not as directly political as Quadrant, there’s a sense in which it is coming to serve a purpose similar to that of Paddy McGuinness’ outrageous little magazine [Quadrant] in the Howard years. Rudd understands politicians can’t change a nation on their own and that, while numerically small and sometimes at odds with electoral realities, committed intellectual support bases are important. They help write the political narrative every government needs to keep a sense of direction … Intellectuals helped make Rudd; he’d be crazy to forget them now he’s in office, and he hasn’t.40

Turnbull was less given to citing authorities, but he did refer to, for instance, Henry Ergas – chairman of an economic consulting company, and competition policy advocate, whose response to Rudd has been mentioned, and who fits Wolfsohn’s sketch of an ‘ideology maker’. It may be, as Lippmann asserts, that we are mostly occupied with our jobs, families, ambitions – the quotidian details of living – and that political thinking is marginal. But when crises emerge we can be reminded, as Rudd strenuously sought to remind us, that political forums are where problems bigger than the personal and familial, problems we face in common, must be resolved. When this happens, we need a framework that gives broader meanings to these resolutions. Astute politicians recognise this as an opportunity: if they can define the framework, they can influence the way we think, act (and vote) – which is precisely what Rudd’s essay was about. To accept, for instance, Rudd’s assertion that markets and non-state mechanisms cannot reinvigorate the global economy, conditions us to accept a greater concentration of political power – given the frame of social democracy, we may be persuaded to think that collective action can address problems that are beyond the capabilities of individual enterprise.

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This is just one instance of a general proposition: the search for meaning is a constant in social life; politics capitalises on that search, producing ideas that supply meaning and mobilise action. It follows that we should always look for the play of ideas, and be alert to the bearers of ideas: politicians, of course, but also those on whom they draw (the authorities cited by Rudd, for instance); those who work with them and sometimes write their words (the people acknowledged at the end of Rudd’s essay); the public intellectuals who help elaborate their political narrative (one instance, The Monthly salon, identified by Glover above) – in other words those whose task within a variety of organisations is to create and give voice to meanings. If ideas are the work of activist insiders (Lippmann) or organic intellectuals (Gramsci), in particular institutional positions, it also follows that they are produced by and serve identifiable interests. At any point in our political history therefore, we can ask, as this book will: What are the leading contesting ideas in political debate? What is the history of such ideas? Who are their proponents? How do they connect with the events of the moment? What interests may we take them to serve? The tenor of our political life will depend not only on the negotiated outcomes of competition, but also the specifics of the ideas in play and their relation to contingency and context. The ideas that Rudd revived (with a contemporary polish) in 2009 had been in some respects, as we have seen, in circulation in Australia for more than one hundred years – but for at least the twenty years preceding his essay they had been dismissed, discarded as the detritus of a regime that was long outmoded. Paul Kelly’s influential book The End of Certainty had been thought to have blown them out of the water in the early 1990s (see chapter 10).41 In many respects Rudd continued to accept much of what Kelly argued – his critique of neo-liberalism was narrower than his rhetoric suggested, and his commitment to state action more limited than his critics allowed – but the contingencies of the crisis

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had allowed Rudd to bring former ideas back into play; the context gave them a contemporary relevance; they could be made to seem more ‘of the moment’ than the nostrums of individual enterprise and markets to which the Opposition continued to cling. A set of more or less common ideas is conventionally thought to characterise Western polities. An indicative, though not comprehensive, list might include doctrines – conservatism, liberalism, social democracy, socialism, anarchism, communism, environmentalism, feminism – on the one hand; and conceptual states – the nation, citizenship, rights, liberty, equality – on the other. Every treatment of political theory identifies them and most intellectual histories treat them as more or less discrete bodies of thought. We can learn an enormous amount by looking at one doctrine, concept or movement in depth. Yet there is a danger that in focusing resolutely on, say, socialism, we will not adequately recognise that political ideas develop in parallel, in competition, in response to shared historical problems and contingencies.42 My approach instead is to identify the challenges facing the community in different periods and to examine the way ideas are deployed, and by whom, in response to those challenges: the attempt is to situate ideas and their evolution in context. This is influenced by three considerations. First, different eras are distinguished by different imperatives: the need to settle the nature of economic responsibility in the 1930s Depression, for instance, was not the same as the problem of determining the role of the state in the face of globalisation in the 1990s. Nor could the challenge Rudd had to address in 2008–09 be framed in the terms that had served in the 1990s, or in the 1930s. Second, as Alan Gilbert and Ken Inglis once argued, when we look back at the decisions people made, we should be aware ‘that the future that beckoned or alarmed them was not necessarily our past – what actually happened – but rather a hidden destiny, a precarious vision of probabilities, possibilities and

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uncertainties’.43 The gamble taken by Rudd with his essays illuminates nothing more strongly than that we are, at any point in time, guessing at a hidden destiny, and forced to settle for ‘a precarious vision of probabilities, possibilities and uncertainties’. Third, the spokespersons of various interests will seek to interpret the challenges of their times in particular ways, to achieve specific outcomes, and in doing so will apply and adapt our common ideas, with consequences for the history of ideas. If my aim is to map the terrain of political ideas, my focus must be on those who engage with those ideas to ‘control the pictures in our heads’: the ideology makers. And a map must begin somewhere: mine begins with the settler population.

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Pa r t I i

Democracy by degrees

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2 ‘Really respectable settlers’ or ‘most furious democrats’?

I beheld a second Rome, rising from a coalition of banditti. I beheld it giving laws to the world, and superlative in arms and in arts, looking down with proud superiority upon the barbarous nations of the northern hemisphere. Lieutenant James Tuckey, 18051

This book deals primarily with national politics. The political parties that have been so much the carriers of political debate emerged in the 1880s, and national political institutions were established in 1901, following extensive debates from the 1880s on. This is, then, largely a history of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, the colonial origins of foundational political ideas must be appreciated if we are properly to understand their more recent usages: this is the purpose of the next two chapters.

Displacement Imagine arriving in an alien world, one in which the given order – as authoritarian as it was – was provisional, and in which the conventions of class, home and place were barely applicable. Here the behaviour of the Indigenous people, fascinating as it was to gifted observers like Watkin Tench,2 seemed by ‘civilised’ standards unintelligible.

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Seasons reversed the ‘natural’ order, and boundaries barely existed. Imagine, that is, arriving in Australia in the early nineteenth century as an administrator or free settler. Imagine the colonial stage as virtually bare, waiting to be peopled, waiting for the sets – the political scaffolding – that would frame a new story. One might feel liberated by these absences to dream of great possibilities (as did James Tuckey), or alternatively, pushed by the vast foreignness, to cling even tighter to the company of one’s fellows and the verities of ‘home’. Of course, the settlers arrived with baggage – cultural and intellectual as well as material. But all would be ‘unsettled’ by arrival. Some remained perplexed and alienated. Others rapidly saw that the challenge of establishing one’s place in a context where the rules were still to be made (for surely the remit of the governor was of limited term) presented opportunities, not only for self-definition, improvisation and innovation, but also for new claims on politics. The convict workers were so important to the viability of the infant colonies that they gained concessions, legal rights and economic opportunities.3 Emancipists were among the earliest entrepreneurs. The military corps, initially intended to maintain order, soon saw economic opportunities, gaining land grants, convict labour and control of rum, the unofficial currency. As they and the early free settlers saw the possibilities of enterprise open up, they would challenge the authority of colonial governors, demanding the ‘rights of Englishmen’. This would be the kernel of the movement for selfgovernment – but not democracy. For this early colonial elite rapidly conceived of itself as a new establishment, adopting the mantle of conservatism to defend against the incursions of the later, much more numerous emigrant arrivals. By the 1830s, the scale of free emigration dwarfed the early cohorts of transportees, gaolers, emancipists and adventurous entrepreneurs. But those who had gained privileged positions and economic advantage in the initial settlements would

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fight to maintain their positions against the perils of democracy. The European settlements that were to become Australia were first established in the late eighteenth century, the age of revolution. The settler populations carried with them the dominant ideas of the period – conservative reaction to rapid change (Edmund Burke), Whiggish attachment to constitutionalism (Charles James Fox), restraint of executive power and gradual reform (Thomas Macauley), which would shade into the liberal assertion of rights (James Mill) and more radical assertions of liberty and equality (Thomas Paine). These ideas would be attached to particular interests, and were modified by the patterns of authority and of economic development that emerged in the colonies. The settlers would pay little attention initially to the radically different views of place, space and human relations among the Indigenous peoples. There was cautious exploratory interchange between the European arrivals and local peoples, and there were always a few sympathetic observers with an almost ethnographical bent among the settlers. But Europeans in the main could not ‘see’ evidence of Indigenous occupation or productive use of the land (so thought it was theirs for the taking); could only interpret disregard for European conventions of property and possession as theft and untrustworthiness; and understood different patterns of kinship and of human relations as lack of civilisation. The process of Indigenous dispossession led rapidly to a situation, as one colonist put it, of ‘perpetual warfare’.4 This was always clear in the colonial press; it was often an administrative problem for colonial governors; it emerged as a political problem when particularly egregious instances of murderous aggression were revealed (such as the Myall creek massacres in 1838), which – unusually – led to some of the perpetrators being sentenced to death, but it rarely entered the discussion of political arrangements in the new colonies. It was an indication of how powerfully framing political ideas operated that Aborigines were excised from the poli-

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tical consciousness of the early settlers. But the repressed would return, as we will see. If place did play a part for the settlers, it was in the evolution of a frontier culture, which, in concert with the cultural preconceptions of the early waves of immigrants, provided the catalyst for that part of political thinking that is determined by culture, as opposed to interests.5

The colonial oligarchy Because Australia was, at first, a convict settlement it had strong governors with authoritarian powers (which facilitated the benevolent paternalism of some early governors like Hunter and Macquarie), a dominant military caste and a practice of close bureaucratic administration. It was, after a hesitant start,6 one of the most thoroughly documented and closely observed societies in the world. A ready acceptance of rules, documentation and surveillance – ‘the invisible state’7 – and a certain ‘talent for bureaucracy’8 were perhaps the outcomes of such beginnings. Awareness of the potential for commercial advantage, however, soon created an admixture, with the introduction of free settlers, and then increasing resort to assisted migration schemes fully to exploit the resources of this ‘undeveloped’ continent. To those whose transport to the new land was involuntary were added those who were impelled by the hope of personal gain, and whose distinctive and competing claims seeded the politics of the nascent community. The economic infrastructure of the settler society – ports, roads, bridges, enclosures, public buildings – was built with convict labour. The first to benefit from the fruits of this labour were their administrators (the New South Wales Corps), the initially small numbers of free settlers, and emancipists (convicts given pardons, or who had completed their sentences) who turned to commerce.

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Benefiting from the system of land grants and reliant on assigned convict labour to develop their holdings, these groups moved to tie up colonial resources. As in any set of political negotiations, they also sought to justify their claims through drawing on received ideas. It was a community defined by hierarchy, with the governor at its apex, but as the military elite developed a controlling interest in trade and gained dominance of land holdings, their interests diverged from those of the colonial governors. They were at once devotees of neoclassical ideals of a society based on deference to rank and station, deeply counter-revolutionary in their suspicion of democracy and of seditious radicalism among the convicts, and vigorous advocates of the ‘rights’ of free-born Englishmen when their intentions were thwarted by ‘tyrannical’ governors. The mix is exemplified in John Macarthur, ‘the great perturbator’ in Governor King’s view. Macarthur, combative, self-confident and opportunistic, was the most influential officer in the NSW Corps in the 1790s (where he served the regimental interest by investing its funds in overseas trade); a signal figure, with his wife, Elizabeth, in the Australian wool industry; a catalyst in the growth of free enterprise in the early 1800s; an agitator for constitutional reform; and the organiser of the rum rebellion of 1809 against Governor Bligh. ‘I have’, he said on the day of the rebellion, ‘been deeply engaged all this day in contending for the liberties of this unhappy colony, and I am happy to say that I have succeeded … The tyrant is now, no doubt, gnashing his teeth with vexation at his overthrow. May he often have cause to do the like’.9 After this he was for six months secretary of the colony of New South Wales before being called to England to account for himself. His views on the future of the colony were most explicit. there is no time to be lost, in establishing a body of really respectable Settlers – Men of real Capital – not needy adventurers. They should have Estates of at least 10,000 acres, with reserves contiguous

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of equal extent. Such a body of Proprietors would in a few years become wealthy and with the support of Government powerful as an Aristocracy. The democratic multitude would look upon their large possessions with Envy, and upon the Proprietors with hatred – as this democratic feeling has already taken deep root in the Colony … it cannot be too soon opposed with vigour. If forty or fifty proprietors, such as I have described, were settled in the Country, they would soon discover that there could be no secure enjoyment of their Estates but from the protection of Government – as the population increases, the aristocratic body should be augmented … New Settlers, with Capital, would find no difficulty to stock their Estates. They would maintain a large body of domestic Servants and labourers; and from their numerous Flocks supply Great Britain … [T]he Proprietors would be desirous to take as many convicts as possible. These men would produce Bread for themselves and their surplus labour would be directed to clearing, fencing and draining, so that every year the estates would become capable of supporting more sheep and the proprietors in circumstances to provide for more Labourers to carry on his [sic] improvements – surely these are points entitled to the most serious attention of Government … [T]here is certainty of an increasing demand for the labour of any number of convicts or paupers … Adventurers without Capital retard all improvement, and as they sink deeper into poverty and distress, swell the mass of discontent, become most furious democrats and attribute the misery into which they are plunged not to their own idleness … but to the errors of Government and the oppression of the wealthy …10

Macarthur’s conservative commitment to a colonial elite of landed families who would ensure stability; opposition to (the governor’s) executive authority and demand for constitutional restraint; and familiarity with the latest theories of utilitarianism and penal reform (which provided a rationale for convict labour in the service of free settlers) were perfectly representative of the interests for whom he spoke. That the deposition of Governor Bligh stated that the governor

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was charged to resign by ‘the respectable inhabitants’ signalled another division in colonial society: that between exclusives and emancipists. The exclusives, free settlers who, along with the military, saw themselves as the colonial elite, claimed the mantle of virtue. The convicts, ticket-of-leavers, emancipists, and their native-born posterity, were tainted by the stain of both criminality and generally lowly social origins. Since Puritan times at least, the criminal poor had been regarded differently from the rest of the socially disadvantaged in English parishes, and denied assistance, and such attitudes appear to have been widespread.11 Once the NSW Corps had been discredited by the rebellion, the exclusives sought to control access to Government House, to assert the importance of religious observance (some of them arguing for an established church) and to uphold the rudiments of an established order. The more liberal proclivities of the emancipists, who came to play an increasingly important role in the mercantile life of the colony, would be supported in due course by the native born. On one side it was thought society should adhere to ‘a social order based on rank and station, in which relationships were personal and particular’; on the other, the coming idea of ‘society as an aggregation of autonomous, self-directed individuals, everyone seeking to maximise their own satisfaction’12 took hold. Conflict between these tendencies shaped the politics of the early nineteenth century. The urging of Macarthur and others encouraged the imperial authorities to recognise the potential of the wool industry in Australia, not least as a means of utilising the seemingly limitless amount of land. The restiveness of the colony, however, where Bligh’s successor, Macquarie, had been perceived as favouring the emancipists over the exclusives, led to an official inquiry by J.T. Bigge. His reports recommended land grants to people of substance, with ex-convicts constrained to continue working for such natural leaders. The influence of Macarthur is evident. This became the template

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for the pastoral industry. Political decisions in London, such as the imposition of tariffs on European producers, gave the Australian pastoralists a cost advantage. Control of land allocation by imperial and colonial authorities provided the means to encourage specific sorts of immigration, allowing a form of social engineering that would determine the nature of social and economic development. The enterprise of the new settlers of the 1820s continued to depend upon assigned convict labour. As prosperity and free settlement increased, however, the long-standing objections of the exclusives against the ‘tyranny’ of governors began to gain ground. Enter W.C. Wentworth, lawyer, author, journalist and cavalier entrepreneur, son of surgeon D’Arcy Wentworth (who had been tried and acquitted of highway robbery – four times – and grew rich from his colonial enterprises) and his de facto, Catherine Crowley (convict). English educated, a gifted agitator, publicist and self-promoter, W.C. Wentworth was the self-nominated spokesman for the native born, the ‘great native son’.13 In speaking against authoritarian government and demanding the rights of Englishmen, Wentworth echoed the Tory aspirations of the big landholders, who saw themselves as a natural aristocracy: The colony of New South Wales is, I believe, the only one of our possessions exclusively inhabited by Englishmen, in which there is not at least the shadow of a free government, as it possesses neither a council, a house of assembly nor even the privilege of a trial by jury.14

At the same time, he was vigorously critical of any new oligarchy: degraded as your humble petitioners consider their present political condition in being deprived of those ancient birthrights and bulwarks of the British Constitution … they would prefer continuing in that degraded position … rather than have an elective legislature created among them of such circumscribed extent as would leave them the

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name of ‘popular representation’, whilst in reality it delivered them into the hands of an oppressive and rapacious oligarchy.15

And he energetically defended the emancipists, who sought to reclaim their standing having paid their debt to society, by accusing the exclusives of trying to convert the ignominy of the great body of the people into an hereditary deformity. They would hand it down from father to son, and raise an eternal barrier of separation between their offspring, and the offspring of the unfortunate convict. They would establish distinctions which may serve hereafter to divide the colonists into castes; and although none among them dares publicly avow that future generations should be punished for the crimes of their progenitors, yet such are their private sentiments; and they would have the present race branded with disqualifications, not more for the sake of pampering their own vanity, than with a view to reflect disgrace on the offspring of the disfranchised parent, and thus cast on their own children and descendants that future splendor and importance, which they consider to be their present peculiar and distinguishing characteristics. Short-sighted fools!16

Wentworth would later move to the conservative side (see below), but in the 1820s his appeal for responsible government echoed the demands of the landed class, while his attack on oligarchy and defence of the rights of emancipists gave him a reputation as a man of the people.

Population growth, responsible government and the influence of the liberals In effect, all sides were committed to the institution of responsible government from the 1820s. For some, this meant the extension of the economic advantages of the landed oligarchy into the political domain, with limits on democracy. Others, however, fought for a

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more open, inclusive system, in opposition both to authoritarian government and to the presumptions of the colonial gentry. The division was given expression in different notions of liberty. For conservatives, such as James Macarthur (son of John), the liberty advocated by Liberals was profoundly to be feared: ‘Our radicals would break down morals in order to establish liberty. God defend us from such liberty!’ The colonists, he said, ‘had to decide whether they would have the rights of Britons or that vile and bastard democracy which had led to so many evil results in different parts of the world’. Liberals saw the conservative landholders as simply pursuing class interests, and responded that ‘a just law no more recognises the supremacy of a class than it does the predominance of a creed … [T]he elective principle is the only basis upon which sound government could be built’.17 These views are to be seen in the petitions drawn up by the exclusives and the emancipists respectively in 1836, on the subjects of transportation and self-government. Thus, the exclusives feared that: Property, life, reputation, moral and political well-being, whatever in short should be dear to men who have been taught to distinguish a rational and well-founded freedom from the disorganizing doctrines, which, under the name of liberty, would subvert the landmarks of social order, and, confounding all just distinctions, sap the foundations of society; all these are at stake.

The emancipists responded to this ‘small illiberal party’ that: no necessity has been or can be shewn to justify the exclusion from the rights and privileges of citizenship of the Freed Colonists, upon any other grounds than those of conviction of crime committed in this Colony … to adopt any other principles of exclusion would be at once to extinguish the most powerful stimulus to reformation, and to divide the Colonists into castes, thereby sowing the seeds of present animosities, hereditary feuds, and perpetual dissentions.18

Demographic and economic change worked against the aspirations of

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the colonial conservatives. Extension of the pastoral frontier opened up the land with surprising rapidity from the 1830s on – four of Australia’s six future states were founded between 1829 and 1859. But the introduction of land sales (as opposed to grants) from 1831 as a means of funding assisted immigration brought a new class of settlers who would contend with the old oligarchy. This reflected the influence of the ‘systematic colonisers’, who adapted E.G. Wakefield’s theories to promote closer settlement. They opposed the grace and favour of the land grant system in favour of expensive land. Land sales would generate funds to underwrite assisted immigration, encouraging a free labour force working to gain the wherewithal to buy small family holdings. This was an entirely different view of how progress would be achieved. Pastoralists could, for a time, confound the expectations of new settlers and the intentions of the systematic colonisers by moving beyond the bounds of settlement and ‘squatting’. The governors’ attempts to control this with the introduction of squatting licences were forestalled in 1847 when the British government opted instead to allow the squatters fourteen-year leases. If the squatters were thus allowed to retain their privileges, population movement would tell against them. Pastoralism, relative to other forms of agriculture, was not labour-intensive and the squatters did not build up a loyal class of retainers whose interests coincided with their own. Instead, the cities – the platforms for trade, the locations of the ports linking primary producers with metropolitan markets, the magnets for investment, the sites of arrival (where many immigrants chose to remain) – began to grow. Emerging urban interests (from mercantile and financial to skilled tradesmen) conceived of a world where liberalism and democracy would overcome the limitations of hierarchical order. By the 1840s, opponents of such ‘radical’ change were describing it in apocalyptic terms:

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When the meeting of Wednesday last was told of the ‘indefeasible rights of man’, a doctrine was put forth equally dangerous, untrue and revolutionary; a doctrine which if pushed to its practical consequences would unhinge the fabric of social life, subvert the foundations of religion, order and morality, and substitute for the pure flame of rational freedom, the strange and unhallowed fires of a relentless and licentious anarchy … The terrible example of the French Revolution, the example of that nation which ‘got drunk with blood to vomit crime’ should teach all men the dangers of these monstrous doctrines.19

The response to such claims revealed a shrewd sense of the real agenda behind the rhetoric. There has been a ringing of charges for the past few days on the pet phrases, vile democracy, colonial Jacobinism, Chartism, etc., etc., … the plain English of which is: Let the colonial franchise be raised so high that the future representation of the colony shall be the same family compact as it has hitherto been and the future colonial constituency be mere horned cattle and pure merinos.20

Indeed, there was never any doubt about the commitment of conservatives to a form of ‘family compact’ (see John Macarthur above), though now, as W.C. Wentworth was soon to declare, ‘population and property, not population alone, were the sound elements of representation’.21 Not so, said the democrats: ‘the elective franchise should be universal suffrage rather than limited by any paltry property qualification, which in this colony is no criterion at all of competency to discharge the sacred duty of an elector …’22 In October 1840, one journalist spoke fulsomely of the democratic aspirations of the growing urban working class: Let the mechanics of Sydney again assemble, and petition the British Parliament for a representative government which will recognise them as a portion of the body politic, by fixing the franchise at a rate which will give every father of a family, or householder, a vote. …

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Tell them in Downing-street that there are thousands of operatives in Sydney who are resolutely bent upon having extended to them the rights of free men; and on being emancipated from the control of an irresponsible legislature, composed in great part of those men who are least of all capable of legislating.23

In cases like this one, the demands of democrats seemed to manifest the influence of Chartist transportees to Australia. The Peoples Charter, drafted by William Lovett in London in 1838, demanded universal manhood suffrage, equal electorates, vote by ballot, payment of members of parliament, annual parliamentary elections and abolition of property qualifications for membership. The Chartist movement stimulated popular support in the 1840s in England through massive protest meetings, occasionally leading to riots and the arrest of its leaders, some of whom (sixty or so) were transported to Australia. Other immigrants, such as Henry Parkes, who became the leading figure in NSW politics in the second half of the nineteenth century, claimed to have been at the first big protest meeting in Birmingham in 1838 that had approved the Charter, and to have carried its spirit to Australia. The conflict between conservatives and democrats was colourfully expressed in the debate on a constitution for self-government in New South Wales in 1853. A reinvented W.C. Wentworth, chairing a committee on a constitution bill for New South Wales, proposed the creation of a colonial aristocracy. He suggested the creation of a class that would not, of right, be admitted to an upper house but that would, on the basis of inherited title, constitute the sole pool from which members of an upper house could be elected. And it was from the pastoral interest, which he described as ‘incomparably the largest, the most important interest in the country’, that this aristocracy would initially be drawn: An Upper House framed on this principle … would lay the foundation of an aristocracy which, from their fortune, birth,

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leisure, and the superior education which these advantages would superinduce, would soon supply the elements for the formation of an Upper House, modelled … upon the analogies of the British Constitution … When a generation having this hereditary right amongst them rises here, I (recalling the menaces of a certain portion of the colonial press, its tendencies to democracy, its recklessness of consequences) predict that it will be found a good and stable bulwark, necessary for the defence of good government and conservative institutions. A powerful body will be formed of men of wealth, property and education – men not raised from any particular section of the community, but from every class that has the energy to aspire to rank and honour.24

The coruscating, witty response of another native son (and child of emancipists), then 25-year-old Daniel Deniehy, punctured this pomposity and crystallised popular reaction: I protest against the present daring and unheard of attempt to tamper with a fundamental popular right, that of having a voice in the nomination of men who are to make, or control the making of, laws binding on the community … [H]aving the right to frame, to embody, to shape it as we will, with no huge stubborn facts to work upon as in England, there is nothing but the elective principle and the inalienable right and freedom of every colonist upon which to work out the whole organisation and fabric of our political institutions. But because it is the good pleasure of Mr Wentworth … we are to have … an Upper House cast upon us, built upon a model to serve the taste and propriety of certain political oligarchs, who treat the people at large as if they are cattle to be bought and sold in the market … I confess I find extreme difficulty in the effort to classify this mushroom order of nobility … I would defy the most skilled naturalist to assign them a place in the great human family. But perhaps after all it is only a specimen of the remarkable contrariety which exists in the Antipodes. Here we all know that the common water mole was transformed into the duck-billed platypus; and in

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some distant emulation of this degeneracy, I suppose we are to be favoured with a bunyip aristocracy.25

The conflicting aspirations of the propertied classes and the colonial liberals were written into the first documents of self-government: the colonial constitutions drafted in the 1850s. All colonies adopted a bicameral system, with a popular house, the Legislative Assembly, and – as a check against democratic excess – a powerful Legislative Council. In the three largest colonies, elections for the Assemblies met four of the six Chartist demands (manhood suffrage, secret ballots, equal electorates and no property qualifications for membership) – ridicule had defeated the pretensions of a ‘bunyip aristocracy’. Conservative interests were to be protected by the review function of, and the method of appointment or election to, the upper house. In New South Wales and Queensland, members of the Legislative Council were appointed by the governor; in the other colonies they were to be elected by those satisfying a property qualification, with an even higher threshold demanded of those seeking election. The Councils, which had ill-defined constitutional powers to block legislation, were therefore to be the bastions of colonial conservatism, the last redoubt of those who had generated the fantasy of a colonial nobility.

The alliance against the ‘Shepherd Kings’ Very substantial population growth was stimulated by the discovery of gold in the 1850s: the non-Indigenous population trebled, reaching 1,150,000 in 1861, and Victoria grew sevenfold, from 77,000 in 1851 to 540,000 in 1861, making it the largest colony.26 It has been said that many of the diggers were Chartists: certainly they came in pursuit of material gain and with ideas of autonomy and self-sufficiency. The new population added to the pressure for further democratisation of colonial institutions.

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An initial manifestation was the Eureka rebellion. In November 1854, at the instigation of the Chartist-influenced Ballarat Reform League, 1000 diggers gathered at the Eureka Stockade near Ballarat to protest the corrupt administration of the mining licence fee and ‘to fight to defend our rights and liberties’. Among the longer term demands of the Reform League were ‘1. A full and fair representation. 2. Manhood suffrage. 3. No property qualification of members for the Legislative Council. 4. Payment of members. 5. Short duration of parliaments.’27 Early one morning, government troops attacked, overrunning the Stockade to disperse the miners and arrest their leaders. They killed thirty diggers, with the loss of five soldiers. No jury would convict the leaders of the movement, and subsequently one of the most prominent, Peter Lalor, was elected to parliament. This leniency needs to be explained, especially considering the severity of the reaction to an earlier rebellion, the Vinegar Hill rebellion at Parramatta, exactly fifty years earlier. Possible reasons might include: the expectation of responsible government; a Whig administration in Whitehall; the combination of distance from England and the authorities’ fear of a larger rebellion; and the development of a culture of support for the underdog and suspicion of authority.28 Certainly the British would not have wanted to imperil the newfound goldfields. Then there is a more complex argument: was it that the Australians of the time were in denial about the ‘little rebellion’, because of an underlying terror of being abandoned at the end of the earth, and losing forever the protective ‘embrace’ of empire?29 The meaning of Eureka has been vigorously debated. It has been variously described as the fount of radical nationalism; the eruption of democrats against an oppressive order; an affair of slight significance as democratic reform was already underway; and the rise of small capitalist entrepreneurs against restrictive and unjust regulation.30 It is significant, however, that the Eureka rebels called not only for the abolition of the

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licence fee (and ‘no taxation without representation’), but also for manhood suffrage (the Victorian constitution had not then been enacted) and the opening up of the land to small holders. If gold was not to secure individual independence, agricultural small holding would. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, liberals ‘could be expected to advocate reform of upper houses, to support legislation to open up land settlement by farmers and to look kindly on measures calculated to benefit working men and the poorer sections of the community’.31 The predisposition to reach out to the more disadvantaged was not solely philosophical: it reflected political and economic imperatives. The campaign to ‘unlock the lands’ created alliances between diggers and townspeople, the middle class and poor immigrants seeking their chance, all united against the squatters (and by extension, the grip of the men of property on the Legislative Councils). Selection Acts in Victoria (1860) and New South Wales (1861), giving free selectors the opportunity to take up pastoral land, were followed in all colonies. The squatters exploited loopholes and used agents to capture much of their land (as owners now, rather than leaseholders), and many small holders were dogged by inexperience, lack of capital and distance from markets. Theirs was a hard lot, even after subsequent legislation strengthened their position. Many such small holders would find their sympathies lying neither with the conservative landowners nor with the urban liberals, but with the collectivism of the gradually emerging labour movement, as is manifest for example in the Electors’ Hand-Book & Guide of 1864 by ‘Agricola’ (J.J. Walsh). While one set of alliances revolved around the land question, another involved collaboration between workers and the urban middle-class against the political sway of mercantile and property interests. In most colonies, after the late 1860s, loose alliances, or reform leagues, between liberals and radicals emerged. A good example was the electoral coalition of leagues representing selectors, miners, manufacturers

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and trade unionists that Victorian liberal premier Graham Berry forged in the 1870s.32 Focusing on protection, direct taxation and reform of the land laws, electoral system and upper house, it swept the polls in 1877 and produced a strong radical majority. Berry’s position can be seen clearly in his subsequent battle with the Legislative Council, and it involved the Chartist issue of payment of parliamentarians.33 For working and most middle-class people, entry to parliament was precluded since it meant losing their income: only those with private means or substantial enterprises could afford to sacrifice time that would otherwise be engaged in earning a living. Payment of parliamentarians had been introduced as a temporary measure in Victoria from 1870 to 1877, but when Berry sought its renewal in 1877, by tacking it on to an appropriation bill, the Council refused to pass it. Berry’s dramatic response was to dismiss hundreds of public servants (who, he claimed, could not be paid without appropriation). This ended the deadlock, with the Council passing the measure but refusing wider proposals for constitutional reform. Berry made an unsuccessful attempt to gain such reform through imperial legislation, gaining much kudos among democrats, but then losing power as the colony experienced a substantial economic reverse (named by his opponents ‘the Berry blight’). Re-elected in 1880, he achieved a compromise with the Council: ‘The property qualification for members was reduced, the franchise widened, the number of members increased … and the term of office reduced from ten years to six, but the Council’s wide-ranging powers were left intact’.34 Economic development in the ‘long boom’ from the 1860s fostered the emergence of a liberal intelligentsia and a collective labour movement. While land sales and wool exports underwrote prosperity the economy diversified, encouraging urban expansion and the augmentation of these groups.35 Economic growth was sustained, and rapid, at least until the 1890s. It depended on population growth and capital

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investment, both primarily from Britain. Population and capital flowed in roughly equal proportions to government and private enterprise activities. Local capital formation was channelled towards residential building, pastoral equipment, railways and local authority works – three of these four favouring expansion of the urban rather than the rural economy. The growth of domestic assets and markets diminished the significance of export income and overseas markets. While primary production expanded, it was not until the depression of the 1890s that its relative importance rose again – and that largely because of a decline in the rest of the economy. For most of the late nineteenth century, it was manufacturing, building, railways and personal services that expanded rather than primary industries. For these years, ‘Australian economic development is mainly a story of urbanization. The building of cities absorbed the greater part of resources diverted to developmental purposes; the enterprises in the towns employed most of the increasing population engaged in work’.36 It is against this background that we must understand the increasing influence of colonial liberals and the labour movement. The economic tides that had borne the squatter kings aloft since the 1830s were ebbing; their redoubts in the Legislative Councils would not be enough to sustain their dominance; a social order based on deference and rank was an impossible dream – liberal individualism and market logic and the rise of cities put paid to that.37 By the mid-nineteenth century Australian liberals had embraced democratisation – manhood suffrage was one means to challenge pastoral dominance. Efforts then turned to economic progress and civic improvement.

The strands of nineteenth-century liberalism The assertion of rights in the colonies was coloured by the revolutions in France and America. As we have seen, the conservative image of

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democratic rights drew upon the ‘excesses’ of the French experience – conservatives referred instead to ‘the rights of Englishmen’, meaning constitutional guarantees of a set of liberties very much differentiated according to class. But how did this relate to the American case? The decision to colonise Australia appears to have been related to American independence, the First Fleet being sent out at the very moment the Americans were writing their Constitution. If Australia, like Canada, in part owes its existence as a British colonial offshoot to US independence, then the US struggle could be seen as the neveracknowledged backdrop to the early debates, at least until J.D. Lang urged colonists to follow the US example. The radical interpretation of democratic rights did not gain traction in Australia, at first, but it would be a mistake to ignore its influence in the colonies, and the way it throws into relief what liberals and conservatives meant when they adverted to rights. Radicals can be identified from the inception of European settlement; some were transported precisely for being advocates of the seditious ideas associated with the age of revolution (often as translated by their demotic populariser, Thomas Paine). For instance, the political reformers known as the ‘Scottish martyrs’ – Maurice Margarot, Rev. Thomas Fyshe Palmer, Thomas Muir, William Skirving and Joseph Gerrald – were tried in Edinburgh and sentenced to transportation for sedition in 1794. Their crime: to have advocated the rights of man (liberty, equality and fraternity) and to have promoted democratic reform (universal suffrage and annual parliaments). In 1806 a convict, Joseph Smallsalts, who had been found guilty of seditious comments, disrespectful to His Majesty’s Government, was obliged to wear a label reading ‘Thomas Paine’ on a journey to Newcastle because he had declared that ‘he would be worse than Thomas Paine, if thwarted’.38 A free settler, John Boston, was alleged to have toasted ‘The Rights of Man, the Tree of Liberty, the French Revolution’ and ‘Damnation 55

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to the King, His family and all the Crown’d heads, that they were absolute tyrants and might be Extirpated from the Face of the Earth’, and in retaliation a group of loyal soldiers killed his pig.39 Did such individuals have much direct influence on their peers? Smallsalts and Boston may have been part of a subculture, but the evidence is fragmentary. What is clear is that literate people within the administrative class were aware of and circulated Paine’s Rights of Man, and that others reacted strongly where they thought they saw signs of its influence. Their class origins separated the Scottish martyrs from most convicts; they were gentlemen radicals, ‘excused labour’ (Palmer, for example, was an Anglican cleric educated at Eton and Oxford). One of them escaped to California, two died shortly after arrival, and while the survivors, Palmer and Margarot, recorded observations and prognostications about the colony, only Margarot appears likely to have persisted in disseminating his views. (In 1804, Governor King, who accused him of republican sentiments and ‘the grossest scurrility against my predecessor and myself’, seized his papers.40 ) These individuals advocated rights more radical than the rights claimed by those who dominated the early development of the colony. We have seen that the colonial conservatives (such as John and James Macarthur) and Whigs (such as W.C. Wentworth) were ever ready to claim the rights of ‘Englishmen’ against ‘tyrannical government’. But these were rights emerging from historical settlements (the Magna Carta, the ‘glorious revolution’) and embodied in institutions and conventions – elected assemblies, restraint of executive power (as in habeas corpus), trial by jury, no taxation without representation, and respect for property rights. Their objective was to see those conventions and institutions properly translated to the colonies. The rights thus established would not be equally distributed: there were rights due to rank and station, and while all could aspire to property

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only the minority would achieve it. Conservatives wanted government responsible to those who elected it, but the implicit constituency was not democratic: it was ‘the respectable inhabitants’, those qualified by property ownership. There was thus no contradiction in arguing vigorously for the rights of Englishmen, while advocating a hereditary aristocracy, insisting on the privileges of men of means and opposing democracy. The threat presented by Paine was that the claims of history, convention and an established order would be swept aside: rights were said to be universal and inherent to the individual; the institutions through which such rights were to be enacted and preserved must be democratic; the principle of participation was equality. These were seditious sentiments not only in relation to established practice in Britain, but also in relation to what the colonial oligarchy was trying to achieve. The ferocity of the response to such sentiments, some of which we have noted, impeded any chance of wholesale democratisation: the more manageable aspiration was to widen the franchise, which became the purpose of the Chartist movement and was the objective of reform alliances emerging from the 1840s on. Still, the notion of individual rights was a seed that would grow. Liberals valued the sovereignty of the autonomous, self-determining individual, but were not agreed on how the best interests of the individual were to be achieved. Many British liberals, much influenced by Adam Smith, believed that leaving individuals to pursue their own purposes was conducive to happiness and to financial progress. Competition between self-seeking individuals would generate wealth and be balanced by market mechanisms. Others would later conclude that state intervention could only cause harm (a position that Smith did not hold); hence the commitment to laissez-faire (non-interference), a term first used in 1756. It was, in its context, a radical commitment, striking against the paternalist domination of economy and society by

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the aristocracy and the landed gentry. It resonated with the grievances of the Chartist movement (with its demands for electoral reform) and with the frustrations of the more middle-class Anti-Corn Law League (in its protest against trade restrictions). The heroes of the latter were Richard Cobden, a persuasive pamphleteer, and John Bright, a gifted public speaker. The Corn Laws allowed British growers to protect their interests by imposing duties on imported corn, raising the price of food for the masses and benefiting the landed elite. Their repeal in 1846 after successful agitation raised Cobden from national to international prominence. The free-trade views of Cobden, Bright and their acolytes (‘the Manchester school’) gained wide circulation as a staple of British liberalism. In Australia, as we have seen, there was another sort of battle between a putative ‘landed’ establishment, with its control of the Legislative Councils, and ‘free-born’ Englishmen seeking to unlock the lands and to achieve further democratisation. Cobden’s arguments, conveyed to literate colonials by the metropolitan presses and augmented by the first-hand reports of newly arriving immigrants (such as William Edward Hearn), helped facilitate a liberal mobilisation in mid-nineteenthcentury Australia. Cobden’s and (after the 1860s) Herbert Spencer’s anti-statist arguments permeated the speeches and pamphlets of George Reid and other Australian free-trade liberals (see chapters 3 and 4). However, another variant of liberalism sought to secure individual sovereignty, through actions of the state. This, too, had identifiable British and European antecedents – in the theories of Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill – but it appeared to be a much more vigorous movement in the colonies than in the ‘home’ country. On this view, people without the independent means that came from the land or an income from labour, were not really ‘free’. These liberals focused initially on the doctrine of protection, arguing for duties to be imposed on imports so that local industries (and local jobs) could grow without being undercut

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by competition from larger markets and cheaper goods. The freetrade movement would claim the heritage of ‘true’ (meaning British) liberalism, while their opponents, arguing for measures that would underwrite economic progress and ameliorate individual disadvantage, sometimes claimed to speak for the native-born. The greatest of all the advocates of a protectionist industry policy was the Melbourne-based newspaper proprietor David Syme (see chapter 3). This readiness to contemplate a departure from laissez-faire drew on a long practice of administrative intervention as the condition of colonial development. As a convict settlement, the state had been supreme. The authorities, through convict labour, had supplied the colonial infrastructure, and the workforce for expansion of settlement and for the emerging primary industries. The encouragement of men of substance, after Bigge’s report, the basis for pastoral expansion and the rise of the squatter elite, depended on the provision of land grants. While the squatters developed an exaggerated idea of their place in a stable, organic order, colonial conservatives nonetheless believed that it was the role of whoever held authority to shape colonial society. The acceleration of free settlement from the 1830s depended upon assisted immigration, funded through land sales. As the economy prospered, and ports, roads, railways and cities had to be built, capital investment from London was channelled through colonial governments and guaranteed by future revenue from customs duties and land sales. In effect, the active role of the state in nineteenth century Australia had been ‘naturalised’. Nonetheless, while the cause of activist liberalism boasted some formidable and influential figures, the sinews of the free trade movement would continue to be stiffened by the immigrant carriers of British opinion: it was a debate that would continue well into the twentieth century, and would briefly provide the basis for the original two-party system (see chapter 4). First, however, colonial liberals would have to clarify their relations with the working class.

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3 Defining interests

[W]e can now stand erect and claim our rights as men … and the home authorities will understand that if these rights are not conceded forthwith, if we are not allowed as high a degree of freedom as has been enjoyed by any community of freemen in any colony of the British Empire, [then] we shall soon be free of Great Britain altogether. John Dunmore Lang, 18511

The rhetoric of late nineteenth-century democrats conjured with the idea of one Australian ‘people’. In its extreme form this concern with Australian identity could lead Marcus Clarke, writing in the 1870s, playfully to imagine the future Australian (male) ‘type’: In another hundred years the average Australasian will be a tall, coarse, strong-jawed, greedy, pushing, talented man, excelling in swimming and horsemanship. His religion will be a form of Presbyterianism; his national policy a Democracy tempered by the rate of exchange.2

This was complemented by his description of the future Australian’s wife, in terms reflecting women’s relegation to a diminished domestic sphere. But Marcus Clarke was adamant that there was an Australian (or Australasian) identity in the process of formation, which would be both distinctively democratic, and singularly different. (His future unitary and republican ‘Australasia’ included New Zealand but not Queensland.) But what would liberty and rights mean in this ‘distinctive’ democracy? All would depend upon whose interpretation won through.

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Loose alliances between liberals and radicals to further democratisation, from the 1860s to the 1880s, assumed that differences could be subordinated to shared objectives; by 1883, for example, James Service could reconcile Gladstonian liberalism with equal opportunity ‘without dogmatic respect for the rights of private enterprise’, democratic reform and state interventionism, and secure Trades Hall backing for his platform.3 However, the challenges to be faced would raise questions about such assumptions. Eventually the reform alliances would fragment, and as the institutional framework for political unity was developed one set of interests and their associated advocates would gain control of the agenda.

Liberals, radicals and working-class organisation Liberals

It would be a mistake to see the divisions in liberal opinion in the period after responsible government had been achieved as clear-cut. For one thing, those most widely associated with liberal causes did not yet see themselves sharing a common interest: ‘The middle class in Australia at this time was particularly new, open, heterogeneous and not yet clearly defined, let alone set, in its attitudes and manner of life’.4 The backgrounds of representative liberals, however, were indicative of the urban provenance of the emerging elite: Graham Berry, city storekeeper; George Higinbotham, journalist and lawyer; Henry Parkes, journalist and businessman; David Syme, newspaper editor; George Reid, barrister; Alfred Deakin, lawyer and journalist; Samuel Griffith, lawyer; Charles Pearson, academic and journalist; Rose Scott, independent means. The politically prominent were supplemented by a phalanx of others – pamphleteers, writers and journalists, such as Henry Wrixon, George Cole, Francis Adams, Edward Morris and

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Mortimer Franklyn, and less prominent parliamentarians including Bruce Smith and Edward Pulsford.5 Liberals were divided philosophically. Liberalism at its core is committed to individual liberty. Initially, it was the claim of ‘free-born’ men against the impositions of aristocratic elites, whose hereditary ownership of land and its resources, justified by ‘traditional’ authority, enabled them to control the polity and keep ‘lower orders’ in their place. Some such reassertion of ‘traditional authority’ was what the colonial conservatives had sought to reinvent or preserve in Australia. In contrast, liberals promised that, given his freedom, each man could pursue his own interests to achieve security and prosperity. An example of this ‘British’ liberalism was manifest in the contribution of Cobden and Bright to the repeal of the Corn Laws (chapter 2). Their argument was that the Corn Laws increased the price of bread (to the disadvantage of most of the populace) and boosted the profits of the landowners (privileging established elites). It was an argument for free trade, and the connection of individual liberty with open markets. Cobden would remain a patron saint for this market-based liberalism, which would later be dubbed laissez-faire liberalism by its critics, though it was never quite that (see chapter 4). Later in the nineteenth century, however, some (in England, T.H. Green and D. G. Ritchie, for example) argued that the promise of liberalism had not been realised. In circumstances of marked disadvantage, liberty could not be achieved by individuals acting alone. Sickness, poverty, lack of education, unemployment, and so on, could constitute such serious impediments to individual advancement that real liberty could never be achieved. In such circumstances, the state must act to ensure the conditions where meaningful individual choice could be exercised; for instance, by providing public education, or safety nets against sickness and destitution. These were the ‘new liberals’. Both camps claimed to defend liberty and the inherent

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contradiction within liberalism – whether liberty is best achieved through individual action, or must be guaranteed by state intervention – would be played out in unique ways in Australian politics. The most comprehensive study of colonial liberalism locates it in Victoria, with a lineage of protectionist founders: Syme, Higinbotham, Pearson and Deakin.6 New South Wales remained the heartland of free trade opinion. But, in the 1890s, governments in New South Wales were torn between protectionists (agriculturalists speaking for the country, and seeking barriers against Victorian produce, as well as proponents of manufacturing industry) and free traders: Reid was able to represent the protectionists as conservative, with himself as the true liberal, and to engineer an alliance with labour to maintain power.7 It would be the rise of the labour movement after 1891 that would eventually force free trade and protectionist liberals to recognise their common interests, culminating in the ‘Fusion’ of the early Commonwealth era (see chapter 4). The characteristics of what would become the de facto liberal ascendancy, however, were apparent by the 1880s in what was by then the most economically developed colony, Victoria: its ruling class – politicians, businessmen and other opinion makers – were nearly all still the young migrants of the fifties. They were more urban middle class in origin and intellectually more provincially English than the ruling class of any other colony. The society they created was more metropolitan-dominated, more closely in touch with the currents of English opinion … and less isolationist than other colonies … The challenges of trade unionists, nationalists, Irish Catholics … – even of bohemians and larrikins – were being contained. Harmony still prevailed in labour relations … Victorians believed themselves secure still in all essentials, and remain [sic] brashly complacent in their prosperity.8

Why was New South Wales the bastion of free trade, and Victoria

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of protection? It was because different patterns of economic development, promoting different political cultures, produced different intellectual currents. New South Wales, the original colony, had long established elites, a history of wealth generation through primary exports and with it a tradition of commitment to free trade – and a revenue base linked to the sale of crown land and land taxes. Victoria, confronted with extraordinary population growth as a result of the gold rushes, turned its efforts to urban growth and industrial development, protecting its nascent manufacturing sector through tariffs – and developing a revenue base reliant on those tariffs. Victoria was the natural context for the generation of a colonial liberalism receptive to the new liberal currents of the 1880s.9 There was, too, the element of colonial competition, with New South Wales (especially through Henry Parkes) wanting to assert its historical status as the principal colony; and with Victoria – having seen Melbourne’s population outstrip Sydney’s for a good part of the late nineteenth century (1861 to the late 1880s), and having become the financial and share capital of Australia for much of that period – convinced that its model was the way of the future. The New South Welshman, Bruce Smith’s, Liberty and Liberalism (1887) was the most extended theoretical account of classical liberalism produced in Australia.10 That Smith lived for another fifty years, and remained active as a writer and a political representative for most of that time, ensured that his views retained currency (see chapter 10).11 Smith wrote of the battles by which the principle of individual liberty had been enshrined as the central constitutional principle in Anglophone states. He detailed the struggles preceding the Magna Charta (sic), the Charta itself (defining the liberties of all orders), the Petition of Right (precluding the imposition of taxes without consent), the Habeus Corpus Act (confirming the principle of personal liberty), the Reform Bill of 1832 (extending the franchise),

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the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 (Cobden’s triumph, removing misconceived restrictions of the market freedom of citizens), through to the repeal of laws restricting combinations and public meetings in the 1870s. ‘If history is carefully followed’, he suggested, it will be seen that as soon as that class of liberties, with which royal despotism had persistently interfered, had been rescued … Liberalism found a new and extensive field, upon which to exercise its equalising functions. It was gradually, and (as popular power was realised) more vividly realised that society, as a whole, was surrounded by restrictions upon ‘the people’s’ liberty. It became more and more apparent that the masses were not in enjoyment of those ‘equal opportunities’ which it is the function of true Liberalism to secure for all; and … the legislative reforms that have been effected … reveal that parliament has been chiefly occupied in securing that ‘equality of opportunity’ which is the chief, and, in truth, the only aim of Liberalism to consummate.

In his view, the restrictions imposed by elites on the people had been curtailed, but now he saw a new threat to individual liberty emerging: the progress of ‘Liberalism’ has produced a long, uninterrupted and concurrent flow of concessions to the people’s liberty. So … that the working classes have been brought to believe no action of the Legislature can possibly … be placed in the category of ‘Liberal’ measures, unless it is actually accompanied by some positive advantages for themselves … The masses … are prepared to apply the term … to any measure which promises to confer some advantages on themselves as a class, even … though such a measure may … involve treatment, injurious to the interests of the remainder of the community. This I regard as the cardinal error of modern politics.

In a move foreshadowing the late twentieth-century argument that the battle for liberty and liberalism had been won (see chapter 10), Smith insisted that ‘the aggressive function of liberalism has been exhausted,

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and … it only remains to guard over the equal liberties of citizens generally, with a view to their preservation’. Having deemed liberalism a progressive movement that had removed restrictions on people’s liberty – against Conservatism’s view ‘that “the people” were not competent to wield, and therefore not entitled to possess that equal power which would be acquired’ – Smith now saw the Liberal project itself as conservative: preserving the heroic gains in individual liberty against the new despotism of the masses in the coming class struggle.12 Influential Victorian liberals were utterly opposed to such a view. Two notable precursors of ameliorative liberalism were David Syme and Charles Pearson. The influence of both can be detected in the views of Deakin’s circle (see chapter 4). Syme’s Outlines of an Industrial Science (1876) drew upon the ‘new’ social sciences: psychology, sociology, and political economy, to present what he regarded as an irrefutable argument that ‘What is good for all, and not merely for an individual or a class, should be undertaken by the state; and what benefits only the few should be left to private enterprise’.13 Pearson’s National Life and Character (1894) focused not on political conflict and constitutional development, but on a history of the struggle between the ‘higher’ and the ‘inferior’ races, closely allied with a history of economic development (including urbanisation). The historical record he presented was designed to show that the industry, efficiency and energy needed for economic development were characteristics of the ‘higher’ races, but that these would be hard-pressed by the struggle for resources with less developed peoples. He concluded that what we now call the higher races will … be restricted to a portion only of the countries lying in the Temperate Zone; that under the pressure which will increasingly be felt as outlets to trade and energy are closed, State Socialism will be resorted to as the most effective means of securing labour from want; that great armies will need to be maintained; that the population of the cities will grow … ; and

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that in proportion as the State’s sphere of activity is increased will the indebtedness of the State increase also in every civilised country. Whether this condition of things will be good, tolerable or bad, must depend very much on the spirit in which the community takes it.

Pearson saw it as historically inevitable that democracy would find its consummation in State Socialism; and … certain notable influences, such as attachment to a Church, municipal feeling and even family feeling, are likely to become less and less important … The great possible motors of action will be the sense of duty to the State, and the self-reliance of individual character.

Pearson, we should be clear, saw State socialism as a ‘consummation’ of the liberal project. And he viewed the outcome (sublimated humanity!) with mixed feelings: ‘The love of country or reverence for the State … is hardly a principle that will stimulate initiative or self-reliance’. On the one hand, Pearson’s version of the liberal project would secure well-ordered polities, security to labour, education, freedom from gross superstitions, improved health and longer life, the destruction of privilege in society and caprice in family life, better guarantees for the peace of the world, and enhanced regard for life and property.

On the other hand The world will be left without deep convictions or enthusiasm, without the regenerating influence of the ardour for political reform and the fervour of pious faith which have quickened men for centuries past … with a passion purifying the soul.14

Notwithstanding our ability to discern an emergent liberal ascendancy in nineteenth-century politics, the significance of those other – more radical – participants in the loose reformist coalitions promoting democracy before the 1890s should not be overlooked. They

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contributed to the momentum for change and their visions had not yet been curtailed. Equally significant was the proliferation of radical arguments about what the commitment to democratic rights entailed. The take-up of such ideas in Australia was profoundly affected by the rise of organised labour, the generation of a reading culture and the emergence of an urban intelligentsia. Organised labour

The voices of those who claimed to represent ‘the workers’ had been evident before the advent of unions: in the rationale for the formation in 1843 of ‘The Mutual Protection Association’ and its organ The Guardian with its ‘purpose of defending the just rights and advocating the legitimate interests of the Middle and Working classes’; in the publication of The People’s Advocate as an organ of the Chartist ‘Constitutional Association’ in 1848; and in the appearance in 1850 of Henry Parkes’ The Empire, styling itself ‘the champion of the common people’.15 If W.C. Wentworth had led the fight for responsible government, it was John Dunmore Lang and Henry Parkes who led the call for representative government. In 1852, Lang proposed ‘to establish free institutions throughout the Australian colonies on the basis of universal suffrage and equal electoral districts’, using the argument that ‘the Australian people … have already attained [their] political majority’. He declared that ‘there is nothing really worth struggling for in Australia but entire freedom and national independence’ as a British Dominion.16 Parkes followed Lang, but Wentworth did not. ‘Representation’, Wentworth declared, ‘should be based on population and property, and not on population alone’. ‘Representation’, countered Parkes, ‘must be placed purely on the basis of population, because we will never consent to be balancing houses and land or sheep and cattle against human beings’.17 From the 1850s, the unions provided an alternative means of pursuing

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workers’ rights and shifted the focus from political representation to pay and conditions. An early victory was the eight-hour (working) day, won by the Operative Stonemasons in Melbourne in 1856, and it became the catalyst for an eight-hour-day movement in country regions and in other colonies – a primary objective of unions in following years.18 Yet, as these early unions represented skilled workers especially in the building and construction sector of the economy (including masons, engineers), the concessions they won were not necessarily widely enjoyed. Nor were such unions particularly radical: they advocated liberal principles of self-improvement, mutual aid and respectability, and assumed negotiated settlements with employers. But ‘[t]hey were uncompromising in their insistence on equality of opportunity, the status of manual labour as the foundation of civilisation, and the right of the colonial working man and his family to a better quality of life than that they had known in the old world’.19 In the 1870s and 1880s, a different form of union organisation emerged. New unionism was driven by two developments. First, the demand for labour, including skilled labour, had come to exceed supply, and craft unions were unable to resist the encroachment of workers who had not been through the apprenticeship system. Second, W.G. Spence had taken his Creswick Miners’ Union into the newly formed Amalgamated Miners’ Association (of which he became secretary) in 1878, and built it into an inter-colonial union. Moreover, he had begun to envision larger and more utopian entities, with ‘each trade’ – as he put it to an inter-colonial union congress in 1884 – to be recommended to amalgamate the several unions of the same trade under one head or governing body; each of the latter heads then to appoint representatives to a conference at which a Federal Council shall be elected, which shall watch over the interests of the whole, and deal with matters affecting the well-being of the working classes generally.20

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This was the pattern Spence followed when invited to organise the shearers in 1886: he formed the Amalgamated Shearers’ Union (ASU), which became the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU) in 1894. These new, broadly based, unions covered a larger proportion of workers than the old craft unions. They could claim with some justice to speak for ‘the workers’ rather than for a trade. They were more suited to inter-colonial organisation. The emphasis on shared interests between craft unions and employers in a specific trade no longer applied: the division between ‘bosses’ (or the ‘classes’) and ‘workers’ (‘toilers’) was more clearly delineated. Conditions favoured organisations that were more national, industrial and militant.21 This provoked, in turn, the formation of employers’ associations. The ground was prepared for collective bargaining and for more radical confrontation. A n u r b a n i n t e ll i g e n t s i a

Increasing organisation was paralleled by an inflow of new ideas, an inflow facilitated by growing literacy and the development of a reading culture. Education and self-improvement were not just liberal causes – conservatives and administrators had shared these preoccupations since the early nineteenth century. The establishment of Mechanics Institutes (Hobart 1827, Sydney 1833, Adelaide 1838, Melbourne 1839, Brisbane 1842, Perth 1851) had been seen as a way of countering the convict mentality: ‘Sound and cheap education is the great moral lever’.22 The creed was taken up by working people. Mechanics Institutes and Schools of Arts became not only means of self-education, but also centres of community activity. The public education Acts of the 1870s provided a substantial fillip. The early colonial divisions – with reading, writing and recording largely the preserve of elites and an oral culture characteristic of the rest23 – were narrowed. Illiteracy, around 13 per cent in 1861, fell to 7 per cent by the 1880s. Newspapers proliferated: by the mid-1880s, New South Wales had 143, Victoria

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more than 200.24 ‘In proportion to population’, said T.A. Coghlan in 1890, ‘it is doubtful whether any country in the world can boast of a larger number or a better class of newspapers than these colonies’.25 In addition, Australians bought ‘about a third of Britain’s output of books and a considerable proportion of her periodicals during the century’.26 The wide reach of a diverse press, the circulation of books and journals, and the reading culture that underlay both were integral to the promotion of alternative ideas and to the development of a radical politics in the late nineteenth century. Neither can be understood without understanding ‘the politics of reading’.27 A corollary of all this was a culture conducive to the formation of an intelligentsia – a class of people whose occupations are oriented to the production and dissemination of ideas. We have seen already the regularity with which the occupation of ‘journalist’ or ‘editor’ appears in the list of prominent liberals. Equally significant is the number of those – autodidacts from the Mechanics Institutes, products of the education acts – who chose to write, edit and produce the array of radical newspapers, journals and pamphlets integral to the development of a working-class reading culture. Louisa Lawson (Dawn 1888), W.R. Winspear (Radical 1887), William Lane (Worker 1890), E.J. Brady (Arrow 1896), William Higgs (Australian Workman 1892), H.E. Holland (Socialist 1894), J.F. Archibald (Bulletin 1880) and the publisher and bookseller E.W. Cole, can be taken as representative figures.28 Products of social, economic and educational change, subject in some cases to a conversion experience when they encountered particular ideas in their quest for self-improvement, and impelled to seek social justice (‘Why, in an era of unprecedented human achievement, was there suffering and want? Why did the hovels of the poor still border the mansions of the wealthy?’29), these people took to changing the world by writing. But their labours were hard and poorly rewarded, their tenure uncertain, and their social position marginal.

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Often they had left their roots behind. They lived in ‘the tidelands of the city: a staging point for immigrants; a haven for the drifter, the outcast, the man or woman with a past; a twilight zone of rootlessness and anomie’.30 An urban intelligentsia, they nonetheless experienced the pressures of daily life and their alienation as confirmation of the capitalist domination of the city. In reaction, they celebrated what they alleged were the ‘purer’ values of ‘the Bush’ – mateship, egalitarianism, nationalism, republicanism (and race prejudice)31 – as the true Australian ethos, and drew on the writings of exemplary radicals for solutions to the social problems they faced. What were they reading? It seems that Marx and Engels were familiar: Mary Gilmore claimed that working men could be seen reading Marx and Engels on the trams; W.M. Hughes mentioned that there were Capital reading groups; W.G. Higgs referred to Capital as the ‘Socialist Bible’.32 It is likely that Marx was even more widely disseminated by popularisers such as: Laurence Gronlund, Co-operative Commonwealth: An Exposition of Modern Socialism, 1884; Edward Aveling, Introduction to the Study of Karl Marx, 1892; and H.M. Hyndman and William Morris, A Summary of the Principles of Socialism, 1884.33 But even more influential were the socialist utopian novels of Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward, 1887) and William Morris (News From Nowhere, 1891) – though Bellamy, with one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century, enjoyed the better sales. Morris’s libertarian response to Bellamy’s regimented future also alerts us to the more extreme libertarian disciples of Mikhail Bakunin (Statism and Anarchy, 1873), anarchists who gained visibility and a small following at this time. An Anarchist Club was founded in Melbourne in 1886. Some of the leading anarchists – J.A. Andrews (civil servant), David Andrade (small businessman), T.O. Roper (architect) – illustrate the middle-class origins common to many radicals. To join the cause, becoming an agitator in the metropolitan

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‘tidelands’, however, often was to become déclassé. The less déclassé radicals were influenced by the Fabian project of incremental reform, through state processes and parliamentary action. Gronlund’s widely read exposition of socialism had a Fabian aspect. H.H. Champion, basking in the glory of the 1889 London dockworkers’ strike, energetically promoted Fabian views and formed the Fabian Society in Melbourne in 1895. The visit of British Fabian notables, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, in 1898, despite their acid views on local socialists and colonial intellectual life, undoubtedly attracted attention.34 Henry George, whose proposal for a single tax on land, outlined in Progress and Poverty (a book that was first published in California in 1879 and serialised in Australia the same year), was intended to solve all problems of inequity, gained enthusiastic adherents not only among workers (whose needs would supposedly be met by redistribution of land tax proceeds), but also from the middle-class and rural smallholders (since land taxes would finally break the power of the squatters). In 1886, at the height of the real estate boom of the 1880s, T. Kean of the South Australian saddle-makers’ union, referring to the panacea of a tax on ‘unearned land values’ argued that ‘a land tax should be made the first object of attainment’. For Kean, there was nothing wrong with ‘calling upon the wealthy landlord to contribute [part of] an income for which he neither toils nor spins, which is not given to him, but which, under a rotten social system, he is permitted to steal from those who work!’35 Although Henry George was an influence, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward was the main inspiration for the 1889 utopian novel by the businessman and hydrotherapist Joseph Fraser. In his Melbourne and Mars – My Mysterious Life on Two Planets, Fraser portrayed a society similar to that envisioned by Bellamy, in which all wealth except personal items was placed beyond the category of private property and used for the benefit of the community as a whole.36 Bellamite passages can be

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found also in popular labour activist, William Lane’s, celebrated 1892 romance, The Workingman’s Paradise: An Australian Labour Novel. In the early period of the Australian Socialist League, from 1887 to 1890, theoretical debates in its journal over the nature and importance of radical socialism and state socialism reflected the divisions between Marxists and anarchists. For example, in November 1887, the Radical argued that the ‘present day Socialist goes further than the State Socialist does, and affirms that it is better to at once cross swords with the privileges of the classes without waiting to see them removed by the supreme monopolist – the State.’ In May 1888, the renamed Australian Radical distinguished ‘two kinds of Socialists – those who follow LIBERTY, and those who follow AUTHORITY; the latter are State Socialists … State Socialism is unrestricted AUTHORITY, which involves a denial of true co-operation, and winds up in slavery’.37 The emphasis on equality characteristic of liberals, influenced by J.S. Mill, and socialists also allowed for the flowering of a women’s movement. While some, such as Rose Scott, clearly drew on liberal principles of self-determination and autonomy, others such as Louisa Lawson and Mary Gilmore were closely associated with radical and socialist movements. They came together in Womanhood Suffrage Leagues where they built on liberal and socialist arguments for a broader franchise. Despite the efforts of some in the labour movement to marginalise women,38 there were enthusiastic supporters (such as E.J. Brady, H.H. Champion, William Lane, and Arthur Rae). Women activists (like Louisa Lawson, Rose Summerfield, and Creo Stanley) ensured that socialist groups were aware of the feminist agenda,39 and by the late 1880s and early 1890s organised movements representing women’s interests had emerged alongside the established movements of labour interests.40 In the salons of leading feminists, like Rose Scott, the preoccupations of the times were registered and the great issues of the day were explored. ‘Issues debated there’, Scott’s biographer observes,

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included free trade versus protection, industrial legislation, socialism, taxation, Utopianism, nationalism and republicanism, capital punishment, public charities and their administration, temperance, Australian literature and literary criticism, Australian art and exhibitions and urban social problems including slums, contagious diseases, prostitution, illegitimacy and juvenile delinquency.41

Ideas about Marxism, socialism, anarchism, single tax, and women’s rights found local expression not just through organisations such as the Australian Socialist League, reading groups, feminist salons and the workers’ press, journals and pamphlets; they found expression also in novels: Catherine Helen Spence’s A Week in the Future (1888– 89); Rosa Praed’s Policy and Passion (1881); Lane’s Working Man’s Paradise (1892); David Andrade’s The Melbourne Riots (1892); S.A. Rosa’s The Coming Terror (1894) and Oliver Spence (1895); Joseph Fraser’s Melbourne and Mars (1889); and Joseph Furphy’s Rigby’s Romance (1905–06, but written much earlier).42 The radical traditions of the 1880s and 1890s would remain a continuing influence, reflected many years later in the title of Vance Palmer’s Legend of the Nineties (1954). Was there a characteristic Australian approach? The most prominent radicals drew eclectically, mixing and matching continental theorists (Bakunin and Proudhon) with American populists (Bellamy and George), English philosophers (J.S. Mill) and socialists (William Morris), Fabians (Bernard Shaw, the Webbs) and with ‘the Bible’ itself (Marx).43 In 1891, for instance, W.G. Higgs nominated Marx as ‘nearest’ to his views, but also referred to a diverse group of other sources including Gronlund, Sidney Webb, Bernard Shaw and Annie Besant.44 The newspapers published by Australian socialists defy: neat categorisation. They contributed to, and drew from, a general radicalism. They were not theoretically ambitious, both because their appeal was intended to be broad, and because the lines of theoretical debate which would have been familiar to European socialists were in

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Australia blurred, at least until the early twentieth century. Much of their content was devoted to highlighting particular injustices …45

But the rich brew of contending visions would be shaken out by the battles soon to come.

Ferment and federation In the early 1890s, the coincidence of a severe depression and the bitterly felt defeat in a series of major strikes, intended to bring urban and rural workers together and to cement the claims of new unionism, brought an end to the assumptions encouraged by decades of economic growth. The conditions that had allowed for loose reformist alliances between liberals and radicals now came to be seen as untenable. Liberals, once sympathetic to the workers’ cause, feared that the organisation of unions on an inter-colonial basis, not to mention direct action – strikes – threatened their interests. Depression conditions – withdrawal of British investment, bank failures, contraction of activity and the consequent precipitate fall in employment – exacerbated the threat. Could revolution be at hand? The leading advocates of ‘progressive’ liberalism, such as Alfred Deakin, chief secretary of Victoria, and Samuel Griffith, premier of Queensland, called out the troops and (in Griffith’s case) read the riot act in response to the 1890 Maritime strike. Troops, the police, special constables (members of the public given police powers during the ‘emergency’) and the courts were mobilised to break the strikes; the ring leaders were imprisoned. The dreams of the labour movement were derailed. On the one hand, the conflicting interests of ‘bosses’ and ‘workers’ were confirmed. Evidence of ‘class warfare’ was the motivating event in the careers of some radicals; E.J. Brady, for instance, had his job terminated when he refused his employer’s request to act as a special constable in the

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1891 strike and moved into another career as a writer, editor and pamphleteer. This pattern recurred frequently among members of the urban intelligentsia who became advocates of republican radical nationalism and created the ‘bush legend’ in the 1890s. On the other hand, there was fragmentation – socialists and feminists called for international mobilisation, and unionists turned back to local concerns. And there was withdrawal: union membership fell, direct action was discredited. Above all, ‘an era of liberal consensus that reconciled sectional interests in material and moral progress had passed’.46 But there were two other important consequences: the shaping of an emerging party system; and a renewed debate, albeit a debate in which only a limited set of interests (hence ideas) would be represented, that would lead to an Australian federation. T h e pa rt i e s

Political parties emerged in the late 1880s and 1890s. They were not yet the means to a consolidation of political ideologies or the channels for opinion aggregation that they would become. But they were an important signal of the reorganisation of interests. For thirty years after the advent of responsible government, colonial parliamentary politics had been the preserve of factions: loose groupings where ties were personal and informal. In the 1880s, new forms emerged, beginning with the protectionists versus free traders: a parliamentary Liberal Party (with a protectionist creed) in Victoria; a Free Trade and Liberal Union in New South Wales (1889); a short-lived Country Party (within protectionist ranks, New South Wales, 1892–94); and the forerunners of the Australian Labor Party, the Labour Electoral League (New South Wales, 1891) and the Australian Labor Federation (Queensland, 1891). These were the first Australian parties.47 The story varied in each of the colonies, but three points are significant. First, the debate over economic development in the 1890s,

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typified by the ‘fiscal’ parties (‘Free Trade’ versus ‘Protection’) and the dominance of those parties in the most developed colonies (New South Wales and Victoria), reflects the ways in which colonial economies were modernising – with a smaller number of large public companies reliant on stock markets rather than entrepreneurs for capital, and professionals rather than self-made men for management. The generation of capital through urban nodes rendered old-style colonial conservatives increasingly irrelevant. (The late nineteenthcentury cleavage between conservatives and liberals would dissipate as the parliamentary labour parties gained traction and became their common foe.) Second, as W.G. Spence insisted, if industrial confrontation saw governments siding with the capitalists, workers had resort to the vote.48 Industrial defeat added impetus to labour’s already developing turn to parliamentary action, and in a remarkably short time the emerging labour parties were to achieve success: ‘By 1914 the Australian Labor party had won government in the Commonwealth and every one of the states; in that same year it became the first working-class party in the world to win a majority of votes in a national election’.49 The first and second points are related: had production not been organised on capitalist and industrial lines, it is difficult to see how trade unionism would have taken shape or conservatism had been so speedily transmuted into anti-labourism and anti-socialism. Likewise, without the institutions of democracy and parliamentary government it is difficult to see how trade unions could have turned so hopefully to political action or how they could have founded such non-doctrinaire and flexible parties.50

Third, labour’s electoral success represented a retreat from the more ambitious dreams of the fin-de-siecle socialists and radicals. The utopian hopes and the republican vision of the radical intelligentsia would be expressed in literature and art now rather than in politics. The labour parties would concentrate on ambitious objectives

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– employment, working conditions, welfare, the right to strike, progressive taxation, and further democratisation – though not as ambitious as many socialists and radicals might have hoped. This suited the Fabian project of achieving change through the administrative processes of the state rather than through class confrontation and it suited the overriding ambition of the parliamentary party – to secure office. These developments had profound effects on the most significant political project of the late nineteenth century: federation. F e d e r at i o n

There can be no clear answer as to why the process (1891–1901) leading to the federal compact and the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia happened when it did. Was the catalyst the ambitions of colonial elder statesmen (such as Henry Parkes) wishing to leave a historic legacy? Was it the persistent advocacy of the Australian Natives Association for the formation of ‘one people’ influencing elite opinion? Was it the evolution of inter-colonial relations to a point of maturity? Was it the need to remove trade barriers? Was it anxiety about defence as other great powers entered the Pacific and Britain withdrew its garrisons? Was it the fear of a republic? Was it desire to prepare for a doomed project of Imperial Federation? Was it the flourishing of national sentiment? While all played a part, federation also was impelled by the wish to achieve a new coherence in the face of the ferment of the 1890s,51 and by an optimism52 accruing to those who emerged the nominal winners from those battles: the moderate liberals. What happened in the federation debates nicely captures the fate of the various streams of colonial opinion. These can be described in terms of three aggregations. There were labour-oriented progressives: egalitarian, materialistic, republican, socialist, and intent on opposing Empire loyalty and the influence of the mother country. The liberal

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middle class, who consciously identified with their country, wanted to foster an ‘Australian’ outlook. They were intent on the unity of the colonies as a nation and saw independence as the change from an autonomous British colony to a British ally or dominion. The residual conservatives, the Anglo-Australian loyalists (land-owning elites), still saw themselves as the social and economic apex. They were ready to declare their Australianism but acknowledged a higher Empire loyalty, and remained ambitious for British honours conferred ‘at Home’. They preferred a responsible elite under the wing of the British Crown, regarding egalitarian nationalism as almost treasonous.53 These differences, as we have seen, were the product of different social and economic circumstances. The labour activists sought a more equitable society for working people; they looked for strength in the mass of bush and industrial workers, which they had tried to consolidate through the new unions and through the outpouring of class-conscious literature. The participation of the new intelligentsia was important in these enterprises. The liberals, urban entrepreneurs and professionals, essentially the products of a cautious middle class, sought to end the influence of the old landed elite. The AngloAustralian loyalists, from the educated gentry, still commanded the large pastoral holdings and could influence access to the financial centres, clubs, universities and Government House. These divisions were made manifest on every issue, whether it was landholding, democracy, the economy, the role of labour, the merits of participating in foreign wars, or federation. Radicals were either Labor Party sympathisers or further to the left. Laborites included: W.G. Spence, with his influential pamphlet of 1892, The Ethics of the New Unionism; and T.R. Roydhouse and H.J. Taperell with their book The Labour Party in New South Wales. Both texts supported workers but denied or ignored socialism as a program in favour of less programmatic policies. The 1895 novel by H.H.

