Nearly 30 years ago now I dropped out of a PhD exploring the communitarian critique of liberalism. My interest in liberalism continued through articles, chapters, book reviews and especially blog posts, but I never wrote anything major, original or influential. From the early 2010s my express ‘liberal’ output dropped further as higher education policy took over my life.
All of this is background to my surprise at being included in The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Party: Intellectuals and the Liberal Party of Australia, a study of six politically engaged liberal/Liberal intellectuals – Peter Coleman, David Kemp, Greg Melleuish, Margaret Fitzherbert, Louise Asher and myself. Along with Melleuish, I was never an MP, but I had several advisory stints with Liberal governments. I was on the winning side in some internal discussions but ultimately failed to achieve my policy objectives.
Geoffrey Robinson, author of The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Party, is an academic at Deakin University. His book is old-school academic work – and I mean that in a positive way, that an academic’s first priority should be to understand their subject matter, not to denounce or to advocate. For someone whose previous book was called Being Left-wing in Australia he shows restraint.
While I do not always completely agree with Murphy’s analysis, his latest book is a very readable narrative history of the Australian welfare state, supplemented with impressive data research and reporting.
The text below is my notes on points of particular interest to me rather than a comprehensive review.
Why did centre-right parties abandon a social insurance welfare model?
An Unlikely Survival attempts some explanation of an intriguing path not taken by centre-right politics in Australia. Up to the early 1950s – although never unaminously – centre-right parties supported a contributory social insurance model of the welfare state. Contributory social insurance is common in other countries.
Under these models, employers and employees pay into funds that later deliver benefits. Benefits can be linked to past contributions. A key reason for centre-right support of contributory social insurance was dislike of tax financed and means-tested benefits, especially for the elderly. This dislike flowed from a belief that means tests penalise people who save to meet their own needs, and rewards those who had not with a pension. It is a moral argument with a