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Champion, The Root of the Matter, sympathetically portrayed a Fabian socialist, but it differed from the radical literature of the late 1880s. Even Henry Lawson had toned down the passion that he had displayed earlier in poems like Freedom on the Wallaby (1891). The Bulletin remained broadly radical, but was becoming highly nationalistic (and racist). The call for a unitary and non-British federation, announced in 1888 by the anonymous author of A Plea for Separation, was kept alive by writers such as Bernard O’Dowd. Within the federation movement itself liberals like Deakin and Isaac Isaacs were democrats and, though loyal to the Crown, did not want British interests placed above Australian national aspirations. The liberal attitude towards democracy is neatly summed up by the statement of B.R. Wise when he said that ‘there is no greater tyranny … than that which is exercised under the forms of democracy when the spirit of democracy is dead. … The democracy I favour is one which gives to every citizen in the community an equal opportunity of self-development’. More conservative delegates to the federation conventions did not share this view. William McMillan, in Adelaide, called such a system ‘extreme democracy’, arguing it would endanger the prospect of a ‘sound and workable’ executive. Another conservativeliberal, Frederick Holder, placed great stress on the ‘bonds’ that bound Australians ‘to the mother-country, to the great British Empire’, and Henry Dobson spoke of his strong support for Imperial Federation and for ‘the united people of Greater Britain’ and of ‘the mothercountry and her colonies’.54 Federation was the middle-class road to nationhood. The delegates to the federal conventions (1891, 1897–98) constituted ‘a roll call of the political leaders of the day’.55 Those who were to take the lead – Samuel Griffith (Qld, 1891 only), Charles Kingston (SA), John Quick (Vic.), Alfred Deakin (Vic.), George Reid (NSW), Edmund Barton (NSW), Robert Garran (NSW) – were liberals to a man (there were

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no women). Even those deemed ‘radical’, such as H.B. Higgins, were social liberals. Conservative delegates (and among the fifty delegates to the 1897–98 convention were fourteen pastoralists) were drawn disproportionately from the smaller colonies – Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia. The hold of the Anglo-Australian gentry, especially in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, had diminished with the rise of the cities and of industrial and entrepreneurial capital in the late nineteenth century: they could modify the liberal agenda, but not overturn it. Radicals opposed federation. One reason for them doing so was that what was proposed did not lead to the creation of a unitary republic but of a federal government that still had constitutional links with Westminster and gave reserve powers to the monarch’s representative, the governor-general. But in the 1890s, radicals were in retreat. Their views may have been represented in the public domain, especially in the Bulletin and Tocsin, but they were not represented at the conventions. Labour’s voice, too, went virtually unheard; William Trenwith, whose only contribution was to facilitate the inclusion of a Commonwealth pensions power, was the sole representative of labour at the Convention of 1897–98. The labour movement’s ranks were divided: some attempted a sort of literary mobilisation;56 others became party organisers and concentrated on parliamentary elections. Either way, federation was not high on their agendas – except, among republicans, as an object of scorn. The movement had been fragmented by the defeat of the strikes in the 1890s, and undermined by the subsequent depression. Thus, it lost momentum precisely when representation to the conventions was being determined. In 1893, at a meeting to establish a federation league, W.A. Holman, the NSW Labour leader, attempted to move a motion supporting a republic. This was in effect a challenge both to liberal sentiment (Deakin, for instance, identified as an ‘independent

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Australian Briton’), and to conservative empire loyalism, within the Federation League. When Holman’s motion was disallowed, Labour withdrew. Later, again in New South Wales, Labour offered a slate of delegates for the 1897 Convention, but with its uncompromising and unrealistic demands (for a Constitution that excluded a ‘states’ house, for instance), none of its candidates were elected.57 Suspicious of its one-time liberal allies, and scornful of the Anglo-loyalist conservatives within the federation movement, Labour instead committed to working within the existing parliamentary political system to achieve reforms for the working class; limited, pragmatic objectives that did not then foster a national vision. Leadership on national issues therefore passed to the liberal activists of the middle class; it was their vision of Australia that was to be decisive in forming the federal compact. How did it play out? A resolution to the rifts of the 1890s was achieved by the middle-class domination of the federation debates.58 Conservative influence might be thought to be evident in the restraints on majoritarian democracy, the preservation of states’ rights, the hurdles placed in the way of constitutional reform, the powers given to the High Court, and the constraints around Commonwealth powers. Conservatives were indeed preoccupied with states’ rights and with limiting the capacity for reform, but many of these features might equally be seen as manifestations of the liberal commitment to limiting government in the interests of individual freedom. Women, through women’s federation leagues and through direct lobbying, influenced the drafting of the Constitution; for instance, by guaranteeing voting rights at Commonwealth elections to all those with existing voting rights in the colonies (women already had the vote in South Australia), thus in effect opening the way for universal federal female suffrage.59 Overall, what emerged from the conventions was a classically liberal document, with its inbuilt checks and balances on the powers of the

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Commonwealth and the states, and its commitment to responsible government (with fiscal powers assigned to the popularly elected House of Representatives) while allowing for an elected upper house of review (the Senate) elected on a state-wide ballot. Federation would effectively crystallise national sentiment and provide a remarkably resilient platform for twentieth-century politics. In a practical sense the constitution would change incrementally, rarely through referenda, but in the ways in which governments chose to interpret and apply its provisions. Reformers would cavil at its limitations60 and political theorists would debate its merits,61 but it was only occasionally the subject of political debate. Indeed, the idea of Australia as a federal state would rarely be questioned until, in the late twentieth century, some began to ask whether there needed to be state governments62 – even then, the federal framework withstood revision. ‘In the brief space of … [a] hundred years’, observed one scholar, ‘we have become imprisoned within a paradigm of thought, and our arguments … have become disciplined in a set of predictable catechisms … We have been carriers of a style of thought for so long that to recondition our understanding … is immensely difficult’.63 Federation became the lens through which national politics was conceived, scarcely visible to, and rarely debated by, those who looked through it.

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rt III: The ‘new liberal’ agenda

Pa r t I i i

The ‘new liberal’ agenda

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4 A true Commonwealth?

To make the society in which we live a true Commonwealth, in the best sense of the term – not a mere collection of persons scrambling for wealth, each one seeking his own selfish ends without regard for others – but a hearty comradeship for all noble purposes … all together seeking for the most splendid and beautiful life possible to human beings – that is the task of citizenship. Walter Murdoch, 19121

At the start of the twentieth century Australian political elites had a project that distinguished them from their equivalents elsewhere: while others enjoyed the Indian summer of the nineteenth-century ‘Age of Empire’,2 the Australians were simultaneously engaged in the challenges of creating a national polity. They were preoccupied, too, with finding measures that would prevent a recurrence of the conflicts of the 1890s. The new federal parliament, meeting at this time in Melbourne, would be the theatre where competing notions of what ‘the Australian people’ were and should become were played out, always with a nod to Empire. Ideas about foundational values would help determine practicalities – the management of defence, the question of who should belong, the nature of our courts, the manner of regulating markets, including the labour market, and the limits of state action. The parliamentarians’ attitudes had been formed in colonial politics, but in this new context they had to stretch beyond these formative experiences to identify a national interest, talking, as the first prime minister, Edmund Barton, had foreshadowed, of ‘a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation’.3 There would be a process of

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adapting and aggregating streams of opinion, which would come to be associated with parties. In parallel, there would be those sceptical of the parliamentary approach who would promote alternative arenas for action and deliberation. Agendas would be set outside parliament in parties and in interest-based organisations. Politics everywhere attracts the self-educated activist, but now, feeding all of these streams, was the professional intelligentsia and, as a new generation emerged, a new breed of public intellectual. Federal parliament, nonetheless, would develop as a theatre where many strands could be brought together, where issues of belief – and most especially conflicts of belief – could be raised above the colonial ruck, and so it is a useful point of departure for understanding the initial tenets of twentieth-century politics.

Three elevens The problem of how to conduct … Parliament when, instead of a majority and a minority, you have three practically equal parties taking part in the proceedings has not yet been solved in any other part of the world … The position is unstable; it is absolutely impossible. It cannot continue, it ought not to continue. Ask yourself the simple question in machinery with which you are acquainted. What a game of cricket you would have if there were three elevens in the field instead of two, and one of those elevens sometimes playing on one side, sometimes on the other, and sometimes for itself. (Alfred Deakin, 1904)4

The realpolitik of federal parliament in the period 1901–10 did not exhibit ‘a hearty comradeship … each one striving for the good of all’. Rather, it was a period of intense competition, multi-party politics and fragile, shifting alliances. The formation of enduring political entities, the career advance of individual members and the material interests of particular sectors hung on the resolution of conflicting intellectual

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currents. We have seen their origins in the colonial period. There was an adaptation of classical liberalism, often claimed to be ‘true’ British liberalism (much influenced by Herbert Spencer, whose Australian exponents included Bernhard Wise and Bruce Smith), and sometimes said to be laissez faire, though colonial capitalism had always depended on state action (for instance, with funded immigration schemes, land grants, government provision of infrastructure). A competing interpretation, ameliorative liberalism, more openly advocated a role for the state (drawing on T.H. Green and advocated energetically in Australia by Charles Pearson, Francis Anderson and Charles Strong). Then there was state socialism (with radicals having been marginalised, and with Labor committed to parliamentarism, owing more to George and Bellamy than to Marx, and spearheaded here by writers like Francis Adams and William Lane). In the parliamentary sphere, these tenets coincided roughly with views espoused by the Free Trade, Protectionist and Labor5 Parties: the ‘three elevens’ whose contests determined the patterns of politics until 1910. The federal leaders of Free Trade (Reid), Protection (Barton and Deakin) and Labor (Watson, Fisher and Hughes) would become national figures and integral voices in a process that, by the decade’s end, had produced a two-party system and a set of governing assumptions that were to shape Australian politics for another seventy years. But if there seems remarkable continuity in what was achieved in those years, to the participants it appeared much more fluid, unstable and contingent. And while the parliamentary sphere became the forum for national opinion formation, there were always dissenters challenging these debates, seeking not only to contest what was said there and to stimulate countervailing publics but also to induce parliamentarians themselves to adopt more radical world-views – we turn to these below (chapter 5). None of the parties in that first decade could rule alone, so each

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leader in turn had to negotiate support from another group to sustain his government. Free Trade and Protection, as we have seen, had roots in colonial politics – with Free Trade having its strongest base in New South Wales (and the energetic support of the Sydney Morning Herald), and Protection drawing primarily on Victoria, having been driven by David Syme and his paper, The Age – but neither affiliation proved a secure predictor of relevant supporters’ voting behaviour in parliament. There were divisions within Free Trade between hard-line advocates favouring smaller state governments and alternative revenue sources, and pragmatists prepared to accept such tariffs as would provide the funds for federal and state governments to function. Protectionists varied from conservatives, wanting limited tariffs and regulation that would preserve local industry, to progressives who advocated ‘new protection’ to stimulate industry, protect jobs and provide the resources for social programs (such as pensions). When the Barton Government legislated for the first national tariffs in 1901, the Minister for Trade and Customs, C.C. Kingston, unveiled a ‘compromise’ measure, allowing for ‘moderate protection’ and also guaranteeing the entire revenue formerly raised by the states as well as some extra to cover federal expenditure. Realising that a high protective tariff would endanger revenue by drastically reducing imports, he stated that there ‘can be no extremes of revenue-production and protection-giving … the two things are mutually destructive.’ 6 The Labor parliamentarians shared most of their principles with progressive Protectionists, but split with them on specific issues (arbitration of industrial disputes, for instance) and on caucus solidarity: ‘the pledge’. But Labor was lukewarm on socialism and its parliamentarians would continue to be exercised on liberal issues like the appropriate role of individual conscience in political determinations: half of the original caucus group would end up on the other side.7 The negotiation of parliamentary majorities and legislative programs

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in the early Commonwealth period is fascinatingly detailed elsewhere, by Peter Loveday and Ian Marsh, and is richly illuminated in the biographies and memoirs of Barton, Deakin, Hughes, Watson and Reid.8 What we concentrate on here is what they said about their objectives. In the process of defining their own positions, building cross-party support and explaining themselves to constituents, the key players in this period voiced their core beliefs, revised the principles carried forward from their colonial experience and adapted theories of their day to local purposes. Starting points

The initial field of contention in federal politics was the fiscal question – the application of tariffs – and this for two reasons. First, the federal constitution, in uniting the colonies, removed the trade barriers between them; tariffs became solely a Commonwealth issue. Second, there were genuine issues of principle at stake: the debate about tariffs was a locale for addressing the question of degrees of state intervention and hence for more fundamental issues – what should be the nature of the nation-state, and what was a liberal polity to mean? But, as always, the resolution of philosophical issues would be influenced by material objectives: mercantile and financial interests, with some large-scale primary producers, benefited from free trade; manufacturers, farmers, some urban professionals and industrial workers were favoured by protection. The irreconcilable elements in the first parliaments – both organisationally and intellectually – were Free Trade and Labor. Protectionists, if they could stick together, could mediate and consolidate their ground as ‘progressive’ liberals. In the early Commonwealth period, Bruce Smith, the champion of free trade, was still elaborating aspects of his manifesto, Liberty and Liberalism (1887), but now applied to the federal field. More intellectually gifted than many of his peers, his influence was diminished by his

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contempt for Reid, whom he described as a charlatan. Bernhard Wise, an Australian-born, British-educated lawyer, who was associated with idealist and Cobdenite circles at Oxford in the early 1880s and then with the free traders around Henry Parkes in the early 1890s, was another who supplied the theoretical rationale for the free trade position (or as he put it in 1889, ‘the wisdom of commercial freedom’), embodied in his Industrial Freedom – A Study in Politics (1892). George Reid, as the leader of the federal Free Trade Party, and a former associate of Smith, Wise, and Henry Parkes in the ‘Free Trade and Liberal Association of NSW’, became the most visible voice of the cause. The Australian Free Trade and Liberal Association (AFTLA) of which Reid was the acknowledged federal leader, established colonial branches and promulgated its position in a paper, Our Country, prior to the first federal election. Parkes, the author of Five Free Trade Essays (1875), also had published on the subject, but his greatest influence derived from his gifts in public debate and his populist instinct: ‘He watches public opinion’, Beatrice Webb had noted, ‘exactly as a stock jobber watches the market’.9 The Free Trade position was most fully expounded in Free Trade and Tariff Reform (1903) to which the leading parliamentary spokesmen, including Reid, contributed essays. They spelled out a general free trade credo, dealing not only with tariff policy but also with preferential trade, democracy, the moral effect of free trade, Labour, militarism and the empire. Free trade, they said, was not a narrow fiscal doctrine, but had general reformist implications, nationalistic in tenor and of benefit to all sections of society and not just to the wealthier mercantile and landowning sections.10

Reid, Smith and Wise could claim to speak for the ‘true’ spirit of British liberalism. Britain’s promotion of free trade at that time was

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buttressed by its having been the first great industrial trading nation, with access to the raw materials of the British Empire and a constellation of dependent markets for its manufactures.11 However, Germany and the United States were intent on overtaking Britain, and relied on tariffs to protect their industries until they were in a position to do so. Australian protectionists could see themselves, therefore, as part of an international trend. Barton is said to have retorted to a provocative comment on free trade that the only free trade countries were England and Turkey: ‘do you think the rest are damn fools?’12 Edmund Barton, who led the federal cause in New South Wales and then the 1897 federal convention, and formed the first federal administration pending an election in 1901,13 was an able and engaging lawyer, more interested perhaps in the machinery of government than in the development of policy. He cared about the federal framework, and his call for ‘a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation’ was at once an effort to energise a unified community, a statement about the necessity of a national (legal) framework, and an ambit claim for a single economy. He campaigned in 1901 as a moderate protectionist: it will not be the policy of the Commonwealth Government to … do anything that will militate against the interests of the States … who have built up industries under the principles of protection … In the framing of a tariff for the Commonwealth Government, composed of six States, most of them protectionist, the policy of freetrade is manifestly impractical … How, I would ask, are we to meet the cost of the Federal Government and the loss of revenue by intercolonial freetrade, unless we get it out of the Customs revenue? What more legitimate course could we adopt, than to tax the over-sea goods for the loss we are sustaining by the abrogation of intercolonial and inter-state duties? … It will be the Government’s main object in the formulation of a tariff, to do so with the view of assisting and encouraging those native industries. …

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I will endeavour to protect as far as possible the productions of our own soil … It will be a tariff that will produce sufficient revenue without discouraging industries. It will be … calculated to maintain employment: in other words a business tariff … The first tariff will be thoroughly liberal and at the same time of a purely Australian character. The Ministry will not take any action that will have the effect of destroying State industries, and the Commonwealth will not be ushered in by the pattering of feet of people driven out of employment.14

This, effectively, was the starting point for subsequent Protectionist administrations. Protectionists marginally outpolled Free Traders in the 1901 election, but the balance of power lay with Labor. Excluding one Independent Protectionist, the Protectionists secured 32 seats, the Free Traders 28, and Labor 16, which included the Labor–Protectionist King O’Malley. Given the diversity of ‘labour’ viewpoints in the 1890s, the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party (FPLP) initially needed to steer clear of specifics: its program was the product of cautious negotiation between the representatives of different state-based associations, with varying names, very different levels of organisation and effectiveness, and distinctive orientations. The first federal delegates had no authority to impose uniformity, and campaigned on a simple platform on the grounds that brevity would promote comprehension and encourage unity.15 Labor’s Platform had four planks: electoral reform (universal adult suffrage), exclusion of ‘coloured and undesirable races’, more use of the referendum to promote direct democracy, and an old-age pension.16 There was no reference to socialism. After the election, the first federal caucus responded to the concern that majorities in New South Wales and Victoria might override the interests of less populous regions and dropped the referendum, but added support for a citizen army and compulsory arbitration. There was no consensus on the fiscal issue: members could vote freely on what was to be the focal

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debate in the formation of parliamentary majorities. The professed tactic of the FPLP was to be ‘support in return for concessions’. The turbulence of this first decade is manifest in simply listing the nine governments that served between 1901 and 1910, their duration and source of primary support. F e d e r a l g ov e r n m e n t s , 1 9 0 1 – 1 0 Leadership and Party Period Barton (Protectionist)

Primary Duration Reason for fall/ support termination

1901–Sept. 1903 Labor

Deakin (Protectionist) Sept. 1903–Nov. 1903 Labor

27 months Resignation Barton 2 months Election

Deakin (Protectionist) Dec. 1903–April 1904 Labor 4 months Defeat on Conciliation and Arbitration bill Watson (Labor) May 1904–Aug. 1904 Protectionist 4 months Defeat on Conciliation and Arbitration bill Reid/McLean (Free Trade/

Aug. 1904–June 1905 Protectionist 10 months Inaction on Tariffs (?)

Conservative/Protectionist) Deakin (Protectionist)

June 1905–Nov. 1906 Labor

15 months Election

Deakin (Protectionist) Dec. 1906–Nov. 1908 Labor 35 months Withdrawl of Labor support Fisher (Labor) Nov. 1908–May 1909 Deakin (Liberal (fusion))

Protectionist 6 months Fusion

June 1909–Feb. 1910 —

8 months Election

I. Marsh, Beyond the Two Party System, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 275, Table 10.1.

source

At first, the Labor Party supported Protectionist administrations, under Barton and then Deakin, but after the 1903 election these parties fell out over an Arbitration Bill. Arbitrated mediation of industrial disputes – on which Protectionists and Labor agreed – was intended to forestall conflict of the sort that bedevilled the 1890s, but Labor wanted to extend its provisions to state government–employed rail workers, against what Deakin believed was the federal principle of states’ rights. Deakin made it an issue of confidence; on losing the vote he resigned. A Watson-led Labor Government– the first national Labor government in the world – was sworn-in. It proved a competent administration.17 Four months later, as Labor again attempted to pass

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its version of the Arbitration Bill, Deakin reached an understanding with Free Trade, withdrew his support from Labor and the Watson Government fell. Reid, leading a Free Trade/Protection/Conservative coalition – from which Deakin stood aside – formed a ministry. How could such a disparate alliance work? The fiscal issue had been a driving concern of the first parliament and while a tariff compromise had been engineered in 1902 it satisfied no one. But as agreement between Free Trade and Protectionists on this was not feasible, Reid negotiated a ‘fiscal truce’. It lasted only ten months. Distrusting Reid, Deakin continued talking with Labor behind the scenes. Once he became convinced Reid had not honoured the truce, Deakin mounted a devastating attack on him, widely understood as ‘a notice to quit’. Labor and Protection then combined to defeat Reid. Deakin then held power, with Labor support, from June 1905 until November 1908. Much of the legislation for what would later be called ‘the Australian settlement’ – including a tariff regime – was passed in those years. But support for the Protectionists as a party was fragmenting. One faction, unhappy with the Labor alliance, left Protection’s ranks to sit as a ‘corner’ (cross-bench) group. While Reid, since 1905, had worked to identify Labor with socialism, to draw together extra parliamentary anti-socialist associations and supporters and to make anti-socialism his campaign banner, a tactic that appealed to some in Protectionist ranks, Labor saw its electoral support rapidly growing. If both Free Trade and Labor could see the chances of their winning government improving, Deakin’s electoral support was diminishing. In 1908, Labor calculated that its time had come, and withdrew support from Deakin. Andrew Fisher now became Labor’s second prime minister, heading a second Labor minority government. It was this that finally drove the two non-labour parties together, their ‘fusion’ inaugurating a two-party system, thus ending the situation

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where no single party could gain a majority in the House. With the fusion in place, Labor was defeated and Deakin again assumed office – but for only ten months. The 1910 election was the first electoral contest between the two parties. Labor won, and with majorities in both houses was able to govern effectively. Fisher would continue down the Deakinite path, but the ‘three elevens’ period was over. The story of this period can be told in a number of ways: as one of different political programs; as a period of gradual refinement in party positions as different alliances were tried out; or as a drama around the personal sympathies and antipathies of the key players, which affected who won and who lost. I take this last tack since a focus on leaders clarifying and explaining their positions comes closest to a narrative of ideas. Given the fluidity of affiliations and the need to mobilise support, leaders had to use parliament and the public domain more generally, rather than cabinet or the party room, to refine conflicting aspirations into manageable programs. To build majorities they had to focus on what was achievable, to speak and win those whose philosophy differed from their own and to decide just where, on a matter of principle, they would draw a line.18 We can take, as our exemplars, George Reid (Free Trade), Alfred Deakin (Protection) and Billy Hughes (Labor). The chief among these was Alfred Deakin, for two reasons. First, he was leader of (and the dominant intellectual force in) the Protectionist Party. As the intermediary party between Free Trade and Labor, in circumstances favouring the middle ground it could either hold office itself (1901–04, 1905–08) or determine who did (Labor, 1904, 1908–09; Free Trade–Protectionist coalition, 1904–05). This made the Protectionists ‘the fulcrum of national politics and the architects of the emergent Commonwealth’.19 Second, Deakin, an idealistic visionary, thought long and hard about what he stood for and spoke clearly about Australian politics both openly and as the anonymous

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correspondent for the London Morning Post. Reid, a canny politician could command a popular following and was a better organiser than Deakin – the infrastructure he helped design would eventually provide the extra-parliamentary framework for the anti-Labor cause.20 He was an important voice of free trade and also engineered the shift to ‘anti-socialism’ as the rallying point for liberals, once the fiscal issue began to fade. Chris Watson’s robust common sense, tact and diligence held the Labor Party together as it began to find its feet: he would begin to define the prerogatives of party leadership. But the irascible, combative and autocratic Billy Hughes was a more eloquent and comprehensive exponent of the Labor cause – though a party colleague gives us a salutary caution, remarking on Hughes’s ‘want of tact; brilliant no doubt, but ballast none’.21 G e o r g e R e i d : o n c o m p e t i t i o n a n d l i b e rt y

Contemporary observers were alert to the intellectual antecedents of the individualistic liberalism advocated by activists such as Bruce Smith and George Reid. Thus, H.V. Evatt in 1915: It was supposed that the individual is likely to provide for his own welfare better than the State, and that the good of the latter is best promoted by its citizens promoting their selfish interests intelligently. ‘The greater the intervention of the Government’, said Dicey, ‘the less becomes the freedom of the individual citizen’. ‘At each further stage in the growth of this compulsory legislation’, thought Herbert Spencer, ‘the citizen is deprived of some liberty which he previously had’. ‘In a sense’, declared Seeley, ‘liberty is the absence of excessive restraint or the opposite of over-government’ … [I]t was not considered possible that under-government might also be hostile to freedom.22

That free trade was integral to liberty (with competition the mainspring of liberalism) was at the heart of Reid’s philosophy. Much given to citing authorities, he drew on ‘Lecky’s Democracy and Liberty’ for the

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proposition that ‘The very main-spring of the production of the world is the desire of each man to improve his circumstances, and to reap the full reward of superior talent, energy, and thrift’.23 He elaborated on fashionable theories of social Darwinism – Benjamin Kidd (‘competition is the immutable law of progress’; ‘competition and selection … prevail in every form of life that is not retrograding’); Professor Flowers (‘competition is the message … [of] biological research’) – and linked these with political economy – Professor Fawcett (‘competition cheapens commodities’); Mr Jevons (‘there is no way of deciding what is a fair day’s wages outside competition’).24 Negotiated competition defined workplace relations: Take two bodies – employers and men. They have a dispute. One naturally wants to get more and the other to give less. They fight it out and come to terms and agree on a contract … I say the two master principles upon which the evolution of industry and humanity will turn will be a condition of things in which the competition which exists between these two great powers will merge into cooperation such as prevails when employers and men have come to an honest understanding.25

The complement of the drive to improve one’s circumstances was the real prospect of failure: enterprises will be impelled when ‘They are run with the utmost energy by individuals whose all is embarked in the venture, who have everything to lose if they fail, and everything to gain if they win’.26 Reformers’ attempts to ameliorate the adverse effects of failure through collective enterprise are misconceived: every such initiative, asserted Reid, has itself been ‘a melancholy failure. They started with the assumption that men are angels, and they soon found out they were not’. Thus, Reid argued, ‘the great destiny of humanity lies in allowing the genius for competition, for striving, for excelling, for acquiring, to reach its uttermost latitude consistent with the due rights of others’.27 His views on state and government:

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The Ideal State. – A community of highly educated men and women, enjoying the fullest measure of personal liberty, who need no compulsion to do their duty to their neighbours and the State. The Ideal Government. – A Government whose power is ever exercised to improve the opportunities of the people and never exercised to interfere with their personal liberty so long as they abstain from wrongdoing.28 Alf r e d D e a k i n : ‘ N e w ’ L i b e r a l i s m

The turn to social liberalism, the essence of protectionism, had vigorous roots in colonial politics, especially in Victoria under the tutelage of Syme, Higinbotham and Pearson,29 and Deakin was its product. But its British antecedents are also significant. That the capacity to exercise liberty depended upon economic well-being was recognised as a dilemma by some British Liberals from the 1880s, and the need to address this dilemma was taken by them to sanction intervention in social relationships, as books such as D.G. Ritchie’s The Principles of State Interference (1891) argued.30 T.H. Green’s opposition to Spencer’s individualism, on the grounds that some circumstances require the state to free its citizens from impediments or disabilities that curb their exercise of liberty, was an influential strand in British liberalism between 1880 and 1920. Green’s disciples, such as Edward Caird, directly shaped the thinking of migrant intellectuals who travelled to Australia, such as Charles Strong.31 But the works of Green – and of those who would later develop ‘new liberal’ doctrines, such as Lord Acton, L.T. Hobhouse, J.A. Hobson, Henry Jones and Graham Wallas – were likely to have been on the agenda of the reading and dining groups in which Deakin, Higgins and others participated (we return to this below). Jones in particular was invited to Australia on the basis of his reputation among those associated with Deakin’s project; his book on democratic civics, Idealism as a Practical Creed (1910), was first

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delivered as a set of lectures in Sydney; and he met with Deakin on whom he is said to have had a significant impact.32 Deakin’s statement of positive liberalism in 1895 foreshadows how he was to develop protectionism after Barton’s modest beginnings: having induced politicians to discard the old programme ‘the devil take the hindmost’, Liberalism would now inculcate a new teaching with regard to the poorest in the community, that all should have what was their due. By fixing a minimum rate of wages and wise factory legislation, wealth would be prevented from taking unfair advantage of the needy, and the latter would be saved from living wretched and imperfect lives.33

Ten years later, in June 1905, as Reid sought to commandeer the liberal banner in what he now defined as the anti-socialist cause, Deakin determined to distinguish his creed both from what Reid represented and from Labor. This was at once a tactic to clarify and reassert the objectives of the early Barton and Deakin administrations, and, as Reid saw it, a calculated ‘unfriendly act’: it would bring down the Reid–McLean coalition that Protectionists had undertaken to support. In allowing government by Labor, then by Free Trade, Deakin may have been demonstrating his argument that ‘any government with a pledged support of only one third has a very insecure tenure … we have not yet arrived at stable Government …’ and that ‘If we could have even temporarily resolved ourselves into two parties, the whole situation would have been different’.34 While at pains to demonstrate the practical reasons behind his support for, and then renunciation of, the leadership of both Watson and Reid, Deakin also had another end in view: by ‘demonstrating to both the rival elevens that they could not occupy the batting crease single-handed, he would remind them of his centrality’.35 To the electors, however, his argument was that neither the professed anti-socialists, nor Labor, had put forward coherent programs on which they could be judged.

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The NSW anti-socialist leagues, Deakin implied, were undermining the Barton Government’s legacy by exaggerating the socialist threat: The proposition to destroy private enterprise – the energies which make modern life … and which have raised us from a condition of savagery – to destroy these in favour of some mechanical government of every human activity, is a vision too idle, too remote, too intangible to be dealt with for a moment as practical politics … There are societies and individuals here who represent that school, but as they are not represented in our politics, it is not necessary to deal with them.36

The parliamentary Labor Party evoked ‘visions too serious to be ignored, yet too insubstantial to be grappled with’.37 For Deakin, the Marxian doctrines of ‘Socialism of the Continent’ needed to be separated from ‘those we are confronted with in this country. Here we have what is called State Socialism’: If by State Socialism you mean an assumption of all the activities of daily life by the State, and require them to be worked by State machinery as the only means of perfection of society, then I am at the opposite pole of opinion … On the other hand, I do not deny the wisdom or necessity of employing the machinery of the State in order to cope with great injustices and injuries which at present beset our social system, provided no more efficient means of dealing with them can be found.38

Yet it was clear that Deakin had renounced the more radical vision of his early mentor, Charles Pearson. Now, he argued, the virtues of private enterprise must not be forgotten, for it ‘brings an amount of intelligence and character to direct and scrutinise even the smallest parts of business workings, which governments have never yet succeeded in securing in their general administration’.39 The degree of intervention is to be measured, ‘the choice is not … between nationalisation and allowing all industries to fall under unrestricted

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competition. Between these distant points lies all the range of regulation’. In the end State Socialism is justified when no other device can be found to protect the public against pillage by the unscrupulous. But regulation comes first because it costs least … every proposal must be dealt with as a plain business proposition … State Socialism is a remedy only to be applied with caution or else the remedy may easily be worse than the disease.40

Early the following year, Deakin returned to these themes, castigating the Free Traders as a party with ‘no positive programme’ and an ‘attitude of denial and negation’, its members ‘rallying in defence of vested interests’.41 Labor, portrayed as an offshoot of the old Liberal Party, had been preceded by the Liberals in adopting ‘the great watchwords … We sought and seek to unlock the lands, develop national industries, and to safeguard the rights of those engaged in them … Before there was a Labor Party those were Liberal aims, and they are Liberal aims today’.42 Our Liberal Party has … sought for social justice by means of progressive measures … and in modern days it has learned to seek these ends by a free use of the agencies of the State … That is the distinctive development of the liberalism of our own day … [I]n this country the adoption of a well-thought-out and scientific system for the development of native industries is the first foundation … The circumstances of our situation have made protection indispensable … The first condition for the transaction of business in this country is to lay down once and for all the conditions upon which Australian investments and Australian labour shall be employed in this country.43

Deakin was developing a version of what British theorists would call the enabling state, a vision that favoured Labor over Reid and his Free Traders. A turning point would come, driving Deakin and his

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followers into ‘fusion’ with their Free Trade rivals. But first, what did Labor stand for? The initial task of the FPLP was to achieve some semblance of a program in the face of fragmenting pressures: very different levels of state organisation; diverse streams of opinion (anarchism, syndicalism, socialism, progressive liberalism); disparate cultural and material objectives (as between, say, nomadic rural labour, skilled artisans, and inner city industrial workers); and ambivalence over those tokens of tribal solidarity – caucus ballots for position and the pledge. The brief 1901 platform was silent on the socialist objective – nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. When it was raised again at the federal conference of 1905, the issue was hedged once more: a compromise reference to ‘the collective ownership of monopolies’, championed by federal leader, Chris Watson, won the day. Moderation and pragmatism were the watchwords of the first FPLP politicians, and Watson was the very embodiment of these qualities. His skill in holding together the disparate alliances constituting the FPLP and the civility of his relations with Deakin contributed to his becoming Australia’s first Labor prime minister in 1904. Watson, negotiator and tactician, was said to be a good speaker, but it is difficult to identify in his speeches clear statements of Labor principles. His willingness to entertain formal alliances with Deakin in 1904 and as late as 1907–08 – initiatives that were frustrated on one side by the Labor caucus, and on the other by Protectionists – point to his liberal sympathies. When provoked by the taunts of antisocialists, he would profess his party’s sympathy with the ‘spirit’ of socialism: It is the spirit of humanity; the spirit of those who care for the poor and lowly; of those who are prepared to make an effort to interfere with the iron law of wages, and with the cold-blooded calculation of the ordinary political economist. [It] is the motive of those who will

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leave no stone unturned, and no experiment untried, in their effort to benefit humanity.44

But asked to identify his party’s achievements, he would fall back on its influence on the ‘new liberal’ legislative agenda: white Australia, arbitration, pensions, protection and defence.45 It was largely the provocation of Reid and other anti-socialists that drove Labor to clarify its position. A debate between Reid and NSW Labor leader, William Holman, in April 1906 at Centenary Hall in Sydney provided a lively theatre of contention. As Reid tried to tar Holman with the alleged excesses of ‘European socialism’, Holman resolutely fought his corner on the basis of ‘socialism as defined in the Australian Labor Party’s objective and platform’. ‘The objective’, he said, ‘reads thus: 1 The cultivation of an Australian sentiment based upon the maintenance of racial purity, and the development in Australia of an enlightened and self-reliant community … 2 The securing of the full results of their industry to all producers by the collective ownership on monopolies and the extension of the industrial and economic functions of the State and municipality.46

‘If that is Socialism’, he continued, ‘and I admit that it is – then we are Socialists … If Socialism means more than that, as some have asserted, then we have nothing to do with it’.47 In a pointed reference to divisions in the ALP over socialism, Holman explained: Our party includes a vast number of men, many of whom do not profess themselves to be Socialists at all, and our objective is a statement of principles upon which the whole party is united and agreed.48

For the most part, against Reid’s efforts to link socialism with wholesale nationalisation, Holman insisted that the ALP was intent only

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on preventing the emergence of trusts and monopolies to avoid ‘the unrestricted and unfettered tyranny of an economic mastership such as monopolists would be able to impose …’ 49 He went on to demonstrate a monopoly’s power to undersell and crush rivals, to dictate raw material prices, to force up consumer prices and to drive down wage rates precisely because of the lack of competition. As Reid threw up problems of loan capital, investment, management, expertise and risk, Holman drew on European, British and American examples of state enterprise to demonstrate how such problems could be addressed: ‘so far from the experience of Socialism having been a failure, every Socialistic experiment that has been made under the conditions that we approve of has been a complete success’.50 More generally, he argued, we regard the State as the great instrument for good … for uplifting humanity; we regard the State not as some malign power hostile and foreign to ourselves, outside our control and no part of our organized existence, but we recognize in the State, we recognize in the Government merely a committee to which is delegated the powers of the community, and whose duty is to use those powers not in the interests of a favored class, but in the interests of all humanity.51

However, it was Billy Hughes who put forward the most coherent exposition of a Labor position. In a series of articles for the Sydney Daily Telegraph between 1907 and 1912, subsequently published as The Case for Labor (1910),52 Hughes depicted an ‘industrial battlefield’, where the unskilled are condemned to dangerous and intermittent work while the more skilled specialists find it impossible to move to other fields when their industry suffers a downturn. Unemployment, he argued, was a product of private enterprise, which maintains a reserve army of labour, a class of men who ‘are constantly employed only in good seasons’. Thus, ‘the life of the average workman in the

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great cities of the world hovers always on the edge of a tragedy … temporary success is the best that can be hoped for’. Fear keeps workers chained to conditions where: ‘women work for a wage shamefully inadequate to maintain them … and men risk death every day fearlessly, uncomplainingly, for a paltry pittance’.53 The response to the ‘industrial battlefield’ should involve not only regulation; it should involve new ideals: legislation dealing with compensation to workmen for accident and disease contracted in the course of their employment and insurance against unemployment is badly needed; but … legislation itself will effect little unless for that spirit of ruthless greed animating modern society is substituted one more kindly and humane. Not the cheapest way of extracting ore or producing wealth, regardless of the health and safety of the workman, but the cheapest way that is safe and healthy; not the cheapest machine, but the cheapest that is absolutely safe to those attending it. These should be and must be the ideals of a decent and civilised society.54

To the argument that regulation is against the ethos of competition, an offence against ‘the natural law’ of the ‘survival of the fittest’, Hughes pointedly reminded his interlocutors that attempts to modify the effects of nature elsewhere were regarded quite differently: ‘Cold and heat, rain and drought, are very material elements … but curiously enough attempts to modify their effects are rarely considered impious or foolish’. Only when it comes to the functions of markets is ‘such interference termed meddling with natural laws’. The capitalist protests against any interference with what he calls natural laws; he protests against coddling the weak and hampering the strong; what he really means is that he possesses just those qualities necessary for success under existing conditions. He fears lest a turn of the wheel should place him in a less favourable environment … [C]ivilisation ha[s] never ventured to permit the fittest to take

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full advantage of his victory. Nor has it ever allowed the unfit to drink the cup of their unfitness to the dregs. With a rapidly changing environment there has been a tendency to adjust conditions so as to keep a certain type from gathering in the whole wealth of the earth which has lately been more marked.55

He went on to compare the iconic capitalist, Rockefeller, with a noxious weed smothering everything else in the garden. The reference to Rockefeller was intended to buttress another argument: like Holman, and echoing the American populists of the early 1900s, he believed that the real threat to competition was the industrial ‘behemoths’ – trusts, monopolies and rings – that stifled other enterprise. Only market regulation could address this. A ‘Behemoth cannot be destroyed save in one way, while the present environment persists, for he is demonstrably the fittest to survive. But we may modify his environment, and in no other way can he be destroyed’. Further, the anti-competitive nature of capitalist monopolies called workers to collective action in the form of unions. Here, however, Hughes was careful to distinguish the legitimate tactics of the industrial movement from the dangerous tactics of ‘the radicals’. Radicals believed that ‘only by some concerted action in the nature of a general strike or revolution is there any hope for workers’. But they ‘forget one fact which is the key to the whole industrial and social problem in this country. Here universal suffrage prevails’. Strikes by workers in specific sectors, when it was their only means to redress their grievances, was legitimate; a ‘general strike’ was not. ‘To advise 85 per cent of the people … to cease work instead of voting for men pledged to get them what they wanted would be the advice of fools or madmen. They can give effect to their desires through the ballot-box’.56 Hughes was here contesting the radical socialism of the Industrial Workers of the World in particular, and the industrial militancy of advocates for the One Big Union, to whom we turn in chapter 5.57

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This led him to an interpretation of socialism as an incremental movement, which would arrive through historical inevitability rather than through an abrupt transition, let alone by revolutionary means. The belief that socialism can be achieved by any coup … can only be entertained by those who fail utterly to understand not only what Socialism is, but what those factors which make for change are … Socialism will replace individualism because it is fitter to survive in the new environment … Competition will be replaced by cooperation because the environment which made competition desirable or possible is changing – has changed, in fact … This is the day of the trust and the combine … the regulation of production and of price for the benefit of a very few enormously wealthy persons. Will anyone dare contend for a moment that this is for the good of the community? … [T]he question being not one of competition versus co-operation, but of co-operation for the benefit of the few versus co-operation for the benefit of the many, there can and will be but one answer. And that is being given every day … Socialism wants no voting for it; it only wants room to grow and move.58

At the heart of Hughes’s case was an argument about positive liberty, drawn explicitly from J.S. Mill not from any socialist text, Fabian or otherwise. For Hughes, the ideal state was one in which ‘State acts are reduced to a minimum and individuals permitted the widest possible freedom’. But the call for restrictive legislation (or state action) was intended ‘to increase the sum of human liberty, not to decrease it, and so-called restrictive legislation has actually had this effect’.59 Against this, he posed the scourge of liberal individualism: Freedom for the individual to bargain as buyer and seller in an open market – to pay just so much, and no more, unless he pleases; to sell for the best price he can get and no less than that; these are the joys and glories of individualism. One is free to get rich and to be rich; to get poor and to be poor. No one will or ought to interfere.60

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Anti-socialists ‘who approved of Arbitration Courts, Wages Boards and New Protection’, admitted ‘that unfettered individualism is no longer safe’: In spite of himself, he is compelled to restrain the so-called freedom of the individual, in order that the whole community may have greater freedom. The employer’s right to pay what wages he likes is taken away, and the employee’s right to work excessive hours or for less than a fair and reasonable wage is also taken away. The employer, and, if you like, the employee, too, are less free, the community more free, because of these restrictions. Civilisation has been achieved by just such means; with every step forward greater restraint upon individuals has been necessary in order that society as a whole may enjoy greater liberty.61

Negotiated settlements The political fluidity of the first Commonwealth decade ended with the merging of Free Trade and Protection in the ‘Fusion’ of 1909, and the decisive transformation of the ‘three elevens’ into an adversarial two-party system. By then, the negotiated settlements between the currents of opinion we can take Reid, Deakin and Hughes to represent constituted the policy framework that Paul Kelly later dubbed ‘the Australian settlement’.62 What had been achieved? Deakin had established the warrant for what has been called ‘the ethical state’ 63 – a liberal polity where freedom was associated not solely with individualism, but with state intervention to assure conditions where a level of liberty could be meaningfully enjoyed by all. Free trade was held in abeyance for another eighty years. The variant of liberalism that accorded primacy to individualism – and hence deplored state action – would henceforward be associated with the conservative

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right rather than with the liberal mainstream. The ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ elements of liberalism, however, would remain in permanent tension not only within the first Liberal Party, but in all antiLabor parties to the present. The Labor Party too had been affected. In some respects, the Labor Party would show more initiative in its resort to state action than did successor anti-Labor parties. But being forced to govern on Deakin’s terms allowed moderate leaders – and parliamentary labourism – to flourish. Deakin lost power in 1910 and left the stage in 1913, but the Fisher Labor Government’s agenda was a recognisable continuation of Deakin’s ‘New Protection’, and more radical labour voices were marginalised – and not infrequently pursued by ALP governments with all the resources of the state. Yet class alliances solidified: spurred by Reid’s anti-socialist campaign, Deakin had finally to own the middle class and business as his core support; Labor reinforced its claim as the representative of the workers. It may be, too, that the court politics surrounding Deakin, ‘the chief’, helped instil in the anti-Labor parties the idea that all problems could be addressed by finding the ‘right’ leader. Or was this a more general problem? For Deakin had observed: ‘The mischief is that democracy in Australia, as in the United States, insists on attaching an extraordinary significance to the personality of its political leader’.64 We might read the outcome, the ‘Australian settlement’,65 as the outcome of a battle of ideas but, as Deakin’s comment revealed, personalities mattered. That Deakin was able to call the shots was decisive. If Barton had not gone to the High Court in 1903, if Sir William Lyne’s attempt to succeed Barton had succeeded, if Syme had not pushed Deakin to take the lead, and if Deakin had been unable to achieve an informal alliance with Labor, then that framework and the legislation enacted would have been different.66 That Deakin developed friendly relations with Watson and neither trusted nor worked easily with Reid was significant – and we might imagine what effect the

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mercurial and combative Hughes could have had on this alliance if he had assumed leadership of the parliamentary Labor Party earlier. The Australian settlement has been widely discussed: it comprised immigration restriction and a ‘White Australia’; a regulated industrial system with needs-based wages; tariff protection to stimulate industrial development; imperial trade preference (with an underlying notion of Australia as an independent actor within a British empire); equalisation of State revenues, with an implicit compensation to rural settlements (all should have equal access to services); acceptance of government roles in targeted welfare delivery and in national development; and – some would argue – masculinism, state secularism and democracy.67 Some of these elements – White Australia, imperial trade preference, developmentalism, masculinism, secularism, and democracy – were taken for granted by the first parliamentarians. Others – needs-based wages, targeted welfare, and protection, in particular – took their initial forms though the parliamentary battles of that first decade. Take White Australia as an instance of the first category. As noted above, it was given expression in the first sentence of the Labor Party’s platform. Elsewhere, Reid would refer to ‘white Australia – a term I invented’.68 Deakin spoke for it not only on economic grounds, but also as a cultural necessity: The unity of Australia is nothing, if that does not imply a united race. A united race means not only that its members can intermix, intermarry and associate without degradation on either side, but implies one inspired by the same ideas, and an aspiration towards the same ideals, of a people possessing the same general cast of character, tone of thought – the same constitutional training and conditions – a people qualified to live under this Constitution – the broadest and most liberal perhaps the world has yet seen … 69

Watson, a decent man, asserted that Labor objections to ‘coloured people’ were ‘to a large extent tinged with considerations of an industrial

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nature’, but went on to express fear of ‘the possibility and probability of racial contamination … The question is whether we would desire that our sisters or our brothers should be married into any of these races … [T]hese people are not such as we can meet upon an equality’.70 There were dissenting, anti-racist voices, such as E.W. Cole in his 1903 book The White Australia Question, but these parliamentary leaders undoubtedly spoke for the mores of the time. This linked into widely accepted views of ‘independent Australian Britons’, sharing the ‘genius of the race’71 and given by sentiment to empire loyalism, with a pragmatic expectation that reciprocation for such commitment would flow in the form of trade preference: Australians were, in their own view, relatively independent actors in a shared context. ‘Empire citizenship’, one exponent argued, embodies the two apparently opposing ideas of complete internal autonomy and a single policy in relation to the outside world … it implies an active and intelligent co-operation on the part of the Dominions, and of the people of the Dominions, in a positive policy – common to the whole Empire – in world affairs …72

The ‘genius of the race’ had long been rhetorically associated with democracy, the desirability of which had been largely established in the colonial period. Universal suffrage, including votes for women, would be settled within the first Commonwealth parliament, although the racial aspect of the settlement was evident in the decision to deny voting rights to Indigenous people. Other aspects of the settlement could be said to hinge upon common objectives, but were marked by disagreement over the means of achieving them. All parties, for instance, were committed to national development as, primarily, an economic process. Indeed, all parties agreed that there was a role for the state in this, as even Reid argued. Free Trade advocates, however, favoured individual enterprise

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and a state that responded to business initiatives; Protectionists and Labor a state that guaranteed some things (arbitrated dispute resolution, a minimum wage, pensions, for instance) and that might take initiatives. The ongoing field of contention concerned the distribution of wealth: Free Trade stood for rewards for individual enterprise; Labor for collective bargaining to ensure workers’ rights in the face of the ‘greed for profits’; ‘progressive’ Protectionists wanted to build industry to create jobs but aimed to exact a return for industry protection by requiring employers to provide ‘fair and reasonable’ wages and working conditions. Industry protection, job protection and minimum wages were thought to be a formula that encouraged employment and self-sufficiency. At this point, masculinism and welfare minimalism cut in. Needs-based wages, established by the Harvester judgment (1907), assumed a male breadwinner requiring the resources to sustain a family in ‘frugal comfort’, while certain ‘women’s’ occupations paid only enough to support an individual. Targeted welfare in effect substituted wages policy for welfare policy,73 though there was a residual system of social security (aged pensions, 1908; invalid pensions, 1910; and maternity allowances, 1912). All of these strands can be mapped back onto the ideas of the protagonists of ‘the three elevens’. The eventual settlement, sometimes characterised as the ‘liberal egalitarian’ project, indicated the success of the Protectionist–Labor alliance. It was informed by a conviction that the doctrine of laissez-faire had failed: ‘It was a gospel of giltedged selfishness’.74 And yet, attention to limits on state action, the emphasis on only residual welfare with self-sufficiency the expected norm, and the commitment to national efficiency were consonant with the arguments of Bruce Smith and George Reid. These were men turning their disparate colonial experiences, and the world-views shaped in that context, to the task of shaping a nation and a ‘people’. Very much influenced by the conflicts and the crashes

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of the 1890s, they grasped for ideas that would provide solutions to those challenges. Some among them would argue that the verities of ‘true liberalism’ had been forgotten – the struggle was to reinstitute individual freedom and to stimulate private enterprise. Though sharing little with earlier colonial conservatives, such as the Macarthurs, they would be dubbed conservative in the early twentieth-century battles – a heritage that would influence subsequent Australian understandings. ‘A Colonial Liberal’, said Deakin, ‘is one who favours State interference with liberty and industry at the pleasure and in the interests of the majority, while those who stand for the free play of individual choice and energy are classed as Conservatives’.75 His opponents were not, and did not believe themselves to be, conservatives in the sense of believing that wisdom could be found in tradition and in established institutions, since their commitment to individual choice and to development ran counter to the conservative appeal to collective, organic wisdom. ‘It is’, said Reid, ‘a mere political trick of the most obvious kind to endeavour to describe any party … as a Conservative party. There is no such party in Australia’.76 Reid’s resistance is understandable: since the aspirations of the putative ‘bunyip aristocracy’ had been defeated, there had been no ‘conservative’ party of the British stamp, believing in restraint of government because the wisdom of community is registered in hallowed traditions, and should not be impiously disrupted by the presumption of a particular generation. And the hero of Free Trade was Cobden, whose challenge to the established order was radical in its time (Marx had called him a bourgeois revolutionary). Yet, as Bruce Smith revealed, the Free Trade stance masked another sort of conservatism. For conservatives of this kind, the great liberal victories had been won, the impositions of the old order on individual liberty had been defeated, and now the threat was that heedless ‘masses’ would use the resources of the state to impose new restrictions on

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enterprising individuals; hence, their resistance to state action; and hence the incentive for the self-anointed liberal progressives (and the progressive press) to dub them conservative. Their resistance to state action might be philosophically distinct from traditional conservatism, but their restraint on collective action was the same in effect. In the eyes of progressives, they stood in the way of national development, failed to see that the laissez faire approach had not delivered freedom, and ignored the truth that public goods demanded public (and not just individual) action. Those who regarded themselves as ‘progressives’ – from Deakin’s acolytes to the moderate socialists of the federal parliamentary Labor Party – drew on J.S. Mill’s conception of ‘positive liberty’ and on more contemporary theorists such as T.H. Green and Henry Jones. Their liberal-egalitarian project identified an element of danger in unfettered individualism and their ‘co-operative Commonwealth’ was thought to balance individual needs, especially income security, with the community’s interest in economic development. Entrepreneurship would be encouraged (industry would not be nationalised), private initiative would drive development, but the potential for conflict between capital and labour would be ameliorated through regulation, ‘a new province for law and order’.77 It has been aptly argued that these men sought to modify the market to create national mastery of material circumstances, to weld a thinly populated continent with distant centres and regional differences into a secure whole, and to regulate its divergent interests to serve national goals. That was not simply a defensive or protective project; it was an affirmative and dynamic one.78

As organised Labor became an effective parliamentary force, Free Trade and Protection would turn their attack on the socialists. ‘The real line of cleavage’, argued Reid, ‘is the line between those who

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believe in development by private enterprise as against those who believe in development, in the industrial world, by State monopolies’. The early Commonwealth period had ensured that Australia would be a liberal polity. Yet Reid’s assertion was misleading. This was a liberal polity in which individual enterprise was lauded, but state action was accepted. There would be state monopolies (water, post and telegraphs, rail services, telecommunications, for instance), and government business enterprises established not as monopolies but as competitors with private enterprise (the Commonwealth Bank, or Trans Australia Airlines, for example). Until the 1980s, the real line of cleavage was that foreshadowed by Deakin, between those who believed that initiative was generated by individual enterprise, and those who saw the solution to problems of both injustice and development as justifying the resort to ‘progressive measures … and in modern days … [we have] learned to seek these ends by a free use of the agencies of the State’.

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And the second class were waiting, in the days of serf and prince, And the second class are waiting – they’ve been waiting ever since. There are gardens in the background, and the line is bare and drear, Yet they wait beneath a signboard, sneering ‘Second class wait here.’ Henry Lawson, 19001

Significant as were the achievements of the first Commonwealth decade, parliament was not the sole arena for political debate. Much went on in the extra-parliamentary parties (including state-based branches), within interest groups and through the press. Indeed, some remained sceptical of the parliamentary process as the means to achieve their ends, challenged the constraints of that forum, developed alternative avenues of expression and relied upon other associations and institutions to further their causes. Typically, they wanted to expand the spectrum further to the right (for instance, the Kyabram movement), or to the left (more radical socialists), than the negotiated settlements of the parliamentary parties would allow. Again, there were others who simply did not then have a voice in parliament (feminists, for instance). Further, there was a new breed of public intellectuals who purported to represent the ‘new thinking’ of their day. These broader groups contributed significantly to the political dynamic because they provided alternative visions: resources that could be deployed when the vicissitudes of national politics seemed to lead to a dead end – as they were soon to do.

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Concerned citizens? An unyielding individualism persisted in the face of the liberal-egalitarian project that constituted the parliamentary consensus. It would be a potent spur to vehement anti-socialism and to ‘anti-political’ thought, and it is a background feature of the Australian polity that we cannot ignore. When it emerged, it purported to speak for ‘citizens’ against political insiders. A representative instance was the Kyabram movement, named for the Victorian town in which it was conceived, devoted to rolling back government, and initiated at public meetings in November 1901. Its historian dubbed it ‘The Voice of the People’.2 The Kyabram meetings established a Citizens’ Reform League dedicated to ‘Retrenchment and Reform’; branches spread throughout Victoria, Tasmania and New South Wales, where a parallel organisation, the ‘People’s Reform League’, emerged; candidates were endorsed for the 1902 Victorian election, and the government of the day was defeated by an opposition prepared to embrace some of the reform clauses (particularly trimming numbers in parliament); a similar reduction was achieved in New South Wales by referendum. The key tenets of the Kyabram movement – small government, opposition to urban elites, the beliefs that politicians collaborated with public servants in distributing spoils and patronage and that both were parasitic on ‘the people’; that profligate public debt and high taxes were endemic and crippled private enterprise; that minimum wages wastefully encouraged ‘loafers’; and that all such tendencies signified socialism and an attack on liberty – appealed to a Cobdenite mentality still said, by its adherents, to be expressive of ‘country’ virtues. But it was effectively a pro-business philosophy: indeed, the NSW League called ‘not … (for) old politicians, but able businessmen who would give a straight out vote’.3 It was no accident that among

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the movement’s founders was a successful city entrepreneur, and that its treasurer was a city financier. One of Reid’s successes, as he shifted his focus to anti-socialism, was the incorporation of such citizens’ movements into the extraparliamentary organisation of the Free Trade Party (and thence into the Fusion and Liberal Parties). Such movements have been readily assimilated into, and by extension neutralised by, the non-Labor side of politics. The sentiments they represent – a populist anti-politics, stubborn individualism, suspicion of elites – have emerged regularly: as an Australian offshoot of the Legion of Frontiersmen (a group that made repeated overtures to the army and which would organise strike-breaking ‘special constables’ in the 1912 Brisbane Tramways strike4); as an element in the foundation of the Country Party (1919); in the secret paramilitary New Guard of the 1930s (see chapter 6); and in Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party of the 1990s (see chapter 10).

The dissenting left The fugitive sentiments of the anti-parliamentary right, to be discerned fleetingly in the records of public meetings and in press reports, are harder to recapture now than are those of the dissenting left, given as the left was to relentless pamphleteering. We should not take this to mean that the influence of the former on the popular imagination was more limited than that of the latter: at their height both sides could attract thousands to public meetings. Was it that the right’s appeal to ‘commonsense’ individualism and to patriotic sentiment was thought to be so self-evident as not to require elucidation? Some on the left had their own answer: their opponents could not, argued Tom Mann, analyse society scientifically, ‘the very attempt … would prove how unnecessary they were to the world’.5

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Socialists, on the other hand, as Mann went on to argue, were committed to ‘knowledge acquired and applied’. Applied knowledge demanded education. This was a view that did not assume a welling up of democratic opinion from workers: ‘To insist on them voting solidly politically before they have received instruction in matters economic is to add to the difficulties …’6 Reform demanded education through an organised labour movement: ‘Every State Party ought to systematically educate the electorate in everything appertaining to the Socialists movement of the world’.7 This implied an engaged intelligentsia, ‘intelligent pioneers of economic change’.8 We can take Tom Mann as an example of the dissenting left.9 A British labour activist who had tasted the success of direct action as an organiser of the London dock strike of 1889, he came to Australia in 1902 to find a labour movement committed to parliamentary action after the wounding travails of the 1890s. Mann’s reputation preceded him: he was able to support himself as a travelling speaker and swiftly built relations with extra-parliamentary socialist organisations such as the Victorian Socialists’ League (VSL) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP), before joining the ALP in Victoria as an organiser. His talents as an orator assisted in establishing party branches, but his wholehearted commitment to socialism – in a party where, as Holman remarked, ‘many … do not profess themselves to be Socialists at all’, and which had not then adopted ‘the socialist objective’ – would provoke repeated conflict. He resigned in 1905. Mann found soul mates in the VSL and the SDP, but went on to found the Victorian Socialist Party (VSP) in 1906 as a means of consolidating fragmented socialist organisations and as an attempt to influence the ALP – the VSP was intended to serve as the ‘conscience’ of the labour movement. He also turned to industrial activism and union organisation. His work with the unions in disputes and a lockout at the Broken Hill Company’s mines and smelters led to his arrest

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for sedition in 1909: he was acquitted. His role was significant in a series of tactical victories at Broken Hill, but the strikers were forced to an adverse settlement by the company’s ability to use state instrumentalities and legal appeals to extend the conflict. Mann’s response was to become more radical – he would advocate syndicalism and later, after his return to England, communism. He left Australia in 1910. Mann’s essay on Socialism (1905)10 can be read against the case for reform advanced by Holman and Hughes. There is substantial common ground in Mann’s preoccupation with ‘the social problem’: the causes and effects of poverty and how to get rid of it. Like Holman and Hughes he believed in a ‘science’ of society, a ‘sociology’ that ‘should be approached as impartially and deliberately as the exact sciences say of Astronomy or Geology’.11 He agreed that the dangerous effects of individualism and of untrammelled capitalism could be empirically established. He echoed their objection to an economic approach that put the objective of profit before public welfare. Like Hughes, he argued that the ‘law of progress’ should see destructive competition outmoded. Like Holman, he saw the harbingers of socialist success in the ‘remarkable growth of municipal enterprise’ – cities taking over from private corporations the operation of facilities such as transport, power and communications as ‘the common property of the people’.12 With Holman and Hughes, he described the failure of socialist experiments, like William Lane’s ‘New Australia’ venture in Paraguay, as deriving from a lack of collectivist imagination and the difficulty of promoting co-operative movements under capitalist governments. Like Champion, he advocated a radical egalitarianism to entail absolute equality of women with men. Mann, however, was much more focused than the ALP expositors on demolishing the argument that failures of productivity and ‘inevitable’ trade fluctuations led to unemployment and poverty.

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He used official papers and statistics to demonstrate significant and consistent increases in trade, productivity and wealth in the capitalist economies over the preceding century. And yet children are dying … women groaning because they cannot command the life’s necessaries for their children, and millions of men … barred by unemployment from getting life’s necessaries, and this in the midst of a superfluity of wealth the like of which the world has never known before.13

‘Can it be plainer shown’, he argued, ‘that the root cause of poverty … is not lack of production but faulty distribution?’14 Politics and state action he saw as only transitional and limited measures in addressing ‘the social problem’. Conceding that ‘the working class … cannot effect the passing of the means of production into the ownership of the community without acquiring political power,’15 nonetheless, Mann believed that state agencies would always reinforce the dominance of ‘the propertied class’. So long as people of that class continue to exercise control and ownership of the means of production, and decide … the character of the Law and the control of the judiciary, no country is ready for Socialism … It is not in the power of any group or society to lift itself out of the pernicious influence of the sectional monopoly, whilst … every Governmental department … is manned exclusively in the interest of Plutocracy.16

Hence, the parliamentary road advocated by the ALP, and the belief, as Holman put it, that ‘the State (is) not … some malign power hostile and foreign to ourselves … the Government (is) merely a committee to which is delegated the powers of the community’, obscure what was needed: ‘Socialism does not aim at making any the slaves of Governments, but to gradually and surely get rid of all Governments other than the self-Government of free and intelligent citizens’.17 Scorning Labor’s timidity, Mann insisted on wholesale nationalisation, not just

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action to constrain monopolies: ‘Socialism means the complete supercession of the present capitalist system … those who do not believe in the necessity for and the justice of Nationalisation of the means of production should not call themselves Socialists’.18 Given that the objective was a society managed co-operatively by the people (‘influence will begin to operate favourable to the shedding of officials and permanent politicians’19), workers should prepare by organisation, education and direct action. By 1909, Mann had concluded: I am not wishful to deprecate political action, but … during recent years in Australia undue importance has been attached to political action, and … there is not held by the typical unionist a proper understanding of the fundamental … importance of economic or industrial organisation … Experience in all countries shows most conclusively that industrial organisation, intelligently conducted, is of much more moment than political action, for … courageous industrial activity forces from the politicians proportionate concessions.20

Indeed, Mann thought that what liberal progressives regarded as landmark achievements – Arbitration Courts and Wages Boards – reinforced a unionism that was ‘sectional and narrow, instead of cosmopolitan and broad-based’. Agreements achieved through such channels ‘absolutely destroy the possibility of class solidarity’.21 Mann’s final manifesto for Australian workers, ‘The Way to Win’ (1909), insisted that ‘Sectionalism must disappear, and the industrial organisations must be equal to the State, national, and international action, not in theory only, but in actual fact’.22 Organisation itself would ameliorate the spectrum of opinions (including conservative opinion) one must expect to find among any workers; education within the movement would facilitate the adoption of socialism. [I]n a centre of industry where there is … no organisation … there are resident … the usual percentage of reactionaries, Liberals, Laborites

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and Socialists, and each of these parties finds its adherents chiefly in the ranks of the workers. That ought not to interfere with industrial organisation, in which they should be enrolled entirely irrespective of political faith; and becoming members of the industrial body, it is here these workers should get their education in industrial and social economics, and this would prove the true guide to political action.23

Mann, by now, had arrived at syndicalism – rejection of parties and parliaments in favour of union activism and overarching international organisation in pursuit of the workers’ interests. His argument has been discussed here as indicative of the temper of the non-parliamentary and more trenchant left: there were many factions advocating varieties of socialism. Nonetheless, Mann was more visible and more eloquent than most and his exposition of a wholehearted socialism would remain a resource for reformers both inside and outside the ALP. Syndicalism would be more forcefully advocated by the adherents of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) – a fundamentally Marxian movement originating in Chicago in 1905, whose Australian offshoots began to emerge around 1907,24 but the impact of which is best assessed in relation to the domestic politics of the First World War. The IWW was much more iconoclastic about parliament, the ALP, and the pernicious effects of palliatives, such as arbitration, than Mann had been. It condemned the state utterly: ‘The State does not represent Society, but only tries to administer things in the interests of the ruling minority’.25 The title of its journal, Direct Action, encapsulated its creed – workers were enjoined to seize power at the point of production, and their means was to be – again following an American formulation – One Big Union (OBU). It was in fact a consolidation of all the ‘radical’ tendencies against which Hughes had fulminated in his Case For Labor. And when the IWW denounced Australian participation in the ‘class war’, the First World War, Hughes would destroy it, as we will see.

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The woman movement Activists who promoted women’s interests in the early twentieth century liked to speak of ‘the woman movement’, as if to signify unity of purpose. This was not true: like other movements they were as divided. But like the ‘concerned citizens’ of the right and the dissenting left, they had ambivalent relations with the emerging political parties, they were sceptical that the principles of the Australian settlement would serve their interests, and they pursued their ends through networking, extra-parliamentary organisations and lobbying, rather than through parliamentary means. In the push for social reform by, among others, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and political rights, exemplified by the Womanhood Suffrage League, the common ground was a conception of women as citizens – women sought reform not to establish their citizenship, but because they thought as citizens other things flowed. Political rights, in turn, were harnessed to concerns for social order, the protection of women and children, education, health and welfare. The suffrage movement, the emergence of Women’s Federal Leagues, and petitions such as that presented at the Constitutional Convention of 1897 made women’s political expectations a consistent theme in the federation debates and in the early Commonwealth. In the Commonwealth Parliament, the right of women to be enfranchised was debated in 1902.26 Reading the speeches provides a fascinating glimpse into the way gender issues were understood at the turn of the century. Women had been granted suffrage in South Australia in 1894 and in Western Australia in 1899, and the main argument for extending this right to all (white) women in the new Commonwealth was the desire for uniformity. In addition, women had to obey state laws and pay taxation if they owned property – in the interests of justice, therefore, women should be enfranchised.

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Moreover, according to Senator O’Connor, women were civilised: they were capable of understanding the complexities of political life and public affairs. But for senators opposed to women’s suffrage, it was precisely woman as ‘civilising’ agent that occasioned doubt. The doubters felt that the ‘burden’ of electoral duty would undermine women’s roles as wives and mothers. Proponents of change rejoined that not only would women remain refined and domesticated, but also the very presence of women at polling booths would discourage boorish or agitated behaviour. The arguments in favour of female suffrage prevailed. Women, unlike Aborigines,27 were granted the right to vote in the Commonwealth elections. The ideal of women as both refined and refining was dominant during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Ideologically, it tied women firmly to the home. As wives, their task was to provide a nurturing, elevated environment to soften the rigours of the public world their husbands inhabited. As mothers, their duty was to bear and raise virtuous children to populate the nation state with white citizens. Thus, their citizenship status was predicated on their maternal role – they were ‘maternal citizens’. Conservative women, as we will see, endorsed the domestic roles of women. However, for progressive advocates of women’s rights, enfranchisement was seen as the first step in a long battle to address injustices caused by this confinement to the private sphere. They sought to redefine themselves as full citizens, with social and civil rights equivalent to those of men. Maternal citizenship, according to some historians, was not what they wanted.28 Certainly, they lobbied for maternal and infant welfare clinics, women’s hospitals and child endowment. They fought to raise the age of consent and to provide economic options enabling disadvantaged women to escape prostitution. They argued for women’s sovereignty over their own bodies, including control of their own sexual and reproductive capacities. But they stressed the

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need for broad social reform, envisaging a more moral and ordered society, in which the values attributed to women – caring, nurturing, sharing – would be given priority. ‘The influence of woman over man for good or evil’, said Rose Scott, ‘is and has ever been the most powerful influence in the world … Is it not reasonable to suppose that the influence of women on political life will be that influence … they have already had upon the progress of knowledge and civilization?’29 For progressive activists, women’s citizenship meant civilising masculine practices that impinged upon the vulnerable and weak. That ‘the passions of the first-wave feminists’30 had only a limited impact on dominant political ideas can be explained in two ways. First, the heterogeneity of conservative, progressive and radical women activists, and their exclusion from the parliamentary theatre in which ideological differences were acted out, diminished their influence. Second – an argument that has become the convention in later feminist histories – the accommodations reached between labour and capital in the early Commonwealth period marginalised women.31 These two factors worked in tandem. Most activists understood that ‘a vote is but a small part of the power which the possession of the political franchise confers – its indirect influence is far more important.’32 But they assumed that gaining the vote would give women’s priorities political purchase: ‘Woman’s point of view is not the same as man’s. Her sense of values is different, she places a greater value on human life, human welfare, health and morals.’33 Such values were thought to transcend party and sectional interests. Yet the briefest survey of leading figures shows the fissures in ‘the woman movement’. Far from standing apart from sectional interests, they were, unavoidably, organic intellectuals formed in and speaking for very specific contexts. Rose Scott, for instance, was a woman of independent means,

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deeply influenced by late nineteenth-century liberalism (especially J.S. Mill) and reliant on her broad social contacts in Sydney to bring selected opinion-leaders together in her drawing room. The Womanhood Suffrage League (1891) was her vehicle, and by the early Commonwealth period she was one of the most widely recognised exponents of the woman movement. After women had been granted the vote, Scott formed the Women’s Political Education League to educate them in how to use it in support of women’s interests – but the League’s membership would be eroded as women joined political parties. Scott was an impressive speaker, but an even more skilful lobbyist. If her public advocacy (especially for women’s suffrage) advanced her causes, her campaigns (for raising the age of consent, early closing of shops and factories, separate prisons for women, infant protection and child maintenance, expansion of women’s options beyond marriage or prostitution, women’s education) relied equally for their success on associations formed around her dinner table. She was an educated new-liberal, able to use her advantaged social position to engage directly with political elites. But she died lamenting that Australian women ‘had allowed themselves to be seduced by the men of party politics.’34 Vida Goldstein, a Victorian, was another whose central cause was women’s suffrage. Well-educated and deeply influenced by a family commitment to social reform, and a mother active in the woman movement, she too became a leading speaker and organiser.35 She shared Scott’s view that the dominance of the political parties by men was a problem, but unlike Scott was determined to engage in parliamentary politics directly. She was the first woman in the British Empire to be nominated for election to a national parliament; she stood as an Independent for the Senate, in 1903 – but lost. Following her unsuccessful attempt to enter parliament, Goldstein also turned her attention towards educating female voters; in her case through

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the Women’s Political Association. She ran for parliament four more times, always as an independent Woman Candidate and always unsuccessfully. Much more a socialist than was Scott, her resolute independence prevented a closer alliance with the socialist cause. But she gained an international reputation as an exponent of women’s rights and emancipation. Women more closely engaged with socialism – Elizabeth Ahern, for instance, who was one of those who founded the Women’s Socialist League – were to become as much identified with the ‘class war’ as with women’s causes. While an ardent supporter of Goldstein and of women’s suffrage, and herself a brilliant orator, Ahern’s profile was that of a VSP activist, a free-speech campaigner, and an associate of Arthur Wallace (whom she married) and Tom Mann.36 While accomplished socialist women like Ahern may have raised women’s issues in public consciousness, and challenged the gendered divisions within early socialist movements,37 it is hard to avoid the impression that the importance of the cause (and the masculine iconography of class struggle38) didn’t help the woman movement. The political awakening of women did not depend solely upon new liberals, like Scott, or their socialist sisters, like Goldstein and Ahern. There were activists, too, on the conservative side, and the organisations they initiated – the Australian Women’s National League (AWNL) (Vic., 1903) for instance – ‘provided a combination of professional training and political apprenticeship that women were unlikely to gain elsewhere … [T]hey became the equivalent of employer associations, professional societies and trade unions for middle-class women.’39 One such activist was Eva Hughes who, with her sister, Janet Lady Clarke, was a participant on the foundation of the AWNL. At its inception, the League was closely associated with efforts of the Victorian Employer’s Federation (VEF) to set up a women’s organisation to further the conservative cause. To this end the VEF

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drew on women who had supported an anti-suffrage petition. But after 1902, the issue became: how should conservative women use their political power? Willing or unwilling, the Women of Australia have had the Parliamentary Franchise conferred upon them … and the future of Commonwealth legislation will depend largely on how they use the political power given them. The women of the socialistic party are being energetically organized, and unless the women opposed to Socialism, with all its dangers, are also systematically organized, the near future may be full of dangers to our present social system.40

With the impetus provided by a socially prominent leader (Janet Lady Clarke), enthusiastic volunteer activists and paid political organisers, AWNL membership rapidly increased. Eva Hughes, having borne and raised four children, took to political organisation and public life with gusto. Always a significant figure in the AWNL, she succeeded to the leadership in 1909, on her sister’s sudden death. As the new leader she became an early and effective practitioner of the art of campaigning through the press. An empire loyalist, a Cobdenite liberal (she supported the free trade cause against Deakin) and a social conservative (she refused to support the parliamentary candidature of women, believing ‘that ordinary women’s “best power lies behind the throne”, guiding “right thinking men … to act for us – amending laws relating to women and women’s honour”’41), Hughes had a profound influence on the organised voice of middle-class women. By 1914, she had built the League into reputedly ‘the largest body of organized women in Australia’.42 Organisations such as the AWNL also had input into the evolution of anti-Labor politics. The League was an early participant, with the VEF (and counterparts in other states), in building the network for anti-socialist mobilisation on which Reid – and later, Menzies – came

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to rely. Hughes, however, insisted that the League remain independent of electoral organisations. She fought vehemently and successfully against attempts by Deakin’s daughter (Ivy) and son-in-law (Herbert Brookes) to incorporate the League as a Deakinite Liberal women’s organisation of Deakin’s (then) People’s Party. Indeed, Deakin’s attempts to incorporate women within the party were seen by Hughes as a declaration of war on the AWNL. Yet she also insisted on the League’s right to a say in the candidate pre-selection decisions of the anti-Labor parties, as the price of its co-operation in party campaigns. Hughes hounded Deakin relentlessly on the policy interests of her women’s constituency. Though she infuriated him she could not be ignored. There is no doubt that Hughes and others helped to align ‘safeguarding the interests of home, women and children’43 with the conservative cause. For quite different reasons, women activists of the left (for example, Ahern), the centre (for example, Scott) and the right (for example, Hughes) all chose to operate at a tangent to the parties and to parliament. Nonetheless, there were deep differences about how women’s issues were to be conceived and how women’s interests should be pursued. Allegiances based on gender were fractured, sometimes destroyed, by divisions based on class or organised around a party. In important respects, then, there was no ‘woman movement’. Some of the differences were driven by aspects of the Australian settlement. The ‘living wage’ defined workers as male; the domestic labour of women was invisible in the labour market; therefore the possibility of choice for women between marriage for a livelihood and economic self-sufficiency was limited. That citizen rights hung upon the ‘independence’ of workers meant that they would be diminished for women. Maternal citizenship (rights linked to motherhood and responsibility for ‘the race’) established biological difference at the heart of politics: this was not the full and equal citizenship of the

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independent worker.44 Yet the arguments of women activists would not disappear even as ‘first wave’ feminism lay dormant. They would remain as a measure of what had not been achieved in the early Commonwealth period, and as a resource on which others would later draw to address institutional inequality.

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6 A civic order Tod Moor e

Australians have possessed themselves of the instruments of freedom, without acquiring delicacy in their operation. They have liberalised their institutions, without infusing them with high intellectual and spiritual quality. Their approach to the larger democracy has also aggravated class bitterness. The easy fellowship of Australian democracy has caused such a lowering of the dignity of public life, that authority itself is weakened, and manners are coarsened for want of a high model. In their haste to cast off the address of servility, Australians have been reluctant to acquire the address of mutual respect. Meredith AtkinsoN, 19201

In the inter-war period, there were influential refinements of the relations between individual and society, and between different economic interests, that had evolved during the first decades of the Commonwealth. What was at stake was not just economic progress, but the nature of civil society and of the networks within it. To some extent this can be traced back to the Great War itself. The tensions that emerged in politics and society during the war force us to question just how ‘settled’ the so-called Australian settlement of the early Commonwealth period really was. Much of the public debate focused around conceptions of proper behaviour, not only on the part of individuals but also of government, business, unions, and voluntary associations. The dominating worldview continued to emphasise a liberal polity and was characterised by the emergence of a new breed of public intellectual, their reinterpretation of new liberalism, and their reframing of state intervention

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as state dependency. The Depression – or at least the way political elites were persuaded to respond to it – hobbled progressive thinkers on the labour side in the short term, not least because of the intimidating ferocity of the middle-class reaction to J.T. Lang’s debt rescheduling proposal, though a determination to prevent such events being repeated was significant in shaping the aspirations of the postSecond World War reconstruction generation. The crisis generated a chorus of dissenting voices as some were driven towards more radical options, and this seeded both radical aspirations (and the rise of the communist party), and extreme right splinter groups (intent on preventing revolution). The civic idealism of the early part of this period, as articulated for instance by Walter Murdoch, a disciple of Deakin and an early advocate of citizenship education, had become, by the 1930s, a discourse of order that would contain extremes. This search for consensus, and the continued commitment of the middle class to the British Empire, took place in an atmosphere of rapid change and modernisation, marked by garden suburbs, domestic electrification, motor cars, aeroplanes, the telephone, cinema, radio, office blocks and modern art.

The Great War The greatest influence on the output of inter-war public intellectuals and the conflicting aspirations that their ideas represented was the Great War of 1914–18. In his Short History, Manning Clark summarised the main costs of the war as follows: Of the 416,809 who entered the services during the war, 331,781 had taken the field. Of these, 59,342 were killed, 152,171 were wounded. The cost of the war between 1914 and 1919 was assessed at 364 million pounds [87 per cent of GDP], while between 1919 and the outbreak of World War II in 1939 the consequential cost of

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pensions, repatriation, care of the wounded, interest on war debts, and aids to returned soldiers was about another 270 million pounds [64 per cent of GDP].2

This comprised a social and political crisis of considerable significance in Australian history. It was one of the main formative experiences of Australians in the twentieth century, and was to cast a very long shadow. The effects of the war in the short term were varied and keenly felt. Jingoistic nationalism was loudly proclaimed: The men of our race have done, are doing and will do all that men at any time in the history of the world can do to save their honour and freedom. We … have looked with pride at the exploits of our soldiers in Gallipoli and elsewhere … [M]onths of heroic efforts … achievements which were from a military point of view stupendous … stamped the Australians as men amongst men.3

Below the surface of nationalism, however, lurked the uncertainty reflected in earlier debates over empire loyalism and Australian self-determination. Australia fought for the Empire, but paid the bills as a sovereign state. Every battalion had to be trained, clothed, fed, armed, and transported at the sole expense of the Commonwealth government, leading Frank Anstey, a radical ALP intellectual, to refer in 1916 to the practice of ‘renting trenches’.4 The cost of the war escalated dramatically after the hoped-for early victory failed to materialise: the eventual economic impact of the war was massive. Public debt soared, including war loans subscribed by the middle-class and high interest loans subscribed by big finance, while shortages and inflation developed. But the economy was rapidly transformed as the war effort strengthened manufacturing and heavy industry, and trade restrictions encouraged import replacement.

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One significant effect of the war, then, was the partial modernisation of the Australian economy, and for the first time heavy industry featuring large scale production of copper, zinc, iron, and steel became part of the economic mix. The drastic reduction of imports was advantageous for manufacturing.5 In addition to the estimated 377 million pounds spent on the war itself, the state governments increased their debts by about 100 million pounds. Much of the Commonwealth debt was financed by war loans and this helped to shore up middleclass support for the war and for principles of financial rectitude. The seven war loans between 1915 and 1918 raised about 250 million out of the 377 million pounds spent on the war itself, and were tax exempt and returned 4.5 per cent. The money-raising campaigns were ‘strenuous efforts by the public authorities in many ways parallel to the recruitment campaigns, with public launches, speeches, banners, and gimmicks to attract public interest, such as giant barometers in each capital city to measure the progress, and a large model tank lumbering through the streets.’6 L i b e r a l s a n d t h e wa r

When the war began in early August 1914 it was unanticipated by the majority of Australians, including those whom we would call intellectuals. Many of the latter were in attendance at the conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), held in Australia for the first time. A handsome book edited by George Knibbs, the Commonwealth Statistician, and designed to introduce Australia to delegates, included a chapter on Australian politics by W. Harrison Moore, Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne. Moore reinforced the image of the newly formed Commonwealth as an integral part of the British Empire. His instrumental and calculating support for the Empire, seen earlier in the attitude of Alfred Deakin towards defence arrangements and imperial federation, was

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to be blown away by the guns of August. By chance, not only was the BAAS conference taking place, but so was a federal election campaign. Some measure of the change can be gained from ALP leader Andrew Fisher’s hyperbole: ‘Australians will stand beside our own to help and defend her to our last man and our last shilling.’7 Fisher duly became Prime Minister, but in October 1915 after barely a year in office, he accepted a posting in London and W.M. (Billy) Hughes became Australia’s national leader. In less than a year, the political experience of Australians had shifted from quiet optimism and debates about anti-trust legislation and declining birth rates, to the horrors of Gallipoli. Fiercely jingoistic speeches, flag waving (usually the Union Jack rather than the national flag, which had been introduced in 1901), patriotic sermons, and the odd impassioned mob, coincided with publications such as W. Gordon Henderson’s Foiled! The Enemy in our Own Land (1915), a hysterical account of imagined German spies. Everyone supported British success on the battlefield, yet Australia’s place in the Empire, and indeed the nature of the Empire itself, were unresolved questions. These issues had been raised since the 1880s, idealistically by proponents of imperial federation, and satirically by the writers of the Bulletin. Closer links versus greater independence – this was also the dilemma that occupied the mind of Lionel Curtis, an idealistic British civil servant, who in 1910 established the Australian branches of the Round Table. Its activities in several states during the war years remind us that the problem of Australian self-determination may have been swamped by Empire patriotism but it did not go away.8 The issue of industrial efficiency allied to scientific management (influenced by theories of industrial production published by an American engineer, F.W. Taylor, in the early twentieth century) was felt to be sufficiently compelling in the wartime context to justify a conference and subsequent published volume, National Efficiency – A

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Series of Lectures by the economist R.F. Irvine and others.9 During the later war years Britain experimented with ideas of industrial consensus embodied in Whitley Councils, large committees composed of representatives of business, and shop stewards representing workers, which were charged with planning entire industries. Growing interest in planning and the social organism, while it was not directed against capitalism itself, was another attack upon the unpopular notion of laissez-faire. Liberals in the universities maintained the swing away from laissez-faire thinking. In spite of antiGerman sentiment, the organic view of society inherited from Kant and Hegel and their German interpreters was still being championed by emerging middle-class intellectuals such as G.V. Portus, Frederic Eggleston, and Elton Mayo, as it had been before the war by W. Jethro Brown and Francis Anderson. Citizenship continued to be a focus for their writing, and it was understood almost entirely in terms of duties as opposed to entitlements: ‘Consider … the things government compels you to do; and ask yourself … whether they are not just the things that your conscience tells you you ought to do; you will find that, with very few exceptions, they are’.10 Consensus views of politics also dominated the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), which was established on the eve of the war and became active in New South Wales, and later in the other states, and which was to become the main focus for new liberalism after the war. The entry of the United States into the war at a time when American ideas were dominated by Progressivism, itself akin to British new liberalism, led to discussion of Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic Fourteen Points for European reconstruction and world peace. In 1918 post-war reconstruction became a concern for many writers and this included the prospect of a League of Nations, something foreshadowed in the Fourteen Points. Typical of this writing is Meredith Atkinson’s long pamphlet Social Reconstruction After the War (1918). Apart from the

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Fourteen Points, the writings on reconstruction tended to cite British idealists such as Ernest Barker, Norman Angell, Alfred Zimmern, and H.A.L. Fisher. The war also stimulated interest in international relations. The seizing of German colonies in New Guinea, the Solomons, Nauru, and Samoa, placed the affairs of the southwest Pacific region high on the political agenda in both Australia and New Zealand. A large number of Australians, both active combatants and those connected to government, military education, and military intelligence, travelled widely. Some, including the economists J.B. Brigden and R.C. Mills, undertook studies in England before returning. When the war was over, a final effect on the development of Australian thinking in international relations was the Paris peace conference, which led to the Treaty of Versailles, at which Billy Hughes ignored Britain and pursued an aggressively nationalist and anti-Japanese policy. It was from this point that Australians began fully to grasp both the possibilities and the responsibilities of genuine diplomacy, in a world where the Dominions were now recognised as sovereign states. L a b o r a n d t h e wa r

For those on lower incomes the war years were difficult times, with inflation of 47 per cent over the course of the conflict in spite of price controls.11 The fall in real wages was accompanied by a significant increase in strikes, already on the upswing before the outbreak of fighting. Although workers were disproportionately represented among the front line troops, working-class support for the war was patchy. The percentage of GDP spent on welfare rose substantially, from 0.4 in 1909­–10 to 1.7 in 1918–19, and this was another aspect of the human cost of the war. Repatriation benefits extended to returned service personnel amounted to more than the total spent on all other forms of welfare, and included innovations such as ‘War Service Homes’, an

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early form of public housing.12 Labor governments in several states put ‘state socialism’ into practice and established government-owned and run operations of economic significance, varying from pubs and fish and chip shops, to electricity grids.13 After Hughes became Prime Minister, in 1915, he went to Britain to participate in the imperial War Cabinet and stayed for a number of months. On his return to Australia Hughes announced a referendum to legitimate the introduction of conscription for overseas service in the military forces and thus began the two conscription debates, of 1916 and 1917. The IWW and its allies in the militant worker movement in 1916 had a ready-made arsenal of anti-militarist propaganda in the form of a popular and remarkably radical illustrated book called War – What For?, by the American Marxist, George Kirkpatrick, and when Hughes announced the first referendum groups like the IWW and the Victorian Socialist Party (VSP) were ready. The union movement, some of which had been attracted by militant ideas since about 1907,14 reacted poorly to Hughes’s proposal. So too did many Irish Australians (about a quarter of the population), aware of the brutality of British military actions in their homeland after the attempted uprising of Easter 1916. D.P. Russell, a miner who had almost wrested the seat of Ballarat from Alfred Deakin a few years earlier for Labor, published Sinn Fein and the Irish Rebellion (1916) in which he defended the heroes of Gallipoli as well as the Irish republicans, and urged his readers to vote ‘No’. From his base in Melbourne, R.S. (Bob) Ross, the leader of the anti-conscriptionists, reprinted a 1910 pamphlet by James Connolly, a socialist who took part in the Rising and was then shot by a British firing squad. The intention of Hughes to counter such opposition via a legitimising referendum underestimated divisions in his own party. ALP members fought on both sides of the 1916 referendum campaign. The proposal was defeated, but the rift within the party saw Hughes and

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his followers forced out. He survived as prime minister by relying on the support of his former anti-Labor opponents until a merger of the Hughes group with the Opposition in 1917 produced a new party, the Nationalist Party, which then won the 1917 federal election. The second conscription referendum in 1917 also failed. Like many from the ALP, Hughes had endorsed a moderate reformist variety of trade union ideology seeking little beyond ‘civilising’ capitalism, set out in his Case for Labor of 1910 and rejected by Tom Mann in his Socialism in 1905 (see previous chapter). Many trade unionists felt that the reformist approach was not addressing injustice in the workplace, and that the arbitration system supported by Hughes and others in the ALP did not deliver higher wages: this helps account for the 1917 strike, which developed into Australia’s biggest strike since the 1890s. As we saw earlier, radical socialist thinking had been circulating in Australia from the late 1880s, bedevilling the ALP and frightening potential ALP supporters, particularly in the Irish Catholic segment of the working-class population.15 In order to retain this vote the ALP needed to purge militant tendencies, and this mentality helps explain the vehemence of the campaign by ex-Labor politicians such as Hughes, W.A. Holman, and George Pearce. During the conscription debates and after, Hughes and his newfound liberal-conservative political allies vented their anger and frustration on the IWW, effectively destroying it. By the end of the war most of the IWW’s major activists were in prison, ending ten years of organised worker militancy. In Sydney, Donald Grant and eleven other militants were imprisoned in late 1916 on spurious arson charges and their convictions were not overturned until 1920, after two Royal Commissions. The campaign supporting ‘The IWW Twelve’ was spearheaded by Henry Boote, radical editor of the Sydney Worker, and Percy Brookfield, a socialist member of the NSW Parliament.16 The conscription debates, especially in 1917, tore Australia apart,

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exposing cleavages of class, religion, and identity, which politics had hitherto papered over. In 1917 physical attacks on anti-conscription speakers became so common that trade unionists in Broken Hill were obliged to create a body-guard, Labor’s Volunteer Army as it was jokingly known. Loyalism, militarism, and imperial supremacism, reinforced by middle-class ideas of duty and social unity, dominated one side of the debate, displayed in a little magazine called Comment and Cartoons. The other side, while it agreed on the virtues of Australian soldiery and even on participation in the war, emphasised the unfairness of compulsion and the disproportionate price paid by the working class. But while many ALP voters opposed conscription a large number of Labor MPs supported it, their resignations damaging the party for years. After the split the ALP became more sympathetic to the industrial left, but paradoxically the ALP also became a more Catholic party as Irish Australians, disgusted by the aftermath of Easter 1916, became politicised. These changes to the ALP were to have significant consequences in the inter-war period, the 1940s, and the 1950s. The conflicted nature of Australian political consciousness that these debates reveal may help us to understand the ambivalence already noted between ideas of a stronger British Empire, and a more independent Australia. They also reveal a division between those with a stake in maintaining developmental and property-based liberal constitutionalism at all costs, and those who saw themselves being excluded from the benefits of economic success, with nothing to value except their own labour and their own skins.

Between the wars What followed for developments in political thinking and culture during the 1920s and 1930s? The most obvious feature of these two decades was the entrenchment of the discourse of social liberalism.

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This was apparent at both the level of middle-class polemical writing and within the work of highly trained university-based authors. There was also a conservative liberalism that evolved as a reaction to the Depression and the interventionist solutions proposed by ALP figures such as Frank Anstey, John Curtin, Ted Theodore, and the maverick Jack Lang, as well as the drift towards Australian fascism by figures such as Wilfrid Kent-Hughes and Eric Campbell. Later in the 1930s the social effects of the Depression would lead to a tentative but ultimately abortive debate on new social welfare provisions: this entailed yet another working-out of the idealist tendency. In the early part of the period in question we must examine the phenomenon of ‘countrymindedness’ (a term coined by Don Aitkin in 197217), which underpinned the rise of the Country Party. We also need to consider the emergence of new patterns of workingclass thinking exemplified by some ALP figures, many Communist Party activists, and groups such as the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). By the later 1930s the Communist Party had become a favourite haunt for middle-class student radicals as well as trade unionists, and events like the Spanish Civil War exposed raw nerves within the ALP in particular. As war clouds gathered, a remarkable phenomenon, the Australia First Movement (AFM), a xenophobic right-wing movement spearheaded by a former communist, P.R. Stephensen, railed against the Britishness of middle-class Australia. Stephensen and other leaders of the movement were later interned during the war for their pro-fascist, anti-war sentiments. But Stephenson’s The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1936), and the AFM’s calls for Aborigines to be recognised as citizens, prefigured the emergence in the 1940s of a more confident Australian nationalism than had been hitherto experienced. Finally, the interwar period also saw a degree of crossing-over between the progressive element within new liberalism, and mild forms of socialism,

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and this was characteristically combined with a Christian ethos of the ‘social gospel’ or ‘the kingdom’. The radical left

Although the IWW had taken the lead in radicalism, its near destruction permitted the other hard-left organisations to lift their profiles. In 1919 the surviving industrial Marxists, unable to stomach the concept of a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries, intensified their agitation for ‘One Big Union’ (OBU). As early as 1913, IWW members in Sydney had formed a local offshoot of the Workers’ International Industrial Union (WIIU), and in August 1918 a congress of unions in Sydney had endorsed the establishment of a Workers’ Industrial Union of Australia.18 By 1919, the WIIU in Melbourne was publishing pamphlets such as Job Control, a frank but anonymous advocacy of worker councils in industry, and a periodical called the One Big Union Herald. In 1920, led by ‘Jock’ Garden, Tom Walsh, Ernie Lane (brother of William Lane) and other militants, the OBU campaign peaked, with a concerted attempt to gain control of the largest union in the country, the AWU. Although popular with AWU rank and file members the attempt was thwarted by officials of the union and although the WIIU survived in Adelaide into the 1930s this was the end of effective industrial Marxism within the Australian left, opening the way for the Communist Party. The Bolshevik Revolution captured the imagination of a great many working-class intellectuals. This is how Ernie Lane described its effect, looking back in Brisbane in 1939: To me, as to many millions, the workers’ revolution in Russia, came as an inspiring revelation of the new society which we had dreamed of and toiled for with little hope in the immediate future. The triumph of the Russian workers lit a torch that flashed a light across the world that gives faith in the hope that the age-long tyranny of the

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select few over the masses of the people will soon be a nightmare of the past.19

The Australian Socialist Party (ASP), which had split from the Manninitiated VSP in 1912, was at the forefront in promoting Leninist ideas, and in 1919 amid flurries of anti-Russian hysteria such as the Red Flag Riots in Brisbane,20 it published a brace of pamphlets, including translations of works by Lenin, Bucharin, and Trotsky. Together with a periodical, The Proletarian, these were published in Melbourne and distributed through Andrade’s Bookshops, which had become part of the demi-monde both there and in Sydney. After much discussion between the ASP and other socialist groupings (including the VSP), a secret meeting took place in Sydney in late 1920. With ‘world revolution’ in the air, it seemed imperative to the ASP that a genuinely revolutionary party be established without delay, and so, on 30 October 1920, the Australian Communist Party (later renamed Communist Party of Australia) was born.21 Among the Communist Party’s founders was Guido Barrachi, who would have a long and often strained career in the party, even advocating its dissolution at one point in the mid-1920s so that its members could hijack the ALP. Other intellectuals among the founders were J.B. Miles, Norman Jeffery, and W.P. Earsman. Given the antiIWW background of the ASP and the hostility of Marxian purists to top-down political action of the Leninist type, few former IWW militants joined the party for more than a brief stint. Through most of the 1920s the Communist Party had very few members; its numbers were not to grow until the mid-1930s. Failure to join, however, did not necessarily imply lack of sympathy, and it is apparent that many Australian trade unionists looked with considerable curiosity to the Soviet experiment. Outside the Communist Party, intellectuals of the socialist left made few significant contributions to political debate, and none to rival the

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importance of V. Gordon Childe’s How Labour Governs (1923). Childe’s observation of the tendency of the ALP to betray the workers whenever it experienced the reality of parliamentary power, written from an insider’s perspective but with the analytical clarity of classical Marxism, took the form of a study of the background and history of the Storey Labor Government in New South Wales. He noted the collapse of ALP ideology amid rising intrigues and a spoils system related to trade union leadership and networks of ‘mates’ in the Party, in a paradigm study of reformists in office. Childe soon abandoned Australian political analysis to go overseas, for a notable career in archaeology. Other classical Marxists of note in the 1920s were E.E. Judd and Bob Ross. Judd’s How to End Capitalism and Inaugurate Socialism (1925) maintained the IWW tradition derived from Daniel de Leon, which opposed Leninism and also opposed any involvement with the ALP. Judd and others in the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) became absorbed in personal rivalries, although the SLP survived into the 1940s, when it re-published Bellamy’s Looking Backward, perhaps harking back to the palmy days of the early ASL. Bob Ross also nursed some IWW tendencies, and in What Next? Building the Industrialist State (1921) he advocated the OBU. But he also favoured the nationalisation of industry, and the idea of two parliaments, one political and one industrial, for which Sidney and Beatrice Webb had argued in Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain (1920). Sympathetic to the Soviet experiment, Ross campaigned for the Pan Pacific Trade Union Secretariat in 1928, which was largely a Comintern initiative. Ross was a Marxist who maintained good relations with radical trade unionists within the ALP such as Frank Anstey. This informed the position he had adopted against the ASP when he argued in Revolution in Russia and Australia (1920) that the existence of parliamentary democracy in Australia meant that Marxian objectives need not be pursued exclusively by a vanguard party.

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In the Depression, the Communist Party and broad left issue-based alliances, such as the League Against War and Fascism and the Council for Civil Liberties, benefited from the anger of those Australians who felt betrayed by capitalism. With events such as a lock-out on the coalfields near Newcastle and a large 1928 timberworkers’ strike, Communist Party membership began to grow. Recovering from the internal disunity of the 1920s, under the leadership of J.B. Miles and L.L. (Lance) Sharkey, the Party presented itself as a revitalised force and in 1930 issued a new, widely circulated manifesto, Australia’s Part in the World Revolution. The Party line now highlighted the worldwide Depression as the start of the expected ‘crisis’ in capitalism, attacked the ALP as a ‘social fascist’ party, and remained opposed to the White Australia policy. In the 1929 Commonwealth election the five CP candidates won just 3000 votes, while in the October 1930 NSW elections a total of 54 official candidates polled about 19,000.22 The Communist line changed after 1933, both in Moscow and in Australia. With the ongoing rise of the far right, the Party sought friends within the broad left, embracing the ALP left within a united front. This had little effect on ideas, however, apart from suppressing the critique of the ALP as a ‘social fascist’ party. Len Fox and J.N. Rawling were leading Communist Party intellectuals at this time, as was the Western Australian novelist Katharine Susannah Prichard. Much of the Party’s printed material was adapted from Comintern material supplied from Moscow. Rawling’s Smash the War Mongers! (1933) shrieked against empire and militarism, as did Fox in his The Truth about ANZAC (1936), which argued that the Great War was a miscalculation and that the Gallipoli campaign was part of a pact between Britain and Czarist Russia, to exchange control over the Bosporus for control of the Persian (Iranian) oilfields. In 1937 Rawling published an exposure of corporate and elite ownership in Australian industry in the very popular pamphlet Who Owns Australia?, subsequently reprinted in many

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editions. Sharkey attacked the Catholic hierarchy and pleaded for understanding and support in the struggle in Spain against Franco and his allies. Thus, the party intellectuals of the later 1930s encouraged both peace and war – disarmament of great empires, and the raising of funds to buy rifles for the volunteers in Spain. The broad left gained an unexpected flood of free press and radio publicity in late 1934 and early 1935 when the government’s attempts to deny entry to a visiting Czech anti-Nazi campaigner, Egon Kisch, backfired spectacularly. Attempting to evade an exclusion declaration, Kisch leapt from the ship on which he had arrived to the Melbourne dock and broke his leg. He was put back on board and then, in Sydney, under the terms of the Immigration Restriction Act, was given a dictation test (in Scottish Gaelic). When he failed, he was declared a prohibited immigrant and imprisoned for six months. His conviction was set aside by the High Court on appeal (Gaelic was determined not to be a European language), and Kisch commenced a now much publicised speaking tour, attracting large crowds, until, nearly six months later there was an agreement that saw his legal costs covered and he left Australia.23 In the late 1930s the Council for Civil Liberties in Melbourne was under the spell of a significant political intellectual, Brian Fitzpatrick. Between 1934 and the outbreak of war, Fitzpatrick consorted with a diverse array of bohemian intellectuals at regular drinking parties at the Swanston Family Hotel, including Judah Waten, Esmonde Higgins (Nettie Palmer’s brother), and the artist Noel Counihan. In Bernard Smith’s words, this was ‘the major social centre for Melbourne’s radical intelligentsia at a time when the city was in the process of recapturing the cultural energy lost since the days of the 1890s depression.’24 Most of Fitzpatrick’s output belongs to the 1940s and 1950s, but in 1939 his ground-breaking economic history of the early colonies, British Imperialism and Australia 1783–1833, was published

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by Melbourne University Press. He sought to challenge the liberal view that the colonies were venues for individual enterprise, with a structural perspective of the colonies as part of a worldwide system of domination and dependency by means of which British manufacturing obtained cheap raw materials and markets. This foundational work was profoundly to influence the post-war left’s interpretation of Australian economic development.

Ideas and the ALP In June 1921 the ALP held a special conference of delegates from the trade unions in order to address the changing political and industrial situation following the war, the OBU campaign, and the appearance of the Communist Party. This conference agreed on the ALP’s adoption of an official policy to advance ‘the socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange’, which expanded on the brief statements endorsed by national conferences of the Party in 1905 and 1919. This imitation of the IWW ‘Preamble’ became known as the ‘Socialist Objective’, and it was interpreted according to a ‘Declaration’ framed by Maurice Blackburn at the same conference. The Blackburn Declaration made it clear that the ALP would not seek to abolish private property rights in industry ‘where such instrument is utilised by its owner in a socially useful manner and without exploitation’. The Objective was maintained by the ALP for many decades, although it was progressively watered-down, yet at no time in the Party’s subsequent history was it seriously acted upon.25 One reason was that the persistent failure of referendums to enable the Commonwealth to nationalise monopolies and regulate trusts, combines, or syndicates of major producers, such as those in 1911, 1913 and 1919, tended to confirm the view that ‘state socialism’ was no longer a serious possibility.

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The ALP produced few intellectuals of note in the 1920s apart from Childe, and those who did stand out were mostly from the left of the Party. Frank Anstey published Red Europe (1919) and Money Power (1921). The former, which went through at least two editions, was largely a description of the short-lived worker republics in the former Austro-Hungarian empire, which he visited just after the war. It also praised the tenacity of the Russian fight against Western intervention between 1917 and 1919. The latter extended his previous critique, in The Kingdom of Shylock, to the 1920 bank legislation that gave control over the Commonwealth Bank to its governor and directors. Anstey was associated with James Scullin (ALP prime minister 1929–32) and John Curtin (ALP prime minister 1941–45), among others, and in about 1930 he and Curtin co-authored a history of the ALP and the union movement. Histories of the sort Anstey and Curtin produced have been a vehicle for ALP thinking since W.G. Spence’s Australia’s Awakening (1909), or even earlier (for example, a history of the NSW Labor Party by T.R. Roydhouse and H.J. Taperrel in 1892, and of the ‘Eight Hour Movement’ by W.E. Murphy in 1896). In 1926–27 George Black’s self-published A History of the NSW Political Labour Party, followed by Arbitration: A Failure (1928), also presented historical narratives. Former Queensland premier, E.G. Theodore, who had entered federal politics in 1927, and would be elected deputy prime minister and treasurer under James Scullin in 1929, published a Campaign Manual for the hard-fought 1928 elections, which defended protection, questioned the repayment of the interest on the war loans, and criticised the very high levels of British migration to Australia at a time of unemployment. His capacity to pursue such policies was to be short-lived: he was forced to relinquish his cabinet post to face a Royal Commission that alleged his involvement in corrupt dealings in Queensland – during which time J.A. (Joe) Lyons, a much more

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conservative man, assumed the Treasury portfolio – and soon after his name was cleared and he resumed as Treasurer, he was forced to abandon his own counter-cyclical plans to implement the deflationary Premiers’ Plan (see further below). In the late 1920s constitutional political debate was enlivened by a Royal Commission on the Constitution, chaired by liberal intellectual J.B. Peden, which reported to the Commonwealth Parliament in 1929. The Peden Commission was dominated by nominees of the Bruce– Page Coalition Government, but included ALP members M.B. Duffy and D.L. McNamara, and an independent Melbourne businessperson, T.R. Ashworth. On the question of phasing out the states, only Ashworth, Duffy, and McNamara were favourable, as they pointed out in their appended Minority Report. This, followed by A.P. Canaway’s The Failure of Federalism in Australia (1930), maintained pressure on the ALP, which had incorporated unitary government into its platform in 1919 and into its ‘fighting platform’ in 1927. It was only a matter of days between the election of the Scullin Labor Government and the stock market crash of 1929, which began the Depression. Like the war, the economic crisis was a global event: we cannot ascribe local causes to it, nor attribute local blame. The intensity of the Depression experience is hard to calculate but it must be accounted one of the primary motivating factors in the subsequent progress of the welfare state in Australia. The origins of the crisis lay in the realm of international finance, particularly the perception that debts could not be honoured. British financial interests had been given time to restructure by the United States, and they in turn pressured Australia to come to their rescue by stopping future borrowings and by maintaining repayments on current borrowings, thereby upholding the market value of the debts. In spite of this Britain repudiated its own US war loans in 1933. The Scullin Government was forced into a position of approving a formula drawn up by economists connected

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to the privately owned Bank of New South Wales, which became known as the Premiers’ Plan. The main thrust of the Premiers’ Plan was a deflationary policy involving cuts in wages, cuts in government spending, and cuts in pensions, as well as revenue measures to guarantee that there would be no defaulting on interest payments to Britain for loans, including war loans. What followed was a massive public debate and pamphlet war over the merits or otherwise of the Premiers’ Plan and alternatives proposed by, among others, Theodore, Curtin, and J.T. (Jack) Lang. It was natural for the public generally to seek guidance and advice from university-trained experts in the field, and according to the orthodox economists the main priority was sound finance, and the prompt honouring of all scheduled interest repayments no matter the consequences. The British financial institutions, largely through their spokesperson Otto Niemeyer and his 1930 Report, insisted that repayments must be accompanied by structural adjustment in the form of deep cuts to the public sector. Opposing Niemeyer’s harsh Report was the indomitable Billy Hughes, who objected to overseas bankers interfering in matters of state. Hughes also drew attention to the fact that a large proportion of the loans were in fact war loans. The British banks were also attacked in pamphlets by Frank Anstey and John Curtin and one of the last things Bob Ross did before his death was to assist John O’Rockie to publish What Means This Unemployment (1931) demanding the abolition of the war debts and advocating full employment. The origin of the ALP in the labour movement was a recurrent theme. In 1934, for instance, Lloyd Ross (a son of Bob Ross) and Alex McLagen published an exhortatory history of the Dorchester Martyrs (or Tolpuddle Martyrs), transported a century earlier for forming a trade union. H.V. Evatt, then still a Justice of the High Court, published another study of the Dorchester trade unionists,

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which included a Foreword by Bishop Burgmann, in 1937. Lloyd Ross also contributed to National Economic Planning (1934), which dealt mainly with economics, in which he had taken his own degree. In 1935 Ross’s chapter in an anthology, Trends in Australian Politics, was paired with a chapter by the moderator of the socialist objective, Maurice Blackburn. During the 1930s Ross became a member of the Round Table, an astonishing feat for the son of a renowned Marxist. Ross also published a fascinating biography of William Lane in 1935, in which he reflected not only upon Lane, but also on the roles of Francis Adams and Henry Lawson, in the emergence of organised labour in politics. John Curtin, who would later be party leader and prime minister, contributed a chapter on ‘The Social Service State’ to the anthology What the Census Reveals (1936). Muriel Heagney, feminist, unionist and ALP activist, started the long campaign for women’s economic equality and economic citizenship with her book, Are Women Taking Men’s Jobs? (1935). Despite her powerful argument that economic independence should be seen as of equal importance to political and civil rights, it would be forty years before an adult minimum wage for women was included in national wage determinations. Ben Chifley, a rising figure in the Federal Caucus, was converted to Keynesianism and is reputed to have had the first copy of the General Theory (1936) to arrive in Australia. Radio was emerging as an extension of the public sphere, and in the 1930s ALP activists found that radio broadcasts linked to pamphlets reached out to a mass audience. An example was Patriots All Ltd. The Munition Makers Prayer (1934), broadcast by J.J. Holland and T. Young, which echoed the anti-militarism of the First World War debates. Labor support for public works and opposition to federalism was aired in 1935 in a broadcast by A.S. Drakeford, and in another broadcast that year P.J. Clarey put the case for high wages and public ownership. L.C. Jauncey was a journalist linked to the ALP via his reportage for

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the Sydney Worker. His main publications, such as Australia’s Government Bank (1933) and The Story of Conscription in Australia (1935), helped to create a Labor view of recent history, which, like the radio broadcasts, would appeal to the ‘ordinary citizen’ and which was critical of the war, banks, and federalism.

The Country Party Within parliamentary politics the main development of the early 1920s was the formal emergence of the Country Party and its hold on certain rural electorates. The thinking of rural activists, whether described as agrarian ideology, or as ‘rurality’, or (later) ‘countrymindedness’, resonates with much earlier political theories, such as the court versus country theory of Henry St John (Bolingbroke), or the agrarianism of Thomas Jefferson, which characterised small farmers as bearers of virtue against the corruption and vice of big cities and in particular big business and banking. Countrymindedness had been one component of the Kyabram movement of 1902, yet it was relatively new in Australian political culture and was linked to the rise in small holdings. William Farrer’s introduction of new wheat cultivars such as ‘Federation’ in the early 1900s led to an explosion in small farming and this was accompanied by a boom in dairying. Regions such as the Riverina and northern Victoria, the mid-west of New South Wales, southern Queensland and parts of South Australia and Western Australia, became wheatproducing areas practically overnight. Dairying expanded very rapidly in higher rainfall regions like the North Coast of New South Wales, and this was combined with a large scale clearing and timberworking industry. Most of the earlier land selections had resulted in failure but there had been some realisation of the officially sanctioned preference for small farming as a mode of land use after 1860, out of which

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emerged ‘Steele Rudd’s’ (A.H. Davis’s) identity-forming stereotypes of ‘Dad and Dave’ in On Our Selection (1899) and other highly popular novels. Small farmers, or family farmers, had been largely absent from the pastoral era ‘legend’ of bush nomads celebrated by the Bulletin, until it began to publish Steele Rudd’s ‘Dad and Dave’ stories. By the time of the Great War, the image of life on the farm was becoming emblazoned on the national psyche as the wheat and dairy industries in particular expanded. Farming became part of the lived experience of many Australians, as shearing had been for generations. Whereas the Communist Party was linked to a self-aware worker movement, countryminded political candidates appeared spontaneously during the war and were independent of larger organising forces until their party was well underway. Small farmers were hostile to banks, but were equally hostile to large scale landholders such as the remnant squatters. For them, the issue of ordered marketing arrangements for butter or wheat was more central than free trade, which threatened them as much as bank mortgages and drought. The wartime experience of block sales to Britain encouraged these schemes. Earle Page, a community-minded country doctor (from Grafton, NSW) and an inventive political strategist, was elected to the federal parliament in 1919 as a founding member of the Country Party. Page had realised that the wheat and dairy farmers could win a significant number of seats in parliament, if they forged alliances with the citizenry of the regional centres, who were mostly working-class voters. The identification of common interests made the forging of such alliances much easier, and the greater the distance between the regional centre and the state capital the more the ‘big city’ was resented there, as for example in the far north coast and adjacent ranges in New South Wales, and in the Riverina. Apart from Page the two leading intellectuals of the Country Party between the wars

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were David Drummond and Ulrich Ellis. The final cementing of the Country Party, then, was the work of Earle Page and his allies, and it culminated in a Coalition government with the Nationalist Party, led by S.M. Bruce, commencing in 1923 and confirmed in the elections of 1925.

New liberal and related thinking Liberalism in the immediate post-war years was dominated by a tightly interwoven network of academic writers linked to the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), which had been established in Edwardian Oxford to build bridges between the universities and the working class. It was founded in 1904 by Albert Mansbridge, a devoutly Anglican cabinet maker, who was also a champion of the British co-operative movement. Mansbridge visited Australia in 1913, where he found a receptive audience. By 1919 the WEA was largely responsible for university extension courses to adults in every state in eastern Australia. From 1919 to 1923 it published seven important textbooks, each of which expressed aspects of Australian social liberalism (idealism) by a distinctive author: Elton Mayo; Meredith Atkinson; G.V. Portus; F.A. Bland; H.B. Higgins; J.T. Sutcliffe and Herbert Heaton. These writers in turn had links via the WEA, via their universities, and via their Anglicanism, to a number of other liberal intellectuals, including (to name only a few) Frederic Eggleston, W. Harrison Moore, Herbert Brookes, Walter Murdoch, Peter Board, E. Morris Miller, Mildred and Bernard Muscio, and especially Francis Anderson. The phenomenon of tightly interlocking circles of mostly universitybased intellectuals in Australia in the 1920s and 1930s has been noted by Stephen Alomes and Helen Bourke,26 and it mirrors the situation in pre-1914 England, where ‘new liberalism was not … the creation

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of a few individuals, but the product of a loosely attached group of like-minded people who exchanged ideas and formulated common views through a number of shared forums, the membership of which overlapped in an unusually consistent pattern.’27 Another type of venue that connected middle-class intellectuals into tight networks was the dinner club. The most organised of these was The Boobooks, formed in 1902 by Frederic Eggleston and B.A. Levinson, which met in Melbourne every month between the wars, with a meal followed by a paper and discussion, and even the taking of some cursory minutes. Members included W. Harrison Moore, J.G. Latham, and at one time even the socialist Bernard O’Dowd. The Round Table groups also used to function as dinner clubs, although their ‘moots’ were less frequent. It would be interesting to know how many of the prominent middleclass intellectuals were active freemasons. As we saw in the case of liberalism before the war, the new liberal ideology was based on more than simply a reaction against the antisocial consequences of laissez-faire economic ideas. German idealist philosophy in the tradition of Hegel and Kant (sometimes filtered through a study of classical Greek), and a Christian social ethic of raising up the downtrodden, gave this variant of liberalism a paradoxical quality, which we see in its Australian exponents. While the law of the jungle of Herbert Spencer was rejected, the existing property system was affirmed, and whereas it was the duty of citizens to raise up the poor, any attempt by the poor as a whole to rise unaided was seen as an attack on the unity of society. It is worth noting that by now leading figures, such as Portus, Bland, Eggleston, and Mayo, were Australian-born and educated, placing them in a growing phalanx of middle-class intellectuals who, like Deakin and Wise before them, were native to Australia rather than Britain. Although the war had many and varied effects it was, for all its magnitude, an external event that may have modified, but could not

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fundamentally alter, underlying social and cultural patterns. It did, however, provide much of the impetus for schemes of industrial planning, strongly promoted by new liberals during the transitional period of 1918–20. The war had demonstrated what economic planning could achieve, and as we have seen, industrial organisation on a sector by sector basis, an idea actually pioneered by the IWW, took on concrete form in Britain late in the war. In 1919 a number of works appeared in Australia supporting a co-operative approach to the organisation and planning of sectors of industry. J.B. Holmes’s The British Scheme explained the operation of Whitley Councils in Britain, and two works by Portus, An Introduction to the Study of Industrial Reconstruction and The Problem of Industry in Politics, cited Whitley Councils as examples of what needed to be done to advance industrial efficiency. Elton Mayo’s version of the organic society in his 1919 WEA text Democracy and Freedom drew heavily on the writing of the apostate Fabian, Graham Wallas, of the University of London. Mayo was critical of democracy for its dependence on the fickle uneducated majority, preferring instead a governing layer of society ‘properly trained’ in the arts of ‘sane and logical public discussion’. The argument drew on points derived from Wallas, and on earlier ideas from Moisei Ostrogorski, Gustave Le Bon, Alexis de Tocqueville, and J.S. Mill. Meredith Atkinson, in The New Social Order (1919), and in a long chapter ‘The Australian Outlook’, in Australia – Economic and Political Studies, which he edited in 1920, focused explicitly on relations between labour and capital, which had been ignored by Mayo due to his extreme organicism. Atkinson, one of the pro-conscription leaders in 1916–17, was highly critical of labour activism, which ‘has too readily adopted the class war as an excuse for ill-considered and violent action.’ He argued that ‘the Australian worker has an even narrower conception of the state than the average Marxian’ and that the worker ‘neither knows nor cares that politics is wider than economics. It is to him

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but one part of the great fight against capitalism.’ There was also an implicit criticism of the ALP: There is no doubt that the acquisition of political power has increased the assertiveness of the industrial classes. They are more apt to demand concessions and improvements when their own representatives are in power. Things economic seem to them easy of alteration, and they do not hesitate to demand the most drastic changes.28

Atkinson was critical of the system of industrial awards and of ‘the defects of the machinery of arbitration which arouse the hostility of the workers’, including ‘the general tendency of Industrial Courts to unsettle the mind of the worker by offering him [sic] a constant inducement to agitate for increases in wages.’ In contrast, another text in the series A New Province of Law and Order (1919), by H.B. Higgins, celebrated the arbitration system in Australia. For Atkinson and the other intellectuals in this group, the crux of the problem was that workers, in their view, had no civic conscience, no sense of idealism that would sustain a broader vision of the perfect social order. They needed to be shown how to take individual responsibility for ensuring the economic and social health of the nation as a whole. The other WEA texts displayed similar tendencies. G.V. Portus’s Marx and Modern Thought (1921) attacked the ‘problem’ at its source using a combination of political science and economic history. F.A. Bland’s Shadows and Realities of Modern Government (1923) used the ‘science’ of public administration, partially derived from Progressive Wisconsin via his earlier association with Peter Board, and partly influenced by Graham Wallas’s organicism, to enlarge on the theme of government by experts. Bland had been a postgraduate student under Wallas in London. As well as strongly advocating university training for the senior grades of the state and Commonwealth public services, Bland proposed specialised groups within administrative structures. Citing Wallas, he pointed to ‘the necessity for developing a thought organisation for the

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work of government’, and even ‘an expert headquarters’ to improve decision-making.29 Four texts published between 1921 and 1922 were all concerned with economics and trade unionism. J.T. Sutcliffe’s History of Trade Unionism (1921) was a specialist study of labour history and economic history from a liberal perspective that was typically hostile to militant unionism. Herbert Heaton’s Modern Economic History (1921) contained a discussion of socialism in Australia and combined orthodox economics with the more radical theories of J.A. Hobson. Taken together with Higgins’s and Portus’s texts, these publications embraced the mission of the WEA in the early post-war years, to ‘educate’ workers away from militancy and strike action, in favour of social responsibility, understood organically rather than collectively. In 1923, two women liberal intellectuals separately published books defending the White Australia policy from a new liberal perspective. Myra Willard’s History of the White Australia Policy and Persia Campbell’s Chinese Coolie Emigration both sought to justify the policy and to portray its history favourably. This may have been a response to people like Hastings Young, who in 1922 advocated ‘coloured labour’ to develop the tropics, but it was more likely a response to criticism of the existing policy by Britain and Japan, in the context of the establishment of the League of Nations and Australia’s Mandate over New Guinea. The fact that both books were written by new liberal women is curious, as very few women were publishing political texts at the time. Like Bland, Campbell had been a student of Graham Wallas at the University of London. She went on to co-edit a collection in 1928 for the Institute for Pacific Relations, then moved from Sydney to New York, where she eventually became a pioneer of the US consumer movement and helped to found the United Nations Association in 1945. Immigration politics, which did not intensify until the late 1930s, was partly damped down by the policy, which facilitated large intakes of British migrants during the 1920s.

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The burst of WEA activity marked by its publications came to an end not long before S.M. Bruce (and Earle Page) replaced Hughes in the leadership of a Nationalist–Country Party coalition in 1923. The Bruce Government represented a retreat towards conventional liberalism in politics, with residual ALP influences sympathetic to unionism, which had arisen from the defection to the Nationalists of Hughes and others, being purged from the political right at the Commonwealth level. There is a dearth of writings from the middle years of the 1920s: perhaps this reflected a delayed onset of apathy and pessimism following the disheartening experience of the war, especially its attendant human costs. Addressing the Boobooks in 1923, Frederic Eggleston detected a post-war pessimism pervading political thought in Australia, which was at odds with the heroic image of middle-class idealism projecting ‘an organic sense of community’. The leadership of the Nationalists by Hughes, especially his reliance on the popular press, reinforced the trend towards mass politics and mass publics, making the heroic Edwardian approach redundant. The new liberals adapted by moving away from the ‘great society’ and becoming more enmeshed in class politics. As the 1920s drew to a close and Bruce moved ever closer to electoral defeat due to his draconian antiunion laws, liberalism re-emerged in the printed sources, assisted by the freeing-up of intellectuals like Eggleston (no longer a Victorian MP) and Harrison Moore (retired). The WEA intellectuals now made way for a larger but no less interwoven cluster of idealist writers, which included many of the remaining WEA figures. This cohort had close links not merely with the Round Table groups in Melbourne and Sydney, but also with a number of so-called Institutes. The primary organisations in this category were the League of Nations Union (LNU), the Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA), the Institute for Pacific Relations (IPR) and the Australian Institute of Political Science (AIPS). In the case of Melbourne

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all four local branches of these were housed under one roof, with a common Secretariat, at the Bureau of Social and International Affairs. The AIPS, and sometimes the AIIA, published anthologies based on mini-conferences, and these accumulated to form a body of political literature in its own right. Also, in 1927 a little magazine, the Morpeth Review, appeared from the Anglican facility for training clergy at St John’s College, Morpeth, not far from Newcastle. In 1928 the Sydneybased liberal-conservative Constitutional Association began publishing the Australian Quarterly, to be sponsored by the AIPS from 1935, and other significant periodicals of the 1920s include the Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, founded by Francis Anderson, and the Economic Record, founded by R.C. Mills, both of the University of Sydney. This was followed in 1937 by Public Administration, founded in Sydney by the ‘Australian Regional Groups’ of the Royal Institute of Public Administration. Taken as a whole these anthologies and periodicals mark a substantial expansion of the public sphere and a venue for new liberal intellectuals in particular. The emergence of this permanent public sphere, sustained by overlapping contributions of middle-class academics identified as Institute intellectuals, was a turning point in the evolution of Australian political thought. The nearest thing we can find in earlier times, such as the Bulletin, or the output of the ASL or the Economic Association, lacked the scope and critical mass of this collection of publications. Associated with the Bruce–Page Government was the 1929 Tariff Report, in which J.B. Brigden was joined by D.B. Copland, E.C. Dyason, L.F. Giblin and C.H. Wickens. All five were Institute intellectuals and Round Tablers, and except for Dyason they were orthodox economists. The significance of the Tariff Report was not so much in its equivocation over the tariff issue, but the impetus the Report gave towards the permanent establishment of the Tariff Board, and the role of economists in government. This was symptomatic

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of the rise of university-trained economists in society generally and among Institute intellectuals in particular. In 1927 D.B. Copland (who had been appointed to the Chair in Economics at the University of Melbourne in 1924) published his Studies in Economics and Social Science, which had a strong anti-government, pro-market tendency. The same year also saw E.O.G. Shann, another laissez-faire economist, warning readers (The Boom of 1890 – and Now, 1927) that in Australia the 1920s was similar to the 1880s, with too much borrowing for public works, large deficits, and vulnerability to reductions in world commodity prices. The orthodox economic line was reiterated by F.C. Benham, in an influential text, The Prosperity of Australia – An Economic Analysis (1928), which questioned protectionism and the alleged prevalence of strikes. However, moderate protection was so central to the surviving Deakinite core of liberalism in Victoria that the Melbourne manufacturer-dominated Bruce–Page Government would not abandon the policy. Thus, Brigden et al. recognised the futility of attacking it head-on in their Tariff Report, and it was not effectively challenged in Australia until Alf Rattigan led the Tariff Board in the late 1960s. In the early phase of the crisis in 1930 professional economists attempted to rise to the challenge presented by the sudden change in the financial situation. Otto Niemeyer’s 1930 Report, following on from the 1928 British Economic Mission, insisted that repayments ought to be accompanied by structural adjustment, and similar arguments, by now commonplace, were advanced by economic writers like E.O.G. Shann, L.F. Giblin and G.L. Wood. Some economists, like Wood and E.R. Walker, still argued that the downturn in conditions was merely part of the business cycle, although by the end of 1930 such arguments had become untenable. During the first half of 1931 Shann teamed up with D.B. Copland to produce a significant publication, The Crisis in Australian Finance, which foreshadowed the Premiers’ Plan adopted in the middle of that year. A.C. Paddison, policy adviser to the Labor

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premier of New South Wales, Jack Lang, responded with The Lang Plan, and Shann and Copland’s rejoinder, The Battle of the Plans, set the stage for a remarkable outburst of middle-class reaction. The Lang idea of unilaterally overturning British advice and, much worse, of rescheduling British repayments, caused dismay and outrage. Anti-Lang pamphlets and books flooded from the presses, such as W. Blacket’s The National Peril and Curse of Communism (1931), which attempted to connect Labor with the Soviet Union, as did Malcolm Ellis in The Red Road (1932) and Hal Colebatch in Democracy or Disaster (1931). Some of these 1931–32 attacks on Lang came close to advocating an openly fascist policy against the ALP and the Communist Party, and the anthology Lang and the New Guard (V.L.H. Coghlan, editor, 1932) crossed that line. Lang’s final dismissal from office by Governor Game in 1932, following his thwarted attempt to repudiate the state’s loan repayments, defused the situation: we shall never know how far the reactionary element would have gone in the actualisation of such ideas. The Scullin Government fared little better than Jack Lang. During 1931 opposition to the ALP was combined with a call for a national unity government for the duration of the financial crisis by the All For Australia League (AFAL), and towards the end of that year the efforts of the AFAL and other such groups paid off, when J.A. (Joe) Lyons, who had succeeded Theodore as Scullin’s Treasurer, defected to the anti-Labor side amid concerns about financial rectitude and ‘sound’ deflationary economics. Brett draws our attention to the ideological importance of these attitudes: For both the moral middle class and for the bankers and financiers the rallying cry of the depression was ‘Sound Finance.’ … [C]ommonsense precepts of sound finance were not simply about the projection of certain vices onto the working classes; they were also about the affirmation of middle class virtues in which the way

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one handled one’s money was as much a moral as a financial matter and had been given national political meanings in the mobilization of national savings in World War I.30

The new anti-Labor political entity, headed by Lyons, was christened the United Australia Party (UAP). It won the 1932 elections with an absolute majority and the ALP was destined to remain out of power at the Commonwealth level (and in most states) for the rest of the decade. After the Lang dismissal many of the Institute intellectuals reemerged from the shadows of their economist colleagues. The AIPS published its first anthology in 1933 (based like all subsequent anthologies on a mini-conference), which was a collection of papers on the Constitution edited by G.V. Portus. In the middle years of the 1930s economic thinking began to change. Ernest Burgmann, soon to be appointed Bishop of the Anglican diocese of Goulburn and Canberra, called for a renewed commitment to welfare and unemployment relief and cited Keynes in his Justice for All and the Case for the Unemployed (1933). The 1934 AIPS anthology was entitled National Economic Planning in seeming defiance of those laissez-faire ideas that had made a short comeback in the burst of economic literature in 1928–32. The return of the state in the later 1930s can be contrasted with the hostility of W.K. Hancock and Frederic Eggleston towards it in the late 1920s. Earlier in the 1920s Eggleston had many opportunities to reflect upon his 1915 remarks opposing publicly owned and operated industries, as he was an anti-Labor Victorian MP and held office in the Peacock and Allen–Peacock Governments as Minister for Railways, Minister for Water Supply, Minister for State Electricity, and as vice-president of the Board of Land and Works. His political career provided a great deal of the ammunition he used against ideological enemies in his book, State Socialism in Victoria (1932), which was written circa 1928. Eggleston there argued that publicly owned and operated essential services, judging from the Victorian experience,

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were not economically or politically sound. He concluded that the ‘economic results of State Socialism’ had demonstrated ‘very little positive benefit. Some state utilities were losing enormously, and no striking economic advantages could be claimed for any.’ He rejected government operation of railways and the like, but added that if ‘we condemn State Socialism in Victoria on balance, we must not be taken to be in favour of a stark laissez-faire as against co-operative and social methods of solving our problems, or even as condemning State Socialism permanently.’ Despite his pessimistic observations, he felt that in Victoria ‘State Socialism is on the whole more systematic, and the principles of organisation and control have been more carefully worked out’ than elsewhere, and that for ‘laboratory purposes it is the more valuable, for it is State Socialism at its best.’ Yet he concluded ‘State Socialism has on the whole failed’ because it caused ‘a failure of the individual citizen’; it had not produced ‘active citizens’, but had been ‘regarded as a substitute for individual action, releasing the citizen from responsibility.’31 It may be that Eggleston’s book was not widely read, but W.K. Hancock’s Australia, published in 1930, was and still is very influential – it could be regarded as a canonical text of Australian liberalism. The seventh chapter of that book, entitled ‘State Socialism’, was based on an early manuscript of the Eggleston book, allowing Eggleston’s ideas to reach a much wider audience than would otherwise have been the case. In concluding that chapter Hancock pointed out that ‘a State should give up running businesses if it will not run them on business principles.’ Elsewhere in the book Hancock placed himself foursquare in the idealist tradition, lamenting the obsession of the Australian masses with their rights, while deaf to a handful of ‘shrill protests about duties’. He felt obliged to point out that the ‘Australian voter has been continually blamed for his lack of initiative and for his excessive dependence upon the State.’ He argued, in an oft-quoted passage,

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that ‘Australian democracy has come to look upon the State as a vast public utility, whose duty it is to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number.’32 The liberalism of Eggleston and Hancock at the end of the 1920s, and the strong support among middle-class Australians for reductions in the public sector as part of the strategy of the Premiers’ Plan, diverged from other aspects of liberal thinking between the wars. One instance of an alternative interpretation can be found in the thinking of Ernest Burgmann, the driving force behind the Morpeth Review and the St John’s Press during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Burgmann was one of the more critical new liberals, combining T.H. Green’s appeal to the social conscience with a theologically based concern for the poor in particular and workers more generally. Like H.V. Evatt he had been a student of Francis Anderson, and he was strongly influenced by F.D. Maurice, Charles Gore, and William Temple. In his politics he was also indebted to Ernest Barker and A.D. Lindsay. Like Fabians, Christian Socialists tended to be ambivalent between liberalism and socialism. Where the Fabians relied on adherence to rationalism, Christian Socialists relied on their theology: in both cases the individual was emphasised, either as a bearer of rights or as the possessor of an immortal soul, as against the collective claims of the community. While Burgmann used a materialist basis for his understanding of the problems of industry, he then built a Christian idealist superstructure upon these newly cleared foundations. In 1927 in the Morpeth Review he argued: The sooner we reconcile ourselves to the standardisation of the material things of life the sooner we shall be free to begin from that point to live as human beings. The acceptance of the machine is not going to be pleasant and the fight for control of the machine is likely to be bitter, but the sooner we realise that the sensible thing for all is to accept the industrialisation of society and to organise as

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scientifically as possible the supply and distribution of material goods the sooner we shall be able to begin the task of living completely on this new foundation.

While WEA intellectuals had opted for the organic ‘great society’ under a meritocracy, their successors in the 1930s supported economic planning and began to become interested in the possibilities of the welfare state. One of Billy Hughes’s complaints against the Niemeyer report had been that it placed industry policy at risk, and in 1934 Copland, the most orthodox of the economists, gave support to the idea of industry assistance in a pamphlet on tariff policy. In 1934 F.A. Bland published Planning the Modern State, acknowledging the potentialities of planning but stressing the place of trained professionals in the process (as did the contributors to the AIPS volume on National Economic Planning). Two years later, the AIPS anthology What the Census Reveals encouraged the expansion of welfare, while schemes to increase employment were discussed by E.R. Walker in Unemployment Policy – With Special Reference to Australia (1936), signalling a change in the attitude of the conservative Sydney University economists. This change from the orthodox deflationary thinking of the early 1930s in the direction of the New Deal was completed by Colin Clark and J.G. Crawford in The National Income of Australia (1938), a book based on deficit finance, expanded public works, and an explicitly Keynesian economic theory. R.F. Irvine had earlier explored Keynes, and the Douglas Credit theory, in The Midas Delusion (1933), although it was not until after the publication of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) that such concepts gained more general acceptance in government. The Lyons Government attempted unsuccessfully to develop a national welfare policy with the 1938 National Health and Pensions Bill, inspired by the New Deal and the liberal-conservative British approach centred on voluntary contributions to national insurance.

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One of the Bill’s architects, J.B. Brigden, defended it on liberal grounds in the 1939 AIPS anthology, in the face of criticisms from F.A. Bland that the policy would inevitably lead to government intervention and higher taxes. In the event it was never to be implemented due to the opposition of vested interests and state governments. Pressure for an expansion of the social role of the state may have been produced by policies in the United States, New Zealand, and even Italy or the Soviet Union. But a more direct catalyst was the grim social reality of the Depression years themselves, including the spectacle of shanty towns, some remnants of which could still be seen on public land as late as the 1950s.33 Institute intellectuals, such as Bland and Brigden, were unable to overcome their liberal preconceptions favouring citizen-duty and self-help to offer a realistic safety-net to the Australian people. For all their talk of organic social unity they remained opposed to increasing the role of the state in welfare.

The threat of another conflict Much of the intellectual output of the later 1930s was concerned with defence and foreign policy as the international situation deteriorated again. The League of Nations had been established to manage the peace but one of the major contributors to its conception, American President Woodrow Wilson, was unable to gain political support for US participation. Without the United States, its ability to act meaningfully was limited, and this was not helped by its inflexible Covenant. As long as the peace lasted the League was a useful forum and catalyst for a number of important treaties, but after the bombing of Shanghai in 1932, the invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935, and the experience of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the capacity of the League to prevent another world war was seen to be negligible. This meant that Australia was in the same situation as it had been a

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generation earlier, with Japan threatening the southwest Pacific and the British fleet tied down in the North Atlantic. Just as Deakin had invited the White Fleet to visit Australian ports in 1908, Australian writers of the 1930s looked to the United States for back-up should Britain fail. William Macmahon (Mac) Ball, an ALP supporter, had been somewhat on the fringe of the Institute scene when his Possible Peace (1936) appeared. Ball agreed with Billy Hughes that Japan would eventually attack Australia, and confirmed that ‘Australia can no longer place any reliance on the Imperial Navy’. Elsewhere in the book he praised the ALP idea of building an effective air force.34 The growth of radio audiences and a demand for informed political talks enabled Institute intellectuals to reach a larger public, and in 1938 Ball edited an IPR anthology that was called simply Press, Radio and World Affairs. The inability of the League to negotiate collective security dismayed members of the LNU and many resigned. Francis Anderson, who had re-emerged from retirement to take up the Presidency of the NSW LNU, published a number of essays and addresses extolling the virtues of idealism during troubled times. Ball was even willing to advocate a scheme of mandates that would facilitate the (re-) entry of Germany and Japan into the League and thereby forestall another war. Of greater significance than writings on the League were those that raised the danger of the Japanese military threat. Not everybody was as polite as Ball on the topic, and in the case of Billy Hughes, his pamphlet The Price of Peace (1934) was perfectly in character. This was printed by The Defence of Australia League, and it combined his early acquired Asian xenophobia with the testimony of recent events. Despite being the senior statesman of the Lyons cabinet, Hughes had a tempestuous relationship with other ministers and was not always taken seriously. By 1935, however, other voices were joining the chorus, including Institute intellectuals and respectable, even ‘sound’, Round Tablers. The AIPS mini-conference of that year

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was followed by publication of Australia and the Far East – Diplomatic and Trade Relations, edited by Ian Clunies Ross from the University of Sydney. Contributors chose their words carefully but the troubled tone of this volume was unmistakeable. A much more blunt statement of the threat in the Pacific came from ‘Albatross’ (E.L. Piesse), whose well-informed Japan and the Defence of Australia (1935) helped to ensure that Australia was not entirely unprepared for the Second World War.

Reactionary movements The stridency of middle-class attacks against any deviation from ‘sound finance’ and the proliferation of amateur economic remedies such as Social Credit and the Single Tax schemes, had a darker echo in the resurgence of the secret army tradition, which had been in hiatus since just after the war, and which culminated in the misadventures of the New Guard.35 In 1934 an Australian fascist program was advocated by Eric Campbell in The New Road, proposing a form of economic discipline that would regiment work in industry in the manner of Mussolini’s corporatism. Some writers of the 1930s were determined to discourage any possible repetition of the catastrophe of 1914–18, and as a result tended to support a policy of appeasement, although usually appeasement was applied to German and Italian expansionism much more readily than it was to Japanese imperialism closer to home. Two liberal-conservative politicians, R.G. Casey and Robert Menzies, published collections of speeches and essays, in 1933 and 1936 respectively, in which appeasement was advanced, and both endorsed Hitler’s leadership in Germany, although Menzies combined this with concerns about the effects of militarism on the empire. Wilfred Kent-Hughes (who had, with Robert Menzies, formed a Young Nationalist Organisation in 1930), published a series of articles in 1933 in the Melbourne Herald, explaining why he had become a

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fascist – not because of ‘domineering dictators’, but because it was ‘the spirit of the age’, with its emphasis on economic planning a ‘half way house between laissez faire and socialism’.36 The New Guard and other secret armies had gone into decline after Lang’s dismissal in 1932. However, the rise of Oswald Moseley’s British fascists in the later 1930s was echoed in Australia by the Australia First Movement (AFM), and its chief propagandist, P.R. ‘Inky’ Stephensen. As a high spirited youth from the country he had been a convert to Leninism in Queensland in the early 1920s. He fell in with Jack Lindsay in the late 1920s in London, where the two operated a private press, which published, among other things, specimens of the work of Jack’s father, Norman Lindsay. A little earlier, in 1924, Norman had published his own theories in Creative Effort, based on Nietzsche’s exaltation of the individual and his own distaste for all forms of collectivism and unionism. Something peculiar happened in London. Jack gradually abandoned his beliefs in his father’s individualist libertarianism in favour of socialism, and Inky drifted in the opposite direction (possibly under the influence of D.H. Lawrence), from Leninism to the extreme right. Stephensen returned to Australia in the early 1930s, seeking to embolden the small local publishing industry to publish more Australian authors, and in the later 1930s he joined forces with W.J. Miles, a Sydney businessperson with fascist sympathies. Stephensen had become ardently nationalistic and violently anti-British, setting out his views in The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1936). The two formed the AFM to further their anti-British version of Australian fascism, and although the AFM was very small it did include Adela Walsh, another former Leninist and anti-conscriptionist. Among the projects of the AFM were a newsletter, The Publicist, propaganda on behalf of Japanese business interests, and also, paradoxically, support for the Aborigines who were calling for citizenship and a boycott

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of the 1938 NSW Sesquicentenary celebrations. It was Stephensen who published the important text of J.T. Patten and W. Ferguson, Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights! (1938). This remarkable adaptation by Indigenous activists of the liberal theory of rights to the Aboriginal predicament foresaw full citizen rights as a prelude to absorption in the mainstream community, but nonetheless provided a powerful indictment of expropriation and of the way ‘protection’ served the purposes of exclusion. Social liberal intellectuals entered the Great War period with Edwardian ideals of duty and the common good of society and an expectation that harmony could be gained via minimal reform and amelioration. They emerged from the war with a different mindset, having witnessed the cleavages that conscription and the 1917 strike revealed. While the later 1920s produced a small financial recovery and encouraged Eggleston and his friend Hancock to formulate their critical views of the state, the experience of the Depression confirmed the wartime cleavages. In a time of emerging technological abundance the experience of misery in the Depression demonstrated to all but a few of these well-placed professional intellectuals that society was not merely divided but that those who were not lucky could suffer a great deal. The remedies that had been thought adequate (the ‘settlement’ of Deakin) did not seem to work, yet the Communists in Russia and the Fascists in Italy were both claiming success with their more regimented and state-dominated societies. Thus it is unsurprising that these middle-class Institute intellectuals should adopt new ideas during the course of the 1930s. Their experience of war and want in the Australian community made it natural for them to look approvingly at the New Deal and to extend their existing ideas in the twin fields of welfare and Keynesian macroeconomic policy. Social unity was still their holy grail and we will see in the next chapter how this unity came to the fore in the ALP’s initiation of the post-war reconstruction settlement.

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IV: Reconstructions: policies for prosperity

Pa r t I v

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7 Building the ‘modern’ nation

National and regional planning may be described as a conscious effort to guide the development of the resources of the nation, and their use in productive enterprise, so as to provide a rising national income, and, therefore, a rising standard of human welfare … In the past national development has been largely in the hands of private enterprise, and has thus been guided by the possibilities of profit making rather than the needs of the community. Commonwealth–State Housing Agreement Report, 19441

The Second World War was both a crisis, and a generator of opportunities, for Australia’s political elites. It sundered the fragile coalitions of the non-Labor parties that had governed since the Depression, forcing a reappraisal of the liberal project. It provided a platform for the Labor party to refashion itself so that it seemed, for a time, the natural party of government. It called forth powerful expressions of patriotism and national identity, while dispelling the pre-war orthodoxies that had ordained conservative ways of life. It served, from 1942 until the late 1940s, to bring marginalised activists – feminists fighting for women’s access to the economy, communists in industrial unions – into the mainstream. Total war mobilisation was the catalyst for economic revival, but a revival driven by planning and regulation rather than markets. The planning imperative gave life to the argument promoted by inter-war new liberals that expert knowledge should determine resource allocation and social order. And the manifold growth

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of the public service both during the war and as a function of postwar reconstruction provided new careers and a means of changing the world for a generation determined to put the privations of depression and war behind them. Australia had not been ready for war. It had accepted its obligations to British banks in the 1930s, at great cost to its people and to its capacity for industrial development. It had done nothing to establish its constitutional independence, though the Statute of Westminster, declaring self-governing dominions to be independent states, had been passed by the British in 1931. It had no independent foreign service, relying instead upon British leadership and assuming British responsibility for collective security at a time when the aspirations of other powers in the Pacific (notably Japan) were becoming increasingly evident and when threatening developments in Europe guaranteed that British attention would be elsewhere. The United Australia Party Government, led by Labor defector Joseph Lyons, had held power since 1932 but was dogged by rivalries and policy disagreement. When Lyons died in 1939, only a month after his ambitious attorneygeneral, Robert Menzies, had resigned over one such disagreement, it was Menzies who won the leadership and became prime minister, despite the opposition and dislike of some in his own party. His initial term as prime minister was an abject failure. He declared Australia automatically to be at war when Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, but was insufficiently attentive to Japan (and had fought against unions refusing to ship materials that could contribute to Japan’s war capacities). An ardent anglophile, he was dismayed when he went to Britain and found the British war cabinet gave very low priority to Australian interests. He spent so long away that leadership in the crucial phase of war mobilisation was lacking – and he lost support at home. In 1941, his government fell, defeated in parliament, and the ALP assumed power with John Curtin as leader.

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Australian troops fought with the Allies in the Middle East, North Africa, the Mediterranean and Europe, but in late 1941, when Japan entered the war after its attack on Pearl Harbor, the regional threat became real. The fall of Singapore, with the capture and imprisonment by the Japanese of Australia’s 8th division (more than 8000 of whom would die), and described by some as ‘the great betrayal’, finally destroyed the conception of collective security with the British. Curtin, once a disciple of Tom Mann, and a reformed alcoholic, proved a great wartime leader. He overcame a lifetime of self-doubt and recurrent humiliation to forge a durable leadership, at great personal cost. He fought against Churchill’s insistence on a ‘beat Hitler first’ strategy when this would leave Australia prey to Japanese attack and potential invasion, insisted on the return of Australian troops for the defence of Australia despite British and US resistance and prevailed, redefined Australia’s defence alliance with the United States, and worked productively with US General Douglas Macarthur (whom he allowed to assume control of Australian troops in the Pacific theatre). He contained his own anxieties about the course of the war, and the anguish of the decisions he had to make, in the interests of public morale. While his every effort was devoted to winning the war, in concert with his deputy and treasurer, Ben Chifley, he also focused on planning for peace. Curtin’s government demanded collective sacrifice and instituted regulation of the economy and the workforce that galvanised industry for war production. But this was also the laboratory for post-war planning.

Post-war reconstruction: the context The period 1939–49 was a transitional phase, as important in its effects as the first decade of the twentieth century. The real possibility of defeat, and then, as success became more assured, the necessity

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to revive a peacetime economy, gave the debate over potential futures an unusual edge. The fragility of the social order, the high stakes of failure, the possibilities for new beginnings were all in play. Total war mobilisation and collective effort gave impetus to government and political processes, and would be the foundation for post-war planning. When circumstances demand redefinition of accepted practices, choices and the importance of choices become unusually apparent. By extension, those who articulate those choices can the more readily be identified. The needs of war drove industrial development, sweeping away the irresolution of the Depression. Its command culture encouraged recognition of the sort of top-down technocratic expertise long advocated by the inter-war new liberals, and its demand for organisation and co-ordination was the catalyst for the bureaucratic expansion that would be a platform for a new intelligentsia. These developments were shaped by the advocacy of John Curtin and Ben Chifley: their successes made Labor, for a time, appear the logical party of government.2 In turn, the reaction to wartime mobilisation and collectivisation generated intense debate about the nature of the peacetime economy, the importance of the individual and of private life, and the threat of totalitarianism. Robert Menzies capitalised brilliantly on these trends to rebuild a political career that had seemed doomed in 1941, and then dominated federal politics until the 1960s. It was his refashioning of the anti-Labor cause that gave birth to the post-war Liberal Party; his call to ‘the forgotten people’ that crystallised the private sphere (and the family) as the proper centre of post-war life; and his ruthless exploitation of ‘the communist menace’ that helped bring incipient tensions in the labour movement to the fore, splitting the ALP and denying it power for twenty-three years. But none of these leaders acted alone. For all leading players, the economic transition was perhaps

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the most important. Their experience in the pre-war context was important. The Depression of the 1930s had disrupted earlier patterns of reliance on primary production, import substitution and British loans. Yet even though forward thinkers recognised the importance of manufacturing in economic revival, government policy had lagged: the developmental vision of the Australian settlement had lapsed. The terms of Australia’s participation in the 1932 Ottawa agreement on Empire trade, for instance, were shaped by the needs of export (primary) industry, at the expense of secondary industry. Yet despite the pro-British views of an older generation of capitalists, accustomed to British loans and the export of primary products to Britain, an aggressive nationalism was generated by industrialists intent on competing against British imports and gaining control of the domestic market. This new context favoured a new class whose rise depended not on family connections or capital, but on technical, managerial and organisational skills: the age of the technocrat had arrived. And it was their views that resonated with the climate of war. The lingering effects of the Depression were not superseded until the demands of war mobilised the economy. The partnership of state and industry in the total war effort consolidated the dominance of manufacturing interests. Massive developments of plant and capacity were facilitated by high levels of state economic control (for instance banking regulation and manpower planning), which were in turn justified by the national emergency. In these unusual circumstances leading representatives of business were admitted to the highest political counsels. Essington Lewis, for instance, chief executive of the Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited (and a pre-war promoter of nationalism, technological development and an independent defence capacity), was appointed in war as Director of Munitions. Not surprisingly, such people looked beyond the opportunities of the moment to a post-war Australia in which they expected to continue

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to play an influential part, and in which their economic interests would be further consolidated. Alongside economic restructuring, the federal bureaucracy was transformed. Until the late 1930s the Australian public service had been small-scale: one observer called it ‘more … a string of independent side-shows … than … a coherent, self-propelling bureaucracy.’3 The war was the catalyst for a bureaucratic explosion: with new demands on civil administration, numbers employed in the federal public service virtually doubled in the period 1939–45.4 Many of those recruited had benefited from the extension of professional and tertiary training in the inter-war period. Some had been influenced by the bitter dissensions of the 1930s to seek new directions (particularly in economics) and a new social order. Such people were behind the proliferation of social reform movements in the late 1930s. In the 1940s the rapid expansion of the bureaucracy and the creation of innovative new planning departments (such as the Department of Post-War Reconstruction) offered access to the policy process at a relatively high level for a committed intelligentsia. Change at the political level complemented transitions in the economy and bureaucracy. Initially the period was marked by the decay and defeat of conservative political forces grouped around the United Australia Party (UAP). Some aspects of UAP policy debates in the 1930s foreshadowed the changes in economic management that would flower later; in particular, the development of a liberal welfare state exemplified in the exploration of a contributory national insurance scheme (shelved in 1939 because of the priority of defence). In the main, however, the UAP belonged to the old order; characterised by Empire loyalism and reliant on British leadership, indifferent to the new technocrats, and bitterly divided over party leadership and strategy at the onset of war, which led to its defeat on the floor of parliament. At this point, the career of UAP leader, Robert Menzies, seemed irreparably damaged.

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The accession of John Curtin’s reform-oriented Australian Labor Party government in 1941 caught the imagination of the intelligentsia, who saw it as the vehicle for the new order, and suited the purposes of the industrial technocrats who took advantage of the partnership proffered by the government to consolidate their command of the economy. The ALP government looked to both groups for advice on wartime administration and assistance with policy. But Curtin and his ministers also realised that the special powers granted government in war overcame many of the constitutional impediments that usually restrain the interventionist measures necessary for securing lasting reform. Their plan was to utilise these powers for a far-reaching program of post-war reconstruction that would, in the process of rehabilitation, build a new Australia. Further, the national emergency promoted acceptance of decisive government action, including such transitions as Curtin’s ‘new directions’ speech of December 1941, which questioned the worth of traditional links of kinship with Britain and asserted instead that the United States would be the keystone of the defence of the Pacific region.5 For many it seemed that Australia was venturing on a new path. The circumstances allowed the government to consolidate changes in the federal machinery that permanently strengthened national government at the expense of the states. Perhaps the most important instance was the alteration to federal finances effected by the uniform tax legislation of 1942, which gave first call on taxation to the federal government and thus relegated the states to a secondary role. However, by 1944, as the tide of battle turned in the allies’ favour, underlying sectional interests again emerged. And anti-Labor political forces would not forever tolerate sitting on the sidelines; they too had sniffed the winds of change and by 1944 Robert Menzies, though at the heart of the UAP defeat, had reconstituted himself as their leader and seized on a message appropriate to the times. The period

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1944–49 saw the renaissance of anti-Labor politics in the forging of the Liberal Party.

Post-war reconstruction: the ideas The arguments over Australia’s future were not divorced from the broad preoccupations of Western polities as they sought to rebuild economies and to shape a new world order, or from the ideas fundamental to those arguments. The divisions might be characterised by the opposition between theorists such as Karl Mannheim and F.A. Hayek. In Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1940), Mannheim insisted that the corrosive effects of capitalism and the sustenance of social institutions were only to be addressed by central planning. In Road to Serfdom (1944; also published in Australia), Hayek condemned such planning as the imposition of state coercion on social life and the assertion of the interests of elites against the choices of individuals. In Australia, both views were influential. The most visible participants in the debates over post-war reconstruction were the mainstream politicians, pre-eminent among them Curtin and Chifley on the Labor side, and Menzies for antiLabor. They expressed ideas and programs developed by others. H.C. Coombs, who had completed a doctorate at the London School of Economics (LSE), where both Mannheim and Hayek were professors, was centrally involved in these events – working at various times with Curtin and Chifley, and with Menzies. On Coombs’s reckoning the originators of the reconstruction programs were university economists, bankers and public servants. He names R.C. Mills, Trevor Swan, Jack (later Sir John) Crawford, Wilmot Debenham, Jock Phillips, L.F. Giblin, Douglas Copland, Gerald Firth, Dick Downing, Thor Hytten, J.M. Garland, Alfred Davidson, Leslie Melville, Leslie Bury, James Plimsoll, Arthur Tange, E.B. Richardson and himself

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as constituting an informal network in which ‘the ideas were being formulated which were to make the conduct of the war when it came and the transition from war to peace exercises in the application of Keynesian economic theory’.6 There was also a wider group of publicists generating ideas about a better order: people such as Lloyd Ross, a former Communist and Trotskyite, now a pragmatist and an influence in the ALP, an activist in the WEA, NSW secretary of the Australian Railways Union, and later director of Public Relations with the Department of Post-War Reconstruction; Georgina Sweet, prominent Melbourne scientist and social reformer, active in the YWCA and the Australian Pan Pacific Women’s Committee; Flora Eldershaw, a well-known writer appointed o brief the UAP government on women’s issues regarding reconstruction; Mary Ryan, who worked with Chifley in the regional ALP and was appointed by him to the Commonwealth Housing Commission; A.P. Elkin, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, and E.H. Burgmann, an Anglican clergyman prominent in the WEA – both Christian theologians and social theorists whose books and pamphlets argued that acquisitive self-interest was a product of capitalism and was not necessarily natural to the social order; and W. MacMahon Ball, a political scientist at the University of Melbourne and advocate of an autonomous voice for Australia in its ‘region’.7 These were all members of the liberal intelligentsia. They were debating the potential for a new order, and in some cases the theory for its implementation, well before the end of the war. Most were strategically placed in academia, business or the unions, and could be drawn from these sources into public service – to form Coombs’s ‘brains trusts’ and Chifley’s ‘official family’ – when the moment for change seemed ripe. H.C. Coombs can be taken as an illustrative figure. Born in 1906, in Western Australia, the son of a railway station-master, his only avenue

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to professional status was through teacher training. After completing his teaching qualifications and going out to work, he completed a BA and then an MA in economics. He then won a scholarship to the LSE where he undertook a PhD on central banking. Already concerned with Australia’s economic plight, he was horrified by the experience of living in England in the grip of the Depression, and certain that governments could – and should – provide solutions. The key was the theories of J.M. Keynes. After completing his PhD and returning to Western Australia, a fortuitous meeting with Leslie Melville (economist with the Commonwealth Bank) and the call of work closer to his expertise prompted him to resign from teaching and in 1935 to join the Commonwealth Bank in Sydney as assistant economist. He rapidly moved into central policy-making circles, and established more informal contacts with strategically placed academics, bankers and public servants. In 1939 Coombs was released from the bank to serve as economist to the Treasury. When Labor assumed power in 1941, Coombs’s ideas appealed to Treasurer Chifley and Prime Minister Curtin, and he became a close adviser to both. Asked by Curtin to establish a rationing commission, Coombs went beyond the bureaucracy to draw on his networks within banks, universities and the professions, an initiative that impressed his political principals. Consequently, in 1942, Chifley appointed him director-general in the new Department of Post-War Reconstruction. Under Coombs this became a ‘brains trust’. He was receptive to people with ideas, and built up a team of talented enthusiasts whose average age was below that of traditional public service appointees (Coombs himself was only thirty-six at the time of his appointment to head the department). It was this group, moved by notions of equity and the need for reform, that was centrally involved in the landmark White Papers on full employment and the economy and in hammering out the details of a rehabilitation that would produce, it was hoped, a better Australia.

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But there were other views of Australia’s future, and another group intent on promoting a quite different program. This group had its origins in the informal association of business people who came together in the aftermath of the disintegration of the UAP. They were intent on tidying up the affairs and clarifying the philosophy of non-Labor interests. There were initially two strands within this association: old-order conservatives seeking a return to pre-war values and practices; and progressive businessmen who saw benefits in a new order but intended to ensure private sector leadership within it. The progressives were the more influential, and it was they who banded behind the Victorian Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), and who were influential in formulating the IPA program, which Menzies subsequently seized as a tool for reorganising the various anti-Labor factions into the Liberal Party. The activists among the business progressives promoted their views through speeches, pamphlets and books. Among their number were Essington Lewis (mentioned above); W.S. Robinson, youngest son of an influential business family, one-time journalist and sharebroker, but now a figure in mining and industrial circles as well as in business association politics; Gerald Mussen, once industrial relations officer for Broken Hill Associated Smelters, but now a director of Associated Pulp and Paper Mills and a promoter of industrial self-government; H.E. Brookes, a director of Australian Paper Manufacturers (APM) and a progressive in employer–employee relations; Leslie McConnan, general manager of the National Bank, who spoke for a wider group of influential businessmen including Walter Massey-Greene, A.W. Warner, W.A. Ince, Keith Murdoch and Ian Potter. All were concerned to mobilise opinion through the IPA to counter the threat to business autonomy that ALP reconstruction plans appeared to represent. Central to this mobilisation were Herbert Gepp and C.D. Kemp. Kemp was a university-trained economist who, like Coombs, saw

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himself as a Keynesian. Emphasising planned development of the economy, with business in partnership with government, Kemp saw Coombs and the Labor reconstructionists as advocates of economic development controlled by government. As a professional economist Kemp was a rarity in business. Employed as economic assistant to the general manager of Australian Paper Manufacturers, Herbert Gepp, he was to be charged by Gepp with producing the program for the IPA. Kemp later became the chief spokesman for, and long-time director of, the IPA. Herbert Gepp, a key figure among the anti-Labor reconstructionists, was in his sixties at the outbreak of the war – virtually a generation older than Coombs. This difference is significant. Gepp chose a vocation and formed political views when the founding of Australian industry offered rich possibilities; Coombs, by contrast, made his initial choices in the middle of the Depression. Gepp was a self-made man who had overcome adversity to achieve a successful business career. As a child he had suffered poverty and cruelty at the hands of a sadistic father, and early pressure to be a provider as the eldest in a large and indigent family. He won a scholarship to Prince Alfred College and another to the University of Adelaide, but had to abandon university studies to find work. He began full-time work at sixteen as a junior chemist with the Australian Explosive and Chemical Co. in Melbourne, and attended university chemistry classes at night. His was a story of unremitting drive to escape his origins. Never satisfied with himself, he communicated this ‘discontent’ to others, and drew them into his restless search for improvements.8 His drive and capacity to provoke got things moving and played a part in swift business success. At age twenty-four, Gepp was manager of the Melbourne branch of A. E. & C. Seeking larger challenges he joined Zinc Corporation Ltd in 1905 and went to Broken Hill to participate in developing the new

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zinc flotation process. During the First World War, he went to the United States to sell zinc concentrates, and became an intermediary investigating the manufacture and purchase of munitions for the Australian government. By 1917 he was general manager of the Electrolytic Zinc Co. of Australasia and was engaged in solving the technical and metallurgical problems associated with processing zinc with hydro-electric power. In 1926, Stanley Bruce, the National Party prime minister, appointed Gepp chairman of the Development and Migration Commission. Though the Scullin Labor Government wound up the commission in 1930, Gepp was later appointed a consultant on development to the Commonwealth government, and accepted a range of other government posts, including chairman of the Royal Commission on the Wheat, Flour and Bread Industries, 1934–36, and director of the North Australian Aerial Geological and Geophysical Survey, 1934. In 1931 he had complemented his public service work by renewing his business career as technical consultant to the newly formed Australian Paper Manufacturers Ltd (APM). In 1936 he was appointed general manager of APM, a position he held until his retirement in 1950. During the Second World War he again had a role as adviser to government, chairing the Central Cargo Control Committee. Gepp was a business progressive. His own tough beginnings gave him sympathy for the underdog; and he believed that co-operative welfare measures were at the heart of industrial relations. In his early years at Broken Hill he inaugurated the Broken Hill Progress Association to improve living conditions on the Barrier, and in subsequent positions he supported workers’ welfare schemes. As a technocrat he believed in planned solutions; as a nationalist he believed expertise should be turned to the country’s service. Always seeking answers, always wanting to be centre stage, he became an inveterate publicist for ideas and causes, especially the cause of a private enterprise where the

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‘drift’ towards laissez-faire (the cruelty of the unrestrained market?) was ameliorated by socially responsible partnership between business and government. By the late 1930s he, like Coombs, had discovered Keynes, and began to propose a version of neo-Keynesian economic planning. It was also the case that the IPA recognised that the ground had shifted, that politically the sorts of things Labor stood for were now ‘mainstream’, and that if the non-Labor parties wanted to get back into office changes in their attitudes to trade unions and the welfare state had to be made. Unlike Coombs, however, Gepp drew the line at anything that looked like collectivism; he was an irascible individualist who had made his own way and whose unease with others extended to distrust of domination by any agent (including the agencies of government). Coombs was a product of his social class and times, and seized the opportunity to pursue his ideas in the bureaucratic explosion occasioned by war. With Gepp, too, there was a match of incentives with opportunities. The drive to achieve engendered in his failed petit-bourgeois family found its outlet in the openings generated with the foundations of industrial expansion in Australia. The search for a cause was satisfied in finding a role as publicist for the new technocratic business elite. By extension, he was a dominant figure in organisations like the Australian Institute of Management, which he helped found. The personal belief in welfare nets (nobody should be cruelly treated) allied nonetheless with a profoundly individualist temperament (avoiding external control), found its public expression in a program advocating co-operation between business and government, but opposing any appearance of domination by government. The constant search for fresh beginnings, the love of development, proved appropriate to the climate of the 1940s. All of these things came together for Gepp in the formation of the IPA and the formulation of its program, events in which he played a significant part.

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The bureaucratic reconstructionists Coombs, looking back to the 1940s, outlined the philosophy of the bureaucratic reconstructionists: ‘Widening opportunity for all was to be the criterion … The task was to ensure an economic and social context in which positive opportunities were present rather than merely an absence of constraints. “Freedom is opportunity” might have been the watchword …’9 The fear of any return to the miseries of the 1930s drove a focus on full employment, and on policies to achieve it. Re-establishing service men and women in civil life, by training, placement, and by settlement on the land or in commercial enterprises was important. But full employment and economic security were not sufficient of themselves; since the quality of human relationships depended on the physical and social environment in which they were conducted, economic and social planning had to be integrated. Such a program, they believed, was compatible with the maintenance of a free-enterprise economy, though one in which government intervention, including the continuance for some time of some wartime controls, was inevitable. Resistance to the continuance of controls was predicted, but a capacity to manage the economy in such a way as to deliver benefits to both producers and consumers was an article of faith: ‘we had the ear and the confidence of a Prime Minister and a Treasurer who combined vision with executive competence; we were conscious that there was in the community generally a conviction that a better world could be built’.10 This was a message of hope and the break with a past that, Coombs said, had ‘impoverished and rendered empty of achievement the lives of many’.11 It was not only an indication of values, but also of tasks, agents and an assumed constituency. The values are those of liberal humanism: individual opportunity, investment in co-operation, the

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primacy of human relationships. There is a faith in technical skills. The practical tasks – creation of a better environment, rehabilitation, full employment – contribute to achieving the material security in which individual choices can be freely made. And whose responsibility is it to assume these tasks? Clearly the chief agents are to be business and government; material security will be achieved by vigorous private enterprise, but government intervention will be inevitable. Indeed, there is an implied hierarchy: government will decide the nature of control, on the advice of the bureaucracy (‘we had the ear and the confidence of a Prime Minister and a Treasurer’). The model is one of leadership from the top, albeit with the compliance of a community that shared ‘a conviction that a better world could be built’. People would accept the new order, and government direction, because, it was thought, ‘they have become accustomed during the war-time years to accepting changes which, when we look back upon them, are revolutionary in character’, and ‘the very weariness of the people and the uncertainty born of their personal post-war problems call for leadership by their governments as dramatic in peace as in war’.12 A consciousness of social unity had arisen from the collective experience of war, and it was assumed that people would be ready to respond to further appeals. If these assumptions were borne out, they created openings for a government that had learned the value of technical skills. ‘The working of the economic system’, Coombs believed, was something within our capacity to control. The fatalism which regarded the fluctuations of economic activity as something we must take for granted, and the miseries which attended them as inevitable burdens which we must patiently bear, was the first casualty of the war … [If] for purposes of war we can be masters of our economic destiny, then so, too, can we be for the purposes of peace.13

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Coombs described the situation as one of choice: The choice before us is … to attempt to rebuild the so-called ‘free’ economy based … on individual choice, freedom of enterprise, unemployment and the alternation of booms and slumps; or to go on, by the use of the knowledge and experience … built up during the war to an economy, still predominantly one of private enterprise and ownership, but with an increasing responsibility on the Government for the allocation of resources, the prime purpose of which will be the achievement of social objectives of a high and stable level of employment, of rising standards of living for all people, of the development of our national resources and security and opportunity for the individual.14

This was a statement of positive liberty – not merely the absence of restrictions on, but the state provision of resources to ensure, individual opportunity – that was more precise than any offered by earlier exponents of ameliorative liberalism, such as Deakin or Higgins. The idea of positive liberty went back to Kant, but had its roots in Australian politics with ‘new liberal’ adaptations of T.H. Green. Now it had been augmented by thinkers such as Mannheim and Keynes, and with Coombs we see it being put to practical effect. Such views were translated into programmatic form in the landmark government White Paper on full employment in Australia of 30 May 1945. It argued that during the post-war transition to a peacetime economy direct government control of prices (to avoid inflation), of materials (to allocate according to need), of imports (to protect local industry) and of employment (to help rehabilitate service personnel) was necessary. It was to be achieved with co-operation between government and business: ‘Except in abnormal circumstances, it will be possible to achieve these aims without governments having to control private actions. [But] … when a specially critical situation has to be met, it may be necessary for governments to exercise some degree of

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direct control’.15 In consequence, government would command the information flow: Government … should have all information essential for carrying out this task. It must know how resources are distributed … the degree of efficiency with which they are being used, and any large prospective changes … [to enable] a swift and accurate … analysis of approaching dislocations and the speedy application of effective counter-measures.16

Government would not only collaborate with business, but also deal with labour, playing a major role in employment through establishing an Australia-wide employment service, assisting training schemes, and mediating with the union movement to ensure that in return for a ‘fair share of increased output’ it recognised a reciprocal obligation to the community. Throughout, the White Paper reiterated faith in technical solutions to the problems of post-war reconstruction, solutions that presupposed the policy role of bureaucratic experts and of extended government machinery. The argument put by the bureaucratic reconstructionists had five elements. The objective was said to be to escape from the past (characterised by insecurity and lives empty of achievement). The norms of individual opportunity and ‘free’ enterprise were endorsed, but individual opportunity was dependent on an economically secure environment. The achievement of that security was a collective good; by extension, the objectives of post-war reconstruction were social objectives, validated by a (hard-won) consciousness of social unity. Consensus about these norms warranted the transfer of authority to the collective (represented by government), and its pursuit of measures instrumental in realising these ends. Thus, government intervention and command of information, central planning and a degree of central direction in the reorganisation of economic activity, and the steering of these activities by bureaucratic ‘experts’ was justified.

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The business view of reconstruction The post-war agenda of the business progressives was formulated in reaction to the government pronouncements of the 1940s. Since some of their number worked with and advised government during the war, it is not surprising that there are areas of agreement that distinguish both camps from the pre-war UAP. In clarifying their own views, however, the business progressives articulated vital differences from the Labor agenda: it was their interpretation of the political culture that was to dominate post-war life. Gepp can be seen as an illustrative spokesperson for this camp, but the most precise and influential formulation of their program is to be found in the 1945 IPA pamphlet Looking Forward. For this group, as for the bureaucratic group, the full-employment economy and the security it brought with it were their primary postwar objectives. They accepted the idea of welfare provision, to be delivered – in their view – by a comprehensive national scheme of social security. They agreed there should be no return to prewar conditions when: ‘There was an absence of order. There were severe fluctuations in unemployment. There were contrasts of wealth and poverty. There was a serious slum problem, and widespread malnutrition. There was inequality of opportunity.’17 It was also presumed that a better future was to be achieved through collaboration between business and government, and the application of Keynesian economics. And they recognised the need for some government control: ‘The government should … plan private enterprise. It should dig the broad channels in which individual organisations can be allowed to function, but within these broad channels private business should remain relatively unfettered and untrammelled, free to pursue its countless and socially profitable variations.’18

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If there was to be planning, there was the necessity for expertise: ‘we should endeavour to blend freedom and order … [The economic system] should be rationally determined and adjusted from time to time by men who have practical experience in the administration and planning of industry and by men who have qualified themselves by specialized studies’.19 This series of apparently shared assumptions was given a different inflection, however, by the core principles on which the business progressives found themselves at odds with the bureaucratic reconstructionists. These principles related to the nature of private enterprise, the exercise of individual choice, the location of responsibility in society, and the nature of agency in social action. The business progressives presented a view of private enterprise in which individual rights were the defining feature: private enterprise was said to involve the right of the individual to work of his own choosing, free of direction by a higher authority; the right to receive rewards and privileges commensurate with enterprise and ability; the right to spend income on commodities and services of one’s own choosing, and the right to compete in a free-price market. The business progressives also vehemently rejected the proposition that the economic lessons learned in war could be extended to the task of re-establishing the peacetime economy: The aim of a war economy … is to secure the maximum possible output of munitions and war supplies, regardless … of costs and efficiency, combined with the minimum output of goods for everyday consumption compatible with the health and morale of the community. A war economy is the absolute antithesis of a peace economy. A peace economy should aim at plenty and leisure … the greatest output of the goods and services … which minister to the physical and cultural well-being of the population … Maximum efficiency … means production at the lowest real cost in terms of human effort

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and labour. This efficiency is most effectively promoted under a system founded in competitive free enterprise which holds out to all participants … incentives to give of their best.20

Where the bureaucratic reconstructionists argued for collective, statedirected, action to produce the material security where individual choices are possible, the business progressives asserted that the creation of that environment itself must be a matter of individual choice. The incentive must come not from the top, but from within the individual. And the most reliable incentive would be the profit motive: ‘The profit motive … provides the most powerful of all stimulants to industrial and commercial effort and economic progress’. With these notions of individual incentive and private enterprise went the conviction that ‘economic problems have this obstinate characteristic – they do not yield to political methods and political techniques’. State participation in the economy and planning therefore had to be qualified: ‘public works … should be regarded as a balancing factor in the economy rather than a permanent field of government activity’. Indeed, one of the most strongly emphasised messages in Looking Forward was that planning of the economy in which government took the initiative would lead to totalitarianism. Initiative, instead, should rest with employers who ‘occupy … positions of leadership in the life of the community; therefore the responsibility for achieving a happier and more effective future for Australian industry and all associated with it is primarily theirs.’ By extension, the key actor for development in social life will be business rather than government: ‘The freedom of action and manoeuvre necessary to progress can only be fully present in private organisations not directly subject to the dictates of political pressure and popular belief’. To counter the reconstructionists’ proposed centralisation of information by government, the business progressives proposed their own advisory bodies, an economic advisory council and a central council of industry, both to have expertise and

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research capacities, and both based on the belief that ‘industry should possess its own industrial and economic general staff’.21 The business progressives sought to distance themselves from the widely promulgated views of the bureaucratic reconstructionists. Their strategy was to restate the value of individual rights and private enterprise in such a way as to limit government activity in the economy, and by extension to challenge the legitimacy of the post-war reconstruction program. By insisting on the total antithesis between a wartime and a peacetime economy, they challenged the alleged consensus about the transfer of authority from individual to collective said to have been learned in the war. Against the sacrifice of war, they represented the peacetime economy as one of plenty and leisure, with the least cost to the individual – this was the promise of normalisation. Alongside this they posted a warning, the threat that holistic planning would lead to totalitarianism (which the war was fought to avert). The motive for progress was not that of co-operation in a common cause, but personal gain, a motive said to move everyone. Theirs was a reassertion that economic initiatives must remain with business, which would make the right decisions because (unlike government) it was free of ‘the dictates of … popular belief’, and that the state should collaborate simply as a balancing force. It was a validation of business leadership and private enterprise as ‘the essential centre-point of post-war society’.

Competing political cultures? The post-war reconstruction debate represented a moment when the values in contention between political elites were clearly articulated. The positions voiced by the bureaucratic reconstructionists on the one hand and the business progressives on the other were taken up as the genesis of their post-war ideologies by the Labor Party and the emerging Liberal Party respectively. For the bureaucratic reconstructionists

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individual opportunity was said to be paramount, but this was seen as contingent on material security that could only be collectively achieved. They emphasised co-operation and community, speaking of a united people and a better future, in contrast to a past empty of achievement. People were thought to be capable of recognising personal benefit as flowing from the collective good and moved by a ‘conviction that a better world could be built’. Political institutions, they argued, were legitimate agents of social change since they represented the collective will: government was obliged to act for the people. Society was represented as moving towards a more ideal state as a result of the continuation of programs successful in war administration, encouraging identification with that success and loyalty to the post-war agenda. Programs for the future were said to be the logical concomitant of this collective experience. Adopting these tenets meant that after the war, the Labor Party began to identify more strongly as a party for ‘the people’ and not just ‘the workers’; to speak for society at large and not just a class interest. The business progressives asserted individual autonomy to be an absolute, not contingent upon the community or collective action. Indeed, collective action was seen as a potential threat to individual autonomy. Opportunity depended on creating one’s own chances. Their central appeal was to freedom, symbolised by the courageous individual exercising initiative and enterprise. People were thought to be competitive, motivated by an interest in personal benefit and gain for their dependants, hence the centrality of the profit motive. Political institutions were thought incapable of the resolution needed to solve economic problems or generate social improvement since they were subject to the vagaries of the popular mood. Agents of social action have to be individuals and private organisations. Further, to the extent that political institutions were allowed to increase their power, they would inevitably be exploitative because they were peopled by competitive individualists who would use that power to pursue their

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own advantage. Business leaders were powerful and privileged, but were constrained by the market place. Thus, government at most should play a balancing role; anything more would lead to totalitarianism. The continuation of wartime measures was represented as a mistake and a threat to the renascence of the fundamental values of Australian democracy. Post-war reconstruction should aim at the constitution of a liberal society, which, by implication, could not be realised in following the Labor program.

A history of ideas The views of both sides in the post-war reconstruction debate have been set out at length for three reasons. First, it can be argued that they have so fully informed post-war political contest that there is much to gain by looking at them again in their first incarnation, and in context. Second, the tendency of commentators to look at them as variants within a liberal hegemony, and then to deal primarily with the alleged insufficiencies in the ALP’s understanding of social change as represented in the post-war reconstruction program, excuses a lack of attention to the anti-Labor argument and obscures the fact that it was this argument that, by 1949, won the day. Third, it is useful to consider briefly in just what respects the conflict of ideas at this time led to new interpretations of the political culture, and who benefited. It is possible to identify the commitment to the welfare state shared by both sides with the strand of Deakinite ‘ameliorative liberalism’ stretching back to the first Liberal governments and the Fisher Labor Government. It is arguable that the acceptance of a measure of state intervention by both groups is no more than an articulation of the long Australian tradition of regarding as necessary the state provision of developmental infrastructure, identified by W.K. Hancock and

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many commentators since as the ‘milch-cow state’.22 There is a persuasive argument that Australian ‘colonial socialism’, the practice of public intervention (in areas like transport and communications) supplementing private inputs and productive activity, prevailed until the 1930s. Labor governments (especially state governments) had also entered the market place, experimenting with government businesses in competition with the private sector. It is nonetheless true that the post-war reconstructionists went beyond the idea of the state as occasional competitor, or as administrative support and provider of essential services to business development, and argued for government regulation of business, for a government role in demand management, and for government oversight of development. The business progressives, for their part, advocated enhanced business influence through the formation of their own ‘general economic staff’ (and the military analogy should not be lost). These represented departures from pre-war traditions. It is clear in looking at this debate that neither traditional conservatism (with its belief in organic development rather than intervention and its pessimism about the frailty of human enterprise), nor fully articulated socialism are represented. Laissez-faire market relations are rejected by both sides. We are looking at varieties of reformism within a capitalist structure. The business progressives accepted limited social management, but wished it to be at the behest of business. The bureaucratic reconstructionists embraced little of the traditional Labor rhetoric; they were not, after all, labour movement figures. Preoccupation with socialisation of the means of production was at last put to rest. Instead, economic control was to flow from government regulation and command of information rather than from nationalisation. Government enterprises were a small part of the picture. (It is worth recalling here that Chifley’s attempt to nationalise the banks grew not out of the intended program, but out

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of frustration at the defeat of more limited measures designed to regulate banking.) Again, the departures from pre-war Labor and antiLabor rhetoric are worth noting. The Depression and the Second World War threw up problems of reconstruction in most Western countries, and provoked a general shift in economic practices from laissez-faire to interventionism. In articulating and justifying their programs, both sides in the Australian post-war reconstruction debate borrowed widely from the many theorists of change elsewhere, dispelling the myth that our political activists were mere provincials perpetuating ideologies from within their own limited intellectual capital. Among the reconstructionists, for instance, Lloyd Ross displayed an extensive familiarity with Mises, Hayek and Robbins on one hand and Laski, Keynes, Carr and Robinson on the other. Coombs, having emphasised Keynes as the centre of his intellectual universe, spoke also of the influence of Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Burley Griffin, J.L. and Barbara Hammond, William Morris, Peter Kropotkin, the spillover of ideas from the Bauhaus, and the English initiatives for new towns on the reconstructionists’ ideas of community. Tim Rowse has demonstrated the influence of T.H. Green, H.J. Laski and the British New Liberals on the reconstructionists.23 Since the 1930s, in Australia attention had been paid to the work of William Beveridge, director of the LSE, central to Britain’s 1911 Social Insurance Scheme and author of the 1942 Beveridge Report on social welfare.24 The business progressives, while familiar with and accepting the general thrust of the Beveridge Report, drew sustenance for their views from other sources. They looked to: the reconstruction proposals of a British group led by the chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries, Lord McGowan, which eventuated in the document A National Policy for British Industry; reports by the Federation of British Industries; individuals like Sir Ralph Wedgwood and Samuel Courtauld; and the

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Reconstruction Conferences at Nuffield College, Oxford. Of this, much was known in Australia; certainly, Kemp summarised it for Sir Herbert Gepp and the IPA.25 Gepp also maintained correspondence with a broad range of business contacts in the United States. Models of business–government partnership were sometimes drawn from the American experience: R.G. Casey saw in the Tennessee Valley Authority a prototype of government acting as ‘development stimulator’, then leaving private enterprise to do the rest. There is no questioning the influence of Hayek on the business progressives. The impact, on Gepp in particular, of Peter Drucker and James Burnham as theorists of industrial society is also evident.26 Both of these argued for a balance between state power and the social power of the corporation, in which the latter would dominate, and both predicted the ascendance of the managerial ‘middle’ class. It is evident that the debate, on both sides, was fuelled not just by Australian traditions and practices (to which new twists were given) but by participation in networks of ideas and debates that went far beyond Australia and its particular predicament. Nonetheless, what is significant is the way in which ideas were articulated with the practical politics of the day.

Interests and outcomes What has been mapped here is a moment of history that could be argued to represent a decisive transition; a moment when Australia’s future and, implicitly, the nature of the Australian people, were at issue. The consensus between the contending parties signified an area of departure from pre-war conservatism, from the rhetoric of laissezfaire and from the interests served by the pre-war order. The war confirmed a new economic order with industrial power at its centre and with enhanced expectations about social planning and the efficacy of

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expertise. Who was to take control? The ALP found in the measures associated with war the means for implementing reform, and sought a message that would justify extension of those measures into postwar economic planning. The newly emergent intelligentsia provided just such a message. Business and finance, while happy to work with Labor in the ‘total effort’ demanded by war because it offered opportunities for restructuring and plant development, were concerned to preserve their freedom of movement in peace, and the IPA intellectuals were mobilised to formulate the program that would legitimate the dominance of the new management elite. On the anti-Labor side, there was the demand for a rationale that would allow an effective regrouping. Menzies’ role is crucial. He needed a new platform, one that would distance him from the failure of the UAP and draw attention away from his part in that failure. This meant adopting a ‘progressive’ program, one that would establish a clear differentiation from Labor. The IPA provided him with the ammunition for this project and he carried it brilliantly into battle. The contending interests, and the bare bones of their confrontation, are to be seen in such instances as the contest over central government powers in 1944, and over banking from 1945 to 1949. The 1944 Powers Referendum, in which the ALP government sought a mandate to carry a range of war powers over industry, production and employment into the post-war period, was a test of the ability of the reconstructionists to carry the public. The ‘Yes’ case was led by Curtin. The ‘No’ case, co-ordinated by the Australian Constitutional League, was organised by the IPA and business figures (such as Ian Potter) played a leading role, notwithstanding that Curtin pledged ample scope for private enterprise after the war. It was Menzies, however, who took centre stage as the public focus of political opposition. In Liberal Party histories, his defeat of the Powers Referendum is seen as the springboard for Menzies’ renaissance and

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the formation of the Liberal Party.27 The battle over banking was even more clearly organised and bitter.28 Key business and banking figures (among whom L.J. McConnan of the National Bank of Australasia was central) expected banks and finance capital to be the front line in Labor’s attempt to control the economy, despite Chifley’s denial at the end of the war that he wanted to nationalise the banks. Business opposition was organised through such bodies as the IPA. The defeat of Labor’s 1945–47 attempts to impose limited controls led Chifley to introduce bank nationalisation legislation in 1947, and accentuated the rhetoric of contestation. While essentially a battle through the courts, in which Garfield Barwick (subsequently a Menzies’ minister) led for the banks and Labor attorney-general H.V. Evatt for the Commonwealth, it provided an arena in which the rhetoric of the post-war reconstructionists confronted that of the business progressives: the promise of individual security collectively achieved against the threat of a return to past miseries, versus the promise of individual freedom against the threat of total control. The end of this story is well known: Labor lost the battle for the banks, and lost government in 1949 – partly, perhaps, because of its stand on banking, but in addition because of its intention to carry petrol rationing well beyond the immediate post-war years and because of the bitter schisms provoked by the mining strikes of the time (see chapter 8). The new business elites had learned how to co-ordinate a political campaign. The Liberal Party consolidated its following and its platform. The idea of individual freedoms as a restraint on government action was reinforced as the received wisdom. This was not to prevent government management of central sections of the economy; government after all was conceded a role as balancing force. Nor did it mean that post-war governments would always satisfy business interests. It did, however, ensure that the crucial

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decisions about the post-war direction of the Australian economy would be business decisions. And it was to ensure the centrality of the new class for which and from which the organic intellectuals of this period spoke: ‘effective power would now lie in the hands of an executive, non-owning stratum, either corporate leaders or senior state personnel, whose outlook … was about to become synonymous with the interests of society as a whole’.29 The post-war reconstruction debates saw the emergence of new interests – a professionalised intelligentsia and an industrial technocracy – contesting for influence in Australian society. Each group expressed a version of the political culture that drew enough on alleged ‘traditions’ to suggest continuity (‘Australian-ness’) yet interpreted them so as to indicate distance from past insufficiencies, recognise the common ground rules deriving from wartime experience, provide clear demarcations from opponents in basic philosophies, and confirm the group’s own centrality in the ‘new order’. New institutions – the burgeoning bureaucracy, and business organisations and peak councils – provided their arenas. But their messages were taken up to provide the progressive programs de-manded by the contending political parties and the interests behind them, and established political leaders thus became the voices of the new order. All parties, in effect, committed to a substantial expansion of the liberal ethos of protection. This was no mere continuation of the Deakin project. As we have seen, the debate in the early Commonwealth period had been about the distinction between a ‘revenue tariff’ (simply providing funds for government to function) and Deakin’s more ambitious ‘new protection’. New protection utilised tariffs not only to give a cost advantage to domestic industry, allowing it to grow, but also: giving incentives for certain business practices (industries would only enjoy the benefits of the protection

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regime if they complied with specified expectations about fair wages and conditions); imposing arbitration of industrial disputes rather than unmediated confrontation between employers and labour; and providing safety nets – minimum wages (1907), invalid and old-age pensions (1908) and later, under Fisher, maternity allowances (1912). It was a limited sort of intervention, depending more on regulation than on state action, and with little that one might describe in terms of a planned economy. The post-war regime, impelled by Keynesianism, was to be far more active than any Deakinite regime – and this under Menzies’ Liberal–Country Party Government. For Menzies: [T]he basic philosophy of Australian Liberalism is that the prime duty of government is to encourage enterprise, to provide a climate favourable to its growth, to remember that it is the individual whose energies produce progress, and that all social benefits derive from his efforts … [But] we do not regard … Government enterprises as inconsistent with our philosophy. On the contrary, we know that private enterprise cannot do its work without them. They provide in many ways a foundation upon which the efforts of private entrepreneurs can build.30

His government would combine industry protection – which, in the hands of minister for commerce and agriculture, Jack McEwen, saw tariffs reach unprecedented heights – with at least some elements of demand management. Control of taxation gave government the means to resource major infrastructure projects (for instance, the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, initiated in 1949 by Chifley, but brought to fruition under Menzies), and to step up public investment when private demand slackened. Population management and social engineering were endorsed; for instance, direction of migrant labour to areas of need (also introduced under Chifley). Initiatives thought central to economic development – the expansion of tertiary 206

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education (following the Menzies-initiated Murray report, 1957), for instance – were funded by the Commonwealth. There was faith in the public sector, and the post-war public service was to play a significant role in: the achievements of relative equality, and hence of social integration; the mediation of the balance of advantage between different economic groups; regional equalisation through federal programs; and the near universalisation of educational access and standards.31 Menzies’ view was that we should always look first to private enterprise, but where state action was needed, the state would step in. We have no doctrinaire political philosophy. Where government action or control has seemed to us to be the best answer to a practical problem, we have adopted that answer … But our first impulse is always to seek the private enterprise answer, to help the individual to help himself, to create a climate, economic, social, industrial, favourable to his activity and growth.32

Business progressives had no problem with this approach: it did indeed provide the foundations on which they would build. The ideas and interests that steered mainstream politics during the nation-building period, from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, however, were to produce contradictions, discontinuities and other unintended consequences that would play against them. Three primary factors generated incremental revision, and eventually the demand for a complete overhaul. First, Cold War politics sparked dramatic political schisms that meant ‘consensus’, received wisdom, was always under challenge. Second, mass immigration, tied to industrial growth as an aspect of reconstruction, transformed not only the country’s demographic make-up and the nature of the cities, but also induced policy concessions intended to facilitate population management and social cohesion. This in turn became the catalyst for different ways of imagining relations between people. Third, the

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‘managed prosperity’ of which political elites dreamed produced a new generation of educated individualists who would challenge the faith of their parents. There was, in short, another side to the ‘new order’ initiated by post-war reconstruction.

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8 Unintended consequences

To whatever extent there is now a falling away on the left, there is no automatic renewal of confidence in the right. Something fundamental has been achieved. The ethos of industrial technocracy no longer quite circumscribes the imagination … No one may know as yet how to reconstruct the cultural order. But it no longer quite convincingly presents itself as in the nature of things. Geoff Sharp, 19721

The resolution of post-war debate with the emergence of co-operative nation-building, where business initiative and state action each had their place, is often seen to have been the precondition for the ‘long boom’ between the 1950s and the mid-1970s. It was not limited to Australia: Richard Nixon’s declaration, ‘we are all Keynesians now’ (in 1972) seemed to set the seal on a golden age. In hindsight, it has often been represented as a time of conservative conformity, a bland and (at least until the mid-1960s) an uneventful era, as if the only problem was that of ‘managing prosperity’.2 In fact, it was a period of bitterly confrontational political conflict, in which every gain was said to be hard won, where growth and security were repeatedly represented as under threat, and where Hayek’s ominous warning – beware the road to serfdom! – retained all of its metaphorical force. Why? On the one hand, it was because the Second World War had left two militantly opposed ‘great powers’ with diametrically opposed world-views in the field: would ‘free enterprise’ or communism be the way of the future? This was underscored by the potential of ‘mutually assured destruction’: an atomic war between the defenders of ‘freedom’ (the United States) and communism (the USSR) that

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threatened apocalypse for all, and destabilised the very generations enjoying the fruits of economic growth. And on the other, the means adopted to ensure economic development – mass immigration to service industry, expand the consumption base and secure our hold on the land; a focus on family life encouraging not only domestic virtues, but also a reflexive identity politics (see further below); investment in education generating a new class of knowledge elites – would all feed not only dissenting, oppositional subcultures that eventually threw the achievements of the post-war dispensation into question, but also the hyper-individualism that presaged neo-liberalism (see chapter 10). So the golden age of growth and certainty was bedevilled throughout by the age-old cry of the Hobbesian realists: can the centre hold?

The left challenge and the Cold War There were those for whom the post-war version of protection did not go far enough in meeting the inequities of contemporary capitalism. They were part of the generation whose earliest memories were of the Depression; men who fought in the war, and women who (given the opportunities created by the exodus of men to the armed services) worked in the factories, tried to get a fair deal from the unions and joined the student movements and incipient social movements of the 1940s. Some of the men returned to university after the war, where they encountered these activist women and where they joined clubs in which they vigorously debated what was to be done. They shared Coombs’s horror at what they had seen, but not his optimism about the managed economy. While the majority of the population was easily persuaded of the threat of ‘totalitarian’ communism (wasn’t totalitarianism what the war was fought to defeat?), this group sought a stronger remedy to the inequities and privations that they feared would return if capitalism was given its head. For them, communism

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was not a threat, but a promise – the mere existence of an alternative to the capitalist model was the oxygen that fuelled their dissent; that it elaborated a radical option constituted its attraction; that it validated collective action against the alienating individualism of the time was its warrant of truth. As Ian Turner explained: We were intellectuals, so we sought a theory of society which would define our present condition and teach us how to transcend it; we found it in Marxism. We were activists, so we sought the means of maximising our political potential; we found them in the ‘vanguard of the working class’, the Communist Party. We were, I suppose, revolutionary romantics, so we looked for a utopia which would prefigure our future; we found it in the USSR and, later, China.3

The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) had figured on the margins of politics since the 1920s (see chapter 6), and was always subject to suspicion, hostility and surveillance by governments of all complexions, but in the 1930s it burgeoned with its critique of the excesses that had created the Depression and in the 1940s it gained added impetus, forging links with activists in industry and the trade unions.4 Simultaneously, anti-communists organised against it, on the right in reactionary secret militia–style movements, but also, from the early 1930s, among anti-communist activists of the ALP and the unions associated with B.A. Santamaria’s covert ‘Catholic Social Studies Movement’. The CPA was briefly declared illegal in the wake of the Hitler–Stalin pact (1939), but when that was destroyed by Hitler’s invasion of the USSR (1941) and the USSR joined the allies against Germany the party regained credibility. It took its mission, and its educative function very seriously, believing (like Tom Mann) in the science of society and the inevitability of the revolution. As it gained intellectual adherents, such as Turner, it began to influence debate in the universities and the teaching and writing of history and literature, evidenced in the publication of works such as

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Robin Gollan’s Radical and Working Class Politics (1960), Russell Ward’s The Australian Legend (1958), Ian Turner’s Industrial Labour and Politics (1965), and R.N. Ebbels (posthumous) The Australian Labor Movement 1850–1907 (1960), not to mention the foundational work of Eric Fry and Stephen Murray-Smith in the journals Labour History and Overland respectively. Not all the ‘radical nationalists’ of the 1950s were communists, but Russell Ward had been, and his Australian Legend was a leading example of the genre. His argument – that the bushworkers of the late nineteenth century had developed a tradition of mateship, a collective ethos, that had come to constitute the essential Australian character – might be read not so much as a reflection of the 1890s (when the tradition was said to have crystallised), but as a reaction to the 1950s. The radical nationalists, responding to the bitterness and divisions of the post-war world, sought to heal the rift by harking back to a prototype of fellowship that had supposedly thrived in less sophisticated times, uncorrupted by cities and by outside influences. Their message was that once upon a time there had been common values – mateship, self-reliance, egalitarianism – fused in a common dream of the future. Acknowledging the legend might help transcend the conflict of the present, encouraging us to recognise that we are ‘a people’ and can build a common future. The resonance of the legend would long outlast the CPA, but its assertion of ‘core values’ would also prove a resource capable of translation to other ends, as John Howard would show (see chapter 10). But with what were the left intellectuals in conflict? Their ‘legend’, with its appeal to a collective democratic temper and implicit call to action, was cast against another mode of representing contemporary experience that hinged instead upon the supposed virtues of ‘the Australian way of life’.5 The first, future oriented and drawing on the past to project a vision of how we might together achieve a better future, was attuned to the aspirations of reconstruction – aspirations

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much modified by Menzies’ ascendance. The second was attuned to the preoccupations of the 1950s, the concern with achieving prosperity, and – in the context of the Cold War and of the ‘challenge’ of mass immigration – with defence of the status quo. Usually cast as a story of what the common man had achieved and now must defend, it was indicative of a shift in Western Cold War thinking. Here, it was persuasively rendered in some of the publications of the IPA, and resonated with the increasing tendency of Australians to see themselves as (or as aspiring to be) ‘middle class’.6 It was a recapitulation and elaboration of the sentiments at the heart of Menzies’ appeal to ‘the forgotten people’. Invocations of the Australian way of life became the textual bedrock of bodies like the Good Neighbour Councils, of immigration recruitment campaigns and of the objectives to be achieved by assimilating ‘New Australians’, of the purposes driving development and industrialisation and of government responses to ‘the communist threat’. Where radical nationalists talked of egalitarianism and mateship, advocates of ‘the Australian way of life’ trumpeted the achievements of self-determining individuals and of the freedom, selfreliance and enterprise that had produced the enviable conditions we now enjoyed – it was essentially a liberal vision.7 Surveys at the time showed how popular and influential such concepts were.8 The CPA, then, was significantly at odds with the popular temper and yet in the war and immediate post-war period, it became a significant power within some trade unions, and began to turn its sights upon the ALP. There were to be crucial battles with the Labor government – most spectacularly, the CPA’s leadership of the miners’ strike against the Chifley Government’s policy on wage restraint, which provoked Chifley, in 1949, to mount an all-out assault on the strikers with the union’s communist leadership finishing up in jail. This was not enough to forestall Menzies’ constant accusations that the ALP was tarnished by communist influence, or to reassure the

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anti-communists within the ALP that the party was not being taken over from within. Two things happened: Menzies made communism an issue in the 1949 election campaign (he would, he said, declare the CPA unlawful and subversive and it would be dissolved); and in the labour movement Catholic activists, now organised as ‘Industrial Groups’ (Groupers), determined to remove communists from positions of power in the unions and of influence in the ALP. Menzies introduced legislation to outlaw the CPA in 1950. This provoked consternation and division within the ALP caucus, but it eventually supported the Bill, only to see the Act subject to a High Court challenge initiated by the Communist-led Waterside Workers Federation, for whom H.V. Evatt undertook to act. Evatt, the former ALP attorney-general, had accepted the brief without consulting his colleagues. The High Court struck down the Act on constitutional grounds. Menzies brought on a double dissolution election in early 1951, and used the communist threat as one of his campaigning issues. Soon after that election, exhausted and defeated, Ben Chifley died. In June 1951, Evatt was elected leader of the parliamentary Labor Party. Menzies, determined to circumvent the High Court finding, called a referendum to outlaw the CPA. Evatt, who was neither a communist nor a communist sympathiser, then led an extraordinary campaign against the referendum proposal, on the grounds of freedom of association. Despite polls suggesting 80 per cent of the public initially supported banning the CPA, he managed to persuade a sufficient number of voters that the government’s proposed action constituted a threat to civil liberties and the proposal was defeated. The CPA never regained its industrial influence after the Chifley Government’s defeat of the miners’ strike: successful at the industrial level, it could not swing the labour movement away from the ALP; its attempts to work from within were effectively contained by the Catholic Groupers; both state and federal governments were

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mobilising against it; and press reporting was frenetically hostile. The Party followed its belligerent confrontation with Chifley by a dogmatic and inflexible adoption of the Soviet line. In most respects it was a political irrelevance. Yet it was the proximate hook for real fear. There is little doubt that Menzies believed in the imminence of a ‘hot war’; that high productivity (since war is a huge consumer of resources), rapid population growth, and strong alliances with ‘great and powerful friends’ were essential preparations; and that the CPA was somehow behind the problems of managing all of this in an inflationary environment.9 Just as important, Menzies’ emphasis on the threat of communism was about to destroy the ALP’s electoral prospects. Immediately before the 1954 election, a contest that polls suggested Labor might win, Menzies announced the defection of a Soviet spy, Vladimir Petrov. Petrov was said to be capable of revealing the networks of communist espionage and influence within Australia. It seemed an enormous shot in the arm for the Coalition. Labor lost the election by a narrow margin (despite gaining an estimated 50.7 per cent of the two-party preferred vote), and Evatt was convinced that Menzies had engineered the defection in such a way as to do Labor maximum damage. Menzies denied it, and when ASIO files became available years later, they confirmed his assertion. A subsequent Royal Commission into Petrov’s allegations revealed evidence of Soviet spying, yet no evidence sufficient to lay charges against any Australian citizen. But early in its inquiry, the Commission identified a document that appeared to implicate some of Evatt’s staff. This convinced him that the Commission was a conspiracy: he chose then to represent them before the Commission. Evatt’s inflammatory and erratic behaviour before the Commission exacerbated tensions within the ALP, and his suspicion about the extent of the ‘conspiracy’ led him eventually to attack publicly ‘a small group’ (the Catholic Groupers) inside the Party

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who were ‘disloyal’ to the ALP. This precipitated reactions in most states and federally that sundered the Party (except in New South Wales). In 1955 enough Catholic representatives split from the ALP to form a new anti-communist party, the Democratic Labor Party (DLP).10 This drew Catholic support away from Labor – long seen as its ‘natural home’ – and, via second preferences, towards the Liberal– Country Party coalition. Henceforth DLP preferences would shore up the Coalition, helping to condemn the ALP to Opposition for another seventeen years and with it the Labor interpretation of social liberalism.

Population change Population growth had been central to government thinking about development since at least the 1850s. The Second World War had given it a new urgency. The post-war planners were convinced that rapid population growth – mass immigration – was essential both to development and to defence. Their slogan, ‘Populate or Perish!’, not only had bipartisan support, but was endorsed by radical nationalists like Vance Palmer. There had long been careful immigration control. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 had instituted the ‘White Australia’ policy, and later legislation (the Empire Settlement Act, 1922) had provided for the exclusion of Southern European immigrants deemed not ‘assimilable’ within the Australian population. Cultural and racial homogeneity was the expectation. By 1947, ‘the non-European population, other than Aborigines was measured by the Census as 0.25 per cent of the total’,11 and 98 per cent of the population was of Anglo-Irish origin. The massimmigration program initiated in 1945 by the ALP’s Arthur Calwell (as Minister for Immigration) was intended to replicate that pattern, aiming for no more than one in ten immigrants of non-British stock,

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though the government had been warned by the Dominions Office in London in 1943 that British immigrants might not be available.12 There proved to be other problems: limits on available shipping, dwindling birth-rates and labour shortages in Britain, and a lack of social infrastructure – such as housing – to lure or to accommodate migrants. If British migrants were not available in sufficient number, Calwell had to change public opinion: If we want thousands of migrants we will have to liberalise our whole outlook towards non-British people and be prepared to help them become assimilated to our way of life. We cannot pick and choose as we have done in the past, but we must instead be prepared to take more of the limited number of people offering. Are we prepared to face such a change of attitude?13

By 1947, the Chifley Government bowed to the inevitable and introduced diversified European immigration. The barriers mandated by Deakin and his contemporaries would have to open up. The intent, as it had been since the late nineteenth century, was that assimilation to ‘the Australian way’ would solve the problems of a diversified population living together. Old ways were to be left behind: ‘New Australians’ would adopt ‘our’ values. One task was to convert the resident population to the new approach. What Calwell’s statement above makes clear is that the appeal hinged on the desire for economic growth and security, which were said to depend on mass immigration, and that demanded changing attitudes. This was made an issue of civic commitment and bodies like the ‘Good Neighbour’ councils were established to enlist community support for the process of assimilation. Over time, such bodies claimed success: ‘during the last twelve years our movement has changed public opinion from prejudice, complacency and ignorance into a growing appreciation of the rich contribution made to Australia by our newcomers’.14 This was still a discriminatory policy. It did not remove the

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underlying assumptions of a ‘White’ Australia (and increasing liberalisation in some aspects of population management certainly did not diminish discrimination against Indigenous people). Despite the assimilationist credo, there was limited assistance for nonBritish ‘New Australians’ towards the acquisition of English language proficiency to sustain citizenship and little assistance for much else. Non-British or ‘alien’ migrants had to wait for five years, and prove English language competency, before applying for naturalisation; until 1973, British subjects and Irish citizens could register for citizenship after only twelve months. Until 1984, British or Irish subjects who were permanent residents but not Australian citizens had privileges, such as voting and employment rights, that other non-British subjects did not possess; those who arrived in Australia before 1984 continue to enjoy these rights. Until 1966 alien migrants were ineligible for maternity allowances, and widows’, age and invalid pensions; British migrants were immediately entitled to all social security benefits save the age pension. Popular culture of the day (manifest, for instance, in the successful novel and subsequent film of Nino Culotta’s They’re a weird mob)15 intimated that non-British migrants were also expected to abandon their linguistic and cultural traditions and to conform to the supposedly homogeneous Anglo-Australian culture. This would ultimately be unsustainable, for a number of reasons. First, the Second World War made it more difficult to justify policies of racial discrimination and exclusion: defining policies of the regime the allies had set out to defeat. Australia was increasingly subject to international pressure, including from newly independent states in Asia, to modify its position. The human rights agenda had been given an enormous boost by the war. The rights of refugees and displaced persons were one of the first concerns of the United Nations. Evatt, an active delegate at the founding conference of the organisation, was elected its third President in 1948. Australia went

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on to take a disproportionate number (per capita) of refugees.16 Moreover, specific concerns for the rights of the dispossessed became generalised in more wide-ranging debates about rights, highlighting the embarrassment of a policy of race-based exclusion, and the injustice of treating alien migrants as second-class citizens. In the late 1950s, a vigorous Immigration Reform movement emerged, and a series of ill-judged deportation cases became a focus for community mobilisation. Second, it became clear that economic growth would depend increasingly on trade with Asia. This had been foreshadowed by some as early as the 1930s but after the war was self-evident, especially when Australia’s favoured nation trading status with Britain ceased with Britain’s entry to the European Community in 1973 (its initial application was in 1961). Not only could Australia not offend its new major trading partners indefinitely; economic interaction inevitably would entail immigration. In addition, Australia’s military engagement in Asia meant it needed to take some responsibility for the flow of refugees, especially Vietnamese refugees in the late 1970s. Third, the resentment of ethnic migrant communities at their second class status in Australia could not be contained: as they began to organise politically – or attracted the interest of politicians keen to win their votes – successive governments would be forced to make concessions. Thus, the ‘long slow death’ of the White Australia policy;17 the discrediting of assimilation as a means of managing new arrivals, which would have consequences for Indigenous policy, too; and the emergence of ‘multiculturalism’.18 The view that only people ‘like us’ could live in harmony with us was being reconsidered. There was a transition from a view of cultural homogeneity as the precondition for political community, to one that relied instead on loyalty to a common civic framework, on accepted ways of ‘doing politics’ rather than on values.19 By the 1980s, Asian immigration would become commonplace;

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by the twenty-first century, though in small numbers, refugees and migrants from Africa began to arrive. This was not to say that race as a denominator of who should be accepted into Australia would easily disappear (see: the Blainey controversy, chapter 9; Pauline Hanson and ‘One Nation’, chapter 10), nor that an insistence on ‘core values’ would not re-emerge (see chapter 10). But the community would be progressively more ethnically diverse; heterogeneity and hybridity would be a fact of life. And acceptance of cultural pluralism would have much broader implications: it would allow for the re-emergence of an acknowledgment of Indigenous cultural claims; it would be the basis for other modes of differentiation and identity politics; and it would be implicated, in due course, in the emergence of liberation movements.

The family haven In the post-war reconstruction period, a major political objective was to encourage women to move back from wartime occupations to their ‘natural’ place in the home. The 1950s was the decade – and not only in Australia – when the family assumed centre stage in social policy, and when family life was idealised.20 The standard explanation sees this as a reaction to depression and war.21 Thus, Geoffrey Bolton’s description: it was not surprising that many Australians in 1945, women as well as men, hoped for post-war compensation for the hardship of earlier years and felt drawn towards life as a family unit – Mum, Dad and the kids in a home of their own with job security. During the next twenty years material security for home and family was accepted in mainstream political debate as the great goal of Australian society.22

This was tied to material change in the cities, especially the population redistribution accompanying suburbanisation. R.W. Connell argued that family life and

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the pattern of suburban living … must be understood … in terms of the forces that persuaded or pushed large groups of the working class into the outer reaches of the cities … Governments in the grip of the ‘populate or perish’ syndrome, or more realistically seeking a labour force for industrial expansion, raised population pressures in the cities by large scale immigration and incentives for breeding … there was a systematic attempt to sell suburban living as the most desirable way of life.23

Two facets of interest are how persuasively Robert Menzies promoted this message, and how closely it was tied to the Keynesian consensus, and hence to planning. Menzies contrasted his ideal of family life with the regimentation of the war economy, and the ‘top down’ approach of the Labor version of reconstruction. As early as 1942, in his famous ‘Forgotten People’ speech, he contrasted the ‘real life’ of the home with the fantasies of the powerful and the threat of organised officialdom (implicitly, personified by the ALP). I do not believe that the real life of the nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or the officialdom of the organized masses. It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who … see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race. The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole.24

For Menzies, the instinct behind patriotism was that of defending hearth and home; the genesis of responsibility was to give one’s children a ‘chance in life’; the imperative behind community engagement was to be ‘lifters, not leaners’. Judith Brett argues that this message resonated at a time when, as Bolton indicates, people wished to turn their backs on the privations of the preceding period.25 But, though Menzies’ invocation of ‘independence of spirit’ may have influenced

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the way people thought of their relation to politics and government, management was deeply implicated in the process. The planners, too, however, voiced their obligation to ‘the family’: ‘Every … planner should have on the wall above his desk, a large picture of a typical family. Every time he raises his eyes he should see the picture and say, “These are the people for whom I work”’.26 One manifestation of the influence of the New Liberals’ preoccupation with decisions being informed by ‘expert knowledge’ was the professional colonisation of the family by ‘experts’ ever since the 1930s.27 The post-war dispensation accentuated this. Psychologists, child health experts, marriage counsellors, social workers, and advocates of functional efficiency in the home and in the domestic economy all assumed authority to ‘guide’ domestic decision-making. Their goals were the rational management of sex, the medical control of reproduction, the stabilisation of relationships and the standardisation of child-rearing (all according to what they deemed to be ‘society’s’ demands), and, by implication, the extension of technical rationality into every sphere of life. In some respects, the family became a site both for technocratic management and ‘a refuge, a sanctuary of affective relations in a cold impersonal world’.28 There was an inherent tension between the desire for freedom encouraged by the individualism Menzies advocated, and the economic development and social integration government aimed for.29 The developmental ethos assumed that primary connections between individual, family and society were economic. Technical rationality is the rationality of production; the metaphors imported by experts into the family were those of efficiency; the behavioural repertoires offered – breadwinner, mother, career-woman, professional, even youth – were all ways of positioning individuals in relation to the market. The family played a crucial part in the postwar objective of economic development because of its importance

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as the site for consumption. It was part of ‘an integrated process of industrial modernisation strategically controlled by the State topped by the Menzies government’.30 If the realisation of the family ideal involved expert advice the instinct behind it, according to Menzies, was ‘to have one little piece of earth with a house and a garden which is ours; to which we can withdraw’ – a home in the suburbs. In one respect, having one’s ‘own space’, and home ownership, were powerful political appeals. In another, surburbanisation was an effective means of promoting and organising consumption, with its separation of work place and family space; the split between public and private spheres; modes of shopping related to privatised transport (the supermarket and the mall as selling machines); and reliance on advertising and the promotion of desire. All could be linked to the rebuilding of the post-war economy (and hence to national and international politics and economics). This gives us a more complex picture of how the Keynesian alliance of business and government elites impacted directly on ‘ordinary life’, on families. But the inherent tensions between domestic ‘freedom’, expert knowledge and community obligations would play out in unexpected ways. This can be seen where the family became the explicit subject of government action, such as in the debate over the Matrimonial Causes Bill 1959. This was a bill intended to provide uniform divorce legislation, and to override the inconsistencies of state legislation. Given the increased emphasis on individual and human rights of the times, it was inevitably more liberal than pre-war (and state-based) legislation. Reading through the parliamentary discussion, the overwhelming emphasis on preserving the family, the unquestioned assumption of heterosexual orientations and nuclear families as ‘natural’, the stress on child welfare, and the importance placed on marriage as an institution, all confirm the ‘familist’ emphasis of the time. The level of anxiety about and suspicion of individual motives figured high

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in this debate. Laissez faire liberals and conservatives joined, with no sense of irony, in defending the collective interest. ‘What effect’, said one, ‘will this sort of catering for individuals in this sort of situation have? What kind of subtle psychological effect will this have on the community attitude towards marriage as a permanent institution?’31 Such people were those most prone to claim the national interest in support of their arguments: ‘we should do all that we can, in a physical, mental, or moral sense, to provide a law incorporating full protection of the national fabric’.32 Yet there was insistent pressure against this view from those who were concerned about the particular position of women, and from those who equated liberalisation with the claims of individual conscience rather than national interest. The counter to the traditionalists’ dismissal of irresponsible individuals who recognised neither moral duty nor community obligation was the idea that reform should be allied to flexibility, hence freedom. But how was the parliament to recognise the claims of ‘the modern conscience’ against the clamour of ‘the community’s tremendous interest in sound marriages’? ‘In earlier times’, Henry Turner (Liberal Party) noted, ‘external compulsions bound people together, but today the parties to a marriage have to work through a conscious self-discipline to maintain their marriages’.33 He went on to detail the changing circumstances that had led to this condition – economic progress (especially the ability of women to earn their own livelihood), increased knowledge of sex and birth control, two world wars ‘with the resultant intermingling of the sexes’, and ‘novels, films and plays [that] have inculcated a different point of view’. The message was clear: there could be no return to the old ways, and marriage as a social institution must depend on autonomous, selfmonitoring individuals and their self-discipline. The debate certainly exemplified the interest of professionals in

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the family, the functionalism assumed to link family and society, and the extension of technical/bureaucratic rationality into the ‘private sphere’ – in short, the impress of top-down ‘expert systems’34 on the populace in the ‘national interest’. Elites were preoccupied with sustaining family forms that would produce solid citizens and reinforce the national fabric. But there are intriguing hints that that was not the whole story. The attention to women’s rights, for instance, cut across the ‘naturalising’ rhetoric of the connections between family and community. Perhaps more important was the assertion of the claims of ‘modern conscience’, and the early signs of marriage becoming a social institution bound not by religion, tradition, community obligation or even the dictates of experts, but by self-determination. The selfreflexive individual therefore was licensed to cavil at the constraints of community expectation and expert guidance. No matter how much the social purposes of marriage were reiterated, the simultaneous invocation of ‘independence of spirit’ meant individual agency (and, indeed, the possibility of families choosing their own ends) had to be acknowledged. As a result, marriage was being detached from the very grounds that were so heavily stressed in the parliamentary debate. This would be the precondition for later changes – the Family Law Acts of the 1970s on the one hand, and the heterogeneity and diversity of family forms and identities in the 1980s and 1990s on the other. The burden of ‘making a self’ – entailing risk, contingency, discontinuity, but also new beginnings – is always potentially at odds with the control achieved through expert knowledge, bureaucratic procedures and governing elites. These factors – risk, contingency and self-reflexivity – generated the potential for difference, and subversion of the Menzies ideal was always the likely outcome. These elements would contribute, in the 1960s, to the unravelling of the ‘Forgotten People’ compact. In the longer term they would seed the neo-liberal ascendancy of the 1980s and 1990s.

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Liberation? One of the most striking features of the 1960s and 1970s was that the very measures that had been put in place to revive the economy, and which had been intended to generate a strong, unified and homogenous community behind the barrier of protection, led to an opening up of society and the breakdown of the founding assumptions of the 1940s dispensation. Ethnocentric ideas about national identity were eroded as the Australian citizenry was redefined to accommodate the cultural impact of post-war immigration from diverse European sources. This transformation of ideas was increasingly represented as a celebration of cultural diversity. Aboriginal people won important victories in their fight for recognition. The women’s liberation movement – ‘second wave’ feminism recognising the importance of the ‘first wave’ in the early Commonwealth period – brought to the fore issues of equality, health and safety for women. In parallel, ‘gay liberation’ would raise questions about relations between sexuality and self-identity. The inherent tensions within ‘familism’ led to self-reflexive individualism rather than to domestic harmony. The investment in education strengthened a critical intelligentsia, with a much expanded base. A ‘New Left’ emerged, championing ‘personal liberation’ as well as Marxism, and challenging the narrowness of the ‘Old Left’. This was a period of militant activism, where women, Aborigines, students, gays and those agitating for the recognition of ‘difference’ stepped up campaigns for a range of civil and social rights. For some of these activists, class struggle and social conflict were defining features of this period, as they had been in the inter-war period. An underlying impetus was the celebration of cultural and social differences. This challenged those older conceptions of community that had hinged on notions of kinship, national unity, conformity and homogeneity. Now there were vigorous campaigns for liberation from

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class, patriarchal, racial, cultural, sexual and capitalist suppression and oppression. One of the most significant events of the period was the removal of the last vestiges of openly racist and Anglocentric definitions of Australian national identity. Such changes were the outcome of over a decade of mass migration of peoples from diverse ethnic backgrounds, and the subsequent growth of migrant communities, migrant pressure groups and reform associations, which had become increasingly vocal about the discriminatory treatment afforded to non-British migrants, as we saw above. In 1973 the Australian Labor Party administered the last rites to the White Australia policy, though its incremental abolition had begun with Holt’s accession to the prime ministership in 1966.35 Labor sanctioned a culturally plural citizenry: a policy of ‘multiculturalism’ (a term borrowed from Canada) was introduced. But as also noted earlier, this would be a springboard for addressing other forms of discrimination and ‘difference’ – one of the most important being the prejudicial treatment of Indigenous Australians. Aborigines, having been dispossessed following 1788,36 denied social, civil and political rights as democratisation of governance proceeded, hived off into reserves in the late nineteenth century, largely excluded from the polity as one of the first acts of the federal parliament, and (despite having been widely drawn into the rural economy as a significant labour force)37 facing cultural and economic constraints after 1945 with the expectation that they ‘assimilate’ and renounce their Aboriginality,38 had shown a remarkable capacity to adapt the rhetoric of liberal rights to pursue their cause throughout. Nonetheless, their voices were scarcely ‘heard’, and they had no discernible influence on the way politics was conducted (except insofar as they were acknowledged in the legislation designed to exclude them – as for instance in the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902, the Invalid and Old Age Pensions Act 1908, or the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918). In the

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1960s this began to change. Adverse differentiation could no longer be ignored, or justified, and significant victories began to roll back the discriminatory practices of the past. Such victories included the right to vote in federal elections, granted in 1962 (although voting was not made compulsory until 1984); the overturning of legislation preventing Aborigines from drinking alcohol and ‘nomadic or primitive’ Aborigines from receiving pensions, unemployment and maternity allowances; and the granting of equal wages to Aboriginal workers in the pastoral industry (1965). Nevertheless, as was made clear during the debate over the 1962 Commonwealth Electoral Bill, although incorporation into the citizenry was no longer legally dependent on cultural assimilation, it was still expected that Aborigines would abandon their Aboriginal culture and become de facto ‘Europeans’. The political right of the franchise was, thus, linked to an expectation of behaving like ‘whites’ and Aboriginal lifestyles and customs were frowned upon as ‘irresponsible’. The most symbolically important victory was the success of the referendum in 1967, which empowered the Commonwealth to enact special laws for Aborigines and to include them in the data it used for the purposes of the Commonwealth, such as in establishing electoral boundaries or making per capita payments to the states. Given that many Aborigines and organisations concerned with Aboriginal welfare had long been calling for Commonwealth control of Aboriginal affairs, 27 May 1967 seemingly heralded the dawn of a new age for Aborigines. Many assumed that the federal government would now legislate to ameliorate remaining restrictions impeding the socioeconomic advancement of Aborigines. This was to prove an illfounded hope in the short term. While legislative change entailed Aborigines being formally considered equal citizens, it did not ensure that Aborigines were freed from economic, social or legal discrim-

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ination, or had equitable access to health, housing and educational provisions. In 1965 Aborigines and non-Indigenous students mounted a campaign to draw public attention to the unofficial apartheid that existed in many country towns. They undertook a ‘freedom ride’ modelled on those mounted by the American black civil rights movement – a bus carrying Aboriginal and student activists toured New South Wales regional towns and centres to explore conditions, provoke debate and attract media attention.39 This initiative was successful in highlighting Aboriginal poverty and racially discriminatory practices, such as the exclusion of Aborigines from public swimming pools, cafes, hotels and motels and their segregation from whites in cinemas, clubs and other public areas. Subsequently, throughout the 1970s many concerned white Australians joined with Aboriginal activists in detailing, and protesting against the social inequalities experienced by most Aborigines. Reports were written by academics and concerned groups detailing social injustices and newspapers ran editorials and articles castigating the government and Australians for their apathy. Disillusioned with the pace of reform, many Aboriginal activists stepped up their demands. Social reform became linked to the issue of land rights – the demand for ownership and control of tribal land, reserves, missions and areas of cultural and spiritual significance. According to the Aboriginal activist Kevin Gilbert, this was because dispossessed peoples need to regain a sense of identity and pride to break free from endemic cycles of poverty. Aboriginal identity was inherently linked to the land, he argued, and thus denial of land rights effectively reinforced the spiritual, emotional and cultural malaise of the Aborigines.40 The fight for land rights became a crucial component of Aboriginal activism during the late 1960s and 1970s. Editorial castigation of governments, impassioned pleas from reformers and

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key events – such as the erection of an ‘Aboriginal Embassy’ of tents in front of Parliament House in January 1972 – drew national and overseas attention to Aboriginal demands. The demands for land rights were also aligned with more radical demands for self-determination and cultural autonomy, which were emerging from more militant Aborigines and groups such as the Australian Black Panthers. These questioned the value of being incorporated into the citizenry as ‘token whites’ and agitated instead for a pluralistic society with separate educational, legal and social structures for Aborigines. This was the beginning of an articulation of rights for Aborigines as Indigenous peoples, not as individual citizens, contesting the individualistic assumptions of assimilation. The emergence of Aboriginal-led organisations, movements and pressure groups indicated their willingness to exert political pressure at the national level. Of course, Aborigines did not speak with a single voice – there were and would remain divided views on how to promote Aboriginal well-being and what tactics to use. But in general terms, citizen rights encouraged activists to confront the prevailing assimilationist and Eurocentric conceptions of the nation. More significantly, some challenged a concept of citizenship based on the belief that all Australians were members of a single community with the same rights and responsibilities. They demanded special rights; but even more revolutionary was their argument for a differentiated citizenry, made up of separate groups recognised as equal but distinct. This went well beyond the culturally pluralistic society envisaged by the proponents of multiculturalism. In the climate of radicalism that characterised this period, women also stepped up their campaigns to fight the exploitation of, and discrimination against, women. This was the high point of ‘second wave feminism’, and explicitly looked back to the struggles of the ‘first wave’ in the early twentieth century. Thus, the visions of those

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who had contested the Deakinite settlement became a resource for later generations. Under the rubric of ‘Women’s Liberation’, groups of predominantly young, middle-class women focused on issues such as sexual discrimination, abortion, rape, childcare, political representation and equality of employment opportunities and pay. Small action-groups mushroomed within universities and throughout Australian cities from the late 1960s, organising rallies and marches, holding conferences, forming self-help groups, publishing feminist journals, and lobbying for policies that gave primacy to the needs of women. Such groups were linked by the premise that women’s needs had not been met by oppressive, male-dominated political and social systems. A belief in a commonality of female interests (‘sisterhood’) was promoted, which presupposed shared concerns and aims. However, although the rhetoric of ‘sisterhood’ suggested a united front, as with Aboriginal movements, significant divisions emerged by the mid-1970s – here, between liberal and radical feminists. The former worked within the existing tenets of social liberalism, using the ‘rights’ agenda and the duties of the state towards its citizens as their justification for reform.41 Radical feminists, in contrast, challenged the liberal feminist belief in the inherently democratic and egalitarian nature of citizenship. Since, in their view, all structures of the state were male-produced and male-dominated, they argued that simply fighting for equal citizenship rights would never achieve true liberation. Thus, radical Women’s Liberation groups viewed the ‘co-option’ of women into government and liberal feminist reformist strategies with suspicion. They argued instead for freedom from patriarchal oppression, which would involve revolutionary change in both the public and private spheres. In their rejection of ‘equality’ in favour of ‘separateness’, they took their cue from those black American and Australian movements that also believed that integration into the

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mainstream was counterproductive to true liberation. However, the persistent lobbying of liberal feminists for greater inclusion of women in federal, state and local politics bore fruit during this period, and saw them take the lead in influencing public opinion.42 Prime Minister Whitlam’s appointments of Elizabeth Evatt as Deputy President of the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission (1972), and of Elizabeth Reid as an adviser with particular responsibility for matters relating to the welfare of women (1973), were seen by some as marking the inception of a federal feminist bureaucracy. The subsequent proliferation of ‘femocrats’, without parallel anywhere else in the world, ensured that women’s issues were incorporated into the public agenda.43 A further significant challenge to the homogeneity idealised in earlier decades came from the burgeoning ‘student’ movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Investments in education to fuel economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s and the entry into young adulthood of the post-war ‘baby boom’ generation led to a massive expansion of tertiary education. Students became an important political force, playing a substantial role in a wide range of social movements: student engagement in the New South Wales ‘freedom rides’, for example, enhanced their media profile. Apart from their involvement in the Aboriginal and feminist campaigns discussed previously, students were at the forefront of the peace and environmental movements of the period.44 Buoyed by the belief that their rights included the civil right to oppose the state in order to end war or to save the planet, these movements used public meetings, rallies and demonstrations to argue their case. In contrast, during the Cold War period, dissent had been represented as potentially subversive – and in any case not respectable. Arguably, economic growth itself had provided a secure base for challenges to the established order on such issues as the

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rights of Indigenous peoples, race, sexuality and gender, and the proliferation of tertiary education had expanded the cohort that was voicing these challenges. Students had played a role in the freedom rides, universities were a base for second-wave feminists and student activism contributed to the workers’ movements and was integral to Australia’s biggest demonstrations – the anti-Vietnam protests. These culminated in the moratorium marches – the first of which, on 8 May 1970, brought an estimated 150,000 protesters into the streets. In the early 1960s mobilisation around left-liberal political issues had stimulated the emergence of student activism. Though only a tiny proportion of students were engaged, the publicity attracted by ‘dissent’ gave them visibility. An ethic of collective action based on civil disobedience (with its corollary, an emphasis on civil rights) began to displace the domestic citizenship of the students’ parents and the inter-war generation’s commitment to citizens’ obligations. It was the moment of the ‘New Left’. It was a heady combination of libertarian individualism and doctrinaire Marxism or Maoism. The libertarians criticised the constraining collectivism, the Marxists the narrowness and lack of imagination they saw as attributes of the ‘Old Left’. The New Left was unified around anti-racism and opposition to ‘imperialist’ wars. Its criticism of the Old Left (and radical nationalists) was informed by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s: they were lambasted for their sexism, sentimental blindness to the acquisitive and petit bourgeois aspirations of the labour movement, and failure to achieve a fully developed class analysis: Humphrey McQueen’s A New Britannia (1970) was the liveliest exposition of this case.45 Participants in the New Left would rectify all these failures. They would animate social movements for personal liberation; for instance, Dennis Altman, ‘Students in the Electric Age’ (1970). They would bolster the Aboriginal cause: Anne Curthoys’ Freedom Ride (2002) recaptures their fervour.

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They would reveal the problems visited upon us by liberal hegemony: Tim Rowse’s Australian Liberalism and National Character (1978) blazed the path. They would give us a fully developed class history, most notably, R.W. Connell and T.H. Irving’s Class Structure in Australian History (1980). And, following Connell and Irving, they would go back to recover the insights and struggles of an earlier generation of radical activists – Tom Mann and his like: see Verity Burgmann’s In Our Time (1985), Bruce Scates’ A New Australia (1997), or David Lovell’s Marxism and Australian Socialism (1997), for example.46 What brought the new movement into focus was its opposition to Australia’s participation in the Vietnam War. The then Liberal– Country Party government had introduced selective conscription of twenty-year-olds into the armed services in November 1964, and had decided to send Australian troops to Vietnam in April 1965 in support of US engagement against the troops of communist North Vietnam. While these decisions were initially supported by most Australians, student anti-war demonstrations assumed a new militancy and became more frequent. Issue-oriented politics began to be subsumed within a more comprehensive social critique. The student press gave voice to this critique and the Vietnam moratorium campaign ensured it wide coverage in the mainstream media.47 Australia’s withdrawal from Vietnam in 1972 was driven, not by these protests – even though anti-war sentiment was by then widespread – but by the pragmatic political imperatives of a new Labor government and the impending disengagement of the United States itself. The articulation of dissent, however, was a continuing strand in subsequent politics. The late 1970s struggle to prevent uranium mining in Australia, for instance, illustrated the new convergence. The anti-uranium cause included peace activists, many of whom had been students involved in anti-Vietnam War campaigns, and environmentalists concerned with land degradation and long-term environmental damage. It also

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drew together Aboriginal groups, concerned with the loss of lands to mining companies, and some feminist groups, who saw the nuclear industry as an example of male exploitation and aggression. Religious groups, socialists, trade unions, academics and sundry others attended nationwide rallies held to oppose the uranium industry. Although their platforms were diverse, what linked these protesters was a belief in their right to challenge the status quo. Both national and international factors contributed to the increase in industrial, political and social radicalism in the late 1960s that followed on from a decade and a half of relative social peace. As post-war decolonisation reshaped Australia’s region, the cultural and economic disadvantages of the White Australia policy were brought ever more forcefully to the attention of policy-makers. Evidence of considerable migrant disadvantage in employment, housing, education, and health encouraged the steadily increasing non-British migrant communities to become more vocal about their needs. Black Liberation movements in America fuelled militant opposition to Aboriginal oppression in Australia. Women’s liberation movements overseas inspired Australian women, who had increasingly entered the workforce, to campaign more vigorously for equal pay and other citizenship rights. The Vietnam War was a major catalyst of student militancy in Australia. The catchcry of the times, ‘the personal is political’, captured the libertarian ethos of an era that encouraged more attention to individual rights than to the balance between rights and obligations that had prevailed since the interwar period. The most important political ideas of the late twentieth century – feminism, environmentalism, anti-racism, Indigenous development, the rights agenda, identity politics – emerged from the ‘liberation’ movements of the 1960s and 1970s (these movements are given further attention in chapter 9). So, too, did neo-liberalism, as we will see. But first, there was a moment when many felt their hopes of reform were to be realised.

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A time of hope We think that governments are the proper instruments for the community to become more equal and free, and the other side thinks that governments are somehow an impediment to these things. (Gough Whitlam, 1972)48

Menzies reigned supreme from 1949 until he chose to retire in 1966. He benefited from the long post-war boom, a considerable capacity to exploit the fear generated by the Cold War, and the split in the Labor Party. He had learned from earlier failure: in building the Liberal Party and crafting an electoral appeal in the 1940s, he showed himself to be the most brilliant Opposition leader Australia had seen (until Gough Whitlam). His early governments saw notable achievements; for example, in developing infrastructure, in delivering on Curtin’s objective of building new alliances with the United States (notwithstanding Menzies’ Anglophilia) as Britain’s power faded, in successfully managing the burgeoning migration program, in what for the time was an enlightened attitude to Aboriginal policy (which laid the ground for the 1967 referendum), in some health services, in implementing the findings of the Martin and Murray reports into education, in the energetic facilitation of industrial expansion (and rising productivity) through protection, in stimulating housing and home ownership – and in using the expanded capacities of the state and public outlays to reward ‘the forgotten people’. But Menzies’ seemingly effortless dominance would fade. He began to seem lazy and out of touch. By 1964 the (then conservative) commentator, Donald Horne, in The Lucky Country (1964) – a book that became enormously influential – described him as ‘virtually an exile’ in his own century, and went on: ‘It is a feature of Menzies’s long rule that little of what he does seems to matter much. His great talent is to preside over events and look as if he knows what they are

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all about’. Horne concluded that ‘Australia is a lucky country run by second-rate people who share its luck … [M]ost of its leaders … so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise’.49 Menzies had reinforced the hold of the secondrate by eliminating or marginalising any potential challengers, leaving an unimpressive crop of successors to assume the leadership when he went. Eventually, the commitment to a series of anti-communist wars, culminating in Vietnam, began to seem too high a price to pay to secure the US alliance, and by the late 1960s (after Menzies’ retirement), as the mass media gave ever more detail of what was happening, the conviction that this was a ‘just war’ in the way that the Second World War had been became more difficult to sustain. The hectoring speeches about national security and insidious enemies and the pious invocations of the importance of great and powerful friends lost credibility. Many of ‘Menzies’ children’ – those who came to maturity in the 1960s and 1970s – turned against him and the party he had created, and looked for another vehicle for their aspirations for social change.50 And one-time supporters (Horne was an example) looked for new beginnings: a leader with ideas. They thought they had found him in Gough Whitlam. Gough Whitlam, Deputy Leader of the ALP (1960–67), and Leader (1967–77), was every bit as brilliant an Opposition Leader in the 1960s as Menzies had been in the 1940s.51 He effectively rebuilt the ALP, winning crucial allies to modernise its organisation and policies; and reshaping perceptions so that it appealed not just to the union-labour movement base but also to a broader social democratic constituency; making the ‘radical’ threat (and communism) an irrelevance; and picking up the themes – social justice, rights, equal opportunity, feminism, Aboriginal advancement, urban renewal, immigration reform, a newly independent stance in world affairs – that appealed to the children of the post-war dispensation and to disaffected liberals

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like Horne. Yet there was no profound cultural shift: the disappointed hopes of Labor supporters with Whitlam’s loss in 1969 were captured in David Williamson’s play, Don’s Party (1972), but between 1968 and 1972, the professional-managerial class overwhelmingly preferred the Coalition to Labor, notwithstanding their evident regard for Whitlam. It helped that Whitlam was an inspirational leader: one who, for some, seemed to enlarge the sense of possibilities.52 Yet these acolytes refused to recognise that their view was never shared by the people at large (Whitlam’s standing in the polls was rarely higher than support for his party, and often well below it). Prodigiously talented, a gifted speaker, widely knowledgeable, intent on policy and party reform, tenacious in pursuing his goals, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before winning power, he appeared to capture the agenda for national policy debate (popular memory since has tended to credit him not only with his own initiatives, but for progressive measures in fact adopted by post-Menzies Liberal prime minsters Harold Holt, John Gorton and Billy McMahon as they tried to respond to the 1960s generation). After a long period of non-Labor incumbency, Whitlam broke through in a way that seemed to revive the romance of leadership. His win in 1972 was far from a landslide, but he impressed himself on the public domain as a man with the answers to the frustrations engendered by years of conservative rule: the exhilarating release from indecision and the indication of new avenues for progress was initially a great cultural and political stimulus. Horne would anoint Whitlam’s advent the ‘time of hope’.53 Whitlam worked hard on developing policy, but operated in such a way that his party (grudgingly), his followers (enthusiastically) and eventually the public came to accept that everything hinged on ‘the leader’. This was epitomised in his famous saying, that when faced with an impasse, you must ‘crash through or crash’. In most cases, this involved engineering confrontations where

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he put his leadership on the line – he was committed to a policy program, but arguments were reduced to a simple proposition: do what I want or remove me. In most cases, this succeeded against opponents much more divided than he was. Whitlam’s accession to the prime ministership in the federal election of December 1972 provoked unusual expressions of euphoria. Even the conservative press lapsed into breathless mini-biographies, dubbing him ‘Australian of the year’. In the early weeks of his accession, before cabinet positions were settled, Whitlam established a two-person ministry with his Deputy, Lance Barnard. And at first the sheer pace of decision-making (foreshadowed by the ‘proconsular’54 governance of the Whitlam–Barnard duumvirate), as key elements of the program were pushed through cabinet, maintained the sense of excitement. Whitlam identified grievances, opened people’s eyes to possibilities, and raised expectations. There can be no gainsaying the Whitlam Government’s achievements: a more independent foreign policy; the final coup de grace for White Australia and official implementation of multiculturalism; free tertiary education; a universal health scheme; implementation of equal pay for women (and women’s views taken account of in policy advice); Aboriginal land rights in the Northern Territory; a Law Reform Commission; liberalised divorce laws; support for urban renewal; enhanced legal aid; and significant support for the arts (including a national film, television and radio school and legislation for a national gallery). Yet, despite significant change achieved in his two abbreviated terms of office,55 Whitlam was not a good prime minister. He assumed that parliament was all: if he could get the numbers there, his program would simply be implemented. His cabinet was erratic: things were pushed too fast, people were not across details, some ministers were out of their depth (and none had experience in government). Whitlam knew what he wanted for society and refused to politick about details.

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He was too impatient to negotiate, and would not learn the necessary political art of compromise, refusing to settle for less than he wanted. Faced with impediments, he adopted the tactic that had worked in party reform, ‘crash through, or crash’, turning dispute about issues into a debate about his leadership. His commitment to ‘the program’ showed him, finally, to be peculiarly inflexible. As international economic circumstances changed, undermining big-spending government reform, Whitlam struggled to adapt (thirty years later, in perhaps his best short account of his government, he could not concede that anything he had proposed needed reconsideration).56 His program was remarkable in that it combined a host of practical, new ideas about policy measures, adapted from (and by) some of the leading minds of the 1960s and 1970s generation who had been recruited to the cause by Whitlam and his advisers, within a framework that was recognisably that of the Curtin and Chifley era. Whitlam’s objectives had been set when he committed to politics in the late 1940s. ‘The basic foundations of this [policy] speech’ he said in 1972, ‘lie in my very first speeches in the Parliament, because I have never wavered from my fundamental belief that until the national government became involved in great matters like schools and cities, this nation would never fulfil its real capabilities’.57 His aim, then, was nation-building of just the sort advocated by Labor’s post-war reconstruction planners. His central assertion was that ‘in modern countries, opportunities for all citizens … can be provided only if governments, the community itself acting through its elected representatives, will provide them. And increasingly in Australia, the national government must initiate those opportunities’.58 In fact, Whitlam was not the new beginning, he was the restoration: he would correct all that had gone wrong since Labor lost power in 1949, and adapt the principles of Curtin and Chifley to the contemporary world. But the world had changed: the oil price shocks of 1974 signalled that

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the long boom was ending, the resources for government-initiated nation building could no longer be found. The imperatives of global marketisation, we were told, limited state capacity: the state should withdraw. The tide had turned against Whitlam’s ambitious program, and he became the victim of circumstances that saw him irrevocably undermined. As a combination of economic reverses and sheer ineptitude generated growing disquiet, a new Liberal Party leader, Malcolm Fraser, organised effectively against Whitlam. In the end, when the Opposition engineered a confrontation by using its majority in the Senate to refuse passage of the ‘supply’ bills the Government needed if it was to operate, Whitlam opted to crash through again. He refused to concede, in the expectation that the community would know who to blame for this fiasco, building pressure in the hope that Coalition Senators would crack. This time he was outmanoeuvred: Fraser held firm; the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, concluded that government was inoperable, and dismissed Whitlam. Kerr appointed Fraser acting prime minister until an election could be held, and Fraser won the election in late 1975 in a landslide. As it happened, Fraser, the great enemy of hope, would turn out to have more in common with Whitlam than with the Liberal Party that would emerge after 1983 (see chapters 9 and 10). As with any political regime, only some were fully committed to the leader’s vision: identification with Whitlam’s enterprise may have enabled reform-oriented activists to overcome a sense of their individual limits, to gain intimations of grand potentials unobtainable in more prosaic circumstances. This minority flocked to his campaigns, meeting like-minded others and persuading themselves that they were the mainstream. For them, Whitlam never ceased to be the great man, his eventual defeat a measure not of personal failings but of conservative treachery and the myopia of the masses. But the ALP,

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under Whitlam, did not win the 1972 election by a large margin, and succeeded in 1974 with an even slimmer majority – despite the euphoria of a minority (and, initially, of the media) the public was fairly evenly divided. Further, another minority, it is clear, had always detested Whitlam’s imperious presumption: for them, any promise was obscured by what they saw as his arrogance; their numbers grew as the media turned on his government, focusing on the ineptitude of a handful of ministers; and Whitlam’s downfall in 1975 was their vindication.

The simple explanation? There is a temptation to seek simple explanations for complex events. The culturally blinkered society, busily pursuing economic development behind protective walls, would reach a point when economic success demanded that it develop a larger vision: continued growth demanded new population sources; increasing capital accumulation encouraged transnational enterprise and international investment. Population change and diversity would challenge the verities of the homogeneous community, opening up Australia to the world. The family would be at once a haven, a crucial unit in economic development, and the site where ‘expert’ guidance – intended for national benefit – produced self-reflexive, questioning individualism. A new generation, raised in relative affluence, with greater educational opportunities and an ever more internationally mediated popular culture, would produce some who rebelled against their parents’ preoccupations with security and stability. The edgy, doomed, James Dean would play out their dark romance (Rebel Without a Cause, 1955). Living under the shadow of ‘the bomb’ would provoke a nihilism in them that was foreign to the preceding generation, which had, it seemed, fought evil and won. ‘What are you rebelling against?’, Marlon Brando

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was asked in The Wild One (1953): ‘What have you got?’, he replied. The conclusions we might draw from these observations are far from straightforward. It is an oversimplification to assume that what had eventuated was a simple division between those who ‘dissented’ from the social and political assumptions that dominated under Menzies (and many of whose hopes for reform were dashed with the dismissal of Whitlam), and reactionary elites intent on opposing the new ideas promoted by the ‘liberations’ of the 1960s generation. Equally, it is too easy to blame the ‘excesses’ and permissiveness of the 1960s for the dysfunction of later decades, and to claim that somehow the right (including within the Labor Party) saw the failure of Keynesianism and heroically turned the ship around. It is a mistake to look back on the collapse of the post-war dispensation and to conclude (as some would, see chapter 10) that its founding precepts were always misguided, since this overlooks the fact that this was an Australian adaptation of a pattern adopted in all developed economies, and underrates the success of those strategies in other places. Finally, it is wrong to interpret the changing currents after 1975 as somehow signifying a thwarting of the temper of the 1960s and 1970s, as we can see by asking: what were the outcomes of dissent? On one reading, it produced all the big political ideas of the late twentieth century – rights, feminism, racial equality, sexual equality, environmentalism, a renaissance of civil society, and so on. Paradoxically, it might be argued both to have generated a new defence of liberalism (via the New Left), and to have been implicated in the emergence of a philosophical individualism that would pave the way for neo-liberalism. That is to say, what was to come was not a rupture with the temper of the 1960s and 1970s, but an extension of it. The New Left would seed a host of progressive and critical movements and public intellectuals (see further, chapter 9). But it was also out of the New Left that the most sophisticated understanding of the

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liberal political ethos arose. At first it might have seemed simply knowing the enemy – as for instance with Tim Rowse’s Marxist interpretation of Australian Liberalism and National Character (1978). But Rowse would later make an acute (and not at all doctrinaire) contribution to understanding the post-war moment with an appreciative intellectual biography of Nugget Coombs (2002). It was remarkable how figures of the left turned to describing and then sympathising with aspects of Australian liberalism. Stuart Macintyre, a former Marxist, evocatively captured the world of A Colonial Liberalism (1991). Warren Osmond, once a leading student radical at Monash University, later produced a compelling and sympathetic intellectual biography of a key New Liberal, Frederic Eggleston (1985). Peter Cochrane, another leading radical at La Trobe University in the early 1970s, would write a marvellous account of liberal democratisation, Colonial Ambition (2006). Judith Brett, once associated with the Marxist editorial collective of the Arena journal, would write far and away the most perceptive and understanding, if critical, accounts of Menzies (Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, 1992), and of the Liberal Party and its predecessors (Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class, 2003).59 Out of contest, it seemed, had emerged an understanding of the liberal polity and of their part within it. Out of understanding grew a wish to defend liberalism from what they saw as the illiberal trends of later periods. The other strand of the cultural revolution of the 1960s was tied to the libertarian impulse of that time. It is manifest in the ties between the students of John Anderson and the ‘Sydney Push’,60 whose alumni included Barry Humphries, Clive James, Robert Hughes and Germaine Greer. This was also an oppositional movement in its reaction to the post-war world. It was much influenced by the philosopher, John Anderson. Anderson had moved from an idiosyncratic Marxism (in the 1930s) to vehement anti-communism (in the 1950s). His fundamental argument was always to do with the nature of freedom, and he

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increasingly sided with those for whom external impositions, especially those of government, were tantamount to an assault on freedom. His version of communism had predicted a society where, emancipated from the strictures of private property, everyone would be free to participate in the decisions that affected them. But he would finally conclude that communism represented a move towards total control rather than liberation. Similarly, in ‘The Servile State’ (1943), he argued that ‘the movement for Socialism, defined as a desire for social security and a future free from want or conflict, is a movement towards servility. Liberty … must be expressed as independent opposition to the State …’61 In the end, Anderson would settle on a sort of radical freethinking – with elements not unlike anarchism or even syndicalism62 – combined with a conservative denial of egalitarianism and support for social privileges and conditions (there must be ‘custodians’). The ‘Push’ would take on these anarchic overtones, and the radical practice of free-thought and translate the conservative support for ‘custodians’ as the familiar justification of an artistic avant garde. It is unlikely that Anderson was a direct influence on ‘new conservatives’, such as the young John Howard. But, as Donald Horne demonstrates in his autobiography, The Education of Young Donald (1967), it is probable that Anderson’s mix of libertarian opposition to the postwar dispensation and social conservatism had a broader effect on currents of thought, especially in Sydney. Members of the ‘Push’ were role models for one sort of dissent, and arguably the precursors of the ‘personal is political’ generation. Moreover, Anderson and his followers were enacting something more deeply rooted in the culture of the time, manifest even in an ambivalent aspect of the articulation of protest in popular culture. This can be illustrated by reflecting upon the seemingly curious fact that John Howard – the ‘ordinary bloke’ who was to become a hero of the right (chapter 10) – once cited Bob Dylan as one of his

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favourite musicians. It transpired that he was not the only politician of the right to express this preference. What could they have heard in the lyrics of the one-time protest singer; the scourge of middleclass mores, the epitome of avant garde cool, the inveterate shapeshifter, constantly engaged in reinventing himself? Perhaps it was that the ‘mothers and fathers’ against whom Dylan railed were precisely the generation that rallied to the post-war dispensation (The times they are a-changin’, 1963); that ‘Maggie’s farm’ was a synecdoche for the nanny state (I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more, 1965); that the search for ‘a way out of here’ was a turn against the social liberalism and community obligation of the ‘New deal’ (All Along the Watchtower, 1967); and that Dylan’s constant narrative of moving on, making a self, having responsibility for nothing but one’s own choices (see Todd Haynes film, I’m Not There, 2007) was the herald of the hyper-individualism at the core of the coming neo-liberal revolution. It was this that Howard would make so much his own. All of which is again to say, the neo-liberal ascendancy was not against the mores of the 1960s: it was, in some respects, an extension of one element in that ‘liberation’.

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Pa r t v

The American songbook

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9 Life is not meant to be easy Tod Moor e

…[L]ife has not been easy for people or for nations, and … that condition will not alter … life is not meant to be easy … We need a rugged society, but our new generations have seen only affluence. If a man has not known adversity … it is harder for him to understand that there are some things for which we must always struggle. Thus people or leaders can be trapped to take the easy path. This is the high road to national disaster. There are many strands to the maintenance of will – a society that encourages individual strength and initiative, an understanding of events, ability to bear sacrifices, an understanding that there are obligations that precede rights and a belief that work is still desirable. Malcolm Fraser, 19711 We would love to be social democrats, ticking along, making a few adjustments to the machine here and there. But we have to absolutely cut through the assumptions of the past … [I]f the world doesn’t trust you then it can ruin you. Bob Hawke, 19862

This period begins with an ending, because 1975 marks the demise of a brief spurt of social exuberance unique in cultural and political history not just in Australia, but globally. In the late 1960s and early 1970s in Australia, a new set of values was beginning to push for recognition. These included freedom of artistic expression, sexual liberation and openness, concern for oppressed peoples, and feminism. For the first time, students were dropping out of university, gays coming out of the closet, and middle-aged professionals selling up and

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starting communes. The heady defiance of the 1970 Vietnam Moratorium marches, and even the (re-)emergence under Gorton of an Australian film industry a couple of years earlier, were signs of cultural pressure building up. The election of the Whitlam Government in 1972 released this pent up cultural energy, and thus the Whitlam years facilitated creative freedom and cultural experimentation as well as progressive social liberal politics. Those who either cherish or revile memories of the Whitlam Government often confuse the cultural explosion, which ended worldwide in the mid-1970s, with the political and economic realities. Beneath the constitutional crisis of 1975 and the personality of Gough Whitlam, a new political and economic reality was emerging globally. As in so many other eras in the history of Australia since colonial times, global trends in thought vied with the local Australian experience in influencing the intellectuals of the public sphere(s). But the dominating factor in the capitalist economies in the 1970s was the stalling of economic growth, with rising unemployment and surging inflation, which was interpreted as the collapse of the Keynesian consensus. The new era, which matured in the 1980s and 1990s, was shaped by a combination of deliberate inaction after the Bretton Woods currency system ended, and the slow return of laissez-faire liberal ideology to centre stage. The late 1960s and the early 1970s resembles an exuberant flourish to the political progressivism, which, Cold War hysteria aside, marked the post-1945 experience. This optimistic view was frozen in the post-1975 era to which we now turn. An age of retrenchment is one way to portray 1975–93, with calls for small government very much the order of the day, along with attacks on the allegedly excessive demands of workers and the imposition of wage restraint, and with an emphasis on monetarist macroeconomic policy (linking economic development to changes in the money supply). High unemployment and the proliferation of

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high rollers and speculative financial ventures would follow. The year 1975 would be portrayed by both Malcolm Fraser (Liberal prime minister, 1975–83) and Bob Hawke (Labor prime minister, 1983–91) as the watershed, justifying criticism of the post-war consensus and the progressivism identified with Whitlam on the inference that they had helped to foster adverse economic consequences. This was in accord with the claims of Milton Friedman that state intervention had both promoted inflation and choked the productivity of free enterprise. Yet both of these global phenomena, which plagued all of the industrialised countries at the time, followed Richard Nixon’s undermining of Bretton Woods in 1971 – first the inflation, then the unemployment. And both preceded the 1975 political crisis. The new mood after the mid-1970s, in Australia and in the industrialised countries in general, was sharply divergent from the positive view of state interventionism and disciplined finance that had prevailed since 1945. The attitudes that emerged in political debate often verged on libertarian ideology, which seeks to remove the state altogether in favour of market-based, and, as Rudd would claim in 2009 (see chapter 1), unrealistic, ways of achieving collective outcomes. For example, in 1981 Lauchlan Chipman advocated that states should be limited to policing functions and the enforcement of contracts as part of his contention that ‘liberty, justice, and the free market are social notions that are mutually supportive.’3 It is difficult to explain such a radical reversal in global opinion. Whereas the rise of social liberalism in the 1880s and 1890s can readily be explained by the Dickensian social conditions that existed under the nineteenth-century laissezfaire system, there was no corresponding human suffering under the post-war welfare state. The post-1971 crisis in world finance did subsequently produce suffering, but as in 1929 this was because of a lack of regulation, not an overabundance of it. In the end, we can explain the rise of neo-liberal laissez-faire thinking

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by observing that a panic set in, giving rise to a crisis mentality that caused policy-makers to search for alternative approaches. Market liberal ideas were attractive because they fulfilled three purposes: they explained that current dislocation was an after-effect of the old order, the price that had to be paid for inappropriate state intervention; they justified internationalisation; and they allowed politicians to disclaim responsibility (markets would succeed where state agencies had failed). Community resistance was diminished since the 1930s experience was fading from the collective memory. But the effectiveness of the silencing of alternative ideas cannot simply be brushed aside, and we will be returning to this theme at the end of the chapter when we consider the intellectuals who opposed this economic fundamentalism. The Whitlam Government’s 1975 budget made clear that politics had shifted in a new direction, although Treasury had been preparing this reorientation for some years.4 The new treasurer, Bill Hayden, following Treasury advice, embraced the ‘fight inflation first’ strategy. As in the preceding era of so-called bastard Keynesianism, the theory was to cut expenditure (and if possible taxes), thus shifting position on the Phillips Curve, which purported to represent a trade-off between unemployment and inflation. The 1975 Budget cuts, the first of many to come, were unable either to change the high-inflation situation, or to salvage the Whitlam Government at the polls, and in the 1975 campaign Malcolm Fraser’s team made much of its new faith in deregulated markets, monetarism, and unencumbered entrepreneurs. Fraser himself, who liked to talk-up free enterprise and whose favourite author was said to be the libertarian Ayn Rand, was a transitional figure, only willing to go part of the way down the laissez-faire path, and even Whitlam himself, it has been argued, had one or two free-market tendencies.5 The ideology of the market, which influenced Australian political

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thinking after 1975 and emphatically dominated thinking after 1983, had its origins elsewhere, although as we saw earlier the laissez-faire philosophy existed in Australia in colonial times in the ideas of Bruce Smith, George Reid, and others. Even before Nixon demolished the fixed-exchange-rate framework underpinning the post-war prosperity, in August and November 1971, the cause of deregulation had been promoted in such works as F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944) and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962), representing the ‘Austrian’ and ‘Chicago’ schools respectively. One of Nixon’s advisors in 1971, Arthur Laffer, a product of the Chicago school, developed a theory soon afterwards (complete with its own Laffer Curve), which claimed that the solution to all ‘problems’ of economic policy was to cut taxes, especially at the top marginal rate. The emphasis on deregulated finance became known as supply-side and it caught on quickly among some liberal-conservative politicians, like Dick Cheney, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher (the latter two not yet in office), as well as Australian liberal-conservative politicians like John Howard (Fraser’s Treasurer). As long as the pro-industry mixed economy of the post-war era prospered, Friedman and friends had a limited audience (indeed were thought of by other economists as extreme), but when things went awry in the mid-1970s their revival of classical liberal economic theories began to appear more attractive, even to some within the ALP. The character of the economic situation at this time challenged those who had taken the precepts of the post-war mixed economy as the norm. Writing in 1976, Donald Horne captured the mood of the moment: ‘[There was] an uncomfortable feeling, shared in all the other [industrial] countries that, after all, the rules of the economy were not known, or that there were some new rules but no one could find out what they were. Keynesian economics seemed busted.’6 To some extent this perplexity was based on a false idea

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of the post-war prosperity itself, arising from a concept of tradeoffs between unemployment and inflation. Currency stability had made it possible for the industrial countries to foster the continuing financing of manufacturing development, with constantly growing output as workplaces became more highly mechanised and physically larger. As small chunks of the workforce became redundant they were reabsorbed, through expansion of the public sector, until new workplaces in industry emerged, which they did. Full employment in turn caused wages to rise, but demand did not affect prices because it is easy for industry to increase supply when productivity is on the upswing. So, high employment and high wages drove unprecedented growth and prosperity. If anything prices went down due to economies of scale. Yet there were inherent contradictions: Keynesian policies boosted aggregate demand, facilitating the realisation of surplus value, but also causing wages to rise in a context of full employment (where labour acquires more bargaining power) and eventually the conditions for the production of surplus value were eroded.7 Add to this the financial check imposed by the oil price shock of 1974, and one begins to see the dynamics underlying the simultaneous emergence of slowing growth, rising unemployment and inflation in the capitalist economies. In Australia, exacerbated by the unstable politics of 1975, the rise of stagflation (simultaneous inflation and unemployment) sent policy makers into a panic and placed the management of the economy at the top of the political agenda, just as it had risen to the top of the agenda in the panic years of 1930–32. As early as January 1975 Fraser had attacked Keynes in a speech in which he advocated cuts in government spending on social programs, and generous tax cuts, and again we can see parallels with the deflationary reaction of the early 1930s. As we saw in the previous case of the early 1930s, the knee-jerk

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response of policy makers to turn to economists, and of economists to turn to so-called ‘deflationary’ solutions, tends to be provoked by a crisis mentality, which to some extent conjures the economistas-saviour into being. Thus in 1931 and 1932, Shann, Walker, Giblin and others all rose to public prominence and all advocated smaller government and a deflationary economic policy as a panacea for Australia’s woes. The mid-1970s saw the beginnings of a similar dynamic. In its 1974 pamphlet The Way Ahead the Liberal party described the then economic situation as Australia’s ‘most serious crisis since the Second World War’, echoing the newspaper and magazine pundits of the day in Australia and around the world. Influential economist Heinz Arndt spoke in similar terms. Social critic Donald Horne called it ‘the world economic crisis’, Labor activist Andrew Theophanous spoke of Australian democracy ‘in crisis’, and Bob Catley (then on the far left) referred to it as ‘the World Crisis’, demonstrating that all shades of political opinion were united in a common sense of ‘crisis’, even if some were deliberately ignoring its global nature.8 The term was still being deployed by Hugh Stretton in the late 1980s. We can compare this consensus over the crisis in the 1970s with the crisis conditions said to prevail in 2007–09 (see chapter 1). Given that the post-war system had apparently broken down, it seemed natural to reject the basis of that system (after all it had seemingly betrayed us), and to seek a new economic philosophy. In this intellectual vacuum the ideas of Friedman, Hayek and influential disciples such as Arthur Laffer gained traction, promoted by wellplaced libertarian intellectuals such as P.P. McGuinness, Warren Hogan, David Kemp, Wolfgang Kasper, and John Stone. Milton Friedman undertook a lecture tour in Australia in 1975; his proposition that the world economic situation was manifestly unsound provoked great interest and much commentary.9 Even before the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain (1979) and Ronald Reagan in the United States

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(1980), laissez-faire ideas were re-emerging in Australia to fill the void and to give hope that a viable alternative to social liberalism existed. In addition to the output of individual intellectuals another venue for the revived economic philosophy of laissez-faire was the thinktank.10 As we have seen, the Institute for Public Affairs (IPA) was established in the 1940s to provide research for the emergent Liberal Party. In 1976 the IPA was joined by the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), a think-tank that had the advantage of not being tied to a political party and thus not being forced to tailor its conferences and publications to that party’s platform. The CIS was founded by Greg Lindsay, a teacher with libertarian views who championed the philosophies of Hayek, Friedman, Adam Smith and John Locke. Working with academic Lauchlan Chipman, Lindsay was able to attract the support of P.P. McGuinness, John Bonython, John Stone, and mining CEO Hugh Morgan. Having established links with the US think-tank The Heritage Foundation (set up in 1973 and closely associated with Arthur Laffer and the former Trotskyite turned neoconservative, Irving Kristol, and joined in 1977 by the even more libertarian Cato Institute), the CIS invited Milton Friedman again to lecture in Australia in 1981.11 By then the Thatcher–Reagan ascendancy had boosted the intellectual merits of economics based on market fundamentalism, facilitated by the rise of economics itself as the central concern of political debate worldwide. As in Britain and the United States, big business was active in promoting its interests within politics12 through funding libertarian supporters in academia, think-tanks, and the media, at a time when others who spoke for what they saw as the public interest found that mass media interest in their message was diminishing.13 This was especially true in the United States, which became the source of much of the neo-liberal philosophy that came to dominate Australia in the 1980s.14 The rise of economic fundamentalism to its position of dominance

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in the 1980s in Australia was at odds with the ameliorative liberalism dominant within Australian political culture until that time. While it is true that Bruce Smith, and a small minority of members of the Economic Association (Sydney, 1890s) had been enthusiastic market liberals, and this had remained a persistent undercurrent in liberal political circles, since the ‘Fusion’ of Free-Trade and Protection in 1909 (see chapter 4), the majority of Australian political intellectuals have either been socialists or social liberals. Even the social liberals who reverted to orthodox market economics in the 1920s and early 1930s resumed their progressive outlook later in the 1930s (see above, chapter 6). Although the journalist Paul Kelly’s 1992 formulation of an Australian ‘settlement’ is open to criticism (see below, chapter 10), its core concept of a consensus in Australia between progressive state intervention and capitalism – a consensus that split apart after 1975 – is accurate. The impetus for this historic compromise was, on the one side, the developmental ethos of ‘new protection’ and, on the other, an active and publicly supported union movement (both brought together in one of the most important of the five pillars of Kelly’s settlement: arbitration). One distinctive feature of Australian economic fundamentalism in the 1990s would be its targeting of unions. Warfare erupted with the unions as companies and governments, goaded by the ‘new right’ intellectuals, tried (not entirely successfully) to replicate Margaret Thatcher’s decimation of the British union movement. Given the unresolved nature of these confrontations, to what extent did the laissez-faire ideas of the thinktanks really take hold? The Fraser Government, in power from the end of 1975 to early 1983, showed a disinclination to tackle unions head-on – this would be left to the later coalition government of John Howard (1996–2007). Fraser was to prove a disappointment to the newly ascendant market liberals. All was not smooth in his party. The turn of the economic tide,

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which had done so much to cruel Whitlam’s ambitious program, was against the post-war nation-building project, to which Fraser still had a residual commitment. Although a proponent of small government, he remained a nationalist and still maintained enough commitment to the ameliorative liberalism that had been developed by Deakin (and practised by Menzies in the post-war reconstruction period), to resist the extremes of economic rationalism. A Liberal ginger group, the Society of Modest Members, had other views, and fought hard to win the debate for free market economics in the parliamentary party room. While it was common to represent Fraser as the harbinger of Thatcher and Reagan, within the parliamentary party, especially when recession hit in 1982, he came to be regarded as insufficiently rigorous. Although the free market disciples began to make inroads in the party room, Fraser could use his authority as prime minister to sustain the appearance of authority in the public domain and to hold them at bay. Fraser’s reluctance to provoke union confrontation, however, may have had less to do with his resistance to market fundamentalism, and more to do with the government’s desire not to upset the miniature mining boom of 1978–82. The influx of capital into Australia’s minerals sector was skewed towards energy, as one might expect in the wake of the OPEC price rises, particularly coal and uranium, and it enabled pundits to argue for a shift from manufacturing to mining in line with the economic orthodoxy of ‘comparative advantage’.15 The uranium issue itself became a defining issue for the political left (see below), but before long the luck ran out as it generally does in mining, and a severe drought hit eastern Australia, causing the economy to go into negative growth in 1982. Internal party disputation, adverse economic circumstances, and the elevation of the popular Bob Hawke to ALP leadership saw Fraser defeated in the elections of 1983. It was in the early period of the Hawke Labor Government that

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advocates of market freedom launched a bitter legal attack on cherished principles of Australian organised labour, starting with the crusade at the isolated seasonal abattoir at Mudginberri to exclude all unionised labour. Victory over the meat workers at the outback works encouraged the rising ideologues of the market, by now labelled the ‘new right’, to pursue similar objectives at the Melbourne confectionery factory of Dollar Sweets, where a small pay dispute was turned into a concerted challenge to the union concerned. In both of these cases, neo-liberal arguments were advanced to justify the intervention by Ian McLachlan, Peter Costello, and others. They were supported by the research capacity of the think-tanks and funds flowing from big business.16 In the middle of 1986 Charles Copeman of the mining company Peko used a dispute at the nearly exhausted iron ore mine at Robe River to attack the concept of award conditions in the name of ‘efficient work practices’. At about the same time a foundation called the H.R. Nicholls Society, which professed its opposition to ‘the Industrial Relations’ club, with members including Geoffrey Blainey, Des Keegan, Greg Sheridan, P.P. McGuinness, John Stone and Gerard Henderson, published its crusading anthology Arbitration in Contempt.17 The centrality of industrial relations and arbitration in Australian political culture was initially used by Hawke to portray himself and his government as purveyors of consensus (at a time when consensus had broken down), symbolised by the ‘Accord’ agreement between the ALP and peak unions. Before Hawke entered politics formally, he had articulated a consensus position very similar to the position espoused by social liberals earlier in the twentieth century, where labour and capital submerged interest politics in the pursuit of a duty to the common good of society, organically understood. It is no coincidence that Hawke, a Rhodes Scholar, quotes the 1920s social liberal John Latham so approvingly in his 1979 Boyer Lectures, The Resolution of Conflict.18 Yet even in this 1979 exposition of his ideas, Hawke refers

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to the unregulated world post-Bretton Woods as an economic danger zone: Our country and our world are in this turmoil of change … [which] has the capacity to diminish or destroy the environment within which the freedom of the human spirit may flourish … However, we totally delude ourselves if we imagine these things [i.e. future prosperity] will happen by a mindless adherence to past assumptions or a blind belief in the adequacy of existing structures and attitudes to meet these volcanic forces of change. The world will not wait for us.19

Even in 1979 we see Hawke distancing himself from the historic compromise, and anticipating the advent of ‘the world’ as a chaotic financial juggernaut whose market-based prescriptions have the fiat of law. The early phase of the Hawke Government (1983–84) followed a ‘third way’ logic (that is, a position in between unrestrained capitalism and socialism), which had first been spelled out at the 1979 ALP national conference. It was then that the ALP addressed its incapacity to manage the inflation of 1974 and the unemployment that had followed. The 1979 Platform attacked Fraser’s free enterprise program, especially its inroads into the public sector, but went on to endorse, at least provisionally, the activities of multinational companies in Australia, and the primacy of economic management.20 In his speech to the Conference, the Opposition leader, Bill Hayden, declared: First, and above all else, we must demonstrate beyond doubt that we are competent economic managers. That competence – and the public recognition of it – is the absolute essential under-pinning of everything we want to do. Without it – without an unqualified commitment to pursue responsible economic management – then we might just as well pack our bags and give the game away.21

During the early phase of the Hawke Government the theme of consensus dominated political discussion, demonstrated by the Accord

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between the ALP and key unions, and a National Economic Summit in April 1983. Bringing together the unions and business groups (not yet organised under the aggressive leadership of the Business Council of Australia), Hawke sought to erect an Australian form of corporatism, the method of regimenting industry perfected in fascist and Latin American states, which has distant origins in the Whitley Councils of the First World War (see chapter 6). Out of the Summit came the Economic Planning and Advisory Council (EPAC), a panel of representatives of government, unions, and business. The Accord and EPAC initially tried to realign policy to deal with both inflation and unemployment, with openings to possible progressive initiatives that might seize the agenda from the economic fundamentalists, albeit within a framework of ‘wage restraint’. This 1920s type of organic social liberalism was not to be, although in 1983 the ALP did manage to pull off the only successful industry policy since the Postwar Reconstruction in the form of the Steel Plan,22 and Industry Minister John Button later made creative contributions to restructuring the automotive industry in the fight to maintain manufacturing in Australia. For all that, as Frank Stilwell put it in his study of the Accord in 1986, the market ideology was ‘currently rampant’: ‘It requires considerable energy, resources and analysis to counter its influence, particularly because the ideas are no longer the monopoly of the extreme right but have seeped through to influence the right wing of the ALP.’23 This renovation of Labor via its dominant right wing gained momentum at about the time of the second consensus event, the Tax Summit in 1985. As Elaine Thompson has pointed out, Hawke’s style was decidedly managerialist, with little focus on policy, and at times it seemed as though, having achieved his life long ambition, Hawke was happy to let others do the actual work of governing.24 In fact it was more complex than that: while others might claim to have authored some of the government’s significant initiatives (Ralph Willis and

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Bill Kelty, for instance, generated what was to become the Accord), Hawke made a major contribution to the early economic reforms. But he also led a team – he was the lead figure in government, the skilled chair of cabinet, and the great negotiator, but not the font of all ideas. In fact Hawke’s failure to insist on a ‘vision’ or to push his own agenda gave latitude to the members of a talented cabinet to pursue their objectives, and this underpinned much of the success of the Labor government. Above all, it opened the way for Paul Keating as the most forceful voice of the new orthodoxy. Economic rationalism was embraced on both sides of politics, but as we will see, with different inflections. This uniquely Australian term for neo-liberal market fundamentalism appears to have been coined by Donald Horne in 1976, when he described Gough Whitlam as a follower of ‘economic rationality’ and an ‘economic rationalist’. As with his ‘lucky country’, Horne was destined to be taken out of context, because what he actually said was this: ‘This was not the old rationality of a market allocating resources appropriate to people’s wants because it was in the nature of markets to do so … But given certain guidelines it also believed that in many matters the market was more rational than direct controls [emphasis added].’25 The purist version of economic rationalism was adumbrated by CIS intellectuals like Warren Hogan and Wolfgang Kasper. Writing in 1985 Hogan crusaded on behalf of investors, with the assertion that the ‘capital market is the core of the industrialised economy’. Hogan stressed the primacy of shareholders and the bane of social welfare, insisting that there be a general deregulation of the economy, especially in the area of finance.26 A year earlier, Kasper had published a pamphlet for the CIS, which argued that ‘controls over international trade and capital movements interfere with free market competition and resource allocation’ and should be abolished. He insisted that the Bretton Woods currency controls were mistaken, and dismissed

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‘fear of destabilizing international speculation’. He believed that no ‘case could be made for restricting a free inflow of foreign capital,’ and asserted that ‘[c]ontrols that exclude foreign buyers often only prevent Australians from realizing the full value of their assets and thus directly infringe property rights.’27 These arguments reflected the ideas of Friedman and Laffer, which had gained currency in the corridors of power in Westminster and Washington by the mid-1980s – particularly in Washington. Reagan was delivering tax cuts to the rich and big corporations with scant regard for the deficit, and a series of revolving doors opened up between the lobbying firms of K Street, the White House, new right thinktanks, and board rooms. Thus the US Treasury and Washington-based institutions like the World Bank and the IMF were converted, and this in turn influenced Treasury policy advisors in Canberra. Keating was of course influenced by the ‘Treasury line’,28 but he also believed that market reform would release capacities to address problems that governments could no longer manage.29 Keating was part of a group in the ALP caucus that included Hawke’s fellow Westralians John Dawkins and Peter Walsh, and in this group market liberalisation had been vigorously discussed. Thus, by the time Keating was starting to drive the agenda in the mid-1980s, it was the market without restrictive guidelines that had laid hold of the ‘rational’ claim in economic policy. This enables us further to appreciate the ALP government’s transition to neo-liberal ideology at this time. The first of many market-based decisions was the December 1983 floating of the currency. Between 1984 and 1986 the banking system was deregulated to some extent and when at the end of 1984 Keating decided to open Australia to foreign banks, sixteen new banks arrived. Local banks resorted to relaxing credit standards in a desperate attempt to maintain market share and to beat off the competition. This liquidity could hardly have helped to deal with the

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never-ending inflation migraine and it is probably no coincidence that inflation moved sharply upwards between 1985 and 1987. In terms of unemployment and inflation the increasing commitment to the one big idea of the market was slow to achieve change. Inflation had been high since 1974 and even when it dipped in the early part of the Hawke years it was still around 6 per cent, although it soon returned to the 10 per cent range. Unemployment was tragically high in the mid-1980s, with an official rate of around 8 per cent and a real rate that was much higher, especially for young Australians. Longterm unemployed lost all hope and the spectre of inter-generational unemployment emerged. The embrace of market liberalisation also affected trade policy. By the post-war era Australian manufacturing had grown to the point where the traded goods (import–export) sector of the economy was dwarfed by the domestic economy. But the ever increasing currency flows since 1971, and the tendency since then for production in the OECD countries to be shifted off-shore, to low-wage regimes in Asia, created a second line of market rhetoric in addition to the main message about low taxes, unrestricted internal markets, smaller government, and so forth. This was the argument that the market should not only take precedence over politics nationally, but also globally.30 Once such a framework is accepted, it is easy to appreciate the broadening of the liberalisation project in the 1980s to include the abolition of allegedly restrictive trade policies, focused in Australia by CIS intellectuals like Kasper on the imperative of tariff abolition.31 Among Australian intellectuals of the 1980s, few did more to advance this aspect of neo-liberalism than economist Ross Garnaut, once a radical associated with the Neo-Marxist Bruce McFarlane, now a staunch advocate of market liberalisation. Garnaut was research director of the ASEAN Australia Economic Relations Research Project (1981–83), senior economic adviser to Bob Hawke (1983–85), Australian

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Ambassador to China (1985–88) and then Foundation Director at the Asia-Pacific School of Economics and Management (1988–2000). We can see Garnaut’s ideas emerging in 1980 in his contribution to the published report of a conference held at the Australian National University in 1979 – ASEAN in a Changing Pacific and World Economy. In Garnaut’s contribution (with Kym Anderson), Asian production of textiles, clothing and footwear was discussed, with the conclusion that such labour-intensive manufacturing ought to be left to the countries with the cheapest labour, and Australia should abandon protection of these industries.32 His argument was anchored to the notion, then popular among many orthodox laissez faire economists, of ‘comparative advantage’, and made much of the resources boom, suggesting that: ‘Continued industrial growth in Northeast and Southeast Asia will further reduce the competitiveness of these industries in Australia [but will improve resource prices] … This is highly favourable to incomes growth in Australia and, if sensibly managed, to employment as well.’33 His response, as discussant, to the paper by Luo Yuanzheng of China was revealing. Garnaut was incredulous that anybody could reject the theory of comparative advantage in favour of the idea that industry is always a good thing. He remarked that: in some parts of the paper there seems to be an implicit assumption that industrialisation is desirable in itself, and that the performance of an economy can be judged to a considerable extent in terms of its industrial growth. [But] if there are some countries … which can produce food and raw materials very efficiently, and if the people in those countries can earn relatively high incomes … there is nothing at all wrong with those countries pursuing the non-industrial path.

The other neo-liberal economists present at the conference, such as Heinz Arndt and Wolfgang Kasper, would have concurred. This desire to remove from the political sphere decisions about trade and about the future shape of a nation’s economy, in the name of

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comparative advantage, continued to drive Garnaut’s work through the 1980s, especially after Hawke came to power and Garnaut became his chief economic advisor. Australia joined the United States in the push for global free trade, which resulted in the opening of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1986, and in 1989 his Report (Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy) was published by the Commonwealth. The gist of the Garnaut Report was that the manufacturing boom in Asia made it imperative for Australia to abolish all tariffs ‘by the end of the century’, and vigorously to persuade the rest of the OECD to do likewise.34 Relying on comparative advantage, Australia should capitalise on exporting wool, wheat, and minerals, with a focus on supplying China.35 As we noticed in earlier chapters, this is a familiar argument – basically it is the ‘developmentality’ approach to the economy, which W.K. Hancock for instance adopted in 1930 to support the concept of Australia specialising in wool production. We have also seen that since colonial times, more clearly since the First World War, and especially clearly since the Second World War, Australian prosperity and full employment have depended on maintaining an industrial base. How, then, was employment and prosperity to be sustained? In fact Garnaut saw Asia not only as the market for our exports, and the future source of foreign direct investment, but also as a market for services (such as education and tourism), which would require a skilled citizenry. The corollary was the push by Science Minister Barry Jones for Australia to become ‘the clever country’, and Hawke’s belief that the future would be assured by Australia becoming technologically and socially innovative, concentrating on generating income through ‘cutting edge’ industries.36 These were heroic assumptions. Michael Costa and Michael Duffy in their book Labor, Prosperity and the Nineties – Beyond the Bonsai Economy (1991) endorsed the argument that Australia should get out of manufacturing. Costa, an ALP figure

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with an MBA from Harvard Business School, and Duffy, also on the ALP right and with a background in laissez faire economics, defended comparative advantage and attacked manufacturing trade unions such as the Metalworkers’, which had begun to advocate renewed industry policy. The union debate over industry policy failed to divert ALP economic policy from Garnaut’s ideas, and those of others committed to market liberalisation, but revealed a deep cleavage in the labour movement. It was this cleavage that Costa and Duffy set out to address. The 1987 Australia Reconstructed report, the product of an uneasy alliance between government economists and proindustry trade unions, had attempted to reconcile the market and industry policy. The report must have made neo-liberals nervous, and this suggests a further reason for Costa and Duffy’s book. In any event, the book is a meld of labour history and the new economic orthodoxy, with influences from Karl Popper, Joseph Schumpeter, and F.A. Hayek. Costa and Duffy characterise post-war prosperity as an accident, caused by immigration and foreign investment, rather than a time of industrial success made possible by regulated international and domestic finance, echoing Keating’s derisive term: the ‘Rip Van Winkle years’. Affirming the line that ‘[s]tatutory monopolies are a damaging substitute for market share’ they endorse Hawke and Keating in their neo-liberal approach to economic policy, especially floating the dollar, deregulating finance, and seeking to abolish all tariffs. Opposing the ongoing protection of the automobile industry by relatively low tariffs, they quote the Garnaut Report, to the effect that a cheaper consumer product is a better outcome than Australian industrial viability and full employment.37 When Keating finally took over the prime ministership from Hawke in 1991, economic reform entered a new phase, which was the privatisation push. By the late 1980s the Business Council of Australia (BCA) had started lobbying the Hawke Government

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intensively over ‘microeconomic reform’, including privatisation, which had been foreshadowed in 1985 by a management consultant from the firm McKinsey’s, Frederic G. Hilmer. He complained that Australian ‘public sector enterprise[s]’, meaning essential services, were overstaffed and argued that the investment in them would have achieved a better return if it had been placed on the deregulated money market.38 The challenge facing the ‘reform’ advocates like Hilmer was that their closest political allies, Hawke and Keating, were at the Commonwealth level, while the essential services that they wanted to privatise (water, electricity, transport) were controlled at state level. In July 1991 the BCA, in its report Government in the 1990s, argued that the states were an impediment to business, due to things like electricity price regimes, and that possibly the states themselves might even be profitably abolished. At this time the Commonwealth under Hawke began to support a state initiative for Special Premiers’ Conferences (SPCs) where economic reform was a recurrent topic. When Keating took over from Hawke the new microeconomic reform concept rose to the top of the agenda, and the SPC was renamed Council of Australian Governments (COAG). In October 1992 Keating established a committee of three, chaired by Fred Hilmer, to review the cost of doing business in Australia. The resulting Hilmer Report, handed down and published in August 1993, laid the groundwork for the forced corporatisation and eventual privatisation of state-based essential services.39 The Commonwealth under Hawke and Keating, for its part, had already privatised a number of public assets under its control. Some of these were iconic: they included the Moomba gas pipeline, parts of the government defence factories, the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, and most of the Snowy Mountains Authority (renamed Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation).40 Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank were in the process of being sold cheaply, and could be added to this list, leaving

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only Telstra to privatise when John Howard became prime minister three years after the Hilmer Report. The new microeconomic reform agenda was introduced to the states via COAG, and large payments to the cash-starved states were made conditional on compliance with Hilmer. The process itself was obscure to observers, one of the by-products of the COAG procedures and also a feature of the many ministerial councils that accompany federalism, both in Australia and elsewhere. There was little or no public accountability in the process; no vote was ever taken and no mandate ever given to privatise essential services in Australia. The report was published and then action followed. Hilmer was the penultimate phase in the neo-liberal makeover of government – it would be left to John Howard to attempt to deregulate the labour market. How significant, then, was the support for these market policies on the other side of party politics? While the ALP in government had adopted an Australian version of the neo-liberal precepts, its adaptations differed from those of administrations elsewhere, such as those of Thatcher and Reagan. It tried, through policies such as the Accord, to balance the adverse effects of market liberalisation with innovative initiatives such as the ‘social wage’; it believed that the outsourcing of services would be more efficient than bureaucratic management; it resorted to privatisation to diminish the costs of government while providing what its constituents demanded by other means.41 Meanwhile, the Liberals were also undergoing a process of transformation. The default position was that Labor had not gone far enough with its economic reforms. In part this was a response to the lure of Thatcherite and US-derived dogmas, in part it was driven by Dries in the party who had promoted the neo-liberal agenda so vigorously in the closing period of the Fraser Government, but it was also necessitated by Labor’s development of so many policies that might have been thought natural to the Liberal Party, forcing it in turn to discover new policy spaces further to the economic right.

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In accordance with British usage the new brooms of the Liberal Party called themselves the Dries and regarded their ideological opponents within the party as ‘wet’. Starting with the Fraser defeat in 1983 the Dry group led by backbencher John Hyde and including Jim Carlton, Peter Shack, and later John Hewson and John Howard, began to purge the parliamentary party of Wets. Fred Chaney, Peter Baume and Chris Puplick were forced out for refusing to abandon the social liberalism that had been dominant in the party Menzies founded and which had prevailed in non-Labor politics since the time of federation. Andrew Peacock was able briefly to maintain a wettish position in the mid-1980s but by the end of the decade he was gone too and the party was safe for the Dries. As Hyde explains, the Dries saw their task as not merely applauding and facilitating the ALP makeover of Australian politics in accordance with neo-liberal ideology but also finding those areas where the ALP had not gone far enough. Assisted by the think-tanks, Hyde and the Dries pushed for harsher welfare cuts and more rapid privatisations, voucher systems in education, and freedom of contract in industrial relations.42 Thus by 1993 the Liberals had become committed to an even more stringent form of economic rationalism than that which characterised the Labor government.

Fragmentation and the ‘new politics’ While the Fraser Government prevaricated between the new laissez faire liberalism and the old socially attuned liberalism of the Menzies tradition, its opponents consolidated a ‘new politics’, which had been growing in influence, especially in the New Left, since the 1960s. Challenging the intolerance and racism, the oppression of women, and the censorship and cultural narrowness, all of which had marred post-war Australian social attitudes, this protest generation developed an economic blind spot. It tended to overlook the achievement of

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post-war prosperity, including full employment, relatively high wages, protection from the effects of dumping and financial speculation, and the public provision of essential services. Things that had been understood and applauded in the 1940s or 1950s, such as Bretton Woods, were now of little interest to the Australian left (especially the New Left), which had also cast aside its class allegiances at the prompting of acclaimed overseas intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Herbert Marcuse. While the economic agenda was becoming both more preponderant and more controlled by laissez faire advocates, ideas of non-economic social change had become almost an obsession for numbers of Australian intellectuals. This phenomenon, which produced cascades of literature, had been building through the 1960s and early 1970s, and it included a series of discrete (although sometimes interconnected) discourses, each with a corresponding public or ‘social movement’. The hegemony of economics sometimes overshadows this, leaving us with the impression that no ideas outside the economic debate really mattered, whereas in fact the emergence of rich and interesting discourses in areas relating to Aborigines, gender and sexuality, peace and the environment, and immigration and identity greatly changed the political landscape in Australia. Looking at ideology more and single issue politics less, we can see that although the political and ideological left was embattled, the radicals flourished, albeit in a splintered and, it must be said, gentrified fashion. Before looking at the elaboration of multifaceted social movements and their associated ideologies in this period, what were the effects of the 1975 dismissal on the left? Literary nationalism, associated with earlier intellectuals of the left such as Vance Palmer, Hugh Anderson, John Manifold and Russel Ward, had already reinterpreted Australian identity in line with radical ideas, as had labour historians like Ian Turner and Robin Gollan. Left-wing nationalism had been further

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stimulated by the 1964 split in the CPA, out of which emerged an explicitly Maoist group, the CPA-ML, which cultivated an interest in historical notions of a rural proletariat. The 1975 dismissal provoked militant indignation in the left generally, but among left nationalists it energised a successful attempt to set up a ginger group, the Australian Independence Movement (AIM), and a magazine, The Independent Australian. Their combination of literary nationalism (Henry Lawson was always a favourite), anti-American sentiment, republicanism, and socialism came to a head in 1980, with a celebration of Ned Kelly as a political martyr and the first publication of his 1879 Jerilderie Letter. The AIM mobilised two powerful symbols of Australian identity, the Eureka Stockade flag, and Dorothy Wall’s popular 1940s cartoon koala, Blinky Bill, usually both in the same image. The decline and fall of the much vilified Fraser Government corresponded to the decline of this rejuvenated literary left-nationalism, and at the popular level the republican idea experienced a brief hiatus as well. In the middle of the 1980s, as the 1988 bicentennial approached, the republic debate re-emerged, and it did so in a different form, resulting from a different line of republican thinking from the radicalism of the bush nationalists. Quite separately, an urban intelligentsia, led by moderately progressive members of the legal profession, had pondered the stirring events of 1975. This bore fruit in 1977 with two publications on the Constitution and republic, one called Republican Australia? and the other Change the Rules!, followed in 1980 by Colin Howard’s thoughtful discussion of the topic in his widely read reflections on constitutional politics and law.43 The mainstreaming of calls for a republic to some extent mirrors a consistent change in poll findings, from about 15 per cent support in the 1950s, to nearly 30 per cent following the 1975 ‘constitutional coup’. This mainstreaming of the republic was further boosted in the 1983 book Australia’s Constitution – Time for Change?, published by the Law Foundation of

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New South Wales and generated in anticipation of the bicentenary by a committee including Don Chipp, Franca Arena, Donald Horne, Neal Blewett, Michael Kirby, and even Bob Hawke, Alan Missen, and John Valder. Its authors, John McMillan, Gareth Evans and Haddon Storey, carefully put both sides of the argument, stressing the constitutional aspects of such a change, but they nevertheless took the change most seriously, giving it an air of inevitability. Noting the popularity of the 1977 Royal wedding, they observed that: ‘Australia’s future is said to lie in a different direction. A true Australian nationhood will be retarded so long as there is a psychological dependence on the symbols and traditions of another country,’ and that for many, ‘the case rests heavily on the actions of the Governor-General in 1975.’44 By 1986, when the Hawke Government was well into its second term, the republic debate reignited, possibly reflecting a sense of unease with the inaction of the government on progressive issues generally, and also the final cutting of appeals to the Privy Council by the Australia Act in that year (final confirmation of the Statute of Westminster of 1931, earlier confirmed in 1942). The person responsible for this was George Winterton, a law lecturer from Sydney. Winterton’s republican tract, Monarchy to Republic, argued in terms of an idea whose time had come, asserting that an ‘Australian republic is, ultimately, inevitable’. He canvassed different models and reviewed the constitutional difficulties and how these might be overcome.45 In response, members of the intelligentsia started talking about ‘the republic’ and an Australian Republican Movement (ARM) was formed in 1991. Too late to secure its initial objective, a referendum, by the 1988 bicentenary, the ARM, under the capable leadership of merchant banker Malcolm Turnbull, caught the fancy of Paul Keating. As an Irish-Australian with strong links to Jack Lang (and Lang’s vehement anti-imperialism), Keating was a natural supporter of the republic, and he made it one of his top priorities when he became prime minister in

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1991, arguing in a speech in April 1993 that it was a logical follow-up project to the success of Labor’s economic reforms: ‘It is important to get our democracy right at the same time as we get our economy right. That is why I think we should start now on the journey to the creation of an Australian republic.’ 46 The timetable established by Keating at this point in the debate included a report from an advisory committee, a referendum, and the change itself coinciding with the 2001 centenary, thus linking it to Aboriginal reconciliation as a key objective for the decade leading to 2001. In his Redfern Park speech of December 1992 Keating had already asserted that ‘we will succeed in this decade’ in the daunting task of reconciliation.47 Following Keating’s loss of office, both the Republican movement and reconciliation would lose traction: John Howard had other priorities. Both feminism and the movement for gay rights underwent a substantial shift of perspective at the end of the 1970s. Both social movements had experienced rapid growth during the early 1970s, and both had been incorporated more or less into the broad left at that time. But winds of change in the late 1970s signalled a shift away from socialist and class analysis in both of these movements at this time. The expansion of tertiary education since the late 1950s and early 1960s, accelerating during the early 1970s, populated these groups with young professionals and students, leading both to increasing publications and to increasing gentrification. The same thing was happening in other industrial countries. The socialist feminism of the 1970s mutated into more radical feminisms in the 1980s, as works like Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room and de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex became key texts within mushrooming women’s groups. Yet these were discourses that had little impact on the reformist economic agenda. By the end of the 1970s every Australian campus had its women’s collective, yet apart from the word ‘collective’ these were devoid of socialist orientation. The ‘Women and Labour’ Conferences

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of the late 1970s gave way, in the 1980s, to a feminism that theorised patriarchy and rape but had little interest it seemed in equal pay. The tendency was noted in 1978 in an essay by Ann Game and Rosemary Pringle, who argued that radical feminism ‘did serve to cover up class differences’ and that it ‘universalized what were in fact the interests of middle-class working women.’ 48 For example, the calls in the early 1980s for more woman-friendly working hours, as Verity Burgmann noted, were seized upon by private employers to justify the creation of ‘flexible’ yet also underpaid casualised workforces, a phenomenon also seen in Australia’s hospitals and universities.49 The economic rationalism of this time also had direct impact on feminists, for example by discouraging the continued funding by state and federal governments of all-important refuges and rape crisis centres. Liberal feminism, spearheaded still by the highly professional WEL, achieved a tremendous victory when Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) was enshrined in legislation after the ALP returned to power federally. This 1986 legislation, in combination with the 1984 Sex Discrimination Act, greatly facilitated women’s employment and promotion in the Commonwealth public service and, in doing so, improved prospects in other large organisations especially for professional women, although some so-called ‘femocrats’ were far from helpful towards less privileged women.50 The rise of professional women in turn assisted in the decoupling of feminism from its earlier left-leaning associations. The enhanced profile and continuous campaigning of feminists in the 1980s not only advanced the EEO agenda but also led to the curbing of sexual harassment in the workplace, maintenance (against strong religious opposition) of the status quo on abortion and reproductive rights, and increased recognition of the problem of domestic violence. These positive gains need to be placed in the balance against those who criticised 1980s feminism for its drift away from socially progressive themes, into middle-class obscurantism and French epistemological

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philosophy. In line with this philosophical turn, universities in the 1980s were lining up to establish Women’s Studies disciplines and not surprisingly historical and theoretical works flooded from the presses. As well as individual publications, there were a number of periodicals, the most important of which were Refractory Girl, Hecate, and Australian Feminist Studies. The new radical feminism did not seek specifically to address the exploitation of women in low waged employment or as integral to the reproduction of cheap labour, but instead created a view of patriarchalism and oppression that aimed at universality. A particular concern of academic feminists and their supporters at this time was to reform language in order to purge it of phrases and words that implicitly reduced the worth of women relative to men, and in this they were reasonably successful, except that they stirred up a debate about ‘political correctness’, which was to be turned against progressive causes during the 1990s. The women’s movement reflected broader trends. Social liberalism and rising prosperity had resulted in a large expansion of the public sector and tertiary education during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and this in turn had created intellectual groups, progressive in aims and outlook, which were largely recruited from the ranks of teachers, university students, public servants, professionals and academics. In addition the anticolonial politics and US civil rights victories of the late 1950s and 1960s had placed notions of ‘rights’ and ‘liberation’ at the top of the agenda, displacing more traditional social justice concerns. The lesbian and gay rights movement was smaller than the feminist movement. As with feminism, the late 1970s activists were often also interested in the ideas and campaigns of the broad left. But, as Burgmann puts it, ‘socialist analyses, common in the 1970s, fell into disfavour in the 1980s with the decline of class analysis and the increasing popularity for theoretical positions that asserted the

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primacy of gender’.51 Responding to police harassment in Sydney in 1978, the Gay Solidarity Group was formed and the first Mardi Gras held, and this is seen as a watershed in the movement. In spite of adverse comment in the media and the backlash of Fred Nile and his Festival of Light organisation, the Mardi Gras grew and became a (frequently humorous) showcase for themes related to the movement’s campaigns. Dennis Altman’s 1979 book Coming Out in the Seventies became the first serious treatment in Australia of the politics of homosexuality, and helped to secure the movement and his place in it. The movement’s HIV-Aids campaign and support for sufferers softened its confrontational aspect in the 1980s as it learned to co-operate with various health agencies.52 Its successes during the 1980s led many of the states and territories to change their laws, decriminalising homosexuality and banning discrimination on the basis of a person’s sexual preference, in line with changing legislation in other parts of the world. This reminds us that these new social movements were very much a global phenomenon, at least in the industrialised world, with movements in local contexts exhibiting only local adaptations. Following the wind-down of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War after 1972, and the end of the war in 1975, the peace movement was dormant for a short time. It would be revived by the debate on uranium mining. The Whitlam Government referred the question of whether to allow the extraction of Northern Territory uranium to an inquiry by a retired judge, Justice Russell Fox, and the Fox inquiry issued reports in 1976 and in 1977. These gave the Fraser Government a green light to encourage uranium mining (subject to safeguards against proliferation) in the Northern Territory, and this decision in 1977 sparked the re-emergence of the combined peace and anti-nuclear movement. Although they were not on the scale of the Vietnam protests, rallies and marches against uranium were frequent and widespread after 1977,

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and in 1979 the Movement Against Uranium Mining (MAUM) was formed to spearhead the movement. Leading figures in the movement included Helen Caldecott, Jim Falk and Joseph Camilleri, and many trade unions lent their support. The movement linked its overall concern with stopping nuclear weapons and nuclear energy to broader issues including Indigenous politics, environmentalism, and opposition to US military bases in Australia. There were strong links with Friends of the Earth (FOE). The opposition to US bases took heart from the Greenham Common women’s protest in the United Kingdom and the persistent rumours of a connection between US concerns about the Pine Gap military installation and the Whitlam dismissal in 1975. In the early 1980s, following President Reagan’s decision to restart the arms race, Hiroshima Day marches around Australia grew in size and popularity. A series of pro-uranium decisions by the ALP after 1982, especially the 1983 decision to allow mining at the Roxby Downs mine in South Australia, blocked the path of these newly activated citizens to mainstream politics, further deepening the sense of fragmentation that was apparent in the other new social movements. After it became clear that the anti-uranium struggle had been lost in the ALP, especially with the 1986 decision to sell uranium to France, the focus of protests shifted to opposition to US bases and towards the formation of a South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone. In the 1984 elections a new Nuclear Disarmament Party poached many ALP votes and one successful candidate, Jo Valentine from Western Australia, claimed to be inspired by Petra Kelly and the German Greens. Writing in 1987 Valentine made it clear that her politics was of the broad left variety, albeit with a single issue focus and without any obvious commitment to progressive or Keynesian macroeconomic philosophies.53 The year 1983 was a watershed for the Australian environment movement. There had been early examples of the increasing popularity of militant environmentalism but before the 1983 Franklin Dam

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confrontation in Tasmania these had gained little political traction. Awareness of environmental issues and ecological philosophies had not entered the mainstream of debate. Intellectuals of the 1960s and early 1970s like John Passmore had explored ecological philosophy, and the poet Judith Wright was part of the successful campaign to protect the Great Barrier Reef from oil drilling in the late 1960s. Another ingredient, the counterculture movement centred near Nimbin on the North Coast of New South Wales since 1973, had been largely a middleclass phenomenon with close links to the universities. Events such as the anti-logging blockade at the remnant rainforest area at Terania Creek (near Nimbin) in 1979 brought together students, hippies, feminists, and Indigenous campaigners, and raised the public profile of the nascent green movement. The countercultural elements at the time were strong, with intellectual roots in theorists like Paulo Freire, Herbert Marcuse, Ivan Illich, Murray Bookchin, and Franz Fanon. Urban environmental issues may have played some part, especially the Green Bans of Jack Mundey’s BLF in Sydney in the period 1971–75, but it was wilderness conservation that stirred the political emotions. After Terania and the escalating Tasmanian protests, the Fraser Government risked the displeasure of Queensland premier Joh BjelkePetersen by submitting Fraser Island (but not the Daintree rainforest) for World Heritage listing. Wilderness issues came to a head in the Franklin Dam blockade of 1982 and early 1983, when wilderness was for the first time a frontline election issue, assisting Hawke to come to power. Wilderness now seemed to have captured the public imagination and in 1987 Bob Brown could boast that wilderness organisations had 300,000 members.54 The founding of a political party, The Greens, in the late 1980s was a consequence of the rise and mainstreaming of environmental activism. As an extension of nature conservation politics, environmentalism at this time was a single issue movement. But as it developed an

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ecological world-view, it had to address broader issues of development, sustainability, social behaviour and economy, becoming potentially as broad as established ideologies such as liberalism or socialism. Writing in 1987 Drew Hutton reflected on its diverse origins: The Green movement has no set ideology from which has emerged certain strategies and forms of organisation. Instead, this movement has emerged in a somewhat incoherent fashion, responding to various crises which the planet and its people have had to face over the last two decades. These single issues have been the basis of most of the social movements which have developed in industrial societies (especially in the West).55

Towards the end of the same essay Hutton points to the very broad implications of ecological philosophy in the field of social justice: Green politics does not accept the philosophical dualism which underpins modern industrial society (mind/body, humanity/nature, boss/worker, male/female) nor that of the traditional left (class struggle and class war leading to a classless society). Instead, it presents the goal of a society where people live in harmony with each other and with nature …56

Thus, environmentalists would claim to have transcended the particular to arrive at the universal and to be so broad as to claim justice not only for all human beings but for the biosphere itself. Their concern for social justice found expression in the Green platform and to that extent the Greens could be seen as a modification of the existing left. Conversely, the movement might be seen as the political embodiment of countercultural elements in the middle class who were responding to the realities of industrial society by seeking to reconnect with a lost golden age of pre-industrial simplicity. Akin to other social movements, environmentalists failed to come to grips with the massive shift in the debate on economic policy, preferring to

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see the new policies and the old policies as equally offensive. A final element of the new social movements was the concern of many of these self-styled activists with identity politics, not only as gendered subjects (witness the women’s and gay rights movements) or as, say, environmentalists, but also specifically in relation to the politics of Indigenous people and the politics of multiculturalism. Between 1975 and 1993 the politics of identity came virtually from nowhere to centre stage. As with other manifestations of the ‘new’ politics this had origins in the worldwide social attitude shifts of the 1960s and the early 1970s in which these global attitude shifts found uniquely Australian subjects. The phased extinguishing of the White Australia policy during the 1960s, and extension of public policy to embrace non-British migrants and Aborigines much more inclusively by every government from Holt through to Keating, set the stage. On one hand, the claims of Indigenous people for rights now extended to more wide-reaching demands that their special identity, culture and symbolic places be recognised, reflected in initiation of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawns in front of Canberra’s Parliament House (1972). The new temper encouraged a series of significant policy changes, such as the establishment of the National Aboriginal Advisory Council (1976), the NT Land Rights Act (1976), the Aboriginal Development Commission (1980), the handover of Uluru to its traditional custodians (1985), the famous Mabo judgment recognising native title (1992), and Keating’s Native Title Act (1993). Aboriginal identity and the Aboriginal subject became key elements of political debate. On the other hand, once the non-British migrant communities of the post-war immigration boom became politically visible in the 1970s there was a scramble on both sides of party politics to recruit the newly discovered ‘ethnic’ communities. Following the ALP’s lead in this area the Fraser Government released the Galbally Report in 1978. As well as the Report, which did much to place the needs of the plurality

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of ‘ethnic communities’ within the mainstream of political discourse, the changing composition of migrant intakes (including a decision to settle about 70,000 mostly Vietnamese refugees between 1978 and 1981) ended the hegemonic identity of Australian Britishness, which, as we saw, had been dominant since federation. As Castles and others point out, the ‘installation of cultural pluralism as a dominant ideology was a profound change in the nature of public discourse in Australia.’57 All was not well in multicultural Australia, however. At a Rotary dinner in Warrnambool, Victoria, in 1984 Geoffrey Blainey ended his speech by remarking that Asians were migrating to Australia in large numbers at a time of unemployment, and that this might be at odds with Australian attitudes. A reporter had taped his talk and soon Blainey was under siege by the media, sensing that the recently elected ALP government would be damaged by his provocative claims. Blainey refused to be intimidated by the media. The ensuing publicity generated a war of words between multiculturalists and supporters of Blainey. Despite the apparent support for Blainey’s view from the new right, especially in the pages of Quadrant, and his defence of it in his book All For Australia (1984), the subsequent continuation of non-discriminatory migration and the multicultural flavour of the bicentenary celebrations in 1988 suggest that his incursion into public discourse had little impact. His ideas may, however, have represented incipient tensions that would later re-emerge in the Hanson backlash in the 1990s (see chapter 10).

The left intellectuals and the economy While the ferment of ideas of the ‘new politics’ was an important feature of this period, it is not there that we find the most concerted criticism of the emerging neo-liberal economic orthodoxy. It is not that economic rationalism was victorious for lack of opposing

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voices. An array of commentators and political analysts came along to condemn the resurrection of revisionist laissez faire economic policy, including R.W. Connell, Dean Jaensch, Frank Stilwell, Peter Wilenski, Graham Maddox, Dennis Altman, Doug McEachern, Hugh Stretton and even Robert Manne and John Carroll (who could claim conservative credentials). Their arguments deserve attention, in order to demonstrate the tenor of their criticisms and the nature of some of their objections, especially when viewed in light of the intellectual heritage of Australian political writing sketched in the present book. Hugh Stretton and Graham Maddox will serve as examples. In his 1989 book The Hawke Government and Labor Tradition the political scientist and ALP aficionado Graham Maddox took Hawke and Keating to task for their embrace of an economic fundamentalism, which, he insisted, was utterly alien to the social democratic currents intertwined in the past experiences of the party. Maddox questioned the validity of wage restraint and financial deregulation and the capitulation to the private sector over the cherished Labor principle of public provision of services. Pointing to the drowning out of alternative voices by the loudspeakers of neo-liberal rhetoric, he argued that to focus on such things as monetary policy ‘was to risk severing the party’s own philosophical roots which supply the intellectual nourishment and establish the character of the branches.’ He questioned whether the much-touted rise of financial globalisation should be accepted without criticism and whether or not it in turn required the deregulation of our currency and national financial institutions. The foreclosure of policy options in the name of an overarching economic theory was documented in detail.58 Like Dean Jaensch’s work of about the same time,59 it offered an assessment of the first few years under Hawke and Keating that strongly refuted the arguments of the Centre for Independent Studies and the Murdoch media outlets. This view saw the ALP of those years as a scene of deep

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betrayal, when the party of initiative gave in and capitulated to the economic policies of the Tories. This argument would be effectively contested by others – Hugh Emy and John Warhurst, for example – who demonstrated continuity and evolution in Labor principles even in this period of change.60 The ‘continuity thesis’ would seed a revaluation of Labor’s achievement after the ALP lost government,61 but the ‘betrayal’ thesis would continue to succour those who opposed the domination of policy considerations by what they regarded as economic fundamentalism. With Hugh Stretton we move from the foreground of politics to the realm of public policy. Stretton’s Political Essays, published in 1987, represented the mature thoughts of a Keynesian who maintained that the preference of people who invest for liquidity and financial speculation, given free rein, has the capacity to drive the real economy through the floor. Stretton described the situation thus: [W]hen the economy ran into trouble in the 1970s the actual functions and efficiencies of the financial system had few expert defenders. … [C]orporate raiders and economists urged the government not to repair and update its financial controls but to dismantle them. It was to those voices which predicted great economic benefits from deregulation that Labor and Liberal governments chose to listen.62

Stretton worried that the new orthodoxy would push capital into the finance part of the economy, starving the real economy of funds, whether that real economy is understood as manufacturing or the great public utilities. By ‘enriching rentiers’ deregulation leads to lower output and more unemployment and inflation, and by selling off natural monopolies it allows private profit to piggyback on anti-social and inefficient business strategies.63 He described privatisation and deregulation as highly effective ways of discouraging the re-tooling of manufacturing industries, especially when monetarist policies led to

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an increase in effective interest rates in the 1980s, which he estimated to have been as much as 700 per cent.64 Instead Stretton called for regulated capital flows, low interest rates, ruthless disciplining of the finance sector to discourage rentier behaviour, shorter working hours and more spending on education and training, all of which, in combination, would create full employment. He described this policy alternative as ‘financial reconstruction’ designed to revive and grow the real economy and increase the creation and fair distribution of commodities in a social liberal–type of framework.65 His advice was not followed: the ascendance of neo-liberal theory had the effect of ruling out such alternative policy options. Beside the more mainstream left intellectuals, such as Stretton and Maddox, Marxists were also active at this time, especially Humphrey McQueen, Bob Connell, Ted Wheelwright, Greg Crough, Frank Stilwell and Ken Buckley. Frank Stilwell, to take one instance, used the unique methodological approach of Marx to shed light on urban and regional planning issues in many book chapters and essays in this period.66 Wheelwright, Crough, and others connected to the discipline of political economy at the University of Sydney published a number of anthologies and separate monographs on aspects of Australian capitalism at this time that were influential among younger political economists.67 How should we assess the larger significance of the diminution of broad concern for social justice in the period in question in comparison with earlier times? The domination of media commentary by the laissez-faire economists and the fragmented attitudes of those in the new social movements, may be reasons for the failure of these alternative voices to be heard where it mattered most. But another reason for the failure of social justice and Keynesian-type arguments can be seen when we examine the policy community itself. Sociologist Michael Pusey’s provocative study of senior bureaucrats, Economic

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Rationalism in Canberra – A Nation-Building State Changes its Mind (1992), purported to reveal the mindset of the key policy makers of this period. Public service reforms in 1984 and 1987, he argued, created a managerialist elite of policy makers, mostly economics graduates, and put these more firmly under the control of the senior ministers and their personal aides.68 Pusey discovered that a substantial proportion of the decision-makers in the Departments of Treasury, Finance, and Prime Minister & Cabinet had not only trained in orthodox economics, but also were part of an easily identified upper middleclass elite of privately educated Melbournians and Sydney-siders. The same coterie that controlled areas like banking and insurance was also, so he argued, supplying the Labor government with ‘the Treasury Line’. There was no H.C. Coombs in 1992 to save the day, as the ethic of providing functional public benefits gave way to the ‘efficiency’ discourse of the deregulated private sector. This was a transitional period, one in which the policy regime initiated after the war broke down, and the initiation of a new approach – neo-liberalism – which would prevail for thirty years, can be discerned. The signals of change can be seen in the final moments of the Whitlam Government (with its alterations to the tariff regime and its more market-oriented last budget), and in the internal battles between Wets and Dries in the Liberal Party during Fraser’s government. But Fraser, for all his rhetoric of small government, would not shift far in practice – and went on to become a vehement critic of economic rationalism (see chapter 10). The convictions articulated by the Hawke Government serve as the most useful indicator of change. Bob Hawke believed that ‘if the world doesn’t trust you then it can ruin you’. So he made disciplined, ‘responsible’ economic reform his overriding policy goal. Hawke and his treasurer, Paul Keating, repositioned Labor as the party of market-oriented, realist government, pursuing private sector deregulation, public sector

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reform, and economic growth. Notwithstanding the criticisms of Maddox, Jaensch and others, can it be defended as a new mode of ‘labour’ government? While couching their objectives and strategies in terms of the emergent neo-liberal orthodoxy, there is little doubt that Hawke and his closest advisers saw their turn to market-based instruments (outsourcing, opening service provision to competitive tender by private sector operators, privatisation and the like) as a way of delivering on community expectations while radically overhauling (and downsizing) the public sector. The Accord with the unions, containing wage claims in return for reinforcement of the social wage (a sort of social-democratic compromise), underwrote Hawke’s economic achievements. The sequence of Hawke-initiated national summits, designed to win co-operation from business and unions, aimed at the same result. These tactics were used to lock in support for neo-liberal reform (for instance, via the tax summit) but were also effective in achieving gains in health, social policy, community services, immigration and multiculturalism, education – while the main game remained the economy.69 It was this balancing of economic reform with social returns that gave credence to the advocates of the ‘continuity thesis’: that is, that Labor was pursuing its traditional objectives in new ways. Supporters of such approaches could point to a persisting concern for society, and it gave some in the Hawke ministry scope to defend social goals, while he and Keating busied themselves with the economy. Hawke himself did not drive the intellectual agenda: others took on the ‘ideas work’: Gareth Evans in foreign affairs; Neal Blewett, Brian Howe and Barry Jones in the delivery of social equity; Ralph Willis and Bill Kelty in the development of the Accord; and Keating as the voice of the main game – economic reform. Hawke’s memoir testifies to his conviction of his own centrality in the process of economic change.70 He was, in terms of received

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views, economically literate; his whole career had been focused on the domestic economy, and he was perfectly attuned to accept the emerging market orthodoxy without resistance. Reform of the party platform drew in part on Hawke’s capacities as a professional negotiator, but overall it hinged less on clever politics than on Hawke’s belief – which the party largely shared – that the ALP could not continue in government without him, which gave him leverage in insisting on the politics of pragmatism. Hawke was an agent of change, but one almost devoid of political imagination; an actor committed to management and process, but with only the vaguest ends in mind. He enacted the dilemma of his times, when the urgency of economics seemed to have eviscerated politics. This is not to say that there were not real economic crises to be confronted, that there was no need for economic restructuring, and that all this did not require careful management. It is, rather, to suggest that even these imperatives might have been addressed in terms of community values, rather than relying on neo-liberal prescriptions alone. The point of politics, in Hawke’s view, was to respond to the environment, rather than to shape it. Politics was about persuading the people to accept strategies (wage restraint, tariff reduction, financial deregulation, cuts in the public sector) that were those said to be demanded by the economic environment. Politics was also about ‘culling Labor’s sacred cows’ – since Labor aspirations were once oriented towards controlling the market where necessary to produce a better society. Challenged to articulate his vision, he spoke of, ‘A country that can adapt to a world that won’t want to pay high prices for our primary products, and that can compete in manufacturing and in services such as health and education’. Pushed further by the question, ‘what is your vision for individual Australians?’, he came up with ‘We need to create the conditions where they can do the best for themselves.’71 There is no hint here of what life would be

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like in the adaptive, competitive country, and the onus is back on individuals to ‘do the best for themselves’ – a direct precursor of what would become Howard’s mantra after 1996. It is a far cry not only from Curtin, Chifley and Whitlam, but also from Deakinite liberalism and from Malcolm Fraser, who during the Hawke years became a spokesman in the press for the interests of the Australian community against international markets (and against the Dries in the Liberal Party). Hawke’s disinterest in big ideas and scepticism about ideology unsettled a conventional belief: that parties and governments should stand for something. In the end, as another Hawke minister, Barry Jones, suggested, the public was entitled to ask: ‘Is there any core belief that the ALP will not give up?’72 To suggest, finally, as Geoff Kitney does, that the Accord eventually failed because it could not deliver ‘the last big structural change demanded by the financial markets’73 – the deregulation of the labour market – is to reveal that negotiated consensus was tolerated only so long as it led in the direction wanted by business. Wage earners were for a time protected from the extremes of deregulation and market caprice, but this was not, in the end, a battle the labour movement could win. When push came to shove, the commitment to economic reform was transcendent – and a number of commentators share Julian Disney’s assessment that ‘even staunch believers in the eventual success of the readjustment tend to agree that it was unnecessarily harsh’.74

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10 A veto on politics

The mischief is that democracy in Australia, as in the United States, insists on attaching an extraordinary significance to the personality of its political leader. Alfred Deakin, 19091

In the early 1990s, an odd thing happened. Paul Keating, the hard man of economic reform, usurped Hawke as leader of the ALP and prime minister, and then tried to revive the big picture politics of ideas. He failed, but understanding his failure tells us something about the grip of the new dispensation and foreshadows the period when neo-liberalism was to be at its most powerful.

Paul Keating’s revelation: from economic to social change Keating had decided as early as the second half of the 1980s that Hawke was not up to the job. He regarded himself as the architect of economic reform, and grew contemptuous of Hawke’s lack of vision. Hawke’s shield against Keating’s ambition was a ‘special relationship’ with the Australian people that persisted even as divisions in the cabinet and caucus began to undermine his leadership. But when that magic eventually wore off by the beginning of the 1990s – something Hawke could never quite understand – he was finally left defenceless against his rival, who challenged twice for the leadership in 1991, and succeeded in October 1991. Once described as ‘carrying ambition as an altar boy carries his missal’,2 Keating had many of the traits of what

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Harold Lasswell called an agitator, fashioning himself as a storyteller to the masses. He adopted the leading script of the day (economic reform), and turned it into a story of necessary change. By the 1990s, his doctrine of dynamic change led to other big pictures: engagement with Asia, Aboriginal reconciliation, a republican future. In this he measured his distance from the man he called ‘old jellyback’, Bob Hawke, who worked through negotiated consensus and never entertained a big picture. Hawke could summarise and draw the threads of a meeting together persuasively, but Keating could sell an idea better than anybody else in the government. He painted word pictures, created images and moods at a stroke. He could turn ideas into icons, make phrases that stuck. He could cut through to the meaning and … restate it in a useful form faster than any politician of his generation.3

The turning point was the battle for re-election in 1993, against the Liberal Party’s then leader, John Hewson, and Hewson’s Fightback! policy agenda – an agenda intended to push the market reform process further and faster by directly confronting the interests said to benefit from the interventionist state. As a political strategy, it depended on electors recognising that better conditions would be achieved when they were ‘freed’ to help themselves. This reform package will put Government in its place and will put Australians back in control of their own lives … The whole thrust of our policy is to strengthen the individual against the state – in particular to strengthen the forgotten people, the low and middle income earners, against the forces which control and limit their lives.4

Hewson was not only a fervent free-market believer; he also represented the Liberal Party’s clearest repudiation of the ameliorative liberalism championed by Deakin and Menzies. In one respect, he represented the endpoint of the path Keating had been pursuing. And by

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attacking from a point further along the spectrum, he forced Keating to double-back, to rethink ‘Labor’ objectives, to revisit the social agenda and the role of the state in providing public goods. ‘We were fitted up with the policies and rhetoric of the eighties’, said Keating, ‘we had to change that and change our position’. Keating’s One Nation policy, marrying public works and family payments with tax cuts, was a beginning in this change, and an answer to Hewson. Few expected Labor to win in 1993; Keating’s popularity was low, unemployment was near 10 per cent and the polls were running against the government. For Hewson it was said to be the ‘unloseable election’. Yet he lost. It was unlikely that people already anxious about the pace of change would be won by a strategy promising even faster reform, even more faith in the market. For his part, Keating made his most sustained attempt to marry the story of change with Labor principles. He represented his success against Hewson as ‘a victory for the true believers’. He enlisted Samuel Johnson to his cause, ‘In a civilised society we all depend on each other’; and accentuated the threat of divisions, It will be a long time before an opposition party tries to divide this country again … to put one group of Australians over here and another over there. The public of Australia are too decent, too conscientious and too interested in their country to wear these sorts of things.

His allusion to values, ‘It was Australian values on the line, and the Liberal Party wanted to change Australia from the country it has become, a co-operative, decent, nice place to live, where people have regard for one another,’ grounded an argument for subordinating economic to social imperatives, ‘I will never accept for Australia the notion of a competitive economy being a synonym for social regression.’ Underlying it all was his version of a shared history, ‘We can give young Australians a knowledge of their past and a sense of

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where they belong in the story. We can tell them about the gift of Australian democracy … We can imbue them with a faith in the core values of Australia …’; and ‘those great nostrums of access and equity … the policies of inclusion’.5 In 1994, policies of inclusion began to be addressed. Keating reinvented himself as a socially concerned leader in a series of headlining policy initiatives following the path of One Nation. There was the Working Nation jobs compact, designed to specify how the disadvantaged were to be ‘pulled up behind us’; the Creative Nation package, intended to resuscitate the arts and national identity; promotion of Aboriginal reconciliation; a youth summit; the appointment of a ‘civics expert group’ to revive responsible citizen politics; and the institution of a ‘national strategies conference’ to steer policy. There were also contributions to the debate about an Australian republic, the achievement of gender equity, the promotion of health and welfare, and an insistence on the importance of ideas. These were the public manifestations of intense debate in the prime minister’s private office between those Don Watson’s insider account called the ‘pointy heads’ – economists who ‘believed their ideas were irrefutably the right ones’ – and the ‘bleeding hearts’ – who ‘professed no radically different species of economics: a little more sympathy for what we understood of Keynes, a little more traditional Laborism, a little more Christian or any other kind of charity’.6 Eventually it came together: … there was consensus about the shape of our ambitions … There was room for argument, but it all concerned the same idea, that in Australia we might in ways unique in the world weld the good economy to the good society and have some influence abroad. It had always been the guiding light of the Labor Government, but I doubt if it ever seemed as clear or reachable as it did in the office over the last six months [of Keating’s government].7

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But it was too late; it was not to be. In the three decades since national opinion polls have surveyed prime ministerial popularity, Keating averaged the lowest scores of any prime minister,8 yet media support for him ‘grew in inverse proportion to public sympathy’.9 Focus group research revealed that significant sectors of the community loathed him,10 yet his ‘true believers’ were inspired by him, and have not forgotten: Paul Keating … made me believe that if I worked hard enough, had an open mind and was passionate about the future, one day I too might become prime minister …The sense of opportunity and hope that Keating helped craft has gone … He made me believe I could do anything and be anybody.11

What distinguished these true believers from those whose scepticism finally prevailed? From the 1970s onwards, we have seen the emergence of what has been called a knowledge society and a knowledge economy,12 privileging the possessors of ‘intellectual capital’. Politics has lost its edge as expert opinion (particularly in relation to economics) appears to drive policy. Old cleavages have disappeared, but new divisions have emerged between knowledge elites, and ‘those whom knowledge politics leaves right out’.13 The former – cosmopolitan and adept in capitalising on change, post-materialist in their aspirations, energised by new opportunities – loved Keating. There was a rational reason for this: their interests were those most likely to be advanced by the agenda he championed. They dominated the press, shared his vision of necessary reform, applauded his ferocious demolition of those seen as impeding the future, and were animated by his readiness to take risks: ‘down hill, one ski, no poles’ as he once put it. Younger people (like the writer quoted above) were also excited by his sense that boundaries could be broken, by the enlarged sense of possibilities he seemed to promise.

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Others, however, were less engaged by the possibilities than by the damage to what they held dear.14 It was not only that some people were more exposed to the disruption of change (as jobs disappeared, or career structures dissolved), but also that they sensed diminishing opportunities for political traction in a policy process where ‘knowledge’ criteria (derived from economic expertise, for instance) seemed, when they were at odds with political criteria, to have an edge.15 It was those who felt this loss of a voice who would, given their opportunity, turn on Keating and punish him for his hubris. Despite his ability, then, to ‘turn ideas into icons, make phrases that stuck’, only some in Keating’s audience were persuaded. For the rest, there was little to indicate how these schemes connected with each other, or with everyday problems. For those challenged, rather than enlivened, by change his initiatives contributed little to an enhanced sense of certainty about the future. Why should they believe that a better world could be built up piecemeal through discrete policy initiatives, each of which was sold as the great breakthrough? Keating’s pronouncements after 1993 followed the pattern of his election night ‘true believers’ speech: a recognition that not only economic restructuring but also social problems needed to be addressed; a grand picture of a possible innovation; but then an inability to mobilise any rhetoric to bring these fragments together other than that of economic reform. His 1996 electoral defeat showed his failure to mobilise a public persuaded of the significance of these new directions.16 So Keating, for all his passion, failed to achieve the social democracy at which he aimed. As economic trends turned sour in 1995, he railed against ‘deficit Daleks’, but had no resources with which to defend against the financial markets’ demands for ‘more discipline’, no persuasive rejoinder to the Opposition’s claim that we’d been allowed ‘five minutes of sunlight’, and then the sky fell in again. Perhaps his difficulty was that he had done as much as anyone in public

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life to bring about the realisation of what Frances Fukuyama was then forecasting: a time when philosophy and political imagination were defeated by a sense of the inevitable, the sense that there could not be anything fundamentally new to say. Why was this?

The end of history – or the consolidation of orthodoxy In 1991, the communist empire – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its Eastern European satellites – came to an end. The collapse of the command economies has been interpreted in a variety of ways, but its most important effect in relation to political thinking was that at a stroke, it seemed to undermine left-critiques of contemporary capitalism. For nearly 150 years (in Australia, the first suspicion of ‘the communist bogey’ had been voiced in 1849)17 the conception of an alternative system of economic development had given oxygen to critics of liberal excesses and market failures. The existence of command economies was their discursive licence. It was not that most left-wing thinkers were fully fledged Marxists let alone communists (though a few were), or that deluded pilgrims (like Manning Clark) who returned from visits to the Soviet Union professing to have seen the future (and ‘it works’) gained much purchase, or that – despite the periodic influence of the CPA, the old left and the new left – there was ever a likelihood of Australia taking a socialist path. It was, rather, that knowing some modern states operated on alternative principles underwrote the idea that there was a spectrum of political and economic management, from unrestrained free markets (and individualistic liberty) at one end, to command economies (and state definition of what liberty was to be allowed and how it was to be delivered) at the other. That there were options was a resource on which those who sought to ‘civilise capitalism’ could draw. In the face

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of insistence that ‘freedom’ was to be interpreted in only one way (as the greatest possible individual liberty), one could still argue that positive freedom might require state intervention to provide welfare nets, or to protect against market failure. Those at the free-market end would always rail against this, point to its infringement of individual liberty, and accuse even the mildest of ameliorative liberals of courting socialism. And of course, since at least Reid’s 1906 election campaign, and with increasing momentum during the Cold War, socialism had been represented as a ‘threat’, a proxy for communism and the totalitarian state. Nonetheless, in the context of the Deakinite settlement, it had remained possible to mount respectable arguments for collective action, communitarian politics and ‘the ethical state’.18 Now – with the abject failure of the great socialist experiment – such professions were in effect laughed out of court. This may have been the most important catalyst for the fragmenting of the left into single issue causes, and identity politics noted earlier. Intellectual progressives talked now of post-modernism, eschewing the ‘grand narratives’ of the modernist past as impossible (and coercive) dreams from which the contemporary ‘subject’ had to be freed to ‘construct’ his/her own narrative from all available possibilities. This ignored the fact that there was, as Fukuyama was to demonstrate, still a grand narrative in play to which many individualistic narratives offered no contest. There remained no objective alternative to bind potential dissenters together. The so-called ‘rainbow coalitions’ of the 1980s and 1990s could mount no coherent, unified response to the overarching orthodoxy of neo-liberalism. The language of individual responsibility for one’s fate did not allow for the analysis of structural patterns of disadvantage in terms of class, ethnicity, gender – indeed, the reversion from such broad social facts to the particularities of, say, identity politics indicated a surrender to the new zeitgeist. Not only did communist parties die (the CPA was dissolved in 1991), but also social

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movement activists had to find another language: feminists spoke, for instance, of having to be bi-lingual, learning to couch claims for equity in productivity terms, ‘speaking one language (managerialism and economic rationalism) while thinking another’.19 The ‘bleeding hearts’ in Keating’s office had no ground on which to stand. As Don Watson explained, the ‘pointy heads’ found in economics a whole world view, a web of meaning and belief by which all events were interpreted and all potential actions measured. That was what they meant by the main game. They believed … that they were on the side of history; their ideas were irrefutably the right ones, that what they did was the best hope for the nation and its people – the last best hope, indeed of mankind … They were believers, a little company with special knowledge, they knew what the game was … On the opposing side there was less clarity and certainty … [W]e bleeding hearts were united … more by opposition to the economists than by any other common ground … [T]he pointy heads’ faith was in the market; the bleeding hearts invested the populace with God-like virtue … In the name of the people, the bleeding hearts were likely to sacrifice policy purity; in the name of policy purity, the pointy heads would sacrifice the people … The problem for the bleeding hearts was to arrive at some coherent analysis – or story – from the mess of moral certainties and political cynicism which informed their thinking.20

Francis Fukuyama brilliantly captured the zeitgeist of the early 1990s in his book, The End of History and the Last Man.21 His was a story of ideological evolution: each past society had claimed its ideal to be superior to another’s, and this fuelled the narrative of conflict and development with which history had been concerned. But this evolution had reached its end: now we were seeing the ‘unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism’, and with it ‘the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism’ and the ‘ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture’. History had ended

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because the only modern alternatives to liberal forms – fascism and communism – had been defeated. Since we had reached the universalisation of an ideal, there would be no change in the future: the narrative of conflict and development was outmoded. There could now be only one idea and one form of state: The state that emerges at the end of history is liberal insofar as it recognises and protects through a system of law man’s universal right to freedom, and democratic insofar as it exists only with the consent of the governed … [I]n the universal homogenous state, all prior contradictions are resolved and all human needs are satisfied … what remains is primarily economic activity.22

The root causes of any persisting inequality were a legacy of premodern conditions, and would be addressed since there were no legal or structural features to sustain them: liberal society ‘remains fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist’. The internationalisation of liberal market principles would have a homogenising effect ‘capable of linking different societies … physically through the creation of global markets, and of creating parallel economic aspirations and practices … The attractive power of this world creates a very strong predisposition for all human societies to participate’.23 We might, Fukuyama decided, remain unhappy ‘with the impersonality and spiritual vacuity of liberal consumerist societies … it is not at all clear that it is remediable through politics’. What is clear is that the world that has reached the end of history is far more preoccupied with economics than with politics or strategy … idealism will be replaced with economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems … There will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.24

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Margaret Thatcher would efficiently condense this liberal triumphalism in a slogan, ‘There is no alternative!’ – and TINA would become the watchword for ‘pointy heads’ everywhere. Of course, we had seen this before, not only in the ‘end of ideology’ rehearsals of Daniel Bell in 1960 (though the ‘universalising’ liberalism celebrated then was that of the mixed economy and the Keynesian consensus), but also a hundred years earlier when Bruce Smith claimed that liberalism had delivered on its promise and it now remained only to preserve what had been gained, and – more surprisingly – with Charles Pearson’s assertion in National Life and Character (1894) that the consummation of the liberal project would be state socialism, for this would produce ‘well ordered polities, security … enhanced regard for life and property’ (see chapter 3). There was, for Pearson too, ‘no alternative’, and like Fukuyama, he predicted that in the absence of any need for debate, ‘The world will be left without deep convictions or enthusiasm, without the regenerating influence of the ardour for political reform and the fervour of pious faith which have quickened men for centuries past … with a passion purifying the soul.’25 Fukuyama would be bound to say that Pearson had been quite wrong – indeed, history had shown him to be wrong. What neither would concede is that their conviction that history could have only one end, that a perceptive elite could have the right answers and that these brooked no alternative, precisely mirrored the ‘historical inevitability’ of those they thought hopelessly deluded, the Marxists. Indeed, these are the defining feature of ideological thinking, and it is the TINA aspect above all that clarifies neo-liberalism as ideological, and that gives it the power to cut through the more provisional arguments of the ‘bleeding hearts’, as Watson so deftly demonstrated. In Australia, an observer just as gifted as Fukuyama in capturing the ideological moment was Paul Kelly, with his influential book The End of Certainty (1992).26 In fact, while (as its title suggests) it

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was a book intent on demolishing one set of certainties (those of the Deakinite settlement), it was equally engaged in promoting the new certainties for, like Fukuyama, Kelly could see no alternative to the free-market orthodoxy. Australia, argued Kelly, had historically developed a bipartisan consensus that relied on a favoured trading position in a larger empire (‘imperial benevolence’), and involved strategies – industry protection, immigration restriction, wage arbitration (the key features of Deakin’s ‘new protection’) – that depended on an interventionist state. Kelly evocatively called it ‘the Australian settlement’.27 None of this is new: Hancock and Eggleston advanced similar arguments in the 1930s. Where Kelly was innovative was in adapting the tenets of contemporary economic debate to show that the collapse of such ideas in the face of economic crisis in the 1970s and 1980s was predestined. The interventionist state had stifled market potential and was now an impediment to the openness and competitive capacity we would need to survive in the global market place. Kelly’s is the best account of what had happened in the policy debates of the ALP and the Liberal Party in the 1980s and very early 1990s, but couches these in terms of an inevitability just as inexorable as that identified by Fukuyama. He noted that the reformers, influenced by Hayek, Friedman and their disciples, were zealots, ‘like all successful reformers’. By the early 1990s, he said, ‘the real division in Australian politics was horizontal, a split running though all parties that separated market-oriented reformers from state power traditionalists’. The latter, he implied, were merely sentimental. Freemarket reform, however, would be irresistible, driven by politics, technology and intellectual force – and the fact that it was a global phenomenon, not unique to Australia. We had to be part of the game. The transition to ‘an economy geared to a new test of international competition, a greater reliance on markets to set prices … a growing

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emphasis on individual skills and enterprise productivity’ had not been fully achieved, but the message was to perfect the transition – the mistake would be to retreat.28 Kelly had no need to worry. The new bi-partisan consensus meant that no one in any major party would dare speak against free markets, and socialism would be literally ‘unthinkable’. Any ‘bleeding hearts’ wanting still to civilise capitalism would first have to testify to the faith (‘the idea of the free market – all of us were attached to that’, said Don Watson), then grope for the rusty language of social democracy, or claim to speak for ‘common sense’ (or, like the feminists, learn bi-lingualism) to describe their project. In effect, what was going on was a loss of the means to speak. The dominance of one idea, as George Lakoff demonstrated,29 constituted a stranglehold on political dialogue: neo-liberalism became the only frame within which government action, politics itself, could be conceived. It was this that undermined Keating’s efforts to reach beyond ‘the policies and rhetoric of the eighties’. In fact, what had happened had been something like a revolution in political thinking. Certainly, as we have seen in earlier chapters, every previous policy regime – the democratisation of the late nineteenth century, ‘new protection’, post-war reconstruction – had generated an effective consensus within which mainstream politics would operate. But there had always been grounds for dissent, traditions of contest on which reformers would recurrently draw, and models of difference: for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the liberal polities had been shadowed by other modern states operating on alternative principles. Now all of these resources, it seemed, had failed. Intellectually, there was nowhere to go. Kelly ended his book claiming that ‘[t]he task of leadership now is to create a synthesis between the free market rationalism needed for a stronger economy and the social democracy which inspired the original Australian

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settlement ideals of justice and egalitarianism.’30 But at the end of history, where could one find the grounds for such a synthesis? The end of history, properly understood, constitutes a veto on politics, for this reason: democratic politics assumes dialogue; any acceptance of the proposition that debate is over (whether by Pearson, by Fukuyama, or by Marxists) undercuts the very purpose of politics, leaving us, as both Pearson (in 1894) and Fukuyama (in 1992) asserted, with only ‘technical’ problems to solve – in a drab ‘world … without deep convictions or enthusiasm, without the regenerating influence of the ardour for political reform and the fervour of … faith’. Democratic politics assumes an aggregation of different interests, even different truths, which must find a way to live together. Politics is not about finding the one true way; instead it is the activity of negotiation, conciliation and compromise between different interests trying to reach a workable solution to the problem of common rule. There are of course other solutions to the problem of order – such as tyranny, dictatorship, despotism and oligarchy – which insist on a single interest and so avoid politics. But we recognise that these are at odds with liberty. Political doctrines themselves are attempts to conciliate diverse interests. But they too will be compromised: politics, as Bernard Crick reminded us long ago, ‘is not simply the grasping for an ideal, for then the ideals of others may be threatened; but it is not pure self-interest either, simply because the more realistically one construes self-interest, the more one is involved in relationships with others …’31 Politics is not a system, but a process; it does not lead to clarity, neatness or ultimate outcomes – the world is and will remain a hybrid and conflicted place. In accepting diversity, the simultaneous existence of different groups and different truths, it recognises that though a political settlement is always the objective, there can be no finality: the door is always open, ideas that seem apt for the moment will eventually fail; new approaches will have to be found – and ‘old’ ideas may be resurrected to save us.

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The pluralist polis described by Crick depends upon a balance between tolerance of diversity and the striking of settlements driven by the community’s interest in sheer survival. But such pluralism is always in danger of overbalancing one way into the belief that there is one fundamental solution to all our difficulties (Pearson’s state socialism; Fukuyama’s neo-liberalism, for example), or the other way into a radical relativism (post-modernism, for instance) that denies the possibility of any common narrative about how we might live together. When we have no options, there can be no politics.

The heir – John Howard’s ‘choice’ and economic reform when this kindly world all round the man has been blackened out … and the foundations of the world fail; then, when the man … is alone … the great individualistic motto shall be written over him in avenging irony … [O]ver his cell shall be written with dreadful truth, ‘He believes in himself’. (G.K. Chesterton, 1908)32

The Liberal–National Party coalition, led by John Howard, won the federal elections of 1996, saying it aimed at the creation of conditions in which the community could be ‘comfortable and relaxed’. It was an apparent renunciation of the hard edges of Hewson’s 1993 agenda, and intended to reassure those made anxious by Keating’s insistence that more reform was needed. In fact, though neither Howard nor Keating would admit it, there was substantial continuity in their commitment to economic management.33 And Howard would, above all, show the potential of how activist politics could be vetoed in the pursuit of the one big idea of the time. This is not to say that he lacked critics – indeed it would become fashionable to dismiss their increasing stridency as evidence that they were not pursuing reasonable dialogue

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but were simply ‘Howard haters’. Rather, his critics began by mirroring the incoherence of the ‘bleeding hearts’, and ended less with cogent doctrine or the assertion of alternative ways of approaching political objectives, but with fears for democracy itself. Little of this cut through. It was only after Howard, when the faith in market solutions was manifestly failing, that the policy regime that he had consolidated could be challenged – and the search for alternatives was again seen as legitimate. In the meantime, Howard remade the public sphere. This was not evident at first. Only after a shaky first term in power did Howard come to dominate his party and his era. He succeeded in part because he built upon the institutional transformation inherited from his predecessors, in part through sheer doggedness, but also because he was able to capitalise on the aggregation of power around the prime minister to amplify his message, and to silence dissent. He was an inventive and aggressive proponent of the contemporary orthodoxy, able to relate it back to what he claimed to be core liberal ideals, to give it a spin that differentiated his approach from that of his (Labor) precursors, and to project it forward as the way of the future. Howard inherited institutional resources that were conducive to strong leadership. Successive prime ministers, over three decades, had built up the office in response to the demands for decisiveness in what was interpreted as an increasingly uncertain world: it was the common domestic response to globalisation. There had been reforms to the public service to make it more responsive to incumbent governments, one element of which had been the centralisation of policy co-ordination and authority in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and through it the prime minister. The advisory structure in ministerial private offices had been substantially augmented. Initially intended to multiply sources of advice and increase options, it had

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instead come to have a funnelling effect, with the capacity to sieve, skew and channel advice towards what ministers wanted to hear rather than what they needed to know. In the Howard decade it comprised not just coalition, but Howard, loyalists. The evolution of media conventions focused attention on leaders and their messages rather than policy debate. Political parties, which had once acted as a constraint on leaders, had been hollowed out; the leader ‘stood in’ for the party in the public eye.34 This, then, was the position from which Howard promulgated the new faith.35 Howard’s vision was clear from the first – radical industrial relations reform, deficit reduction and further public sector modernisation (with a belief in private sector provision wherever possible), a conviction that rent-seeking elites dominated most programs and much service provision (and must be challenged by opening up market competition), a commitment to liberating individual ‘choice’ as the best driver of resource allocation, and a conviction that he was in touch with the core values (‘self reliance, a fair go, pulling together and having a go’) of ‘the mainstream’. These elements were signalled in his early ‘headland’ speeches,36 and he soon began to preface every policy initiative with a preamble showing how it was informed by these core principles. Judith Brett has shown how Howard, scorning the intelligentsia, determinedly committed to plain speaking, fashioned an enormously powerful message that professed to speak for the ‘ordinary battler’, and to advance the interests of ‘the mainstream’ and a common heritage against vested interests (‘elites’), internal division, international challenge and foreign hostility.37 How did he do it? He recognised four things. First, he saw that Labor had abandoned popular nationalism in its pursuit of economic reform, and its insistence on what ‘we’ must do to prosper in a global market. In response, Howard skilfully took over the Australian Legend, once the preserve of radicals and

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the ALP, insisting that there was an ‘essential’ Australian heritage to be defended, and turned its values – the fair go, mateship – into a story of conservative individualism. Second, he articulated what a disconsolate electorate was feeling: that Labor’s reform was topdown, a series of injunctions voiced by the knowledge elite with which the rest of us were to comply. Instead Howard turned the reform message from a mantra about the imperatives of the market into a story about how careful change would deliver more jobs and more choice. And he demonised the unrepresentative elites said to have captured the Labor party – he would govern ‘for all of us’. This was at once a message of unity (he spoke for ‘the mainstream’) and a way of marginalising opponents. Third, sensing that the climate of uncertainty engendered by change had generated disabling anxieties, he realised that if targeted and organised, these emotions could be mobilised to advantage. The naming of specific ‘elites’ as the enemy of ‘mainstream’ aspirations (and the rhetorical association of those elites with everything Howard sought to overcome) gave anxiety a target and political action an objective – the restitution of conditions in which we could be ‘comfortable and relaxed’. Fourth, the sheer aggression with which Paul Keating had sought to box in the coalition parties by defining issues (Asian engagement, reconciliation, the republic) in ways they could not accommodate could be turned against Labor: this was the prelude to the ruthlessness with which Howard would later, as prime minister, reverse the valencies of political discourse to disable the ALP in, for instance, debates on immigration and asylum seekers and the ‘history wars’.38 Brett, no apologist for the right, argued persuasively that Howard was the most creative conservative political leader since Menzies. John Howard would never acknowledge any continuity with the Labor reform project, referring repeatedly to ‘the thirteen barren years under Hawke and Keating’. Rather, he undertook the task of

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redefining ‘the public’, of drawing together many interests under the mantle of ‘the ordinary people’, with a new vigour and a new twist – he was the mainstream leader who adopted anti-elitism. By endorsing the view that there are elites who will betray us, he may have aimed to win breakaway supporters of Pauline Hanson (see further below), both containing her, and capitalising on populism. However, it is hard to ignore what appears to be a borrowing of the tenets of US neoliberals: a distinctively different rhetoric that favoured the interests of precisely those whom Hanson and her followers feared.39 American proponents of the new dispensation pioneered the technique of short-circuiting the gap between elites and citizens by targeting social liberals alone as ‘the elite’ and representing themselves as the defenders of the people’s right to determine their circumstances through market choice. Howard’s speeches recapitulate the American model (as articulated by, say, Gary Becker or Jeffrey Bell)40 too closely to believe that this is coincidence: he adopted and adapted elements of this discourse to effect the inversion of the post-war consensus, and to castigate his critics (and the ALP). Where the one constant in the Hawke–Keating years was the challenge of economic change and how ‘we’ were to adapt to it, the constant in Howard’s mantra was ‘the people’ and how their choices could be given effect through economic opportunity. Where Hawke and Keating acknowledged an element of threat (‘If the world decides it does not trust you, then it can ruin you’), there was, with Howard, only muted allowance that markets might not always deliver: instead the threat was constituted by impediments to choice, especially those created by self-interested elites. With this went very particular interpretations of the people (their history, traditions, values and interests); the nature of change; the state (and the roles of government and bureaucracy within it); and the characteristics of opposition. Howard followed Keating in proposing that Australia was comprised

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of a people formed by a shared history, but immediately turned his history into an attack on Keating’s version: Keating’s history ‘failed because it aimed to establish a form of historical correctness as a particular offshoot of political correctness’.41 This fed a more generalised attack upon selective historians and navel-gazing elites who, he said, endorsed a ‘black arm-band’ view that our history ‘has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination’. ‘I take a very different view. I believe that the balance sheet of our history is one of heroic achievement and that we have achieved much more as a nation of which we can be proud than of which we should be ashamed …’42 In a century of achievement ‘during which only four generations fashioned a unique culture, created a decent, tolerant and cohesive society, built a thriving modern economy, nurtured some of the finest democratic traditions … and earned gratitude and respect,’ according to Howard, ‘a distinctive national character was formed, marked by good humour, a sense of fair play, generosity of spirit and independence’.43 Thus, against the Keating history of peoples coming together in a ‘community of fate’, Howard resorted to an essentialism born of common traditions, issuing in common values and crystallising in national character and ‘bedrock institutions’. Howard was given to extensive commentary on ‘national character [as] an important factor in achieving prosperity’, the ‘outstanding qualities which set us apart’ and ‘an Australian way – different and so often better than that of comparable societies’.44 Typically, he linked this with what he said were the foundation values: ‘self-reliance, a fair go, pulling together and having a go’.45 Howard denied any disjunction between ‘the Australian settlement’ and the uncertainties of globalisation and market fundamentalism. Where were the grounds for such continuity? In his equation of individual liberty with choice, the assertion that Liberals had always

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been committed to the protection of liberty, and his interpretation of the policy task as that of maximising choice. We believe … that ‘the only real freedom is a brave acceptance of unclouded individual responsibility’. And in making policy … that encouragement of self-reliance, of giving people choice … has been at the forefront of our efforts … The … changes to industrial relations law give back power to individual workers. The incentives for private health insurance encourage people to accept responsibility … The changes to education funding improve the choice available to parents.46

Howard frequently emphasised the limits of government, remarking that there must be ‘a practical balance between the limits of government and the limits of markets, between laissez-faire economics on the one side and a suffocating centralism by government and bureaucracy on the other’ (emphasis added).47 Only one side of this dichotomy was subject to adverse qualification – this trope recurred and always in the same terms. The effect was to deny what many previously saw as the achievement of the post-war public service. Bureaucracy could not be empowering or enabling: ‘people motivated by high ideals, stirred by a sense of vocation, guided by local knowledge of their communities, and unashamedly desiring a reward if successful at their task, can help … better than a bureaucracy forced to work to rigid regulation’.48 Increasingly, people want governments not out of their lives but off their backs … the role of modern government is evolving so that it facilitates competitiveness and choice … so that it provides a fair safety net without destroying incentives and risk taking; and so that it is more than a mere keeper of the ring without resorting to the other extreme of trying to micromanage people’s lives …49

Because of its failure to recognise these truths, Labor stood condemned:

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This is a path down which Labor, constrained by old loyalties, burdened by old ideology, simply cannot travel. The new concept of working through others, of being ally not superior, is simply impossible for a party historically committed to bureaucratic intervention … They simply cannot accept that others can be trusted with resources and with responsibility …50

Note the features of Howard’s rhetoric. He was intent on differentiating himself from his Labor predecessors and denying any connection with them in the task of economic reform, which he presented as wholly the domain of his government. His appeal was to a countervailing public: one he depicted neither as imprisoned by the old, worn-out ideology that he asserted bedevilled Labor, nor as amenable to the dissembling of noisy minorities (which is to say, elites). That public had a history, an essential nature that gave rise to shared values ‘developed over a century’ but as applicable ‘to today’s issues as those of tomorrow’.51 Howard, unlike Keating, did not resort to the language of the economic technocrats, and unlike Hawke, did not speak of the ‘imperatives’ of the new global economy or the threat if we fail. Rather, through a sequence of strategic elisions, he asserted not a break with the past but a continuity of ‘fundamental’ values and ‘bedrock’ institutions. Critics – foremost among them the Labor Party, but also including advocates of alternative approaches – represented vested interests, elites whose pursuit of sectional advantage rather than national objectives would restrict the choices of the people. Howard resisted any such betrayal: the Liberal Party was ‘owned by nobody … answerable only to the aspirations and the hopes and the dreams and the passions of the ordinary men and women of this country’.52 It might be thought simply opportunistic that Howard should cast Labor as working in concert with elites, but his story mirrored American neo-liberal rhetoric, in which anti-elitism had a broader

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strategic purpose.53 Howard needed anti-elitism not only to castigate Labor, but also to effect the inversion that would see the end of the old consensus. Why? Because, following the American model (see, again, Gary Becker, or Jeffrey Bell),54 the new story represented those who would act on behalf of other people (in favour, for instance, of equalising projects) as comprising an elite that lacked faith in people’s ability to make decisions about their own lives. Allied propositions were that free choice is the pinnacle of democracy; choice is most clearly manifest in market decisions; markets, thus, are the realm in which popular sovereignty is exercised; government and its agencies are therefore potentially a threat to that popular sovereignty; and critics can reliably be identified as speaking for special interests.55 These were precisely the notions that surfaced in Howard’s rhetoric. We can also map the defining features of the ‘economic rationalist’ world-view onto Howard’s story. Lindy Edwards has shown that material wealth, democracy of consumption and reliance on market decisions to allocate resources were said to be the objectives of the new dispensation, and these are underpinned by three principles: choice, efficiency and justice. Choice (the manifestation of freedom), efficiency (targeting resources to give us what we most want) and justice (ensuring that there is no impediment to choice imposed by government; that the market can serve as impartial arbiter)56 – these, too, were recurrent features of Howard’s story. This approach achieves a neat inversion in allowing the advocates of social and economic equity – the ALP, the churches, social welfare advocates and critical public intellectuals – to be portrayed as elites while recasting the discourse of reform in terms that favour commerce. The inversion I am interested in here, however, is that of the post-war dispensation in Australia. The measure of how completely the assumptions of post-war elites had been swept away can be found in comparing Howard’s individualistic market liberalism

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with the Keynesian social liberalism of the business progressives and founders of the modern Liberal Party in the 1940s. With Howard’s ascension, advocates of market liberalism had won the policy high ground in business, media and politics. The conventions asserted by the new elite constrained the public sphere: it became difficult for alternative arguments to gain a hearing.57 The ‘organic intellectuals’ of the new order developed an anachronistic reading of the past to castigate the old ‘nation-building’ elites as the authors of all current problems – and to associate those public intellectuals who expressed concern about the local and the national with that old, ‘elitist’ order. (Howard’s representations of critics, the ALP and ‘noisy minorities’ who would disrupt the ‘coalitions’ he was attempting to build ‘across the mainstream’ were striking examples.) Thus was the resentment of the disenfranchised short-circuited: a widely disseminated body of popular commentary purported to ‘expose’ elites as the source of present difficulties.

Was Howard a neo-liberal? While the governing ideas of a party or movement rarely stem from the leader alone, a strong leader can bring them to the fore with particular emphasis, and can rally believers in such a way as to marginalise those with divergent interpretations of the cause. Howard was such a leader. His ability to dominate and his predilections were indicative of transitions in liberalism during his era. Howard’s rhetorical investment in market liberalism of the sort critics (and Kevin Rudd) would identify as neo-liberalism was apparent. We have seen the strategic purposes it served. But it was allied with what might initially seem curious paradoxes. Notwithstanding the commitment to market reform and to ‘choice’, there was a re-orientation of regulation (rather than de-regulation), and Howard

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maintained big government and sustained high levels of government spending. This was by no means a laissez-faire approach, nor does it fit easily with those accounts of neo-liberalism that emphasise its principles of self-regulating markets; the distorting effects of government; the futility of state intervention when economic drivers are global; and, ideally, the retreat of the state to its core historical function of maintaining security. It might be argued that government under Howard demonstrated the residual influence of the Australian political culture: a concern with wealth creation (now thought best achieved through market liberalism and in that respect continuous with the Hawke–Keating project), but with a ready resort to the powers of the state to achieve political objectives (vide Hancock’s argument) and to targeted welfare (now to serve socially conservative ‘family’ values). This point could be extended to suggest that Howard adapted what he needed to serve his strategic objectives, but ignored elements that impeded his capacity to use government powers to shore up his constituency. It might equally be argued that the insistent rhetoric of market liberalism, allied with the practice of big-spending government, was simply incoherent. After all, though political activists have more cause than most to think about how they justify their decisions, political outlooks are typically incoherent and inconsistent: ‘something people build behind their backs, every now and then passing a beam, or plank, or strut backwards on to a growing pile, which makes in due course some kind of habitation, but one they never squarely look at – an edifice of the night.’58 For all that, one might detect in Howard’s distinctive adaptation of the ‘Washington consensus’ another logic. Wealth creation was to be served by adopting many of the policy prescriptions of market liberalism, and justified in terms of ‘choice’ and liberty. But the subsidiary question, then, was to do with wealth transfer. Here, two factors cut in: social conservatism (the retention of social values

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not far removed from the Menzies era) and deeply Tory instincts (obligation to the underclass; a commitment to placing ‘the right people’ in positions of responsibility and authority; and a belief that the status of the already privileged should be preserved because success and privilege are just deserts for effort and enterprise). Social conservatism led to a recalibration of welfare outlays: while the impact of the taxation system and direct benefit payments was strongly pro-poor,59 and real incomes of families at the bottom rose, the average incomes of disadvantaged families did not move closer to the income of all families, there was no improvement in standards of living for this group, and increases in family payments and tax thresholds benefited less needy Australian families as much or more than those in the poorest circumstances.60 Thus the much criticised culture of ‘middle class welfare’ was fostered. The Tory predisposition led to the winding back of the equalising project that had been so much a part of the post-war agenda, including under Menzies. The move from direct to indirect taxation, with the introduction of the GST, for example, had regressive effects: it increased revenue and thus the capacity to invest in welfare and services, but as low-income families are obliged to spend a greater proportion of total income on necessities the price increases due to the additional tax eroded the benefits of direct payments.61 Incentives to ‘take responsibility’ for health (in the form of a substantial rebate for those taking up private health insurance), or to exercise ‘choice’ in education (with a significant increase in Commonwealth funding for private providers, at the cost of the public system), disproportionately rewarded the middle class. Government was pro-active in implementing policies that facilitated a systematic transfer of wealth during the Howard years to those who were already relatively advantaged. Is this neo-liberalism? Two lessons can be drawn from this. First, the adoption of a position that can, on the basis of principles espoused, be categorised

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in a certain way – for instance Howard’s ‘neo-liberalism’ – might be influenced in practice by other values and instincts – for instance his social conservatism and Tory reflexes – leading to policy outcomes that few would deem purely neo-liberal. The point, however, is that political positions and programs are rarely pure. Second, although it can be demonstrated that there was broad continuity in market reform between 1983 and 2007,62 governments can remain more or less in accord on a primary objective (in this case, wealth creation through market liberalisation) while effecting substantial changes in ‘who gets what, when, how’. The Hawke–Keating Governments began the process of market reform, but chose through such initiatives as the Accord to redistribute wealth in ways that might have been interpreted as continuing the equalising project of the post-war years. The Howard Governments continued market reform, but rejected both their social-liberal heritage, and the ‘false class-war’ they deemed to be behind Labor’s redistributive measures, instead promoting wealth transfers that rewarded those who were already relatively successful.

Why Howard went too far Even if neo-liberal rhetoric (if not policy practice) dominated, had the task of consolidating publics supportive of the new interpretation of public reason succeeded? It might be argued that institutional dominance and the failure of critics to dent the TINA principle (which Howard had made his own) were consolidated by the coincidence of the war on terror, prompting a sort of hubris that brought Howard undone: the people finally recognised the veto on politics. For underlying the whole performance was a consistent vision, a fantasy of battle that underscored Howard’s self-belief: he self-identified as a Churchillian warrior: ‘I am the bloke who ultimately wins the battle, and in political terms that is Churchill’.

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He was the natural leader, then, to prosper from the ‘securitisation’ agenda provoked, first, as illegal immigration was construed as an attack on national sovereignty,63 then immensely amplified by the September 11 attacks on America (Howard was in Washington at the time), the ‘war on terror’ and the Iraq invasion.64 He was, by instinct, a crisis leader who began to identify threats, articulate the need to fight, institute divisions between ‘them’ and ‘us’ and rally ‘the troops’ well before international events accentuated the negatives. When they did, as Mark McKenna argues, his natural propensities could be fused with the need for combat leadership, and Howard emerged as the ‘wartime’ leader that had, McKenna believed, long been his fantasy ideal.65 As Paul Kelly also demonstrated, it was an additional accelerant in consolidating prime ministerial power.66 When the Coalition gained control of the Senate at the 2004 election the Howard Government felt licensed to push through measures that had always been intended but had previously been diluted by Senate ‘obstruction’ – the most controversial being radical ‘WorkChoices’ legislation that regulated workplaces, truncating the power of unions and shifting the balance in negotiating wages and conditions decisively in favour of employers. Howard misjudged the community unease such measures provoked, and this became indicative of the hubris that would lead to disaster. In effect, as the strong leadership that had served Howard so well for a decade began to create difficulties, there was an even more frenetic commitment to a command culture that was now out of step with policy problems of central community concern that could only be collectively addressed (such as climate change). The endpoint arrived in 2007, when there was what amounted to a year-long election campaign. In the theatre of campaigning, politicians’ minds were concentrated by the battle for power, and suddenly social problems of lengthy duration were said to be so urgent, and

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so challenging, that only an experienced government (the Coalition) could manage, or that only ‘new leadership’ (Labor) could break through. As the tide of public opinion began to turn against Howard, a characteristic pattern of policy determination set in. A crisis would be identified – social breakdown in Indigenous communities, the states’ administration of hospitals, water management, for instance – and it was argued that only central government intervention and strong leadership could serve as the circuit-breaker. Other authorities (local and state governments especially), dissenters and Opposition arguments were overridden or attacked as barriers to the resolution of national problems. Liberal institutions (the federal devolution of power, parliamentary scrutiny, the courts), whose purpose is to guard against capricious government, were diminished. Initiatives were driven from the top (to the detriment of community consultation); tactics were fundamentally illiberal (the urgency of action used as a licence to break down the ‘normal’ checks and balances). There was a devaluation of local knowledge and of the wisdom of those with hands-on experience of those areas the policy community now determined to take over. When, at Howard’s invitation, and only weeks from the 2007 election, a majority of his Cabinet colleagues indicated that Howard should relinquish leadership he refused to accede – after consulting his family, he stared them down. It was evident that his own predilections trumped the concerns of his party. It may be that we were saved from the extremes of the command culture only by the scepticism of the public. One might read the substantial gap between polls on the best prime minister, and more general surveys of political satisfaction and engagement, from the late 1990s on, as evidence that people were willing to rate Howard the best available leader given the alternatives offered by Labor, while at the same time being unhappy with politics, politicians and some policy directions. It may be that

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the final coincidence of what was now overtly ideologically driven policy (in WorkChoices) and the appearance of a Labor leader (Rudd) that the public could live with, sealed Howard’s fate.

Voices from the margins The rise of neo-liberalism appeared to dissolve the traditions of both the right and the left. The Liberal Party, starting in the early 1980s but reaching its climax under Howard, torched its social-liberal heritage, reinventing itself under the aegis of the ‘Dries’ as the bastion of free-market liberalism.67 As we have seen, this was a charade: Howard did not reduce but increased government and government spending; he did not de-regulate, but redirected regulation (as with the extensive regulatory impositions entailed in the WorkChoices legislation). Howard, as we’ve seen, engaged in philosophical revision with great vigour, but his was a message that eventually seemed so identified with himself as leader, and so closely allied with the market faith of the 1990s, that when this ‘certainty’ was undermined by the global financial crisis of 2007–09 (and still counting) his successors’ attempts to re-define their platform seemed threadbare (see chapter 1). The Labor Party, following its attempts to marry market liberalisation with social reform, lost its way after Keating’s defeat, descended into factional warfare and squabbles over leadership and, as one of its former senior ministers, John Button, exclaimed, was ‘beyond belief’.68 As a result, some of the most trenchant critics of the period were from within the major parties, or at least emerged from their own support bases. What did they have to tell us? An initial problem for the right was the emergence of populist reaction, in Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. Hanson, who was elected to federal parliament in 1996, was – as she made clear – the spokeswoman for all those who feared change. Standing initially

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as a Liberal candidate for what had been a safe Labor seat, she had lost Liberal Party endorsement before her election, after claiming there had been too much attention to Aborigines, but it was too late to change the ballot papers. Her maiden speech called for a closed society (‘we are in danger of being swamped by Asians’), railed against Aborigines (‘I am sick of being told “This is our land”. Well, where the hell do I go?’), and expressed the anxiety of all who had lost control of their economic fortunes. It was a classic populist appeal – mirroring precursors like the Kyabram movement (chapter 4) – in its claim to speak for the people against the betrayal of the political classes. She represented herself initially as independent, and then went on to found the ‘anti-political’ One Nation Party. It captured, for a time, some of those who were disaffected: Hanson became a media star; her party won nearly a million votes (predominantly in Queensland and New South Wales) at the 1998 federal election, and 23 per cent of the vote in the Queensland state election that year – some thought it would become the third major party. Howard was slow to criticise Hanson, fearing that it would make her a martyr and arguing that he would not be captured by ‘political correctness’; and that though he disagreed, ‘if someone disagrees with the prevailing orthodoxy … that person should not be denigrated as a narrow-minded bigot’. His reluctance to confront Hanson’s grievances directly and tardiness in agreeing that her party should be last to receive Liberal preferences, were interpreted by some as implicit support for her racism and for punitive border control. In fact he had recognised her appeal, and was intent on winning her supporters back to the Liberal fold by redirecting their attention to the ‘real’ elites (see earlier) – he of course being ‘an average bloke’ – without sacrificing the economic reform agenda. Eventually the One Nation Party imploded: it had been so tightly controlled by Hanson and her associates that it was intensely vulnerable when personal differences emerged; it could not

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translate its grievances into a persuasive program; and it lacked the organisational sophistication and the resources needed to survive. A more long-term source of opposition was from those Liberals who had been marginalised or driven out of the party by the new dispensation. Malcolm Fraser, the former prime minister, can be taken as an illustrative figure. Fraser had called for small government in the 1970s, and had welcomed Hayek to Australia; but his commitment to human rights and to finding a balance between the needs of the nation and the imperatives of the market saw him increasingly at odds with the developments in the 1980s and 1990s. He fought against erosions of multiculturalism, and against what he saw as the abrogation of rights in Australia’s mandatory detention of asylum seekers. He argued for an apology to the Indigenous people. Above all, he opposed the economic policies of both Labor and Liberal governments. His message on this was consistent: We are told we live in one global, capital market. That with financial deregulation it is now one world. With the greatest respect in the world to those who hold those views, I think it is hogwash … Is it ignorance, naivety, belief in an ideology that makes no sense or is it a consequence of deregulation, of a belief that you don’t need rules, or that there is no legitimate role for government in protection of the national public interest? … There has been no need to ask: what should we deregulate, how should we deregulate – just deregulate, reduce the role of government, get government out of our hair … let people do what they want to do. Corporations will self-regulate and Australia will be a better place … We did go through a period when we had unrealistic views about what governments could achieve. But it is not very sensible to replace that mistake with the belief that governments are almost unnecessary and can achieve very little.69

Such views made him anathema to the Howard Government. But he was not alone. Other former Liberals wrote books: Greg Barnes, for

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instance, in a despairing analysis of the party, argued that the Liberal Party is a very important institution … but … it’s lost the capacity it once had to put front and centre human rights, a respect for pluralism and tolerance within our community and within the party and … most disappointingly, the sort of engagement that the party used to have as a broad church under Malcolm Fraser and even during the 1980s seems to have diminished.70

Significantly, he made a particular point of the closing down of dialogue: there was no longer the capacity for or tolerance of debate within the Liberal Party. Such despair was not limited to the Liberal Party. As Howard relentlessly consolidated his hold, Labor activists generated a cottage industry analysing the ALP’s problems. Curiously, most approaches to trying to rethink the Labor position of these years came not from the party proper but from individuals writing essays and books (Mark Latham, Lindsay Tanner, Duncan Kerr, Craig Emerson, John Button and Wayne Swan, for instance).71 What struck one was the individuality of the voices – there were common themes, but little collective vision. Earlier instances of Labor rejuvenation (the Labor Essays series of the 1970s, for instance) featured policy specialists talking at length about their topic, but in terms of a shared project. And Labor policy generation, in the 1970s and 1980s, was characterised by teamwork (especially under Hayden, but even when driven by strong leadership, like Whitlam’s). In the 1990s, in contrast, it was as if each had to work things out for himself: a strange outcome in a party ostensibly committed to the collective resolution of social problems. Most of these writers identified the problems of Howard’s rule, acknowledged the problems within the ALP, but were less compelling in indicating what should be done. Mark Latham was one of the few

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who developed an expansive vision in his Civilising Global Capital (1998): a book that attempted the difficult feat of distancing the author from Labor traditions, from conventional welfare and from critics of the market (Latham strongly supported the neo-liberal dispensation), while arguing for a social democracy that entailed devolution of decisionmaking and hinged on ‘education for social capability’. Although a complex argument, showing wide reading and some ingenuity, it failed to cut though. Latham went on to a stint as one of the ALP’s most disastrous federal party leaders, during which he retreated from much that he had espoused, which destroyed the credibility of his project. For the most part, what Labor authors revealed was that there had been no debate within the ALP about beliefs to correspond with the Liberals’ 1980s reinvention: there was little in their work to indicate what a modern social democratic party should stand for, and thus no answer to Howard’s capture of the ideological agenda. Barry Jones, a former Labor MP, a minister in the Hawke Government, and President of the Party (2005–06), reflected illuminatingly on the problem for Labor in his autobiography, A Thinking Reed (2006). Eschewing the labels of left and right, Jones recast politics as a conflict between the parties of Hobbes (pessimistic self-interest) and Locke (optimistic individualism, allied to co-operation as the extension of human capacity). In confronting the magnitude of the victory of the party of Hobbes (that is, the neo-liberals), he wondered whether everything he believed in had been compromised or destroyed by the consensus that there could be only one answer to our problems. In his view, as traditional liberalism lost its hold, and social commitment its salience, the conventions through which interests negotiate accommodation had been disaggregated, core convictions evaporated, and fundamentalisms rushed into the vacuum. His party, too, had succumbed to the fundamentalism of the moment. The strident assertion of the economic reform agenda since the

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1980s had paralleled the hollowing out of party structures. Although there was evidence that the general public continued to believe that which party governed made a difference72 – a sensible conclusion given the policy outcomes under successive Labor and Coalition governments – there was also a continuing diminution in allegiance to, and trust in, the major parties during this period.73 The corollary was rising (though fluctuating) support for minor parties, and independents, and the diversion of the attention of some to social movements and single issue politics. The Australian Democrats emerged in 1977 as an avowedly nonideological party, and became for a time the most sustained ‘third force’ in Australian politics. The party was formed by breakaway elements of the Liberal Party who continued to support the ‘social liberal’ ethos as the Liberal Party itself converted to market liberalism. Its first leader was Don Chipp, a former Liberal MP and briefly a minister in the Holt and Gorton Governments, who resigned from the Liberal Party in 1977, citing its abandonment of progressive liberalism. His break was the catalyst for the new party: the Democrats formed soon after and he was elected to the Senate, where he led the Party from 1978 until 1986. When he retired, he was succeeded as Party leader by a procession of notable women, Senator Janine Haines, Senator Cheryl Kernot (who would eventually defect to the ALP), Senator Meg Lees and Senator Natasha Stott-Despoja. It was a party notable for its acceptance of the role and influence of women. It was a measure of the dissatisfaction with the major parties that support for the Democrats grew at successive elections: the party won around 10 per cent of the vote at federal elections between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s, and held the balance of power in the Senate for most of that period – after 1996 it shared this with the Greens and some independents until the Howard Government won control of the Senate in 2004. Determinedly participatory and

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consultative with its membership, and committed to ‘conscience’ votes for its representatives, it was always difficult for the party to articulate a consistent policy position, though the general tendency was centre left. It asked to be trusted to ‘keep the bastards honest’, and was less significant as an influence on political thinking than for the negotiations, while it held the balance of power, that ameliorated some of the harsher edges of economic reform under both ALP and Liberal–National Party governments. The party effectively died in 2008, when it lost its last federal Senate representatives – having succumbed to differences over leadership, divergence over the primacy of strategies needed for electoral success versus maintenance of internal direct democracy, and the challenge of others (such as the Greens) on centre-left issues such as environmental sustainability. The Australian Greens is a federation of state based organisations – and has been considerably more successful in winning state seats than were the Democrats – though the party has been increasingly successful in the federal sphere, where organisation is undertaken by a National Council and a Co-ordination Group. Its origins can be traced back to the early 1970s in Tasmania, but its national influence was to become apparent in the late 1970s and 1980s. Senator Bob Brown has been a leading figure both in the Greens party and in the broader Green cause. A general practitioner, he first came to national attention as Director of the Wilderness Society in Tasmania, where he organised the blockade of the Franklin River dam works in the early 1980s. In the course of this and later environmental protest movements, he faced sanctions, arrest and occasionally jailing, all of which enhanced his profile. He was elected to the Tasmanian parliament as its first Green MP in 1983, and there came to lead a group of five Green MPs who held the balance of power from 1989 to 1993, when he resigned. Elected to the Australian Senate in 1996, he became the driving force in the Party nationally, and an articulate spokesman for the cause.

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The Greens party had a more clearly defined identity than did the Democrats, and competed on the same ground, for those voters looking for an alternative to the major parties. Although it also had common ground with the Democrats on climate change and environmental sustainability, it took a harder line on economic issues (refusing to negotiate with Howard over the goods and services tax, for instance) and was less willing to compromise with incumbent governments. It was philosophically more distant from the major parties than the Democrats, and its objective was not to occupy the middle ground but eventually to win power in its own right. This is an unlikely outcome, since even though it has developed a policy platform that encompasses a broad social justice agenda, it continues to be seen as primarily an environmental party; the rise of public concern has seen the major parties move to take on the environmental agenda; and the core voting support for the Greens is concentrated among the most ‘socially democratic’ voters, a proportion unlikely to exceed 10 per cent overall (though it well exceeds 10 per cent in certain electorates). Nonetheless, the Greens gained clear electoral benefits as sustainability and climate change became more pressing issues in the public mind, and yet Howard continued to express scepticism and to insist that surrender to the green lobby would damage the economy. While the Democrats’ voting support dwindled, that of the Greens rose, until at the 2007 federal elections the party had near the 10 per cent support that the Democrats had once enjoyed. Its leverage on policy debate, however, was impeded by the countervailing views of other independents in the Senate. While undoubtedly the Greens enhanced the profile of environmental issues in mainstream politics, it is difficult to assess the party’s influence apart from the undoubted impact of more general social movements, bodies such as the Australian Conservation Foundation (which, like other such bodies, had no formal links with the party), and the increasing publicity

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given to some major public intellectuals (such as Tim Flannery) and to climate scientists themselves.74 Social movements had made a significant input into political debate since the 1960s, and some saw them to be both the source of new political thinking, and an alternative to the calcifying party system. Every wholly new domestic issue on the Australian political agenda in the past thirty or so years was originally championed by a social movement. Think of the impact of the environmental, women’s, Indigenous, gay, anti-globalisation, republican and other movements. The major parties have ultimately played critical roles in brokering these issues onto the formal agenda. But the initial energy, aspiration and motivation started elsewhere.75

This led to an argument that, since party membership seemed such an unproductive channel in influencing party policy, the tactic should be to develop momentum through social movements and then to use the new information technologies – primarily the internet – to aggregate opinion in a manner that could not be ignored by politicians or government. One such enterprise to emerge in Australia as a forum for debate and participatory deliberation was the internet lobbying organisation, GetUp!76 Others, however, saw the dominance of neoliberalism as having significantly eroded the capacity of social movements, detailing how the gains made by the women’s, Indigenous and environmental movements had been wound back in the face of the ‘socially regressive’ values of the new dispensation.77 A pointed case study was the manner in which civil rights had been curtailed by legislation intended to facilitate the ‘war on terror’.78 It was difficult to distinguish the influence of social movements from the increasing visibility of public intellectuals, many with origins in just such movements: this suddenly seemed to be the age for public intellectuals. Many of them spoke for single issues: Peter Singer, Ian

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Lowe, Tim Flannery or Robyn Eckersley on environment and ecopolitics; Alison Broinowski or Raimond Gaita on the morality of Howard’s commitment to the ‘war on terror’, for instance. Some, Gerard Henderson for example, took on what was said to be the pervasive influence of the left. For the most part, however, public intellectuals gained attention as critics of the neo-liberal dispensation, ranging across economic inequality, ethics, human rights, securitisation, post-democracy, globalisation, the culture wars and market fundamentalism. They comprised not only long-term figures of the left (for example, Humphrey McQueen), former Marxists (for example, David McKnight) and revisionary social democrats (for example, Clive Hamilton), but also one-time conservatives (for example, John Carroll, Robert Manne). Manne, indeed, was one of the most energetic and prolific public intellectuals of the age, writing not only his own extensive commentaries on contemporary politics, but editing a series of collections that brought together many of the most prominent dissident voices.79 This profusion might provoke scepticism about my suggestion that the pervasiveness of neo-liberal orthodoxy constituted a veto on politics. Yet, with few exceptions these critics could be dismissed as speaking at a tangent to what was important. They were frequently derided as the ‘so-called intelligentsia’, were said to have ‘devalued’ the currency of moral outrage and might have been accused of hubris both in the scale of their objections to the Howard Government and in their prescriptions for the incoming Rudd Government. Although their insight into the emerging problems of market fundamentalism and the decline of democratic decision-making was acute, their failing was in producing a persuasive alternative to the governing consensus. Clive Hamilton, for instance, was a persistent critic of neoliberalism, of the ‘silencing of dissent’ produced by slavish adherence to orthodoxy,80 and of the attrition of old ideas of solidarity and

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justice in the face of self-focused individualism. He proposed that we needed a new politics of liberation – the defining problem of modern society being not justice but alienation, which conventional social democracy could not address.81 Yet his solution was to focus on the personal, not the political, asserting that we could not be free without living a moral life, without sloughing off the internalised values of consumer citizenship ‘to discover what unites us in all our humanity’.82 But is this not a capitulation to individualised ‘liberation’? What might be the next step in working collectively on challenges that confront us all? David McKnight’s Beyond Right and Left (2005) is another indicative case. He produced one of the most far-sighted reviews of the triumph of market fundamentalism, the failure both of the old right and of socialism, and of the culture wars between neo-liberals and the left intelligentsia. But when it came to a program for the future, his argument for a ‘new humanism’ replicated the predicament that Don Watson (see above) had described as bedevilling the ‘bleeding hearts’ of the 1990s: a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and a stronger dose of compassion. For McKnight, it was a vision of a ‘hybrid humanism’, drawing on ‘caring values’, ‘conservation values’ and a new moral framework connecting the personal to the social.83 Fine in principle, but what did it mean for ‘new politics’ and the practical problems of the day? It was hard to read into this a story of political renewal. Indeed, it was hard to see that such arguments had any significant effect on the policy transitions that emerged with the fall of the Howard Government and the ascent of Kevin Rudd. The possible exception, the public intellectual who bridged Keating, Howard and Rudd, the dissident intelligentsia and the economic rationalists, was Noel Pearson. A voice genuinely from the margin, the Indigenous community, he was the exception that proved the rule – a critic who gained access to the centre.

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Pearson, an Aboriginal activist and community leader from Cape York, had, from the late 1980s on, developed arguments for devolution of decision-making to local communities, to fight against paternalist welfare approaches to Indigenous issues, and for the Aboriginal ‘right’ to an economy.84 His key point was that responsibility in Indigenous communities had been destroyed by decades of ‘passive welfare’ and economic dependence; and that this left these communities prey to the poison of ‘grog’, drug abuse and family breakdown (including appalling levels of domestic violence and child abuse). His was a significant and influential break from the separatist and land rights discourses that had emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. These had manifestly failed. Now, he argued, the need was for decisive action to address endemic breakdown in the short term. Then there must be partnership between state agencies and Indigenous leadership in community building, with the longer term objectives of devolving decision-making from the bureaucrats administering welfare to Indigenous community leaders, and integrating these communities with the economy. In developing his case, Pearson made a unique contribution to what was elsewhere thought of as ‘proximity democracy’, influencing not only the contemporaneous arguments of Mark Latham on education for social capability (see above), but eventually the decisions of Howard and Rudd on the federal ‘intervention’ into remote Northern Territory communities. His passionate linking of community welfare with integration into the market economy won favour with economic reformers in both major parties, from Keating and Latham to Howard. Pearson’s support for the Northern Territory intervention was controversial, since while it provided the decisive action he thought necessary, it did not address the community-building agenda that had long been part of his message. His response was to point out that he might have done things differently, but that the need to address immediate suffering was so urgent, the failure of the previous policy

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regime so complete, that emergency action was justified – and longer term change would depend not only upon government but also upon Indigenous leaders ‘taking responsibility’.85 Other formidable activists (for example, Marcia Langton) and observers (for example, Peter Sutton) would make similar arguments; yet others would bitterly oppose his strategies and complicity with a government they regarded with antipathy (for example, Mick Dodson).86 But Pearson’s intellectual acuity; his capacity to advance, in accessible language, complex arguments about welfare provision destroying community, and to link proximity democracy with advocacy of access to the market economy; his media skill in reaching a mainstream audience; and his ability to work with each of the major parties, and with leaders as diametrically opposed as Keating and Howard, made him one of the most influential figures of the period. He offered something genuinely novel: a break with ‘the colonial flow of ideas’;87 an adaptation of theoretical debates about where decisions affecting community should be taken and by whom to practical problems that were now acknowledged to have enormous consequence; and a bridge between the advocacy of community and rights (usually the domain of the left) and economic development and market reform (usually the domain of the right). Despite all, Kevin Rudd, at least in his campaign for the election of a Labor government, repeatedly stressed his economic conservatism and commitment to free markets. His stress was on sound management, not on fundamental change. The neo-liberal world-view, in the end, produced its own contradictions – it was shaken not by the arguments of its critics, but by the inception of a global economic crisis. It was difficult to de-couple this market failure from the neo-liberal precepts that seemed to have provided the platform for its emergence (though this would not prevent market advocates, including the new leadership of the Liberal Party, from attempting to do so – see chapter 1). It was

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also the catalyst for reinvigorated debate about alternatives to the free-market policy regime that had come to life in the late 1970s and 1980s and had dominated until 2008, all but closing down pluralism and dialogue in the process. To what extent could a new story draw upon the ideas of the critics of neo-liberalism? This question brings us back to the opening of this book, and to the way we live now.

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Pa r t v I

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11 Conclusion: political reasoning and political action

Only in metaphor can we speak of situations being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ … It is no use arguing with situations. They will not blush if you reprove them, or turn over a new leaf if you plead with them. The only thing you can do with them is to understand them. W.K. Hancock, 19471 Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority who hear voices in the air are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. J.M. Keynes, 19362

This book opened on the note of crisis conjured by Kevin Rudd in early 2009 as he represented the predicament of our times as a ‘seismic shift’, demanding the revival of ‘social democracy’ to ‘save capitalism from itself’. A bare six months later, it seemed that a capitalist recovery might be underway, consumer confidence was resurgent, commentators claimed to see the ‘green shoots’ of revival and the Australian ‘miracle economy’ was said on many measures to be outstripping the world. Yet the rhetoric of the ‘Global Financial Crisis’ persisted. There was much to reinforce the impression that confidence in recovery might be precipitate. Rudd himself continued to insist that ‘economic recovery … will be a long, tough and bumpy

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road with many twists and turns’. Internationally, few could say with accuracy what the costs to governments had been of extraordinary stimulus measures, let alone the eventual bill for bailing out banks and offering guarantees to stabilise the international financial system. These were, as Malcolm Turnbull reminded us, ‘debts to the future’. Government deficits might not be a problem if development resumed and debt could be paid down, yet the growth model of the 1990s was precisely what had failed. Australia’s deficit was relatively modest as a proportion of GDP, but the country could not expect to avoid the effects of larger problems elsewhere. There was fear that the scale of government debt might itself diminish the availability of credit needed by private enterprise to rebuild, inducing a double-dip recession. Outside Australia, banks were said to be ‘the industry that failed’, and it was expected that there would have to be a stricter contract between banks and society.3 Governments were working together, particularly through the G20, on reforms of international financial governance that implied a reversion to a tougher regulatory regime. It remained the case, then, that there were grounds for concluding that the policy assumptions of the previous thirty years – privatisation, deregulation, and liberalisation – had been severely shaken. But were they finished? It remained a transitional stage, some arguing that it was merely a continuity break before the next phase of globalisation; others (like Rudd) that it presaged major reform. Notwithstanding Rudd’s admonitions, there was no coherent alternative to the neo-liberal framework he railed against. He was closer in spirit to what Andrew Gamble called a ‘regulatory liberal’ (less concerned with social rights than with preserving the essentials of open trading and sound investment through reform of the financial architecture)4 than to social democracy. Above all, this episode was a reminder of the centrality of the economic dimension in politics. In reviewing our history, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that

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though our interest in and engagement with politics might be driven by ideals – democracy, equal opportunity, liberty, choice, selfdetermination, justice – the fundamental determinant of political reasoning is economic. Ideas that do not carry with them an answer to the problem of resource allocation – who gets what, when, how – are marginalised. This may be why the ‘big ideas’ of the recent past – environmentalism, gender equity, Indigenous rights, identity politics, the republic, ‘hybrid humanism’ – so rapidly lost traction when every question seemed to reduce to Bill Clinton’s campaigning nostrum, ‘it’s the economy, stupid!’ From the inception of responsible government in Australia, every decisive shift in political thinking, every inauguration of a new policy regime, has been driven by economic crisis. And most crises have been generated outside Australia, in circumstances over which we can have little control. Yet we always assess these events as, at some level, a failure of local administration. And we adapt what are invariably international ideas in interesting ways that tell us something about the local political culture. We are at such a juncture now, which gives this story all the more point.

Recurrence Look, then, at what we might call the policy regimes of the settler society in Australia. We started with authoritarian administration – but even the convicts, carrying the ideas of ‘the age of revolution’, were quick to demand, and to gain, certain rights. Equally, an enterprising administrative class, seeing the economic potential of the colonies, and recognising the opportunities of free settlement, made adroit use of their insider status to capture resources and eventually land holdings: they then pushed for responsible government, but opposed democracy. They demanded the rights of ‘free-born’ Englishmen, but argued for ‘aristocratic’ privileges for those who had already gained

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the upper hand: the derision provoked by their attempts to deploy traditional conservatism in support of arrangements that suited them undermined forever the claims of organic conservatism within Australian political discourse. The nineteenth century instead saw a process of incremental democratisation. The questions were, who would get a say in responsible government, and what sorts of institutions would we develop? The outcome was a triumph for the liberal middle class. It had fended off the claims of conservative ‘landed’ interests through strategic coalitions with the emerging labour movement in the name of democracy and liberty, but then invoked the ‘responsible’ exercise of power to defeat the labour movement’s resort to direct action (in the strikes of the 1890s). It is important, however, that economic collapse was behind both the vicissitudes of the labour movement (and the emergence of its alternative ‘parliamentarist’ vehicle, the ALP), and the nature of the liberal settlement achieved in the first Commonwealth decade. Deakin then, just as Rudd now, was intent on a policy setting that would pull Australia out of the economic doldrums. The ‘fiscal’ question that preoccupied both Deakin and Reid was a question about a new policy regime – one that would consolidate the ‘democratic’ gains of the late nineteenth century and that would forestall any recurrence of the collapse of the 1890s. Reid (influenced by Cobden and Spencer) pinned his faith on free enterprise; Deakin (influenced by T.H. Green and D.G. Ritchie) on a regime of ‘protection’ that would promote development, give enough security to labour to satisfy ‘the working man’s’ aspirations without insurrection, and facilitate nation building. The defeat of free trade was the basis of the ‘Australian settlement’, and an attempt to marry private enterprise initiative with state action to the benefit of both. It was the framework for a distinctive mode of targeted (rather than universal) wage-earner’s welfare: a residual welfare model that has persisted ever since. It was a

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process that, for a time, drew the nascent ALP deeply into a Deakinite alliance, permanently truncating its socialist potential (and the hopes of those who drew on Marx and Bellamy). Both Labor and anti-Labor worked within the framework of the settlement. It was a binding policy regime. This is not to say that it was free of divergent trends and countervailing forces within. There were vigorous critics, who pursued parallel visions and whose arguments would be a continuing resource for those who sought alternatives. And then there was the narcissism of minor differences. Reid’s anti-socialist campaign, and the eventual fusion between Deakin’s forces and Reid’s successors, clarified the distinction between Labor and anti-Labor parties, solidifying the rhetoric of ‘socialism’ as the clear enemy of liberal aspirations. Along the way, conservatism had also taken on a distinctive Australian caste – traditional conservatism had little traction as a doctrine after the pretensions of the squattocracy, but Deakin’s ‘progressive’ liberals (and the press) now succeeded in attaching the term to anyone who opposed ‘the ethical state’5 and who argued that state action was an impediment to liberty. For seventy years the tag ‘conservative’ would carry a derogatory caste, condemning those who resisted ‘progress’: it was a designation vigorously resisted by anti-Labor leaders, free trade (Reid) and ‘progressive’ (Menzies) alike. The next great crisis was the Depression of the 1930s. It would take fifteen years, and wartime mobilisation, to generate a new model. The new dispensation was also intended to overcome the depredations of the past. It was not simply a variant of the Australian settlement. That settlement had been the warrant for government in regulating, arbitrating, determining wage levels and awarding favours (such as the extension of ‘protection’ to companies abiding by minimum wages and the manipulation of tariffs to encourage particular industries). The 1940s regime went further: it was an adaptation of Keynesianism

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that justified government in becoming an economic actor in nationbuilding projects, population management, the provision of services, and demand management – notwithstanding the then Coalition government’s commitment to private enterprise ‘leadership’. ‘Our first impulse is always to seek the private enterprise answer’ said Menzies, but ‘where government action or control has seemed to us to be the best answer to a practical problem, we have adopted that answer’. This would last from the mid-1940s to the late 1970s. It would withstand the bitter conflicts of the Cold War and the acute critique of the dissenting baby boomers (who owed their education and insight to institutions arising from the policy initiatives of the 1940s generation). There would be a late flowering as Whitlam tried to reinvent the Labor reconstructionists’ vision in the 1970s; and even Whitlam’s foe, Malcolm Fraser, would try to hold the line into the early 1980s. But it too would fail. The next economic reverse, that of the late 1970s and 1980s, was seen as the failure of Keynes. The theories of Keynes’s opponents (such as F.A. Hayek) were now rediscovered. The Hawke and Keating Governments instituted reform, driven by the market solutions of the times, but with a distinctive attempt (through the Accord; through training programs; through investment in health, education and better cities) also to achieve social outcomes. This was the flowering of neo-liberalism: the regime consolidated above all by John Howard. The collapse of the USSR was read as the death knell of command economies: socialism was no longer just suspect, it was unthinkable; the dissenting left seemed deprived of oxygen; TINA was the watchword of the day. Curiously, conservatism made a comeback: now touted as a defence of enduring social values (and even of current economic orthodoxy), even while economic reform destroyed the codes of behaviour that had been taken for granted in the era of post-war nation building. And yet the neo-liberal regime too would succumb to

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crisis – and by 2009 the search would commence for a new mode of political reasoning that could justify what government now needed to do (markets having failed to provide an enduring solution). That crisis was not the end of capitalism, but initially it was widely agreed, as panellists at Australia’s 2009 ‘Future Summit’ concluded, that ‘it will never be the same again’.6 Was that assessment justified? Soon questions were being raised: was the 2007–09 ‘crisis’ an event on the scale of the ‘Great Depression’, or merely a blip from which the global market would soon recover? Within months of Rudd’s early 2009 essay, the Australian economy appeared to rebound. Rudd and his colleagues insisted that it was their rapid and decisive fiscal stimulation that had been the catalyst, proof of the wisdom of ‘Keynesian’ intervention. It was a message accepted by most of the electorate: in a volatile context, Rudd’s popularity remained undiminished. In fact, while cash handouts and infrastructure spending played a part in generating domestic demand, Australia’s economic salvation was equally dependent upon continuing demand for our primary products, especially from China. The ‘miracle economy’ was a product of luck as much as of management. Yet Rudd’s ‘success’ gave credence to his message that government itself was the guarantor of smoothly functioning capitalism. His warning that the road ahead would continue to present problems encouraged the expectation that decisive intervention would recurrently be needed. By late 2009, it was said that he had influenced the G20 in positioning itself as the forum for global economic co-ordination. The promise was that governments, now acting together, would address the causes of market failure. As always, it was a problem of ‘the world system’;7 as always, we saw it primarily through the lens of our own community and our own leadership. Leaders, then, become the focus for opinion aggregation and consensus formation. There are always currents of ideas in play;

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people with something to say provide the resources for leaders seeking an explanation for what must be done; leaders craft a message that mobilises us behind their cause (or that fails to persuade and seeds their defeat). We began our exploration with Kevin Rudd, not because he was specially gifted, or his message was unusually deft, but because he illustrated something that is a recurrent feature of effective leadership: crafting a narrative for the times is an essential capacity. We saw it with Deakin’s powerful interpretation of ‘new liberalism’; with Chifley’s invocation of ‘the light on the hill’; with Menzies’ brilliant appeal to ‘the forgotten people’; with Whitlam’s declamations to ‘the men and women of Australia’; with Keating’s striking word pictures, and not least with Howard’s creative repositioning of liberalism as ultimately about free choice, turning his party away from Deakin and back to Reid. But through the accident of history (rather than through any talent of his alone) Rudd alerted us to something else: he was speaking at a time of transition, as consensus was shaken and a new rationale for action was demanded. Policy regimes, then, can be seen as circular: a large scale problem emerges; a set of taken-for-granted ideas is thrown into question and leaders scramble for new solutions (in which the ideas of critics, and often of long-dead dissenters assume a fresh valency). An alternative is hammered out and over time a new political ‘settlement’ is arrived at. This is consolidated and becomes the consensus framework for political reasoning and political action until the energy of the regime is exhausted or its inherent flaws themselves generate an unlooked for reversal and throw all the ‘certainties’ of the day into question – and so the consensus collapses and the cycle starts again. This progression has led Stephen Skowronek to distinguish between historical time (a linear sequence) and political time (the regime cycle).8 What characterises political time is recurrence: the process is circular and one can find interesting parallels in identifying

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the stages of any cycle and the sorts of leadership typically manifest at particular stages. Progressive reformers are always significant both in reacting to regime exhaustion and in initiating new directions (Deakin driven by his own financial failure in the 1890s, and driving ‘new protection’ in 1900–10; Coombs, Curtin and Chifley adamant that the miseries of the Depression would not be revisited and finding in Keynes the inspiration for post-war reconstruction; Hawke and Keating determined not to repeat Whitlam’s mistakes and turning to market solutions rather than state provision as their alternative; finally, Rudd insisting that it is the task of social democracy to ‘save capitalism from itself’). Then there are the consolidators, often from Opposition parties but demonstrating the hold of the ‘consensus’ (Fisher and Hughes following Deakin; Menzies in the post-war period; early Howard following Hawke and Keating). Finally, there are those who must try to deal with regime exhaustion, or with the internal contradictions that bring a consensus down (Scullin and Lyons in the 1930s; Whitlam and Fraser as the long post-war boom ended; Howard in the last stages of his government). It is a striking manifestation of our blindness to recurrence that we fail to notice that at the high point of regime consolidation, the TINA principle – we might call it the hubris of the moment – frequently emerges. It is the conviction among policy insiders and the organic intellectuals of a regime that they, at last, have found the ultimate solution, that unlike every preceding generation (which is thus treated with condescension) they know the future and how it is to be managed: there is no alternative. We’ve noted instances going back to the 1880s: thus it was with Bruce Smith (the great achievements of liberalism have been secured; it remains only to defend them against change); with Charles Pearson (state socialism is inevitable, as it will ensure prosperity and security); with Daniel Bell (the end of ideology) and with Frances Fukuyama – and arguably Paul Kelly (we have reached

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the end of history). If political activists are to draw any lesson from this book, it should be the familiar axiom that life is a series of lessons in humility. Arguably, it is the moments of transition – breakdown and renewal – that generate the greatest debates. Here too, we find recurrence, but not complete replication. In chapter 1 I demonstrated the family resemblance between Rudd’s arguments for ‘social democracy’ (2009) and Deakin’s justification for state action as an aspect of ‘new protection’ (1904–09), alongside the free-market rhetoric of their opponents, Malcolm Turnbull, and George Reid. But we have seen that family resemblance does not entail simple replication. Deakin’s commitment to protecting social rights involved limiting market exchange through tariffs and wage arbitration, within a bounded state. Curtin and Chifley (and their consolidator, Menzies) in the service of nation building and full employment, would endorse direct investment in major projects and the development of state enterprises to manage them. For Rudd, market mechanisms trumped social rights: he concentrated on deploying state funding to boost private demand (and job creation) while accepting private enterprise as the most efficient provider even of public goods (hence, Labor’s automatic reversion to Public/Private Partnerships as the instrument of choice in any development). His preference reminds us that the third corner of that 1906–10 debate, ‘socialism’, has disappeared, at least as an advocacy position in mainstream politics: no one in the parliamentary sphere now claims to be socialist, it survives only as a term of abuse. Nor could one realistically claim that Rudd’s invocation of social democracy is merely a euphemism for socialism: contemporary commentators might describe him as a ‘regulatory liberal’, but we can see that his demand for the better regulation of global capitalism echoes the spirit of Deakin (who said, ‘the choice is not … between nationalisation and allowing all industries to fall

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under unrestricted competition; between these distant points lies all the range of regulation’) rather than the polemics of Tom Mann or even the Billy Hughes of 1910.

Resilience Ideas undergo change both in their transference from a metropolitan culture to a settler society, and over time within a context. Thus, for instance the changes in our understanding of conservatism, undermined first by an unsuccessful attempt to appropriate it for particular ends in the colonial context, and then reapplied pejoratively to the nay-sayers of the early Commonwealth, only to be resurrected in defence of ‘values’ and economic orthodoxy in the late twentieth century. The Australian understanding of conservatism, then, had departed from what it meant in Britain; but its late twentieth-century renaissance here probably owed more to borrowing American usage than to Australian tradition. On the other hand, the reinterpretation of ‘liberal’ as a term of abuse after the 1970s (as a repudiation of the ‘New Deal’) was one American innovation that would not ‘take’ in Australia, since it was integral to the identity of the ‘moral middle class’,9 and to the naming of the greatest and most enduring anti-Labor party. The demise of socialism as an advocacy position in mainstream politics owed something to the fact that the ALP from the first could not agree that it was socialist, but possibly more to the international collapse of the command economies. The emergence of social democracy here had less connection to the European tradition of social democracy than to a desire by the ALP, from the 1960s, to talk about reform in ways that neither invoked socialism nor class: the constituency it then wished to reach did not self-identify as ‘working class’. But social democracy would later become a useful descriptor for Rudd’s project when he needed to establish his

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difference from the ‘neo-liberals’ and market fundamentalists. Still, Rudd struggled to escape from the shadow of the previous thirty years: market provision of life’s essentials rather than state engagement in delivering social rights remained his objective; state regulation to maintain the democratic legitimacy of the market order, encourage participation in it and contain its destructive aspects was the corollary. Yet, that the positions of the politicians of 1909 could recognisably be mapped onto the arguments of 2009 (and vice versa) tells us something about the remarkable resilience of some aspects of our political culture and ideas. The Australian interpretation of Anglophone traditions of liberty and liberalism – which is to say the tension between positive and negative liberty and consequent visions of the appropriate role of the state – was set relatively early (hence the family resemblance between those arguments from 2009 and from 1909). We have yielded only partially to the experiences of others: we refuse to ‘learn’ from American individualism; or from more wholehearted adaptations of social democracy, such as the Scandinavian polities; and we remain baffled by Asian adaptations, such as market liberalisation with authoritarian government in China. The supposed virtues of nineteenth-century bush-workers, distilled by an emergent urban intelligentsia in the 1890s, always distant from the experience of the majority (most of whom lived in cities from the late nineteenth century on), and reinvented by the radical nationalists of the 1950s to repudiate the ‘conservative’ hegemony of that time, still proved capable of persuasive adaptation to very different purposes by John Howard in the 1990s. He distilled what he said was a hundred years of ‘core values’ from what had once been the preserve of the left. And all this in a population that had tripled and diversified enormously from the meagre 7 million (98 per cent then of British origin) who had peopled Australia after the Second World War. What Miriam Dixson

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has called the ‘holding culture’10 of the initial Anglo-Irish immigrant population has proved enormously resilient. But it is likely that the resilience of Australian patterns was also sustained by path dependency: that is, by initiatives that started us down a pathway, which became a direction difficult to reverse. For instance, the practices established in the colonial period and in the early Commonwealth, when government was the only agency capable of developing infrastructure, supporting (and managing) the immigration that expanded the labour force and generating major investment – all with the intention of building the platform for private enterprise11 – had as much to do with the recurrent default to what Hancock called ‘the milch cow state’ as did any developed political philosophy. This dovetailed easily with both the Deakinite settlement and with mid-twentieth-century reconstruction. But even Howard – though committed to ‘freeing’ us to make our own choices, intent on retiring government debt and oriented to market decisions as the best mode of determining resource allocation – sustained levels of welfare spending and, by shifting revenue from direct taxation to a Goods and Services Tax, made his the highest taxing (and the most astonishingly profligate) government in our history. His Treasurer, Peter Costello, also developed the system of prudential regulation that was such an effective hedge against the excesses of the Global Financial Crisis. It became obvious at the end that government intervention was Howard’s response to every social conundrum (witness the final phase of his Indigenous policy, or the attempted takeover of certain hospitals to ‘return’ them to the community); and that regulation was for him, even more than for Deakin, the preferred mode of action (witness his final solution to the ‘deregulation’ of the labour market – the ‘WorkChoices’ legislation – which was paradoxically one of the most extraordinarily detailed regulatory impositions on the relations between employers and employees imaginable).

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Resources There is, then, both a strong linear history (reinforced by a ‘holding culture’ and by path dependency) that explains the resilience of Australian adaptations of political ideas, and a regime cycle that sees settlements that had prevailed for a time break down and stimulates an energetic search for new resources and different approaches. The ‘new’ often recycles parts of what was once ‘old’ and discredited. The circularity is inevitable: no political settlement can serve all purposes and all times, and capitalism is inherently subject to ‘failure’ and reconstruction. (‘All that is solid melts into air’, warned Karl Marx; progress depends on ‘creative destruction’ rejoined Joseph Schumpeter.) Yet what happens when the predictable crisis arises? As Rudd’s approach makes manifest, we remain almost unconscious of the influence of the Australian experience. He looks to Keynes and to Bonhoeffer, rather than to anyone from his own context, and yet speaks in terms that would be recognisable to Australian social liberals of a century ago without apparent awareness of that heritage. He is, in other words, shaped by the Australian political culture. And, searching for a contemporary social democratic model of economic management, he seems equally oblivious to the concerted work of economically literate Australian critics of neo-liberalism over the past twenty years and more, making no reference to, say, John Nevile, Frank Stilwell, John Quiggin, John Langmore or, above all, Hugh Stretton.12 To reinforce the point, when Robert Manne, the eminence grise of The Monthly, sought responses to Rudd’s essay, he deemed Australian reaction so disappointing that only the great and good of other metropolitan cultures were commissioned to reply.13 Invariably, we look to ‘the great elsewhere’14 for inspiration. Nowadays, conscious of the global context, we call it being part of the ‘Anglosphere’. This is the settler society paradox, made all the more striking

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in that Rudd is no new arrival: his forebears settled in Australia generations ago. Sylvia Lawson captured it memorably when writing about the late nineteenth century: ‘Metropolis, the centre of language, of the dominant culture and its judgements lies in the great Elsewhere; but the tasks of living, communicating, teaching, acting out and changing the culture must be carried out … Here’.15 Was this mindset transcended in the twentieth century? Not if one accepts the testimony of Alan Davies, who wrote in the early 1970s that ‘the compelling and organizing centres for … writing were far distant, and what local work there was limped along discontinuously at their very margin’.16 Peter Loveday, also in the 1970s, argued that ‘there have been no fixed positions in Australian politics and no great debates’; that ideas were borrowed merely to clothe ‘the naked politics of interest’, they were ‘part of the environment, monotonously and uncritically repeated from which individuals slowly select and absorb fragments, building their own private outlooks’. He deplored our failure to generate Australian equivalents of Burke, Madison, Calhoun, Paine, Bentham and Mill.17 On this view our politicians were simply ‘utility players’,18 handballing whatever they were passed from abroad. But this is not the whole picture, for it ignores the ingenuity that made Australian adoption of mainstream Anglophone ideas so distinctive. Those whom Alan Davies mischievously dubbed ‘the inspectors’19 – Alfred Metin, the Webbs, Henry Jones, James Bryce, for instance – visited Australia’s ‘laboratory’ near or soon after the turn of the twentieth century and went away impressed with the democratic innovations being pioneered through our Liberal–Labor alliances and the negotiations that would give rise to the Australian settlement. Chifley and Curtin were influenced by Keynes and Beveridge, but their vision of post-war reconstruction was like no other. Menzies summoned a constituency of the ‘forgotten people’ and forged a progressive liberalism that served its purposes and

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fostered post-war prosperity. The Hawke and Keating Governments took up the neo-liberal script, but they gave it a unique inflection by incorporating a social wage and social rights, and in so doing pioneered what successors (like Tony Blair) called the third way. Howard’s persuasive incorporation of the rhetoric of ‘choice’ with a cleverly nuanced assertion of ‘Australian values’ led Judith Brett to the assessment that he was one of the most creative conservative leaders we have seen.20 And with Rudd’s essays, we see again a leader at work with ideas, adopting and adapting the tenets of his era to Australian purposes. Surely, too, much has changed in the past forty years? There is, as we have noted, much more detailed analysis of our political traditions and of political thinkers than existed in the 1970s, much more capacity to see the creativity of our ‘ideology makers’. The cultural renaissance (in film, writing, music, art) that some identify as originating in the Whitlam years; and the proliferation of intellectual history in the past twenty years alone, do these not give us grounds for qualifying the views of an earlier generation, of Davies and Loveday? And yet Rudd, very much a man of our times, ambitious to demonstrate mastery of the present challenge, reminds us again of our reliance upon ‘compelling and organising centres … [that are] far distant’. It is likely, then, that the initial resources for the next regime cycle will be derived from the ‘international’ (but still largely Anglophone) gurus who claim to speak for the new dispensation. Just as Deakin and his followers drew on T.H. Green and D.G. Ritchie; the new liberals on Graham Wallas and Henry Jones; Curtin and Chifley on Keynes; and the neo-liberals on F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman; it is likely that current leaders will draw on the much touted popularisers of a new order, such as Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, John Gray and Amartya Sen21 – or indeed the commentators assembled by The Monthly to respond to Rudd.22 Not all of these could be deemed

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social democrats (Gray, for instance, is a conservative critic of neoliberal excess). Some do not promise that the welfare state can be saved (though others, Sen for instance, remain strongly committed to welfare economics). While alert to the ‘mystique of markets’,23 none of them challenge their centrality, or believe in a return to trade protection: globalisation will not be reversed, save by even more profound economic collapse. It is even argued that, rather than a ‘new capitalism’, what is proposed is a rescue of Adam Smith (who believed in values far beyond profit seeking) from the neo-liberals, with their mistaken faith in the self-regulating capacity of markets.24 But all insist that there must be a new financial architecture that will have political effects. It will demand global financial regulation, entailing global co-operation and internationally respected institutions. Controls on credit and on currency exchange are essential. A capacity to address unsustainable gaps between rich and poor both within states, and between developing and developed economies must be developed. A rethinking of the role of the state itself and of governance is needed, along with a recalibration of the ‘risk shift’ that (in getting the state ‘off our backs’) has resulted in all vulnerabilities being concentrated on families and individuals, who have been expected to manage for themselves.25 What has happened in the past, however, is that gifted Australian mediators have adapted such currents of thought to local conditions for our political leaders: think of Bruce Smith interpreting classical liberalism to support free trade and a new conservatism; Walter Murdoch translating new protection into a program of civic competence; Meredith Atkinson and Frederic Eggleston parlaying ‘new liberalism’ into the warrant for inter-war knowledge elites; Coombs channelling Keynes through Curtin and Chifley into postwar reconstruction. If history is our guide, two things will happen. First, the precepts of the new order will provide the opportunity for

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local intellectuals who have been working on precisely the problems that bedevilled neo-liberalism – Hugh Stretton on a social democratic economy, John Quiggin on the risk society, Stephen Bell and others on re-theorising the state, Noel Pearson on proximity democracy, John Uhr on ethical constraint, for instance – to gain credence in policy circles. The popularising work is already underway, in David McKnight’s Beyond Left and Right (2005) and Mark Davis’s The Land of Plenty (2008), for example.26 The organic intellectuals of the political class, in the public service, in ministerial offices, in think-tanks, in consultancy roles, will translate this into terms political actors can use. Second, whether or not the Rudd Government succeeds or fails, a successor administration – notwithstanding the current Opposition’s vehement rejection of what is on offer, inability yet to think beyond the verities of Howard (and continuing ridicule of those who question the market solution)27 – will comply with the essentials of a new policy regime, and will be bound to draw on much the same intellectual resources, even if (like Menzies following Chifley, or Howard following Keating) they take it in directions other than those envisaged by its initiators. The transition process may be long and difficult, as were the dolours between the 1930s Depression and post-war reconstruction. It is very difficult to break out of habits of thought that have been entrenched, and embedded in institutional practice, for twenty or thirty years. There is a possibility that the first measures to stimulate economic recovery will generate higher interest rates and a backlash that may take neo-Keynesianism (and Rudd’s dream of social democracy) down with it.28 We may be facing the recession that finally breaks the welfare state, as Bob Gregory has argued.29 Alternatively, Australia’s ‘miracle economy’, or the ‘green shoots’ of recovery that were touted by late 2009, might encourage the perception that the crisis was over-rated, and that we are not at the end of the neo-liberal policy regime. It is hard, however, to see that with financial institutions

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in disarray, enormous levels of government debt, America in decline and new powers emerging, we can proceed without a rebalancing of the international economy – a rebalancing that must, as Rudd avers, involve a new understanding between governments and markets. It is yet to be seen if Rudd is the Fraser of our time (talking the talk of bold reform, but so much shaped by the ‘economic conservatism’, which is to say orthodoxy, of the preceding era that he will fail) or else the Deakin of the day, foreshadowing the ‘Australian settlement’ of the twenty-first century. Yet, if those who say capitalism is changed forever are to be believed, Rudd’s fate is only marginally relevant: the politics of the future has to mean a new accommodation between state and market, and one that recognises that ordinary life cannot be entirely dictated by either. It is in this intermediate realm – that of civil society – that political debate should be anchored. It is to be hoped that those who devise the new regime can learn from the rich history of our political thinking, the resource it provides, and the resilience that has characterised Australian adaptations of the patterns of Western thought. It is too much to hope that they will learn humility.

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Guide to sources

Citation details for the source materials quoted or directly referred to in this book are given in the notes to each chapter. However, this project has drawn upon a much larger body of material – in excess of 2700 items— – and one that cannot readily be accommodated as a bibliography within this book. Readers who wish to go into further detail, or fellow researchers, are therefore encouraged to refer to the extended bibliography, which is available online at: < www.arts.monash.edu.au/psi/what-were-they-thinking/>

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I n t ro d u c t i o n 1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1831] 2002, chapter 14. 2 Paul Keating, ‘Why Would they Go to the Photocopiers?’, in Well May We Say … The Speeches that Made Australia, ed. Sally Warhaft, Melbourne: Black Inc, 2004 (1996). 3 Don Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A portrait of Paul Keating PM, Sydney: Knopf, 2002, p. 84. 4 B. Head and J. Walter, eds, Intellectual Movements and Australian Society, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988. 5 L. Strachey, ‘Preface’, Eminent Victorians, Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1918] 1977, pp. 9–11. 6 See for instance, L. Hartz, The Founding of New Societies, New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1964; H. Collins, ‘Political Ideology in Australia: The Distinctiveness of a Benthamite Society’, Daedalus, Vol. 114, No. 1, Australia: Terra Incognita? (Winter, 1985), pp. 147–69; E. Van Acker, Different Voices: Gender and Politics in Australia, Melbourne: Macmillan, 1999; D. Denoon, Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983; P. Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History, London: Faber & Faber, 1987; R. Gibson, South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. 7 I have engaged with these debates elsewhere, and concede that they fruitfully inform this work, but they are another element that can remain ‘beneath the surface’ for the purposes of this book. See, for instance, J. Walter, ‘Necessary Myths’, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 26, May 1990, pp. 26–36; ‘Nation and narrative: the problem of general history’, in B. Hocking, ed., Australia: Towards 2000, London:

Macmillan, 1990; ‘A question of discipline? The Australian Studies versus Cultural Studies debate’, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 57, 1998, pp. 38–49. 8 Indeed, I’ve argued that one can only understand the success of a leader like Johannes Bjelke-Petersen by understanding the unique culture of Queensland state politics in his time: see, J. Walter, ‘Johannes Bjelke-Petersen: The Populist Autocrat’, in D. Murphy, R. Joyce and M. Cribb, eds, The Premiers of Queensland, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1990, pp. 495–526.

Part I: The way we live now 1 A seismic shift? 1 K. Rudd, ‘The Global Financial Crisis’, The Monthly, February 2009, pp. 20, 29. 2 J. Howard, The Inaugural John Howard Lecture for the Menzies Research Centre, Centenary Hall, Melbourne, 19 February 2009. 3 Rudd, ‘The Global Financial Crisis’, pp. 20–29. 4 See K. Rudd; ‘First speech to Parliament’, 11 November 1998, at , accessed 23 March 2009; K. Rudd, ‘Faith in Politics’, The Monthly, October 2006; and K. Rudd, ‘Howard’s Brutopia’, The Monthly, November 2006. 5 All quotations in the next five paragraphs are taken from Rudd, ‘The Global Financial Crisis’. 6 H. Ergas, ‘Capital use of principle: the prime minister has no alternative to the market economy’, Australian, 28 February – 1 March 2009. 7 Cf., e.g., B. Keane, ‘The Rudd manifesto: an exercise in simplistic propaganda’, Crikey, 4 February 2009, at , accessed 23 March 2009.

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8 Ergas, ‘Capital use of principle’. 9 Ergas, ‘Capital use of principle’. 10 M. Turnbull, ‘PM’s cheap money shot’, Australian, 7–8 March 2009. Subsequent paraphrase and quotation in this paragraph draws from the same article. 11 M. Turnbull, Speech to the Liberal Party’s Federal Council, 14 March 2009, at , accessed 23 March 2009. 12 M. Turnbull, Speech to the Liberal Party’s Federal Council, 14 March 2009. 13 K. Rudd, Transcript of Press Conference, the Blue Room, Parliament House, 31 January 2009 at , accessed 22 September 2009. 14 Rudd, quoted in D. Flitton, ‘Spiked! PM’s rejected essay’, Age, 5 September 2009. His essay had been submitted to Foreign Affairs (but not published) earlier in the year – but this was an argument Rudd reiterated in many other fora. 15 See the views of World Bank President, Bob Zoellick, quoted in M. Grattan, ‘Paving the way to new prosperity’, Age, 4 September 2009. See, too, A. Davies, ‘Rudd role looms as mediator’, Age, 19 September 2009. 16 M. Corden, ‘The World Credit Crisis: Understanding It and What to Do’, The World Economy, vol. 32, no. 3, 2009, pp. 385–400, at pp. 397, 399. 17 Rudd, ‘Road to recovery’. 18 Quoted in T. Colebatch, ‘It’s been very stimulating, but what now?’, Age, 20 August 2009. 19 T. Colebatch, ‘OECD praise for Canberra stimulus package’, Age, 17 September 2009. 20 K. Rudd, ‘The road to recovery’, Age, 25 July 2009. 21 M. Turnbull, ‘Rudd’s reckless debt gamble’, Age, 1 August 2009. 22 ‘A Leader in search of a real narrative’, Editorial, Australian, 12–13 September 2009; M. Grattan, ‘Turnbull needs to find his reform mojo to win this history war’, Age, 11 September 2009. 23 See T. Wright, ‘Rudd drills it home to the troops on Howard years’, Age, 8 September 2009; M. Grattan, ‘Turnbull fires salvo at Rudd’, Age, 9 September 2009; P. Kelly, ‘Turnbull

lashes PM for “creepy spin-doctoring”’, Australian, 12–13 September 2009; and note that John Howard himself was drawn into the fray, see J. Howard, ‘Rudd demeans himself trying to rewrite history’, Australian, 11 September 2009. 24 R. Manne, ‘Neo-liberal meltdown: the response to the prime minister’s essay’, The Monthly, March 2009. 25 L.T. Hobhouse, Liberalism, New York: Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 8. And see Bob Leach, Political Ideologies, Melbourne: Macmillan, 1988, p. 93, pp. 128–51. 26 Rudd, ‘Howard’s Brutopia’. 27 H. Lasswell, Politics: Who gets what, when, how, New York: Peter Smith, [1936] 1950. 28 J.S. Mill, ‘Considerations on Representative Government’, 1861, in his Collected Works, 1963ff., xix, p. 382. 29 A. Metin, Socialism Without Doctrine, trans. R. Ward, Sydney: APCOL, (1901) 1977; J. Bryce, Modern Democracies, London: Macmillan, 1921; Beatrice Webb is quoted in A.F. Davies, Essays in Political Sociology, Melbourne: Cheshire, 1972, p. 28; W.K. Hancock, Australia, ed. H.A.L. Fisher, 1st edn, London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1930; P. Loveday, ‘Australian Political Thought’, in R. Lucy, ed., The Pieces of Politics, 2nd edn, Melbourne: Macmillan, [1975] 1979, pp. 4–5. See also H. Collins, ‘Political Ideology in Australia: The Distinctiveness of a Benthamite Society’, Daedalus, Vol. 114, No. 1. 30 M. Clark, ‘Rewriting Australian History’, in T.A.G. Hungerford, ed., Australian Signpost, Melbourne: Cheshire, 1956; R.W. Connell, ‘Images of Australia’, Quadrant, 12, March– April (1968); Tim Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character, Melbourne: Kibble Books, 1978; Geoffrey Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come, Melbourne: Heinemann, 1973. 31 R.G. Menzies, ‘The Revival of Liberalism in Australia’, in Afternoon Light: Some Memories of Men and Events, Melbourne: Cassell, 1967. 32 See L. Hartz, The Founding of New Societies, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964; R. Rosecrance, ‘The Radical Culture in Australia’, in Hartz, The Founding of New Societies, chapter 8; Collins, ‘Political ideology in Australia: The distinctiveness of a Benthamite society’. 33 Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public, New Brunswick and London: Transaction, [1927] 1993, pp. 14, 29, 33, 34–35; on Weber, Michels, Mosca and Pareto, see J. Walter,

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‘Political Leadership’, in George Rizer, ed., The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Sociology Vol VII, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007, pp. 3441–45. See also J. Higley and M. Burton, Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracy, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006; H.C. Kelman, ‘Nationalism, patriotism and national identity: Socialpsychological dimensions’, in D. Bar-Tel and E. Staub, eds, Patriotism in the Life of Individuals and Nations, Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1997, p. 171. 34 Lippmann, The Phantom Public; Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, New York: Macmillan, 1922. 35 A. Gramsci, ‘The Intellectuals’, in Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. 36 Kelman, ‘Nationalism, patriotism and national identity’. See also A.H. Eagly, R.M. Baron, and V.L. Hamilton, eds, The Social Psychology of Group Identity and Social Conflict Theory, Application, and Practice (on Kelman’s work), Washington: American Psychological Association, 2004. 37 H. Wolfsohn, ‘The Ideology Makers’, Dissent, no. 12 (1964); Sol Encel, Equality and Authority – A Study of Class, Status and Power in Australia, Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire, 1970. 38 There will be further discussion of these figures in chapters 10 and 11. 39 Rudd, ‘The Global Financial Crisis’, p. 29. 40 D. Glover, ‘PM’s pitch to the nation’, Australian, 10 February 2009. 41 P. Kelly, The End of Certainty: The story of the 1980s, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992; and see J. Walter, Tunnel Vision: The failure of political imagination, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996, chapter 3. 42 Once, while talking to a young academic whose brilliant thesis on the early twentieth century labour movement had impressed me, I mentioned comparisons and contrasts with the New Liberal thinkers of that period, referring explicitly to one of the most prominent, Meredith Atkinson. He looked completely blank, asking ‘who was she?’ So preoccupied had my colleague been with the labour movement, he had not developed even a nodding acquaintance with one of its chief interlocutors. 43 Gilbert and Inglis make this comment in the general preface to the multi-volume Australians: A Historical Library, Sydney: Fairfax, Syme and Weldon Associates, 1987.

Part II: Democracy by degrees 2 ‘ R e a lly r e s p e c ta b l e settlers’ or ‘most f u r i o u s d e m o c r at s ’ ? 1 J. Tuckey, Account of a Voyage to Establish a Colony at Port Phillip in Bass’s Strait, London: Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1805, p. 190. 2 The attempts of some on both sides to bridge the cultural gap between the ‘British’ and the ‘Australians’ is marvellously conveyed by Inga Clendinnen, see her Dancing with Strangers, Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2003, and especially her discussion of Watkin Tench, pp. 57–66. 3 J. Hirst, Convict Society and Its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1983; S. Nicholas, ed., Convict Workers: reinterpreting Australia’s past, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 4 Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers; C.D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Melbourne: Penguin, 1972; H. Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987. 5 R. Ward, The Australian Legend, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958; L. Hartz et al., The Founding of New Societies, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964. See also G.C. Bolton, ‘Louis Hartz’, Australian Economic History Review, vol. 13, no. 2, 1973, pp. 168–76. 6 A. Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia: A History, Vol. 1, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997. 7 A. Davidson, The Invisible State: the formation of the Australian state 1788–1901, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 8 A.F. Davies, Australian Democracy: An Introduction to the Political System, 2nd edn, Melbourne: Longman, 1964, pp. 4–5. 9 John Macarthur, letter to his wife, 26 January 1808; R. Ward and J. Robertson, comp., Such Was Life: Select Documents in Australian Social History, Vol. 1, 1788–1850, Sydney: Alternative Publishing Cooperative, 1978, p. 72. 10 John Macarthur, letter to J.T. Bigge, 19 December 1821, M. Clark, ed., Sources of Australian History, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 135–37. 11 S. Hindle, ‘Hierarchy and Community in the Elizabethan Parish: The Swallowfield Articles of 1596’, The Historical Journal, vol. 42, no. 3 (Sep.

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1999), pp. 835–51, at p. 850. 12 S. Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999. p. 55. 13 See K. Inglis, Australian Colonists, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993, chapter 3. 14 Cited in J. Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 44. 15 W.C. Wentworth, speech on the question of a House of Assembly for New South Wales, in the Australian, 27 January 1827. 16 W.C. Wentworth, A Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales, London, 1819, pp. 348–49. 17 First comment from Macarthur cited in J.M. Ward, James Macarthur: Colonial Conservative 1798–1867, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1981, p. 35; second comment from Macarthur cited by T. Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty: the democratic movement in New South Wales before 1856, Sydney: Federation Press, 2006; response, Daniel Deniehy, in G. Walsh, Daniel Deniehy: A portrait with background, Canberra: Department of History, University College, UNSW, 1988, p. 27. 18 F. Crowley, A Documentary History of Australia – Vol. 1, Colonial Australia 1788–1840, Melbourne: Thomas Nelson Australia, 1980, pp. 502–503. 19 Australian, 22 February 1842. 20 Colonial Observer, 9 March 1842. 21 Cited in H.L. Harris, ‘The Influence of Chartism in Australia’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 11, pt. 6, 1926, p. 371. 22 The Sydney Free Press, 12 February 1842. 23 Australasian Chronicle, 1 October 1840, quoted in Crowley, A Documentary History of Australia – Vol. 1, p. 589. 24 W.C. Wentworth, Speech on the NSW Constitution Bill, in M. Cathcart and K. Darian-Smith, eds, Stirring Australian Speeches, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004, pp. 25–27. 25 Daniel Deniehy, speaking against Wentworth’s ‘Bunyip Aristocracy’, in Cathcart and DarianSmith, pp. 28–31. 26 Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, p. 87. 27 Argus, 16 November 1854, quoted in Crowley, A Documentary History of Australia – Vol. 2, p. 287. 28 See Ward, The Australian Legend, chapter 5; J.N. Molony, Eureka, Melbourne: Viking, 1984. 29 See, again, Ward, Australian Legend, chapter 5.

30 An example of the fire of the Eureka debate is the rhetorical space between the texts by R.S. Ross and C.H. Currey. R.S. Ross, Eureka, Freedom’s Fight of ’54, Melbourne: Fraser & Jenkinson, 1914; C.H. Currey, The Irish at Eureka, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1954. 31 P. Loveday, A.W. Martin, and R.S. Parker, eds, The Emergence of the Australian Party System, Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1977, p. 12. 32 Loveday et al., The Emergence of the Australian Party System, p. 29. 33 F. Bongiorno, The People’s Party: Victorian Labor and the radical tradition, 1875–1914, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996, pp. 22–23. 34 Bongiorno, The People’s Party, p. 23. 35 See N.G. Butlin, ‘The Shape of the Australian Economy, 1861–1900’, The Economic Record, 34, April 1958, pp. 10–25. 36 Butlin, ‘The Shape of the Australian Economy, 1861–1900’, p. 21. 37 See Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia , p. 55. 38 Cited in M. McKenna and W. Hudson, eds, Australian Republicanism: a reader, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003, p. 14. 39 T. Parsons, ‘Was John Boston’s pig a political martyr? The reaction to popular radicalism in early New South Wales’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 71, no. 1, 1985, pp. 163–76, at p. 168. 40 Cited in Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia, p. 49; my discussion here draws on Gascoigne.

3 Defining interests 1 John Dunmore Lang, quoted in P. Cochrane, Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006, p. 279. 2 ‘The Future Australian Race’, in M. Clarke, The Marcus Clarke Memorial Volume, Melbourne: Cameron, Laing and Co., 1884, p. 251. 3 G. Serle, The Rush to be Rich – A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1883–1889, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1971, pp. 24–25. 4 Loveday, Martin, and Parker, eds, The Emergence of the Australian Party System, p. 12. 5 The Australian Dictionary of Biography, available online at (accessed 1 April 2009) provides a marvellous resource for brief essays on such activists: there are, for instance, entries for all

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those cited in this paragraph. 6 S. Macintyre, A Colonial Liberalism: the lost world of three Victorian visionaries, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991. 7 A.W. Martin, ‘Free Trade and Protectionist Parties in New South Wales’, Historical Studies, vol. 6, no. 23, 1954, pp. 315–23. 8 Serle, The Rush to be Rich, pp. 339–40. 9 Macintyre, A Colonial Liberalism. 10 B. Smith, Liberty and Liberalism: a protest against the growing tendency toward undue interference by the state, with individual liberty, private enterprise and the rights of property, Sydney: Centre for Independent Studies, [1887] 2005. 11 Smith has recently been revived as the prescient hero of the neo-liberal renaissance; see, e.g., G. Melluish, ‘Australian Liberalism’, in J.R. Nethercote, ed., Liberalism and the Australian Federation, Sydney: Federation Press, 2001, pp. 31–33. 12 For passages quoted in this paragraph, see Smith, Liberty and Liberalism, pp. 6–7, 158. 13 D. Syme, Outlines of an Industrial Science, London: H.S. King, 1876, p. 185. 14 C.H. Pearson, National Life and Character: a forecast, 2nd edn, London: Macmillan, [1893] 1894, pp. 191, 276–77, 339, 355. 15 See Harris, ‘The Influence of Chartism in Australia’, pp. 372–74. 16 J.D. Lang, Freedom and Independence for the Golden Lands of Australia, London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1852, pp. x, 34, 334. 17 The Empire, 28 December 1850, cited in Harris, ‘The Influence of Chartism in Australia’, p. 375. 18 Its position in trade union folklore was assured by the publication of W.E. Murphy’s History of the Eight Hours Movement, Melbourne: Spectator Publishing Co., 1896. 19 Bongiorno, The People’s Party, p. 13. 20 Inter-Colonial Trades Union Congress, Standing Order Committee, Melbourne, 1884, p. 53. 21 See R. Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics: a study of Eastern Australia, 1850–1910, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967; L. Churchward, ed., The Australian Labor Movement, 1850–1907: extracts from contemporary documents, selected by R.N. Ebbels, Sydney: Noel Ebbels Memorial Committee in association with Australasian Book Society, 1976; Loveday, Martin, and Parker, The Emergence of the Australian Party System, pp. 482–83. 22 Cited in G. Davison, ‘Mechanics Institutes’, in G. Davison, J. Hirst and S. Macintyre, eds, The

Oxford Companion to Australian History, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 422; I draw heavily on Davison in this summary. See also George Nadel, Australia’s Colonial Culture: Ideas, men and institutions in mid-nineteenth century eastern Australia, Melbourne: Cheshire, 1957. 23 See Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia, Volume 1. 24 Loveday, Martin, and Parker, The Emergence of the Australian Party System, p. 9; see also R.B. Walker, The Newspaper Press in NSW 1803–1920, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1976. 25 T.A. Coghlan, A Statistical Account of the Seven Colonies of Australasia, Sydney: Government Printer, 1890, pp. 171–72. 26 M. Cannon, Life in the Cities: Australia in the Victorian Age, Vol. 3, Melbourne: Currey O’Neil, 1975, p. 258; and see D. Lovell, Marxism and Australian Socialism: before the Bolshevik revolution, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 1997, p. 53. 27 This is Bruce Scates’ felicitous phrase; and see B. Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997, chapter 2. 28 See Scates, A New Australia, pp. 57–64; Lovell, Marxism and Australian Socialism, pp. 50–52. 29 Henry George, Progress and Poverty, London: Hogarth Press [1884] 1953, p. 7; and see Scates, A New Australia, pp. 64–65. 30 G. Davison, ‘Sydney and the bush: An urban context for the Australian legend’, Historical Studies, vol. 18, no. 71, pp. 191–209, at p. 194. 31 I draw here on Davison’s argument in ‘Sydney and the bush’, but cf. Scates, A New Australia, and Ward’s Australian Legend (to which Davison is responding). Racism was not something Ward emphasised – the classic attack on colonial racism being H. McQueen’s A New Britannia: an argument concerning the social origins of Australian radicalism and nationalism, Melbourne: Penguin, 1970. 32 Examples drawn from V. Burgmann, ‘In Our Time’: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, chapter 6 (Capital had been translated into English in 1887 and was available in Australian public libraries, and cheap London reprints of the first nine chapters were circulating in the early 1890s). 33 See Lovell. Marxism and Australian Socialism, pp. 37–38. 34 Burgmann, In Our Time, pp. 17–20; and see R. Mathews, Australia’s First Fabians: Middleclass radicals, labour activists and the early labour movement, Melbourne: Cambridge University

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Press, 1993. 35 T. Kean, ‘Property and Land Taxes’, reprinted in J. Norton, ed., The History of Capital and Labour in All Lands and Ages, Sydney: Oceanic Publishing Co., 1888, p. 242. 36 See T. Moore, ‘Melbourne and Mars: the Australian all-electric communist utopia’, Labour History, no. 87, 2004, pp. 209–20. 37 Burgmann, In Our Time, pp. 41–42. 38 See J. Damousi, Women Come Rally: Socialism, communism and gender in Australia 1890 – 1955, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994. 39 I draw on Scates, A New Australia, chapter 6, for these points; see also M. Lake, Getting Equal: the history of Australian feminism, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999, chapter 1. 40 See P. Grimshaw et al., Creating a Nation, Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1994, chapter 7. 41 J. Allen, Rose Scott, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 76. 42 See Scates, A New Australia, chapter 2; J. Docker, The Nervous Nineties – Australian cultural life in the 1890s, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 108–109. 43 Cf. Burgmann, In Our Time; Lovell, Marxism and Australian Socialism; Scates, A New Australia, chapter 2. 44 Cited in Lovell, Marxism and Australian Socialism, p. 38. 45 Lovell, Marxism and Australian Socialism, p. 52. 46 Macintyre, Concise History of Australia, p. 125. 47 Loveday, Martin, and Parker, eds, The Emergence of the Australian Party System. 48 Macintyre, Concise History of Australia, p. 128. 49 S. Macintyre, The Labour Experiment, Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989, p. 4; see also G. Maddox, Australian Democracy in Theory and Practice, Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1985, pp. 242–43. 50 Loveday, Martin, and Parker, eds, The Emergence of the Australian Party System, p. 454. 51 A point made by Stuart Macintyre, see Concise History of Australia, p. 136. 52 Compare H. Irving, To Constitute a Nation: A Cultural History of Australia’s Constitution, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 212. 53 Three such streams were identified in Charles Blackton’s useful early delineation of the social, ideational and economic dynamics of federation, see C.S. Blackton, ‘Australian Nationality and Nationalism, 1850–1900’, Historical Studies, vol. 9, no. 36, pp. 351–67. I draw on Blackton

here and in the next three paragraphs, while acknowledging the revisions flowing from research on federation since the 1960s. See especially, Irving, To Constitute a Nation, pp. 212–15, and H. Irving, ‘Introduction’, in H. Irving, ed., The Centenary Companion to Australian Federation, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 1–15. 54 Quotations come from the following: Wise at the Third Session of the Australasian Federal Convention, Melbourne, 10 March 1898; McMillan, at the First Session of the Australasian Federal Convention, Adelaide, 29 March 1897; Holder at the same session on 27 March 1897; Dobson, again at the Adelaide session on 26 March 1897. 55 John Bannon, quoted in B. Matthews, Federation, Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999, p. 84. 56 These are well captured by Ward, Australian Legend, 1958; Davison, ‘Sydney or the Bush’; and Scates, A New Australia. 57 See B. Birrell, Federation: The Secret Story, Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 2001, chapter 5. 58 Blackton, ‘Australian Nationality and Nationalism’; Irving, To Constitute a Nation. 59 See H. Irving, ed., A Women’s Constitution? Gender and history in the Australian Commonwealth, Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1996. 60 See, for instance, E.G. Whitlam, On Australia’s Constitution, Melbourne: Widescope, 1977. 61 For example, B. Galligan, A Federal Republic: Australia’s constitutional system of government, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1995; S.R. Davis, Theory and Reality: Federal ideas in Australia, England and Europe, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1995. 62 This arose, for instance, in the Australia 2020 Summit: Initial Report, April 2008, at p. 34, at , accessed 6 June 2009. It is not evident in Australia 2020 Summit Final Report, 31 May 2008, pp. 342–45, at , accessed 6 June 2009. 63 Davis, Theory and Reality, p. 6.

Part III: The ‘new liberal’ agenda 4 A t r u e Co m m o n w e a lt h ? 1 Walter Murdoch, The Australian Citizen: An Elementary Account of Civic Rights and Duties,

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Whitcombe and Tombs, n.d. [1912], p. 238. 2 E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875–1914, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987. 3 Barton’s remark was made in a speech campaigning for Federation in the mid-1890s; see M. Rutledge, ‘Barton, Sir Edmund’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 7, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1979, p. 197. 4 Argus, Melbourne, 2 February 1904. 5 The Party was variously rendered as the Labour Party or the Labor Party at this time: later it would be invariably spelled as the Australian Labor Party. To avoid confusion for contemporary readers, I refer to it as the Labor Party throughout. 6 J.B. Brigden et al., The Australian Tariff – An Economic Enquiry, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1929, p. 148. 7 S. Macintyre, ‘The First Caucus’, in J. Faulkner and S. Macintyre, eds, True Believers, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001, p. 28. 8 P. Loveday, ‘Emergence: Realignment and consolidation’, in Loveday, Martin, and Parker, eds, The Emergence of the Australian Party System, pp. 453–87; I. Marsh, ‘Consensus in Australian Politics’, in I. Marsh, ed., Australia’s Choices: Options for a Prosperous and Fair Society, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003, pp. 239–59 ; G.C. Bolton, Edmund Barton, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000; J.A. La Nauze, Alfred Deakin: a biography, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1965; L.F. Fitzhardinge, William Morris Hughes: a political biography, 2 vols, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1964–1979; R. McMullin, So Monstrous a Travesty: Chris Watson and the world’s first national labour government, Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2004; W.G. McMinn, George Reid, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1989. 9 Cited in S. Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia, Vol. 4, The succeeding age, 1901–1942, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 85. See Anon., Report of the Proceedings and Public Meetings of the First Annual Conference of the Free Trade and Liberal Association of New South Wales, Sydney: Free Trade and Liberal Association of New South Wales. 10 Loveday, ‘Emergence: Realignment and consolidation’, p. 400. 11 Bolton, Edmund Barton, p. 225. 12 Bolton, Edmund Barton, p. 237. 13 Though Barton was only called after an abortive attempt by a new and badly briefed Governor-

General to install the anti-federation NSW premier, Sir William Lyn, as prime minister; see J.A. La Nauze, The Hopetoun Blunder, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press for Australian Humanities Research Council, 1957. 14 Maitland Daily Mercury, 18 January 1901, cited in F.K. Crowley, Modern Australia in documents, Vol.1, 1901–1939, Melbourne: Wren, 1973, pp. 1–3. 15 Macintyre, The Succeeding Age, p. 86. 16 L.F. Crisp, The Australian Federal Labor Party 1901–1951, London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1955, p. 261; and see Macintyre, ‘The first Caucus’, p. 18. 17 See McMullin, So Monstrous a Travesty. 18 I draw here on Marsh, Beyond the Two Party System, p. 233. 19 I draw on Macintyre, The Succeeding Age, p. 89, for this and the previous sentence. 20 See Loveday in Loveday, Martin and Parker, eds, The Emergence of the Australian Party System, pp. 415–16, 418, 425–26, 451–52. 21 Cited in P. Weller, Caucus minutes, 1901–1949: minutes of the meetings of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party, Vol. 1, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1975, p. 30. 22 H.V. Evatt, Liberalism in Australia: an historical sketch of Australian politics down to the year 1915, Sydney: Law Book Co. of Australasia, 1918, pp. 72–73. 23 George Reid, in G.H. Reid and W.A. Holman, Socialism – As Defined in the Australian Labor Party’s Objective and Platform, Official verbatim report of the public debate between Reid and Holman in Sydney, 2nd & 3rd April, 1906, Sydney: Worker Trades Union Printery, 1906, p. 57. 24 Reid and Holman, Socialism, pp. 33–34. 25 Reid and Holman, Socialism, p. 35. 26 Reid and Holman, Socialism, p. 56. 27 Reid and Holman, Socialism, p. 36. 28 Reid and Holman, Socialism, p. 36. 29 Macintyre, Colonial Liberalism. 30 See S.M. Di Scala and S. Mastellone, European Political Thought 1815–1989, Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1998, p. 69. 31 See M. Sawer, The Ethical State? Social liberalism in Australia, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003, pp. 36–37. 32 J. Uhr, Terms of Trust: arguments over ethics in Australian government, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005, pp. 54–55. 33 A. Deakin, ‘What is Liberalism?’ Age, 19 March 1895.

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34 A. Deakin, The Pre-Sessional Speech of Mr. Alfred Deakin, MP, to his Constituents, Melbourne: the author, 24 June 1905, p. 3. 35 Macintyre, The Succeeding Age, p. 91. 36 Deakin, Pre-Sessional Speech, 24 June 1905, p. 5, pp. 6–7. 37 Deakin, Pre-Sessional Speech, p. 6. 38 Deakin, Pre-Sessional Speech, p. 7. 39 Deakin, Pre-Sessional Speech, p. 8. 40 Deakin, Pre-Sessional Speech, pp. 8–9. 41 Quoted in G. Starr, The Liberal Party of Australia: A Documentary History, Melbourne: Drummond/ Heinemann, 1980, p. 4. 42 Crowley, Modern Australia in Documents Vol. 1, 87 [Age, Melbourne, 7 May 1906]. 43 Ibid: pp. 87–89. 44 Quoted McMullin, So Monstrous a Travesty, p. 94 [CPD, 26/5/1904: 1672]. 45 Quoted Crowley, Modern Australia in Documents Vol. 1: 33–5 [Advertiser, 1 September 1902]. 46 Reid and Holman, Socialism, p. 4. 47 Reid and Holman, Socialism, p. 4. 48 Reid and Holman, Socialism, p. 50. 49 Reid and Holman, Socialism, p. 10. 50 Reid and Holman, Socialism, p. 62. 51 Reid and Holman, Socialism, pp. 62–63. 52 W.M. Hughes, The Case for Labor, Sydney, Workers Trustees, 1910, (Facsimile edition, Sydney University Press, 1970). 53 Comments to be found in Hughes, Case for Labor, pp. 10–17. 54 Hughes, Case for Labor, p. 21. 55 Hughes, Case for Labor, pp. 56–57. 56 Direct quotes in this paragraph from Hughes, Case for Labor, pp. 55, 36, 26. 57 On the IWW, see V. Burgmann, ‘The IWW in International Perspective: comparing the North American and Australasian Wobblies’, in J. Kimber, P. Love and P. Deery, eds, Labour Traditions, Papers from the Tenth National Labour History Conference, University of Melbourne, 4–6 July 2007, Melbourne: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, pp. 36–43; on the OBU, see Ian Bedford, ‘The One Big Union, 1918–1923’, in I. Bedford and R. Curnow, Initiative and organization, Sydney studies in politics 3, Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire for the Dept of Govt and Public Administration, University of Sydney, 1963. 58 Hughes, Case for Labor, pp. 90–92. 59 Hughes, Case for Labor, p. 59. 60 Hughes, Case for Labor, p. 143. 61 Hughes, Case for Labor, p. 144.

62 P. Kelly, The End of Certainty. 63 Sawer, The Ethical State. 64 A. Deakin, ‘Federal Political Crisis’, The Morning Post (London), 17 May 1909, at , accessed 16 June 2009. 65 First outlined by Keith Hancock in 1930; elaborated by J.D.B. Miller in the 1960s; and then given a new life by Paul Kelly in 1992. See W.K. Hancock, Australia, London: Ernest Benn, 1930; J.D.B. Miller, Australian Government and Politics, London: Duckworth, 2nd edn, 1959; and Kelly, The End of Certainty. 66 This is Stuart Macintyre’s argument: see S. Macintyre, ‘Comment: An Historian’s Perspective’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 39, no. 1, 2004, p. 32. 67 For an extended discussion of these elements, see Geoffrey Stokes et al., ‘Symposium’ (The Australian Settlement), Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 39, no. 1, 2004, pp. 5–48. 68 Sir George Reid, My Reminiscences, Melbourne: Cassell, 1917, p. 203. 69 Alfred Deakin, speaking on the Immigration Restriction Bill, 3 October 1901, cited in M. Cathcart and K. Darian-Smith, eds, Stirring Australian Speeches, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004, p. 123. 70 J.C. Watson, cited on B. McKinlay, A Documentary History of the Australian Labor Movement, 1850–1975, Melbourne: Drummond Publishing, 1979, p. 28. 71 An extended example of this rhetoric appeared in an article on ‘Empire Day’ in the Sydney Morning Herald, 24 May 1907, reprinted in Walter and MacLeod, The Citizens’ Bargain, pp. 28–32. 72 T.R. Bavin, ‘Empire Citizenship’ in Walter and MacLeod, The Citizens’ Bargain, p. 25. 73 See F.G. Castles, The Working Class and Welfare: reflections on the political development of the welfare state in Australia and New Zealand, 1890–1980, Wellington, NZ, and Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with Port Nicholson Press, 1985. 74 This was a comment by Peter Board in 1919, see his ‘Australian Citizenship’, cited in Walter and MacLeod, The Citizens’ Bargain, p. 101. 75 A. Deakin, The Federal Story: the inner history of the Federal cause, 1880–1900, J.A. La Nauze, ed., Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1963, p. 12. 76 George Reid, 14 July 1909, cited in Starr, The Liberal Party of Australia, p. 10. 77 H.B. Higgins, A New Province for Law and Order, London: Constable, 1922. 78 Macintyre, Concise History, p. 152.

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5 Pa r a ll e l v i s i o n s : t h e settlement in question? 1 H. Lawson, from ‘Second Class Wait Here’, in his Verses Popular and Humorous (1900), at , accessed 12 November 2009. 2 H.L. Nielsen, The Voice of the People, or the History of the Kyabram Reform Movement, Melbourne: Arbuckle, Waddell and Fawkner, 1902; see also Macintyre, The Succeeding Age, pp. 97–98. 3 Macintyre, The Succeeding Age, p. 97. 4 A. Moore, The Right Road? A history of rightwing politics in Australia, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 21. 5 T. Mann, Socialism, 1905, in J. Laurent, ed., Tom Mann’s Social and Economic Writing: A preSyndicalist selection, Nottingham: Spokesman; Surry Hills, Australia: Amalgamated Metal Workers’ Union, 1988, p. 118. 6 T. Mann, ‘The Way to Win’, 1909, Laurent, Tom Mann’s Social and Economic Writing, p. 145. 7 Laurent, Tom Mann’s Social and Economic Writing, p. 127. 8 Laurent, Tom Mann’s Social and Economic Writing, p. 146. 9 For biographical details of Mann, see J. Laurent, ‘Introduction’ to his Tom Mann’s Social and Economic Writing, pp. 1–35; J. White, Tom Mann, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991, chapter 5. 10 Mann, Socialism, in Laurent, Tom Mann’s Social and Economic Writing; all quotes here from this source. 11 Mann, Socialism, p. 79. 12 Mann, Socialism, p. 99. 13 Mann, Socialism, p. 125. 14 Mann, Socialism, p. 94. 15 Mann, Socialism, p. 118. 16 Mann, Socialism, p. 87–88. 17 Mann, Socialism, p. 94. 18 Mann, Socialism, p. 95. 19 Mann, Socialism, p. 114. 20 Mann, ‘The Way to Win’, pp. 145–46; (Mann’s emphasis). 21 Both quotes, Mann, ‘The Way to Win’, p. 144. 22 Mann, ‘The Way to Win’, p. 144. 23 Mann, ‘The Way to Win’, p. 145. 24 See V. Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: the industrial workers of the world in Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 25 Direct Action, 10 June 1916. 26 See Commonwealth Franchise Bill debate,

Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (Senate), 9 April 1902, pp. 11450–92. 27 House of Representatives debate on the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 concluded by denying Aborigines the vote, notwithstanding the fact that they had not initially been excluded from the adult male franchise in the colonies, in the 1890s could still vote on the same terms as non-Aborigines in four states and in the Northern Territory, and retained voting rights in some jurisdictions in the twentieth century. Section 41 of the Constitution provided that those who had state voting rights before 1902 were eligible for the Commonwealth franchise, but political leaders (including Deakin) continued to insist that Aborigines had been excluded, and both states and the Commonwealth found ways of removing them from the electoral rolls. See M. Goot, ‘The Aboriginal Franchise and Its Consequences’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 52, no. 4, 2006, pp. 518–23. 28 S. Magarey, S. Rowley, and S. Sheridan, eds, Debutante Nation: feminism contests the 1890s, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993; S. Magarey, Passions of the First Wave Feminists, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2001. 29 R. Scott on womanhood suffrage, in Walter & MacLeod, The Citizens’ Bargain, pp. 83–84. 30 Susan Magarey’s title for her definitive book on these activists. 31 See Magarey, Passions of the First Wave Feminists; M. Lake, Getting Equal: the history of Australian feminism, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999; J. Damousi, Women Come Rally: socialism, communism and gender in Australia 1890–1955, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994. 32 Scott on womanhood suffrage, in Walter & MacLeod, The Citizens’ Bargain, pp. 83–84. 33 United Associations (of Women), quoted in Lake, Getting equal, p. 143 – I draw on Lake’s argument relating to this point. 34 J. Allen, ‘Scott, Rose (1847–1925)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 11, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988, p. 548. See also Allen’s biography, Rose Scott. 35 J.N. Brownfoot, ‘Goldstein, Vida Jane Mary (1869–1949)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 9, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1983, pp. 43–45; J. Bomfort, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman: Vida Goldstein, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993. 36 Damousi, Women Come Rally, pp. 15–17; G.

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Hewitt, ‘Ahern, Elizabeth (1877–1969)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 7, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1979, pp. 18–19. 37 As Scates argues, A New Australia, pp. 197–98, in contrast to Damousi. 38 As is evident in Damousi, Women Come Rally; see also J. Damousi, ‘“The woman comrade”: equal or different?’ Women’s History Review, vol. 2, no. 3, 1993, pp. 387–94; J. Damousi, ‘Gendered meanings and actions in left-wing movements’, in T. Irving, ed., Challenges to Labour History, Sydney: UNSW Press, 1994, pp. 150–68. 39 M. Fitzherbert, Liberal Women: federation – 1949, Sydney: Federation Press, 2004, p. 18. 40 Letter from Janet M. Clarke et al., July 1904, quoted in Fitzherbert, Liberal women, p. 44. 41 Hughes, quoted in Lake, Getting Equal, p. 143. 42 J. Smart, ‘Hughes, Agnes Eva (1856?–1940)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 9, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1983, p. 388. 43 Fitzherbert, Liberal Women, p. 46. My account of Hughes here draws on Fitzherbert, Liberal Women, chapters 3 and 8; see also Smart, ‘Hughes, Agnes Eva …’. 44 Compare Magarey’s argument in her Passions of the First Wave Feminists, on which I draw here.

6 A civic order 1 M. Atkinson, ‘The Australian Outlook’, in M. Atkinson, ed., Australia: Economic and political studies, Melbourne: MacMillan, 1920, pp. 35–36. 2 M. Clark, A Short History of Australia, New York: New American Library, 1969, p. 213. 3 W.M. Hughes, in D. Sladen, From Boundary Rider to Prime Minister: Hughes of Australia – The Man of the Hour, London: Hutchison, 1916, p. 89. 4 F. Anstey, The Kingdom of Shylock, Melbourne: Labor Call Print, 1917. 5 A.G.L. Shaw, The Economic Development of Australia, Melbourne: Longmans, 1967, pp. 130, 136–37. 6 J. Brett, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class – From Alfred Deakin to John Howard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 87–89. 7 Clark, A Short History of Australia, p. 204. 8 L. Foster, High Hopes – The Men and Motives of the Australian Round Table, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1986, passim.

9 R.F. Irvine et al., National Efficiency – A Series of Lectures, Melbourne: Victorian Railways Institute, 1915. 10 W. Murdoch, The Australian Citizen, Melbourne: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1926, p. 215. 11 Murdoch, The Australian Citizen, p. 133. 12 M.A. Jones, The Australian Welfare State. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1980, pp. 21–22. 13 J. Walter and T. Moore, ‘State Socialism in Australian Political Thought – A Reconsideration’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 52, no. 1, 2006, pp. 25–26. 14 V. Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 19–21 et passim. 15 P. Ford, Cardinal Moran and the ALP, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1966, passim. 16 I. Turner, Sydney’s Burning, London: William Heinemann, 1967, passim. 17 D. Aitkin, ‘“Countrymindedness” – the Spread of an Idea’, Australian Cultural History, no. 4, 1985, pp. 34–41. 18 Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, pp. 266, 253. 19 E.H. Lane, Dawn to Dusk – Reminiscences of a Rebel, Brisbane: William Brooks & Co., 1939, p. 194. 20 R. Evans, The Red Flag Riots – A Study of Intolerance, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1988. 21 S. Macintyre, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from origins to illegality, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998. 22 E.W. Campbell, History of the Australian Labor Movement – A Marxist Interpretation, Sydney: Current Book Distributors, 1945, p. 128. 23 H. Zogbaum, Kisch in Australia: the untold story, Melbourne: Scribe, 2004. 24 B. Smith, Noel Counihan – Artist and Revolutionary, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 106. 25 B. O’Meagher, ed., The Socialist Objective – Labor & Socialism, Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1983. 26 S. Alomes, Reasonable Men, PhD thesis, Australian National University, Canberra, 1979; H. Bourke, ‘Social Scientists as Intellectuals: From the First World War to the Depression’, in Head and Walter, eds, Intellectual Movements and Australian Society, pp. 47–69. 27 M. Freeden, ‘The New Liberalism and its Aftermath’, in R. Bellamy, ed., Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-century political thought and

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practice, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 176. 28 M. Atkinson, ed., Australia – Economic and Political Studies, Melbourne: Macmillan, 1920, p. 25. 29 F.A. Bland, Shadows and Realities of Government, Sydney: Workers’ Educational Association of NSW, 1923, pp. 38, 39. 30 Brett, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class, pp. 93–94. For pamphlets see M. Goot and P. Holt, ‘Bibliography’, in J. Mackinolty, ed., The Wasted Years? Australia’s Great Depression, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1981, pp. 213–47. 31 F.W. Eggleston, State Socialism in Victoria, London: P. S. King & Son, 1932, pp. 13–14. 32 W.K. Hancock, Australia, London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1930, p. 72. 33 S. Gray, ‘An Evil Long Endured’, in Mackinolty, ed., The Wasted Years? p. 64. 34 W.M. Ball, Possible Peace, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1936, p. 127. 35 See M. Cathcart, Defending the National Tuckshop: Australia’s secret army intrigue of 1931, Fitzroy: McPhee Gribble/Penguin, 1988. 36 ‘Kent Hughes, Sir Wilfrid Selwyn (1895–1970)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, online, at , accessed 30 April 2009.

Part IV: Reconstructions: policies for prosperity 7 Building the ‘modern’ n at i o n 1 Quoted in N. Brown, Governing Prosperity: Social Change and Social Analysis in Australia in the 1950s, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 144. 2 Indeed, some anti-Labor politicians I interviewed on their election to federal parliament in 1978, stressed that their earliest political memories included the fear that Curtin and Chifley were so dominant that Menzies and his colleagues would never return from the wilderness; see J. Walter, The acculturation to Political Work: New members of the federal backbench, Canberra: APSA and the Parliamentary Library, 1979. 3 A.F. Davies, Australian Democracy: An introduction to the political system, Melbourne: Longmans, 1964, p. 12. 4 S. Encel, Equality and Authority: A study of class, status and power in Australia, Melbourne: Cheshire, 1970, pp. 657–59.

5 John Curtin’s speech was reprinted in the Sydney Morning Herald, 29 December 1941. 6 H.C. Coombs, Trial Balance, South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1981, p. 6. 7 Ross, Elkin, Burgmann and Ball are discussed in T. Rowse, ‘Political Culture: A Concept and Its Ideologues’, in G. Duncan, ed., Critical Essays in Australian Politics, Melbourne: Edward Arnold, 1978, pp. 5–27; details of Sweet, Eldershaw and Ryan are to be found in C. Allport, ‘Women and the New Order Housing’, in Women and Labour Publications Collective, All Her Labours, Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1978, pp. 129–68. See also, T. Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character, Melbourne: Kibble Books, 1978; Coombs, Trial Balance. 8 See Kemp’s essay on Gepp in C.D. Kemp, Big Businessmen: Four Biographical Essays, Melbourne: Institute of Public Affairs, 1964, pp. 13–84. 9 Coombs, Trial Balance, p. 26. 10 Coombs, Trial Balance, p. 27. Note, the preceding paragraph draws on Coombs, Trial Balance, pp. 26–27. 11 Coombs, Trial Balance, pp. 26–27. 12 Coombs, Trial Balance, p. 78. 13 Coombs, Trial Balance, pp. 85–88. 14 Coombs, Trial Balance, pp. 98–99. 15 Full Employment in Australia, Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra: Commonwealth Government Printer, 1945, p. 6. 16 Full Employment in Australia. p. 18. 17 H. Gepp, When Peace Comes, Melbourne: Robertson and Mullens, 1943, p. 24. 18 Gepp, When Peace Comes, p. 28. 19 Gepp, When Peace Comes. p. 22. 20 Institute of Public Affairs, Looking Forward: A Post-war Policy for Australian Industry, Melbourne: IPA, 1944, pp. 25–26. 21 All direct quotations in this and the previous paragraph are from IPA, Looking Forward. 22 Hancock, Australia. 23 Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character, p. 37 ff and p. 150 ff. 24 As Coombs makes clear in Trial Balance. 25 J.R. Hay, ‘The Institute of Public Affairs and Social Policy in World War II’, Historical Studies, vol. 20, no. 79, 1982, p. 202, and for previous sentence see Hay, pp. 201–202. 26 Rowse, Australian Liberalism, pp. 171–74. 27 See J. Brett, Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, Sydney: Macmillan Australia, 1992; I. Hancock, National and Permanent? The federal organisation of the Liberal Party of Australia 1944–1965,

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Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000; M. Simms, ‘“Private Enterprise and Progress”: The Genesis of Liberal Party Ideology’, in H. Mayer and H. Nelson, eds, Australian Politics: A Fifth Reader, Longman Cheshire: Melbourne, 1980, p. 9; M. Simms, A Liberal Nation: The Liberal Party and Australian Politics, Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1982, p. 6; and G. Starr, ed., The Liberal Party of Australia: A Documentary History, Richmond: Drummond/Heinemann, 1980, p. 66 for elements discussed here. 28 A.L. May, The Battle for the Banks, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1968. 29 Rowse, Australian Liberalism, p. 174. 30 R.G. Menzies, Afternoon Light: some memories of men and events, Melbourne: Cassell Australia, 1967, p. 282. 31 I draw here on a more detailed argument advanced by Alan Davies in reviewing the public sector between the mid-1940s and the mid-1980s; see J. Walter, ‘Bureaucracy and Democracy in the American Century: A.F. Davies on Administration and the “Knowledgeable Society”’, Australian Journal of Public Administration, vol. 58, no. 1, 1999, pp. 23–32. 32 R.G. Menzies, ‘Address to the Liberal Party Federal Council’, 6 April 1964, in Starr, ed., The Liberal Party of Australia, p. 217.

8 Unintended consequences 1 G. Sharp, ‘Editorial’, Arena, n. 29, 1972, pp. 1–2. 2 N. Brown, Governing Prosperity: Social change and social analysis in the 1950s, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 3 Ian Turner, quoted in J. McLaren, Free Radicals: On the Left in Postwar Melbourne, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2003, p. 72. 4 Macintyre, The Reds. 5 See R. White, ‘The Australian Way of Life’, Historical Studies, vol. 18, no. 73, 1979, pp. 528–46; J. Murphy, Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies’ Australia, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2000, chapter 5. I draw substantially on White and Murphy for this paragraph. 6 White, Australian Way of Life, pp. 531–32; Murphy, Imagining the Fifties, pp. 66–67. 7 Murphy, Imagining the Fifties, p. 71; Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character, p. 193, pp. 233–37. 8 O.A. Oeser and S.B. Hammond, eds, Social

Structure and Personality in a City, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954, p. 25. 9 David Lowe’s is the best account of this – see D. Lowe, Menzies and the ‘great world struggle’: Australia’s Cold War 1948–1954, Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999. 10 In Queensland, the associated grouping initially called itself the Queensland Labor Party. 11 James Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 9. 12 This sentence paraphrases Gwenda Tavan, see G. Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, Melbourne: Scribe, 2005, p. 34, and for general background, see Tavan, chapter 2. 13 A. Calwell, How Many Australians Tomorrow? Melbourne: Reed and Harris, 1945, pp. 51–52. 14 The Good Neighbour Council of New South Wales Newsletter No. 64, February 1962. 15 Nino Culotta was a pseudonym for an Australian writer (of Irish heritage!), John O’Grady: They’re a Weird Mob: a novel, Sydney: Ure-Smith, 1958. 16 B. York, Australia and Refugees, 1901–2002: an annotated chronology based on official sources, Canberra: Information & Research Services, Dept of the Parliamentary Library, 2003, pp. 51–52. 17 Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia. 18 See T. Rowse, ed., Contesting Assimilation, Perth: API Network, 2005. 19 This paraphrases Donald Horne’s articulation of the change that took place; see his Ideas for a Nation, Sydney: Pan Books, 1989. 20 J. Murphy, Imagining the Fifties: Private sentiment and political culture in Menzies’ Australia, Sydney: UNSW Press/Pluto Press, 2000, chapter 4, gives a useful overview. 21 Compare Murphy, Imagining the Fifties, pp. 13–14. 22 G. Bolton, The Middle Way: The Oxford History of Australia, Volume 5, 1942–1988, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 26. 23 R.W. Connell, Ruling Class, Ruling Culture, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 215–16. 24 R.G. Menzies, ‘The Forgotten People’, in J. Walter and M. MacLeod, The Citizens’ Bargain: A Documentary History of Australian Views Since 1890, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002, pp. 138–41. 25 Judith Brett, Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, Melbourne: Macmillan, 1992, pp. 15–59. 26 F.O. Barnett, ‘The flesh and blood aspects of planning’, Twentieth Century, No. 2, March 1948, p. 87.

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27 K.M. Reiger, The Disenchantment of the Home: Modernizing the Australian family 1880–1940, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985. 28 Reiger, Disenchantment of the Home, p. 28. 29 L. Johnson, The Modern Girl: Girlhood and growing up, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993, p. 45. 30 M. Rolfe, ‘The Fordist Highway to Australia Unlimited: Americanisation and the Development of Australia During the Menzies Era, 1939–1962’, PhD Thesis, University of New South Wales, 1995, pp. 23, 33. 31 Mr Reynolds (Barton), CPD, Vol. H. of R. 25, 18 November 1959, p. 2832. 32 Senator Cooke, CPD, Vol. S. 16, 25 November 1959, p. 1819. 33 Mr Turner (Bradfield), CPD, Vol. H. of R. 24, 13 August 1959, p. 253. 34 See Anthony Giddens on ‘expert systems’, in his Modernity and Self-Identity; Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, pp. 18–21. 35 T. Frame, The Life and Death of Harold Holt, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 2005, pp. 160–61; Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, chapters 7–9. 36 It is not feasible to review the now extensive literature on Aborigines, settler populations and the state here, but see B. Attwood et al., A Life Together, A Life Apart: A History of Relations Between Europeans and Aborigines, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1994; B. Attwood and A. Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999; R. Broome, Aboriginal Australians: black responses to white dominance, 1788–2001, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001; N.G. Butlin, Economics and the Dreamtime: a hypothetical history, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1993; J. Chesterman, Civil Rights: How Indigenous Australians Won Formal Equality, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2005: M. Goot and T. Rowse, eds, Make a Better Offer: The Politics of Mabo, Sydney: Pluto Press, 1994; M. Howard, ed., ‘Whitefella Business’: Aborigines in Australian Politics, Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978; H. Reynolds (comp.), Aborigines and Settlers: The Australian Experience 1788–1939, Melbourne: Cassell Australia, 1972; H. Reynolds, Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989; T. Rowse, White Flour, White Power: From Rations to Citizenship in Central Australia, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

37 See R. Frances et al., ‘Broken Silences? Labour History and Aboriginal Workers’, in T. Irving, ed., Challenges to Labour History, Sydney: UNSW Press, 1994, pp. 189–211; H. Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales 1770–1972, Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with Black Books, 1996; M.A. Jebb, Blood, Sweat and Welfare: A History of White Bosses and Aboriginal Pastoral Workers, Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2002; A. McGrath, Born in the Cattle, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987; A. McGrath and K. Saunders with J. Huggins, eds, Aboriginal Workers, Sydney, 1995; D. May, Aboriginal Labour and the Cattle Industry, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 38 The intention behind Aboriginal assimilation, a term borrowed from, but not coterminous with its use in immigration policy after 1945, was to combat discrimination by training Aboriginal people to adapt to ‘the Australian way of life’. See Tim Rowse’s careful exposition of Paul Hasluck (Minister for Territories, 1951–63) as the promoter of this policy in T. Rowse, ‘The Modesty of the State: Hasluck and the Anthropological Critics of Assimilation’, in T. Stannage et al., eds, Paul Hasluck in Australian History: Civic Personality and Public Life, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1998, pp. 119–32. 39 A. Curthoys, Freedom Ride: a freedom rider remembers, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2002. 40 Kevin Gilbert, cited in C. Tatz, ed., Black Viewpoints: The Aboriginal Experience, Sydney: Australia & New Zealand Book Co., 1975, p. 9. 41 See Sawer, The Ethical State. 42 Lake, Getting Equal, chapter 11. 43 H. Eisenstein, Inside Agitators: Australian femocrats and the State, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996; M. Sawer, Sisters in Suits: women and public policy in Australia, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990. 44 For a general overview, see R. Gerster and J. Bassett, Seizures of Youth: ‘The Sixties’ and Australia, Melbourne: Hyland House, 1991. 45 H. McQueen, A New Britannia: an argument concerning the social origins of Australian radicalism and nationalism, Melbourne: Penguin, 1970. 46 D. Altman, ‘Students in the Electric Age’, in Richard Gordon, ed., The Australian New Left, Melbourne: Heinemann, 1970, pp. 126–47; Curthoys, Freedom Ride; T. Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character, Melbourne: Arena Publications, 1978; R.W. Connell and T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History,

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Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1979; V. Burgmann, In Our Time: socialism and the rise of Labor, 1885–1905, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985; B. Scates, New Australia: citizenship, radicalism and the First Republic, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997; D. Lovell’s Marxism and Australian Socialism, Before the Bolshevik Revolution, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 1997. 47 For instance, see the coverage of anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in the metropolitan press on 5 July 1968 and 9 May 1970. And see Gerster and Bassett, Seizures of Youth, pp. 43–46. 48 Australian Financial Review, 30 May 1972. 49 D. Horne, The Lucky Country: Australia in the sixties, Melbourne: Penguin, 1964, pp. 200–201, 239. 50 Brett, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class, pp. 140–47. 51 See Jenny Hocking, Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History, The Biography, Volume 1, Melbourne: Miegunyah Press/Melbourne University Publishing, 2008. 52 See James Walter, The Leader: A political biography of Gough Whitlam, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1980. 53 See D. Horne, Time of Hope: Australia 1966–72, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1980. 54 Geoffrey Bolton’s phrase, see The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 5, 1942–1988, The Middle Way, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 215. 55 See Gough Whitlam, The Whitlam Government 1972–1975, Melbourne: Penguin, 1985; Jenny Hocking and Colleen Lewis, eds, It’s Time Again: Whitlam and Modern Labor, Melbourne: Circa, 2003. 56 See Gough Whitlam, ‘The Relevance of the Whitlam Government Today’, in Hocking and Lewis, It’s Time Again, pp. 10–32. 57 E.G. Whitlam, Australian Labor Party Policy Speech, Blacktown Civic Centre, Sydney, 13 November 1972. 58 E.G. Whitlam, Australian Labor Party Policy Speech, Sydney Town Hall, 1969. 59 Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character; T. Rowse, Nugget Coombs: A reforming life, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2002; S. Macintyre, A Colonial Liberalism: the lost world of three Victorian visionaries, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991; W. Osmond, Frederic Eggleston: An intellectual in Australian Politics, Sydney: Allen & Unwin,1985; P.

Cochrane, Colonial Ambition: foundations of Australian democracy, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006; J. Brett, Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, Sydney: Macmillan, 1992; J. Brett, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: from Alfred Deakin to John Howard, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 60 A. Coombs, Sex and Anarchy: The Life and Death of the Sydney Push, Melbourne: Viking Penguin, 1996. 61 M. Weblin, ‘Introduction’, in M. Weblin, ed., A Perilous & Fighting Life: From Communist to Conservative – The Political Writings of Professor John Anderson, North Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2003, p. 17. Weblin’s ‘Introduction’ also informs the interpretation above. 62 See P. Beilharz, ‘John Anderson and the Syndicalist Moment’, Political Theory Newsletter, No. 5, 1993, pp. 5–13.

Part V: The American songbook 9 L i f e i s n ot m e a n t to b e easy 1 Malcolm Fraser, ‘Towards 2000: Challenge to Australia’, The Fifth Alfred Deakin Lecture, 20 July 1971, at , accessed 3 April 2009. 2 Cited in J. Walter, Tunnel Vision – The Failure of Political Imagination, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996, p. 56. 3 L. Chipman, Liberty, Justice and the Market, Sydney: Centre for Independent Studies, 1981, pp. 1, 13–14. 4 See B. Hughes, Exit Full Employment, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1980; G. Whitwell, The Treasury Line, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986. 5 J. Warhurst, ‘Transitional hero: Gough Whitlam and the Australian Labor Party’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 31, no. 2, 1996, pp. 243–52. 6 D. Horne, Money Made Us, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976, p. 184. 7 Cf. F. Stillwell, Political Economy: The Contest of Economic Ideas, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 290. 8 The Way Ahead quoted in M. Simms, A Liberal Nation – The Liberal Party & Australian Politics, Sydney, Hale & Iremonger, 1982, p. 136; Horne, Money Made Us, p. 184; A. Theophanous,

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Australian Democracy in Crisis, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980; Catley, in Duncan, Critical Essays, p. 223. 9 See J. Courvisanos and A. Millmow, ‘How Milton Friedman came to Australia: A study of class based political business cycles’, Journal of Australian Political Economy, no. 57, 2006, at , accessed 18 August 2009. 10 M. Smith and P. Marden, ‘Conservative Think Tanks and Public Politics’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 43, no. 4, 2008, pp. 699– 717. 11 See CIS website – history of CIS, at , accessed 3 April 2009. 12 See again Courvisanos and Millmow, ‘How Milton Friedman came to Australia’. 13 See G. Turner, Making it National: Nationalism and Australian popular culture, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994. 14 The pervasiveness of this US influence is much discussed: see, for instance, C. Greenfield and P. Williams, ‘“Howardism” and the media rhetoric of “battlers” versus “elites”’, Southern Review, vol. 34, no. 1, 2001, pp. 32–44. 15 Catley, in Duncan, Critical Essays, p. 244. 16 Creighton in K. Coghill, ed., The New Right’s Australian Fantasy, Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1987, pp. 85–87. 17 D. McEachern, Business Mates, Sydney: Prentice Hall, 1991, p. 51. 18 R. Hawke, The Resolution of Conflict, Sydney: The Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1979, pp. 50–51. 19 Hawke, The Resolution of Conflict, pp. 66–67. 20 L. Oakes, ed., Labor’s 1979 Conference Adelaide, Canberra: Objective Publications, 1979, p. 179. 21 Oakes, Labor’s 1979 Conference, p. 226. 22 J. Stewart, The Lie of the Level Playing Field, Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 1994, p. 143. 23 F. Stilwell, The Accord and Beyond, Sydney: Pluto Press, 1986, p. 156. 24 Thompson, in B. Head and A. Patience, eds, From Fraser to Hawke, Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1989, p. 223. 25 Horne, Money Made Us, p. 244. 26 W.P. Hogan, Enterprise – Free, Dependent or Captor? Sydney: Centre for Independent Studies, 1985, pp. 13, 20, 22. 27 W. Kasper, Capital Xenophobia – Australia’s

Controls of Foreign Investment, Sydney: Centre for Independent Studies, 1984, pp. ix, 6, 17, 27, 30. 28 Whitwell, The Treasury Line. 29 D. Love, Unfinished Business: Paul Keating’s interrupted revolution, Melbourne: Scribe, 2008. 30 Kenichi Ohmae had epitomised this approach in a series of influential articles from the mid1980s, later consolidated in K. Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and strategy in the global marketplace, London: HarperCollins, 1994. 31 Kasper, Capital Xenophobia. 32 R. Garnaut, ed., ASEAN in a Changing Pacific and World Economy, Canberra: ANU Press, 1980, pp. 404–410. 33 Garnaut, ASEAN in a Changing Pacific and World Economy, p. 410. 34 R. Garnaut, Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy, Canberra: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 1992, p. 7. 35 Garnaut, Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy, p. 10. 36 Cf. M. Kalantziz, ‘Immigration, multiculturalism and racism’, in S. Ryan & T. Bramston, The Hawke Government: A Critical Retrospective, Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2003, p. 313. 37 M. Costa and M. Duffy, Labor, Prosperity and the Nineties – Beyond the Bonsai Economy, Sydney: The Federation Press, 1991, pp. 60–63, 190, 180. 38 F.G. Hilmer, When the Luck Runs Out – The Future for Australians at Work, Sydney: Harper & Row (Australasia), 1985, p. 13. 39 F.G. Hilmer et al., National Competition Policy, Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1993. 40 G. Singleton et al., The Second Keating Government, Canberra: University of Canberra – Centre for Research in Public Sector Management, 1997. 41 See M. Keating, Who Rules? How government retains control in a privatised economy, Sydney: Federation Press, 2004, especially chapter 7. 42 J. Hyde, Dry: In Defence of Economic Freedom – The saga of how the Dries changed the Australian economy for the better, Melbourne: Institute of Public Affairs, 2002, chapter 11 et passim. See also C.J. Puplick, Is the Party Over? The Future of the Liberals, Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1994. 43 G. Dutton, ed., Republican Australia? Melbourne: Sun Books, 1977; S. Encel et al., eds, Change the Rules! Towards a democratic constitution, Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1977; C. Howard, The Constitution, Power and Politics, Sydney: Fontana/Collins, 1980. 44 J. McMillan, G. Evans and H. Storey, Australia’s

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Constitution – Time for Change? Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1983, pp. 181, 182. 45 G. Winterton, Monarchy to Republic – Australian Republican Government, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 14. 46 P. Keating, Advancing Australia – The Speeches of Paul Keating, Prime Minister, Sydney: Big Picture Publications, 1995, p. 156. 47 P. Keating, Advancing Australia, p. 231. 48 Duncan, ed., Critical Essays, p. 120. 49 V. Burgmann, Power and Protest – Movements for Change in Australian Society, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993, p. 104. 50 Burgmann, Power and Protest, p. 118. 51 Burgmann, Power and Protest, p. 143. 52 Burgmann, Power and Protest, p. 169. 53 Burgmann, Power and Protest, pp. 196–97; D. Hutton, ed., Green Politics in Australia, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1987, p. 55. 54 Hutton, Green Politics, p. 45. 55 Hutton, Green Politics, p. 16. 56 Hutton, Green Politics, p. 30. 57 S. Castles, B. Cope, M. Kalantzis and M. Morrissey, Mistaken Identity – Multiculturalism and the Demise of Nationalism in Australia, Sydney: Pluto Press, 1990, p. 70. 58 G. Maddox, The Hawke Government and Labor Tradition, Melbourne: Penguin Books Australia, 1989, p. 7 et passim. 59 D. Jaensch, The Hawke–Keating Hijack, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989. 60 See H. Emy, ‘A Political Overview: From Social Democracy to the Social Market Economy’, in H. Emy, O. Hughes and R. Mathews, eds, Whitlam Re-visited, Melbourne: Pluto Press, 1993; J. Warhurst, ‘Transitional Hero: Gough Whitlam and the Australian Labor Party’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 31, no. 2, 1996, pp. 243–52; 61 For instance, S. Ryan and T. Bramston, eds, The Hawke Government: A critical retrospective, Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2003. 62 H. Stretton, Political Essays, Melbourne, Georgian House, 1987, p. 43. 63 Stretton, Political Essays, p. 29. 64 Stretton, Political Essays, pp. 37, 47. 65 Stretton, Political Essays, pp. 48–49. 66 For example, F. Stilwell, Australian Urban and Regional Development, Sydney: Australia and New Zealand Book Co., 1974. 67 For an overview of these debates, see G. Butler, E. Jones and F. Stilwell, comps, Political Economy Now! The struggle for alternative economics at the

University of Sydney, Sydney: University of Sydney, Darlington Press, 2009. 68 M. Pusey, Economic Rationalism in Canberra – A Nation-building State Changes its Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 69 See Ryan and Bramston, The Hawke Government. 70 Bob Hawke, The Hawke Memoirs, Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1994. 71 Hawke, Hawke Memoirs, p. 101. 72 B. Jones, A Thinking Reed, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006, p. 348. 73 G. Kitney, ‘The Hawke Government: An assessment from the outside’, in Ryan and Bramston, The Hawke Government, pp. 426–40. 74 J. Disney, ‘Social Impacts of the Hawke Years’, in Ryan and Bramston, The Hawke Government, pp. 225–40.

1 0 A v e to o n p ol i t i c s 1 Morning Post, 17 May 1909, Item 7/344, Alfred Deakin Papers, National Library of Australia, , accessed 11 November 2008. 2 Paul Kelly, The Hawke Ascendancy, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1984, p. 31. 3 Don Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM, Sydney: Knopf, 2002, p. 24. 4 Fightback! It’s Your Australia, Liberal and National Parties, Canberra, 1991, p. 23 and p. 36. 5 Comments quoted here come from: ‘A win for the true believers’, Age, 14 March 1993; and Keating, Advance Australia, pp. 104, 127, 131. 6 Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, pp. 39–40. 7 Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, p. 675. 8 Ian McAllister, ‘Prime Ministers, Opposition Leaders and Government Popularity in Australia’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 38, no. 2, 2003, p. 267. 9 Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, p. 28. 10 Michael Gordon, A Question of Leadership: Paul Keating, Political Fighter, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1993, p. 198. 11 James McConville, ‘The Paul Keating we have to have (again)’, Age, 8 June 2005. 12 An acutely prescient early description was offered by Alan Davies: see A.F. Davies, ‘Politics in a Knowledgeable Society’, in his Essays in Political Sociology, Melbourne: Cheshire, 1972. 13 Davies, ‘Politics in a Knowledgeable Society’, p. 20.

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14 See M. Pusey, The Experience of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Reform, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 15 Compare Davies ‘Politics in a Knowledgeable Society’, p. 3. 16 This is argued in more detail in Walter, Tunnel Vision, pp. 59–69. 17 Peter Cochrane, Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006, pp. 226, 250. 18 See Sawer, The Ethical State. 19 M. Sawer, ‘Reclaiming Social Liberalism: The Women’s Movement and the State’, in R. Howe, ed., Women and the State, Australian Perspectives, special issue of the Journal of Australian Studies, Bundoora: La Trobe University Press/Centre of Australian Studies, Deakin University/Ideas for Australia Program, 1993, p. 17. 20 Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, pp. 39–41. 21 F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, London: Penguin, 1992. 22 Fukuyama, The End of History, p. 16. 23 Fukuyama, The End of History, p. 108. 24 Fukuyama, The End of History, p. 23 and pp. 24–25. 25 Pearson, National Life and Character, p. 355. 26 P. Kelly, The End of Certainty: The Story of the 1980s, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992. 27 Kelly, The End of Certainty, Introduction. 28 Kelly, The End of Certainty, pp. 666, 680. 29 George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2004. 30 Kelly, The End of Certainty, p. 686. 31 B. Crick, In Defence of Politics, London: Penguin, [1962] 1992, p. 25. The argument in this paragraph draws from Crick’s still important book. 32 G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, London: John Lane/ The Bodley Head, (1908) 1927, p. 44. 33 See George Megalogenis, The Longest Decade, Melbourne: Scribe, 2006 for a persuasive account of this continuity. 34 These developments are covered in detail in J. Walter and P. Strangio, No, Prime Minister: Reclaiming politics from leaders, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007. 35 Walter and Strangio, No, Prime Minister; A. Tiernan, ‘Advising Howard: Interpreting Changes in Advisory and Support Structures for the Prime Minister of Australia’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 41, no. 3, 2006, pp. 309–32; P. Kelly,

Rethinking Australian Governance – the Howard Legacy, Occasional Paper Series 4/2005, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Canberra, 2005; P. Weller, Cabinet Government in Australia, 1901 – 2006, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2007. 36 J. Howard, ‘The Liberal Tradition; the beliefs and values which guide the federal government’, The 1996 Sir Robert Menzies Memorial Lecture, 23 May 2003, , accessed 20 May 2003. 37 J. Brett, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2003, chapter 9. 38 See J. Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable with the Liberal Party, Quarterly Essay No. 19, Melbourne: Black Inc; D. Marr and M. Wilkinson, Dark Victory, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2004; S. Macintyre and A. Clark, The History Wars, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003. 39 See, for instance, T. Ball, ‘Imagining Marketopia’, Dissent, Summer 2001 at , accessed 21 July 2009; T. Frank, One Market Under God: extreme capitalism, market populism and the end of economic democracy, New York: Doubleday, 2000; R. Kuttner, Everything for sale: the virtues and limits of markets, New York: Knopf, 1997. 40 See G. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behaviour, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976; J. Bell, Populism and Elitism: politics in the age of equality, Washington: Regnery Gateway/ National Book Network, 1992. 41 Howard, ‘The Liberal Tradition’, p. 2. 42 Howard, ‘The Liberal Tradition’, pp. 9–10. 43 J. Howard, ‘A century of nationhood’, Melbourne Press Club Address, 22 November 2000, , accessed 20 May 2003, p. 1. 44 Howard, ‘A century of nationhood’, p. 2. 45 Howard, ‘A century of nationhood’, passim. 46 Howard, ‘A century of nationhood’, p. 2. The quotation near the beginning of this passage is from Menzies’ ‘The Forgotten People’ (1942), and signals that current policy is the present enactment of Menzies’ ideal. 47 Howard, ‘The Liberal Tradition’, p. 12. 48 Howard, ‘A century of nationhood’, p. 5. 49 J. Howard, ‘Address to the World Economic Forum Dinner’, Grand Hyatt Hotel, Melbourne, 16 March 1998, , accessed 20 May 2003 p. 3.

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50 Howard, ‘A century of nationhood’, p. 5. 51 Howard, ‘A century of nationhood’, p. 7. 52 J. Howard, ‘Address at the Liberal National Convention’, Melbourne, 16 April 2000, , accessed 20 May 2003, p. 7. 53 Frank, One Market Under God. 54 See Becker, Economic Approach to Human Behaviour; Bell, Populism and elitism. 55. This paraphrases Frank, One Market Under God, pp. 40–50. 56 Lindy Edwards, How to Argue with an Economist, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 76–79. 57 See Edwards, How to Argue with an Economist, pp. 19–28; Walter, Tunnel Vision, pp. xiv, 90–91, 101–102. 58 A.F. Davies, Private Politics, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1966, p. 244; see also P. Loveday, ‘Australian political thought’, in R. Lucy, ed., The Pieces of Politics, 2nd edn, Melbourne: Macmillan, 1979, p. 14. 59 A. Harding, R. Lloyd and N. Warren, Income Distribution and Redistribution: The Impact of Selected Benefits and Taxes in Australia 2001–2, National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, University of Canberra, paper presented at the 28th General Conference of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, Ireland, 22–28 August 2004. 60 J. McNamara, R. Lloyd, M. Toohey and A. Harding, Prosperity for All? How low income families have fared in boom times, National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, University of Canberra, paper presented at the 9th Institute for Family Studies Conference, Melbourne, 9–11 February 2005. 61 McNamara et al., Prosperity for All? p. 30. 62 Megalogenis, The Longest Decade. 63 Marr and Wilkinson, Dark Victory. 64 R. Garran, True Believer: John Howard, George Bush & the American alliance, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2004. 65 Mark McKenna, ‘Howard’s Warriors’, in R. Gaita, ed., Why the War Was Wrong, Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2003, pp. 167–200. 66 Kelly, Rethinking Australian Governance. 67 Kelly, The End of Certainty. 68 J. Button, Beyond Belief: What Future for Labor? Quarterly Essay 6, Melbourne: Black Inc, 2002. 69 M. Fraser, ‘Labor, Liberal – where do we go?’ Speech at the William Quick Dinner, Queen’s College, University of Melbourne, 7 August

1991 at , accessed 9 April 2009. 70 G. Barnes, What’s Wrong with the Liberal Party? Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2003; and Selling the Australian Government: Politics and Propaganda from Whitlam to Howard, Sydney, UNSW Press, 2005; Barnes quote from ABC TV, Lateline, 21 October 2003 at , accessed 9 April 2009. 71. M. Latham, Civilising Global Capital: new thinking for Australian Labor, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998; L. Tanner, Open Australia, Sydney: Pluto Press, 1999; D. Kerr, Elect the Ambassador! Building democracy in a globalised world, Sydney: Pluto Press, 2001; C. Emerson, Vital Signs, Vibrant Society: securing Australia’s economic and social wellbeing, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006; Button, Beyond Belief; W. Swan, Postcode: the splintering of a nation, Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2005. 72 M. Goot, ‘Party convergence reconsidered’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 9 - vol 39, no. 1, 2004, pp. 49–73. 73 E. Papadikis, ‘Constituents of confidence and mistrust in Australian institutions’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 34, no. 1, 1999, pp. 75–94; I. Marsh and D. Yencken, Into the Future: The Neglect of the Long Term in Australian Politics, Melbourne: Australian Collaboration/Black Inc., 2004. See also Scott Brenton, ‘Public Confidence in Australian Democracy’, Democratic Audit of Australia, May 2005, at , accessed June 2007. 74 An excellent overview is provided by S. Bennett, ‘The rise of the Australian Greens’, Research Paper no. 8, 2008–09, Parliamentary Library, Parliament of Australia, at , accessed 14 April 2009. 75 I. Marsh, ‘Opinion formation: Problems and prospects’, in P. Saunders and J. Walter, eds, Ideas and Influence: Social Science and Public Policy in Australia, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005, p. 222. 76 See GetUp! Action for Australia, at , accessed 14 April 2009. 77 V. Burgmann, Power, Profit and Protest: Australian Social Movements and Globalisation, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003; C. Bulbeck, ‘Gender policies: Hers to his’, in Saunders and Walter, Ideas and Influence, pp. 141–58; Sawer, The Ethical State. 78 J. Hocking, ‘Liberty, security and the State’, in

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Saunders and Walter, Ideas and Influence, pp. 178–97. 79 See, for instance, R. Manne, Left, right, left: political essays 1977–2005, Melbourne: Black Inc 2005; R. Manne, ed., The Barren Years: John Howard and Australian Political Culture, Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2001; R. Manne, ed., Dear Mr Rudd: ideas for a better Australia, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2008. 80 C. Hamilton and S. Maddison, eds, Silencing Dissent: how the Australian government is controlling public opinion and stifling debate, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2007. 81 C. Hamilton, What’s Left: the death of social democracy, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006. 82 C. Hamilton, The Freedom Paradox: towards a postsecular ethics, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 2008. 83 D. McKnight, Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture Wars, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005, chapter 9. 84 For a selection of Pearson’s essays and commentary, which gives a good overview of his position, see N. Pearson, Up from the Mission, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2009. 85 Pearson, Up from the Mission, pp. 301–12. 86 See M. Langton, ‘Trapped in the Aboriginal reality show’, Griffith Review, no. 19, 2008, pp. 143–62; P. Sutton, The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the end of the liberal consensus, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009; and compare P. Karvelas, ‘Aboriginal leaders join attack on Pearson’, Australian, 12 July 2007. 87 The phrase is Nicholas Rothwell’s; see his ‘Indigenous insiders chart an end to victimhood’, in E. Beecher, ed., The Best Australian Political Writing 2009, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009, pp. 117–35.

Part VI: Reconsiderations: the way we live now, reprise 1 1 Co n c l u s i o n : p ol i t i c a l r e a s o n i n g a n d p ol i t i c a l a c t i o n 1 W.K. Hancock, Politics in Pitcairn: and other essays, London: Macmillan, 1947, p. 25. 2 J.M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Prices, and Interest, London: Macmillan, 1936, pp. 383–84. 3 ‘Rebuilding the banks: A special report on international banking’, Economist, 16 May 2009.

4 A. Gamble, The Spectre at the Feast: Capitalist Crisis and the Politics of Recession, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 153–56. 5 See, again, Sawer, The Ethical State. 6 L. Battersby, ‘Crisis raising security risk’, Age, 19 May 2009. 7 I. Wallerstein, ‘The Modern World System’, in his The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York: Academic Press, 1976, pp. 229–33. 8 S. Skowronek, ‘Presidential leadership in political time’, in Michael Nelson, ed., The Presidency and the Political System, Washington: Congressional Quarterly, 1984, pp. 87–132. 9 Brett, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class. 10 M. Dixson, The Imaginary Australian: Anglo-Celts and Identity – 1788 to the present, Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999. 11 N.G. Butlin, Forming a Colonial Economy, Australia 1810–1850, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994; P. Cochrane, Industrialization and Dependence: Australia’s road to economic development, 1870–1939, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1980. 12 See, for instance, J.W. Nevile, ‘Economic Rationalism: Social Philosophy Masquerading as Economic Science’, in B. Cass and P. Smyth, eds., Contesting the Australian Way, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 169–79; F. Stilwell, Changing Track: a New Political Economic Direction for Australia, Sydney: Pluto Press, 2000; J. Quiggin, Great Expectations: Microeconomic Reform and Australia, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996; J. Langmore, To Firmer Ground: restoring hope in Australia, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007; H. Stretton, Economics: a new introduction, rev. edn., London: Pluto Press, 2000; H. Stretton, Australia Fair, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005. 13 The Monthly, May 2009. 14 Sylvia Lawson’s phrase, when writing about the late nineteenth century: see her The Archibald Paradox, Melbourne: Allen Lane, 1983. 15 Lawson, The Archibald Paradox, p. ix. 16 A.F. Davies, Essays in Political Sociology, Melbourne: Cheshire, 1972, see pp. 32–33. 17 P. Loveday, ‘Australian Political Thought’, in R. Lucy, ed., The Pieces of Politics, 2nd edn, Melbourne: Macmillan, 1979, pp. 2–28. 18 Davies again, Essays in Political Sociology, p. 28. 19 Quoted in Walter, ‘Bureaucracy and Democracy in the American Century’, p. 27.

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20 Brett, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class, chapter 9. 21 All are prolific commentators in the broadsheet press in New York and London: extensive listings of their arguments can be found on websites, such as , , , and . 22 Eric Hobsbawm, Charles Morris, John Gray, Dean Baker and David Hale, ‘Symposium’, The Monthly, May 2009, pp. 26–37. 23 P. Krugman, ‘The Market Mystique’, New York Times, 27 March 2009. 24 A. Sen, ‘Capitalism Beyond the Crisis’, New York Review of Books, vol. 56, no. 5, 26 March 2009, at , accessed 4 May 2009. 25 For extended discussion of the ‘risk shift’ in Australia, see G. Marston, J. Moss and J. Quiggin, eds, Responsibility and the Australian Welfare State, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009. 26 Stretton, Australia Fair; J. Quiggin, The Risk Society: Social Democracy in an Uncertain World, Centre for Policy Development, Occasional Paper No. 2, July 2007 at ; S. Bell, ed., Economic Governance & Institutional Dynamics, Melbourne: Oxford

University Press, 2002; N. Pearson, Our Right to Take Responsibility, Cairns: Noel Pearson and Associates, 2000; J. Uhr, Terms of Trust: Arguments over Ethics in Australian Government, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005; McKnight, Beyond Left and Right; M. Davis, The Land of Plenty: Australia in the 2000s, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008. 27 Compare Malcolm Turnbull’s comments on individual enterprise (chapter 1) with those of John Howard (chapter 10); and for some measure of the tenor of attempts to ridicule Rudd, see for instance, H.G.P. Colebatch, ‘A Fake Prime Minister’, Quadrant Online, at , accessed 29 April 2009, or S. Kates, ‘Reflections of a Neo-Liberal’, Quadrant Online at , accessed 6 May 2009. 28 As Lindy Edwards has warned, paper (untitled) at ‘Crunch Time Conference’, Trades Hall, Goulburn Street, Sydney, 22 April 2009, but see an edited version, L. Edwards, ‘Reinventing social democracy is vital for future progress’, Age, 27 April 2009. 29 Cited in Edwards’s paper, ‘Crunch Time Conference’.

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Index

Aboriginal people 1967 referendum, 228 Aboriginal identity, 280 campaigns against discrimination, 173, 227–30 colonial dispossession, 38–39 critique of ‘welfare dependency’, 329–30 land rights, 229–30 Northern territory intervention, 329–30 the Accord, 259–60, 288 Ahern, Elizabeth, 129 All For Australia League (AFAL), 164 Altman, Dennis, 276 Amalgamated Shearers’ Union, 70 ameliorative liberalism, 66–67, 88, 199, 256–57 see also ‘new liberalism’ American Revolution, 54–55 anarchism, 72 Anderson, Francis, 88, 138, 156, 162, 167, 170 Anderson, John, 244–45 Andrade, David, 75 Anglicanism, 156, 162, 167 Anstey, Frank, 150, 152 anti-communism, 214–15 Anti-Corn Law League, 58 anti-elitism, 306–7, 310–12 anti-militarism, 140, 153 anti-nuclear movement, 276–77 ‘anti-political’ thought, 118–19 anti-socialism Deakin’s criticism, 100–101 Reid’s advocacy, 95 role of women’s organisations, 129–31 appeasement, 171 arbitration system, 94–95, 159, 256, 258 Archibald, J.F., 71 Ashworth, T.R., 151 assisted immigration, 46, 59 Atkinson, Meredith, 138, 158–59 Australia First Movement, 172

Australian Democrats, 323–24 Australian Greens, 278–79, 324–25 Australian identity, 60, 212–13, 271 Australian Independence Movement (AIM), 271 Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA), 161 Australian Institute of Political Science (AIPS), 161 Australian Labor Party (ALP) acceptance of neo-liberal orthodoxy, 7–8, 16 ‘Australian settlement’ and, 338 Childe’s critique of Labor governments, 146 commitment to parliamentary action, 78–79, 83, 103 early electoral success, 78, 110 early Labor governments, 94–96, 110 forerunners, 77 ideas in interwar years, 149–54 impact of First World War, 139–42 nationalisation and socialisation, 104–5, 149, 204 platform and objective, 93, 104, 151, 259 questioning of federalism, 151, 153 relevance of socialism, 80–81, 89, 93–94, 103–8 role of histories in ALP thinking, 150, 152–54 splits in, 142, 215–16 in ‘three-elevens’ period, 89, 93, 95–96, 103 see also individual Labor governments Australian nationalism, 72, 77, 79–81, 135, 137, 212–13, 271, 305–6, 345 Australian political culture derivative character, 347–50 foundational ideas, 25–26 as pragmatic and utilitarian, 23–24 Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), 8

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Index ‘Australian settlement’ ‘concerned citizens’ dissent, 117–18 Deakin and, 96–97, 109–10, 337 liberal critics, 165–67 origin and features, 95, 109–16, 256, 337–38 role of personalities, 96, 110 socialist and syndicalist dissent, 119–24 women’s scepticism about, 125–32 Australian Socialist League, 74 Australian Socialist Party (ASP), 145 ‘Australian way of life’, 212–13 Australian Women’s National League (AWNL), 129–31 Australian Workers’ Union (AWU), 70 Aveling, Edward, 72 Ball, W. Macmahon, 170, 184 banking system attempt to nationalise, 204 deregulation, 263 prudential regulation, 8 Barnes, Greg, 320–21 Barrachi, Guido, 145 Barton, Edmund, 81, 86, 92 Bell, Daniel, 299, 342 Bellamy, Edward, 72, 146 Benham, F.C., 163 Bentham, Jeremy, 58 Berry, Graham, 53, 61 Beveridge Report, 201 Bigge, J.T., 42 Blackburn, Maurice, 149 Blainey, Geoffrey, 281 Bland, F.A., 159–60, 168–69 Board, Peter, 21 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, x, 29 The Boobooks dinner club, 157 Boston, John, 55–56 Brady, E.J., 71, 74, 76 Brett, Judith, 164, 221, 244, 305–06 Brigden, J.B., 139, 162–63, 169 Bright, John, 58, 62 Brookes, H.E., 186 Brown, Bob, 324 Bryce, James, 23 Bulletin (magazine), 71, 81, 82, 155 ‘bunyip aristocracy’ proposal, 48–50 bureaucrats, see Commonwealth bureaucracy Burgmann, Ernest, 165, 167, 184 Burgmann, Verity 234, 274, 275 ‘bush legend’, 72, 77, 155, 212, 305–6, 345 Business Council of Australia (BCA), 266–67

business progressives, 186–89, 194–99, 201–2 business-government co-operation, 192–93, 194 Campbell, Eric, 171 Campbell, Persia, 160 Canaway, A.P., 145 Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), 255, 261–62 Champion, H.H., 73, 74, 80–81, 121 Chartism, 48, 50–51, 53, 58 Chifley, J.B., 153, 206 Childe, V. Gordon, 146 Chipman, Lauchlan, 250 Chipp, Don, 323 Christian Socialism, 167–68 CIS (Centre for Independent Studies), 255, 261–62 Citizens’ Reform League, 118 citizenship, 45, 126, 131, 138, 153, 173, 218, 230 Clark, Manning, 24 Clarke, Janet Lady, 129–30 Clarke, Marcus, 60 classical liberalism, see individualistic liberalism Cobden, Richard, 58, 62 Cold War, 210–16 Cole, E.W., 71, 112 colonial aristocracy, 48–50 colonial liberals, see liberals, nineteenth century colonial oligarchy, 39–45, 47–50, 56–57, 62, 336–37 see also settler society in early Australia Comintern, 146–47 Commonwealth bureaucracy explosion in size, 181 ‘femocrats’, 230, 274 and post-war reconstruction, 190–93 technocratic expertise, 158–59, 185–86, 191–93, 207 Communist Party of Australia attempt to outlaw, 216 in Cold War years, 210–16 formation, 145 in interwar years, 147–48 Connell, Bob, 24 conscription issue (World War I), 140–42 conservatism connection between social democracy and, 18–19 derogatory connotation, 19, 114, 337–38

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distinctive Australian usage, 19, 338 of landed colonial oligarchy, 40–41, 43, 45, 47–50, 56–57, 62, 337 populist anti-politics strand, 118–19 resurrection in Howard years, 17–18, 344 Rudd as ‘economic conservative’, 18 women’s organisations and, 129–30 conservatives as Anglo-Australian loyalists, 80 fear of liberty, 45 and federation movement, 80, 82, 83 Constitution as liberal document, 83–84 Royal Commission on, 151 convict system, 39–43 Coombs, H.C., 183–86, 190–92, 201, 244 Copland, D.B., 162–63, 164 Corn Laws, 58, 62 corporatisation of public enterprises, 267 corporatism, 260 Costa, Michael, 265–66 Costello, Peter, 8 Council for Civil Liberties, 148–49 countercultural movement, 278–79 Country Party, 154–56 countrymindedness, 154–56 craft unions, 69–70 Crick, Bernard, 302–3 cultural pluralism, 281 Curtin, John, 153, 178, 182 Davies, A.F., 348 Davis, Mark, 351 Deakin, Alfred ‘Australian settlement’ and, 96–97, 109–10, 337 federation movement and, 81 as intellectual force in Protectionist Party, 63, 96–97 ‘new liberalism’ and, 99–102 defence policy, 169–70, 178, 182 democracy debates on, 44–50, 68, 81, 337 see also Chartism; franchise democratisation, in nineteenth century, 337 Deniehy, Daniel, 49–50 Depression (1930s), 147, 151–52, 173 deregulation of markets, banks Hayek and Friedman on, 252 labour market, 288 dinner clubs, 157 Dries (in Liberal Party), 269 Duffy, M.B., 151

Duffy, Michael, 265–66 Dylan, Bob, 245–46 Earsman, W.P., 145 economic crises as cause of policy-regime shifts, 336–44 resort to Anglosphere thinkers, 347–50 economic development British Imperialism and, 148–49 late nineteenth century, 53–54 post war, role of the family, 222–23 economic fundamentalism, see neo-liberal market economics economic planning, 165, 168 Economic Planning and Advisory Council (EPAC), 260 economic rationalism among Canberra policy makers, 284–85 Australian usage of term, 261 Howard and, 311 impact on feminists’ economic claims, 297 Whitlam and, 259, 269 see also neo-liberal market economics economic stimulus measures Rudd Government, 13–14, 335, 340 Turnbull’s criticism, 15 economics, centrality in politics, 335–36 economists 1929 Tariff Report, 162 and neo-liberal market orthodoxy, 252, 261–65 as originators of post-war reconstructionism (1940s), 183–84 Premiers’ Plan debate, 152, 163–64 response to global financial crisis, 13–14 rise of university-trained, 162–63 Eggleston, Frederic, 157, 161, 165–66, 244 elite theorists, 26 emancipists versus exclusives, 42–44 Empire, Australia’s place in, 135–37, 140–41, 148–49 Encel, Sol, 29 ‘end of history’, 297–99 ‘end of ideology’, 299 Engels, Friedrich, 72 environmentalism and environment movement, 277–80, 324–25 Equal Employment Opportunity, 274 Ergas, Henry, 9, 30 Eureka rebellion, 51–52 Evatt, Elizabeth, 232 Evatt, H.V., 214–15, 218

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Index exclusives versus emancipists, 42–44 experts, see economists; technocratic expertise Fabian ideas, 73 family and ‘familist’ values diversity of family forms, 225 divorce legislation, 223–24 idealisation of the family, 220–23 interest of professionals in, 222, 224–25 role in post-war economic development, 222–23 fascist sympathisers, 143, 164, 171–73 federal governments (1901–10), listed, 94 Federal Parliament ‘fiscal issue’, 89–95, 337–38 formation of two-party system, 95–96, 109 liberal–egalitarian consensus, 109–16 ‘three elevens’ period (1901–1909), 87–95, 103 federal system acceptance and questioning, 84, 151 and microeconomic reform, 267–68 Federation (1901) debates on, 79–81 as middle-class road to nationhood, 81, 83–84 reasons for, 79 feminists ‘first wave’, 125–32 lack of impact on reformist economic agenda, 273 liberal versus radical (1980s), 273–75 resort to neo-liberal language, 297 socialist (early 1970s), 230–32 Ferguson, W., 173 financial crisis, see global financial crisis Financial System Inquiry, 8 First World War conscription debates, 140–42 economic aspects, 134–36, 139–40 impact on liberals, 136–39, 157–58, 173 Jingoistic nationalism, 135, 137 post-war intellectual pessimism, 161 postwar reconstruction, 138–39 ‘fiscal question’ Australian Labor Party and, 93–94 in colonial politics, 63–64, 77–78 in first Commonwealth decade, 89–95, 337–38 fiscal stimulus policy, 13–15, 335, 340 Fisher, Andrew, 137 Fitzpatrick, Brian, 148–49

‘Forgotten People’ compact, 220–25 foundational ideas, 25–26, 36–50 Fox, Len, 147 franchise Aboriginal Australians, 173, 227–28 female suffrage, 74, 83, 125–26 manhood, 47, 50, 54 universal versus property qualification, 46–50, 68 Fraser, Joseph, 73, 75 Fraser, Malcolm, 241, 251, 285, 320 Fraser Government, 256–57 free market fundamentalism, see neo-liberal market economics; neo-liberalism free trade liberalism Australian advocates, 90–91 British advocates, 57–58, 91–92 conservative aspects, 114–15 defeat, 109, 337 New South Wales as bastion, 63–64 Free Trade Party divisions within, 89 Fusion with Protectionist Party, 95–96, 109 incorporation of populist citizen’s leagues, 119 French Revolution, 47, 54–55 Friedman, Milton, 250, 252, 254, 255, 262 Fukuyama, Francis, 297–98, 342 Full Employment in Australia (White Paper), 192–94 Furphy, Joseph, 75 the ‘Fusion’, 95–96, 109 Garnaut, Ross, 263–65 gay rights movement, 275–76 George, Henry, 73 Gepp, Herbert, 186–89, 202 GetUp!, 326 Giblin, L.F., 162–63, 183 Glass-Steagall Act, 4, 8 global financial crisis as end of neo-liberalism?, 330–31, 334– 35, 340, 349–52 Rudd on causes, 3–8, 14–15 Rudd’s proposals for handling, 4–7, 13–14, 340 Turnbull on causes, 9–12 Glover, Dennis, 29 Goldstein, Vida, 128–29 ‘Good Neighbour’ councils, 217 Gramsci, Antonio, 27–28 Great War, see First World War

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Green, T.H., 62, 99, 337 Greens, see Australian Greens Griffith, Samuel, 61, 76, 81 Gronlund, Laurence, 72–73, 75 Hamilton, Clive, 327–28 Hancock, W.K., 23, 166–67 Hanson, Pauline, 307, 318–20 Hawke, Bob disinterest in big ideas, 260–61, 286–88 proponent of negotiated consensus, 258– 60, 288 Hawke Government corporatist approach, 259–60 embrace of economic rationalism, 261– 63, 268, 282–83, 285–86 and traditional Labor principles, 282–83, 285–87 Hayden, Bill, 251, 259 Hayek, F.A., 29, 183, 252 Heagney, Muriel, 153 Hewson, John, 290–91 Higgins, H.B., 82, 159 Higgs, W.G., 71, 72, 75 Higinbotham, George, 61, 63 Hilmer, Frederick G., 267–68 ‘history wars’, 306, 308 Hogan, Warren, 254, 261 Holder, Frederick, 81 Holland, H.E., 71 Holman, William, 82–83, 104–5, 121 homosexual politics, 275–76 Horne, Donald, 236–37, 252, 254, 261 Howard, John anti-elitism, 306–7, 310–12 on Bob Dylan’s lyrics, 245–46 consolidates neo-liberal regime, 303–18 as creative conservative, 305–6, 349 hubris and political defeat, 315–18 individualistic neo-liberalism, 246, 305, 307, 308–11 influence of US neo-liberals, 307, 310–11 reluctance to confront Hanson, 307, 319 resort to government regulation, 346 self-identification as Churchillian warrior, 315–16 social conservatism, 313–14 strong leadership, 304–5, 316–17 use of popular nationalism, 305–7, 308– 11, 345 Howard Government as high-taxing, big-spending government, 12, 312–13, 318

wealth transfer to middle class, 313–15 H.R. Nicholls Society, 258 Hughes, Eva, 129–31 Hughes, W.M. (Billy) anti-Japanese stance, 139, 170 on Labor’s agenda, 105–9, 121 opposes Niemeyer Report, 152 Hyde, John, 269 Hyndman, H.M., 72 ideas in Australian political culture, 23–26, 347–50 foundational, in Australia, 25–26, 36–50 ‘hubris of the moment’, 342–43 recurrence, resilience and path dependency, x, 20–22, 343, 344–46 role in politics, vii, 20, 22–23, 31 role of opinion leaders, 22, 26–33, 341–42 identity politics, 280 ideology makers, 26–33 immigration policy, 216–20 see also White Australia policy Indigenous people, see Aboriginal people individualistic liberalism Australian statements, 64–66, 88, 90–91, 97–99, 305, 308–11 British antecedents, 57–58 fear of the masses, 114–15 see also neo-liberalism industrial efficiency, 137–38 industrial planning and reconstruction, 158 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 107, 124, 140–41, 145–46 industry policy, 168, 264–66 Institute intellectuals, 161–71, 173 Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), 161, 170 Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), 186, 190, 194, 203 intellectuals bureaucracy-based, 181 as ideology makers, 26–33 Labor, in interwar years, 148–50 nineteenth century urban, 70–75 Rudd’s interface with, 29–30 traditional versus organic, 28 university trained, 156–69 international cooperation and coordination, 6 international relations Institute intellectuals and, 161, 169–71 post-World War I interest in, 139

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Index internet lobbying, 326 Irvine, R.F., 138, 168 Japan, 139, 170–71 Jauncey, L.C., 153–54 Jeffrey, Norman, 145 jingoistic nationalism, 135, 137 Jones, Barry, 265, 322 Jones, Henry, 99–100, 115 Judd, E.E., 146 Kasper, Wolfgang, 254, 261–62 Keating, Paul as ‘big picture’ politician, 289–95 political failure, 294 as republican, 272–73 Keating Government balancing economic reform and Labor principles, 290–92 neo-liberal economic agenda, 266–68 Kelly, Paul, 31, 109, 256, 299–301, 342 Kelman, H.C., 26, 28 Kemp, C.D., 186 Kent-Hughes, Wilfred, 171–72 Keynesian economic management collapse of Keynesian consensus, 249–54 contradictions in, 253 early converts, 153, 165, 168, 185, 187, 189 misrepresentation of, 9 Rudd’s resurrection of, x, 5–6 1940s policy-regime, 206–7, 338–39 Kirkpatrick, George, 140 Kisch, Egon, 148 knowledge elites, 293 Kyabram movement, 118–19 labour market deregulation, 288 labour movement anti-militarism, 141, 153 craft versus industrial unions, 68–70 and Federation movement, 80–83 liberals’ fear of, 65–66, 76 opposition to conscription, 140–41 turn to parliamentary action, 78–79 and World War I, 139–42 Laffer, Arthur, 255, 262 laissez-faire liberalism British advocates, 57, 62 first use of the term, 57 liberals’ rejection of, 137–38, 157, 165, 200–201 post-First World War critiques, 137–38

see also neo-liberal market economics; neo-liberalism Lalor, Peter, 51 land question campaign to ‘unlock the lands’, 52 land sales, 46, 59 land rights, Aboriginal, 229–30 Lane, William, 71, 74, 153 Lang, John Dunmore, 68 Lang, J.T., 164 Latham, Mark, 321–22 Lawson, Henry, 81, 271 Lawson, Louisa, 71, 74 leadership articulation of ideas, 341–42 importance in anti-Labor parties, 110 League of Nations Union (LNU), 161, 170 Lecky, W.E.H., 98 Legion of Frontiersmen, 119 Legislative Councils, 50, 53 Leninist ideas, 145 Lewis, Essington, 186 ‘liberal’, as term of abuse, 344 liberal ascendancy, see ‘Australian settlement’ Liberal Party (1944–) critics of neo-liberalism in, 320–21 influence of business progressives, 203–6 neo-liberal advocates in, 257, 268–69, 290–91 Liberal Party (Deakinite), 102 liberalism and active role for the state, 58–59, 62, 66 British variants, 57–59, 62–63 colonial conservatives’ fear of, 45 and constitutional reform, 52–54 impact of First World War, 136–39 liberal feminism (1970s–1980s), 274–75 New Left’s appreciation of, 243–44 in nineteenth century Australia, 57–58, 64–66 resilience in Australian politics, 344 see also individualistic liberalism; neoliberalism; ‘new liberalism’ liberals, nineteenth century alliances with radicals, 52–54, 61, 66–67, 74, 76 fear of organised working class, 65–66, 76 and Federation movement, 81–82 free-traders versus protectionists, 63–65 versus landed colonial oligarchy, 45, 50 philosophical divisions, 57–58, 61–68

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urban provenance, 61 liberals, twentieth century as critics of laissez-faire, 137–38, 157, 165, 200–201 fear of labour activism, 158–60 hostility to state socialism, 165–67 social liberalism in interwar years, 156– 61, 165, 168–69 liberation movements, 226–35 libertarianism among market economists, 254–55 and ‘Sydney Push’, 244–45 liberty conservatives’ fear of, 45 meaning in a liberal polity, xi Reid on competition and, 97–99 Liberty and Liberalism (Smith), 64–66, 90 Lippmann, Walter, 26–27 Loveday, Peter, 23–24, 348 The Lucky Country (Horne), 236–37 Macarthur, John, 40–42 Macquarie, Lachlan, 42 Maddox, Graham, 282–83 manhood suffrage, 47, 50, 54 Mann, Tom, 119–24 Manne, Robert 28, 282, 327, 347 Mannheim, Karl, 183 Margarot, Maurice, 55–56 maritime strike, 76 market fundamentalism, see neo-liberal market economics marriage, concept of, 224–25 Marxism, 72, 145–48, 211, 233–34, 284 ‘maternal citizens’, 126, 131 Mayo, Elton, 158 McGuinness, P.P., 30, 254, 255 McKnight, David, 328 McMillan, William, 81 McNamara, D.L., 151 Menzies, Robert appeal to ‘Forgotten People’, 213, 221– 23, 244 on appeasement, 171 on Australia’s distinctive liberalism, 25 exploitation of anti-communism, 214–15 idealisation of the family, 221–22 as political leader, 177, 203–4, 236–37 on role of government, 203, 206–7 Metin, Albert, 23 microeconomic reform, 267 middle-class intellectuals advocates of ‘Sound Finance’, 164–65

see also Institute intellectuals; Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) intellectuals middle-class welfare, 314–15 Miles, J.B., 145, 147 Miles, W.J., 172 Mill, John Stuart, 23, 58, 108, 115 monopolies, 104–4, 107 The Monthly (magazine), 30, 347 Morgan, Hugh, 255, 347 Morpeth Review, 162, 167 Morris, William, 72 multiculturalism, 219–20, 227, 281 municipal enterprise, 121 Mussen, Gerald, 186 National Economic Summit (1983), 260 national efficiency, 138–39 National Life and Character (Pearson), 66–67 nationalisation, 104–5, 122–23, 149, 204 nationalism, see Australian nationalism neo-liberal market economics among Canberra bureaucrats, 284–85 as cause of global financial crisis, 3–5, 7 critique by left intellectuals, 281–84 as economic orthodoxy, 3, 7–8, 16, 295–301 Hawke-Keating Governments’ transition to, 262–68, 282–83, 285–86 Howard Government’s embrace, 6, 303–18 ‘inevitability’, 297–300 intellectual advocates, 251–52, 254–55, 261–66 Liberal Party advocates, 257, 268–69, 290–91, 305, 307, 308–11 Liberal Party critics, 320–21 overseas Anglosphere critics, 349 rise to ascendancy, 249–58 Rudd’s critique, 3–8, 14, 15–16 and targeting of trade unions, 256–58 as veto on politics and debate, 264, 284– 85, 301–3 see also neo-liberalism neo-liberalism defined, 15–16 dissident Labor voices, 321–22 dissident Liberal voices, 320–21 Howard’s version, 305, 307, 308–11 as ideology, 299 impact on party allegiance, 322–23 ‘inevitability’, 295–302 as overarching orthodoxy, 7–8, 16,

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Index 296–97, 339 populist reaction against, 318–20 public intellectuals as critics, 326–28 as stranglehold on dialogue, 301–3, 312, 327 succumbs to global financial crisis, 339–40 transition to successor policy regime, 349–52 see also neo-liberal market economics New Guard, 171–72 New Left, 233–35, 243–44 ‘new liberalism’ British antecedents, 62, 99 and Christian Socialism, 167–68 Deakin and, 99–102 interwar years, 138, 156–62, 165, 168–69 post-war reconstructionists, 192 Rose Scott and, 127–28 Victoria as bastion, 63 ‘new politics’ (1975–93), 269–81 ‘new protection’, 89, 205–6, 300, 337 ‘new right’, see neo-liberalism New South Wales as bastion of free-trade liberalism, 63–64 see also settler society in early Australia New South Wales Corps, 39–42 new unionism, 68–70, 76 newspapers, nineteenth-century, 70–71 Niemeyer Report, 152 Northern Territory intervention, 329–30 novels, utopian socialist, 72, 73–74 Nuclear Disarmament Party, 277 One Big Union (OBU), 107, 124, 144–45 One Nation Party, 318–20 opinion makers, 26–33 organic view of society, 138, 158–59, 168–69 organised labour, see labour movement Page, Earle, 155–56 Paine, Thomas, 55, 56 para-military movements, 26–33 Parkes, Henry, 48, 61, 68, 91 Parliament (Commonwealth), see Federal Parliament pastoralists liberal-radical alliance against, 50–54 Macarthur as conservative spokesman for, 40–41 opposition to liberalism and democracy, 45–47

path dependency of ideas, 346 Patten, J.T., 173 payment of parliamentarians, 53 peace movement, 276–77 Pearson, Charles, 61, 63, 66–67, 299, 342 Pearson, Noel, 328–30 Peden, J.B., 145 People’s Reform League, 118 periodicals and anthologies, 162, 165 Piesse, E.L., 171 planning economic, 138, 165, 168 industrial, 158 see also post-war reconstructionism (1940s) policy regimes cyclical character, 341–42 impact of economic crises on, 336–44 inevitability, 295–302, 342–43 see also ‘Australian settlement’; neoliberalism; ‘new protection’; post-war reconstructionism (1940s) political correctness, 275 political parties distrust of, 118–19, 128, 131, 319, 323–25 emergence, 77–79 formation of two-party system, 95–96, 109 in ‘three-elevens’ period, 87–95, 109 politics centrality of economics, 335–36 nature of, 302–3 neo-liberalism as veto on, 302–3, 327–28 role of ideas, vii, 20, 22–23, 31 significance of personalities, 96, 110 populism Howard’s populist nationalism, 305–6, 308–11 reaction to neo-liberalism, 318–20 Portus, G.V., 156–58, 159, 160, 165 positive liberalism, see ‘new liberalism’ positive liberty, 108, 115 post-war reconstruction (1918–), 138–39 post-war reconstructionism (1940s) business progressives and, 186, 194–97, 198–99, 201–2 Deakinite elements, 199 as departure from pre-war traditions, 200–201, 202–3 emergence of new interests, 205 Howard’s inversion of, 307, 311–12 immigration program, 216

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intellectual influences on, 201 as Keynesian policy regime, 206–7, 338–39 objectives of the bureaucratic reformers, 185, 190–93 role of family, 220–26 role of H.C. Coombs, 183–86, 190–92, 201 role of university economists, 183–84 significance of the debate, 199–207 Powers Referendum (1944), 203 Praed, Rosa, 75 Premiers’ Plan, 152 Pritchard, Katharine Susannah, 147 privatisation of public assets, 266–68, 283–84 protectionism moderate protectionism, 89, 92, 163 ‘new protection’, 89, 205–6, 300, 337 Victoria as bastion, 63–64, 99 see also tariffs Protectionist Party divisions within, 89, 95 fusion with Free Trade Party, 95–96, 109 in ‘three-elevens’ period, 87–95, 100 proximity democracy, 329–30 prudential financial regulation, 8 public administration role of experts in, 158–59 see also Commonwealth bureaucracy public opinion and opinion makers, 26–33 Pusey, Michael, 284 Quadrant (magazine), 30 racialism, 66, 111–12 radicals and radicalism attitudes to Federation, 80, 82 Eureka rebellion, 51–52 European influences, 75–76 expressed in novels, 72, 73–74, 75 and individual rights of man, 55–57 late 1960s, 234–36 of left in interwar years, 144–45 liberal-radical alliances, 52–54, 61, 66–67, 74, 76 and nineteenth century urban intelligentsia, 71–76 radical feminism (1980s), 273–75 radical nationalists of 1950s, 212 role of urban intelligentsia, 70–75, 148 in 1880s and 1890s, 75, 77, 80–81 syndicalism, 124 radio, use of, 153, 170

Rawling, J.N., 147–48 referendums Aboriginal affairs, 228 on military conscription, 140–41 on nationalisation of monopolies, 149 to outlaw Communist Party, 214 Powers Referendum (1944), 203 Reid, Elizabeth, 232 Reid, George as anti-socialist, 95, 97, 119 authorities cited, 97–98 depicts protectionists as conservative, 63 and federation movement, 81 as free-market liberal, 23–24, 91, 97–99 as voice of free trade, 97 representative government, 68 republicanism, 60, 72, 75, 77, 82, 271–73 responsible government, 44, 48–49 rights conservative interpretation, 40, 44, 55, 56 radical interpretation, 55–57 Rights of Man (Paine), 56 Ritchie, D.G., 62, 99, 337 Robinson, W.S., 186 Rosa, S.A., 175 Ross, Bob, 140, 146 Ross, Lloyd, 152–53, 184, 201 Round Table, 137 Round Table groups, 157, 159 Rowse, Tim, 24, 234, 244 Royal Commission on the Constitution, 151 Roydhouse, T.R., 80 Rudd, Kevin accused of over-simplification and hypocrisy, 8–11 on causes of global financial crisis, 3–5, 8–9, 14–15 on central role of the state, 5–7 critique of neo-liberalism, 3–8, 14–16 Deakinite echoes, 343–44 as ‘economic conservative’, 18 intellectual influences on, 29, 347 interaction with organic intellectuals, 29–30 as ‘regulatory liberal’, 335, 343 seeks revival of social democracy, 3–7, 16–18 Rudd Government response to the financial crisis, 13–14, 334–35 rum rebellion, 40 Russian Revolution, 144–45

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Index Scott, Rose, 61, 74, 127–28 Scottish martyrs, 55 search for meaning, 31 Second World War general impact, 176–78 see also post-war reconstructionism (1940s) Selection Acts, 52 self-government debates, 44–50 self-improvement, 70 Serle, Geoffrey, 24 Service, James, 61 settler society in early Australia active role of the state, 59 conservatives versus democrats, 39–50, 336–37 dominance of the landed oligarchy, 39–44 exclusives versus emancipists, 42–44 Indigenous dispossession, 38–39 initial sense of displacement, 36–39 Shann, E.O.G., 163–64, 168 Sharkey, L.L., 147 single issue politics, 326–27 single tax, 73 Smallsalts, Joseph, 55 Smith, Adam, 57 Smith, Bruce, 64–66, 90–91, 299, 342 social Darwinism, 98 social democracy alleged failures, 9 link between conservatism and, 18–19 Rudd on, 3–5, 16–18, 344–45 usage in Australian politics, 16–17, 344–45 social liberalism, 99, 156, 173–74 see also ‘new liberalism’ social movements impact of neo-liberalism, 326 late 1970s–1980s, 273–80, 326 1960s and 1970s, 226–35, 242–46, 248–49 use of new information technologies, 326 social welfare policy, 168–69 socialism Christian Socialism, 167–68 Holman’s debate with Reid, 104–5 Hughes on, 107–8, 121 influence on working-class readers, 72–74 intellectual influences, 72–76 in interwar years, 145–46 Mann on, 120–24 marginal role in Labor politics, 80, 104– 8, 343–44

as term of abuse, 17, 104, 343 women’s suffrage activists and, 74, 129 Socialist Labor Party, 146 socialist parties, 74, 120, 145, 146 Spence, Catherine Helen, 75 Spence, W.G., 68–69, 80 Spencer, Herbert, 58 squatters, 46, 59 state activism ‘Australian settlement’ and, 112–13, 115–16 in colonial period, 39, 59 Deakin on, 101–2 Eggleston on, 165–66 Hancock on, 166–67 Holman on, 104–5 Hughes on, 105–8 Mann on, 122 for post-war reconstruction, 190–94, 199–202 Rudd on, 5–7 Syme and Pearson on, 66–67 see also ‘Australian settlement’; ‘new liberalism’ ‘State socialism’ in colonial Australian thought, 66–67, 88 Deakin and, 101–2 Eggleston on, 165–66 Pearson on, 67 in post-war reconstructionist thought, 199–200 see also socialism Stephensen, P.R. ‘Inky’, 172–73 Stilwell, Frank, 284 stimulus spending, 5, 13–15, 335, 340 Stone, John, 254, 255 Stretton, Hugh, 283–84 strikes, 76, 141 student activism, 232–35 suburbanisation, 221, 223 suffrage, see franchise supply-side economics, 252 ‘Sydney Push’, 244–45 Syme, David, 61, 63, 66 syndicalism, 124 Taperell, H.J., 80 tariff abolition, 264–65 tariffs abolition, 264–65 Tariff Report (1929), 162 technocratic expertise, 180–82, 188, 191–93, 205, 222, 293

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terror, war on, 316–16, 326 Theodore, E.G., 150 think tanks, 255 ‘third way’, 7, 349 TINA (‘there is no alternative’), 339, 342 trade liberalisation, 263–65 trade unions Communist influence in, 213–14 craft versus industrial, 68–70 liberal hostility to militant unionism, 158, 160 neo-liberal attack on, 258 Turnbull, Malcolm and Australian Republican Movement, 272 critique of Rudd’s essays, 9–12, 15 on liberalism and freedom, 11–12 United Australia Party (UAP), 165, 181, 203 university-trained intellectuals, 156–69 uranium mining, opposition to, 234–35, 276–77 urban intelligentsia (nineteenth century), 71–75 urbanization, 54 utopian socialist novels, 72–73 Valentine, Jo, 277 Victoria, as bastion of protectionist liberalism, 63–64 Victorian Employers’ Federation (VEF), 129, 130 Victorian Socialist Party (VSP), 120 Vietnam War, opposition to, 234 Wakefield, E.G., 46 Walker, E.R., 168 Wallas, Graham, 158, 160 Wallis Inquiry, 8 Walsh, Adela, 172 Ward, Russell, 212 Watson, Chris, 94–95, 97, 103–4, 111–12

Watson, Don, 292, 297 Webb, Beatrice and Sidney, 23, 73, 146 WEL (Women’s Electoral Lobby), 274 welfare policy, 168–69 welfare state, 199 Wentworth, W.C., 43–44, 48–50 White Australia policy, 111–12, 147, 160, 219 Whitlam, Gough free-market tendencies, 251, 261 as inspirational leader, 237–40 Whitlam Government dismissal, 241, 270–71 progressive social liberalism, 239–40, 249, 339 Whitley Councils, 138, 158 wilderness conservation, 278 Willard, Myra, 160 Winspear, W.R., 71 Winterton, George, 272 Wise, Bernhard, 81, 91 Wolfsohn, Hugo, 28–29 Womanhood Suffrage Leagues, 74, 125, 128 women intellectuals, 128–29, 153, 160 Women’s Liberation, 231 women’s movements early twentieth-century divisions, 125–32 for female suffrage, 74–75, 83, 125–26 ‘second wave’ feminism, 230–32 Women’s Political Education League, 128 wool industry, 42–43 Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) intellectuals, 138, 156–60 Workers’ Industrial Union of Australia, 144 working class development of a reading culture, 71–76 early champions, 68 see also labour movement World Wars, see First World War; Second World War Wrixon, Henry, 61

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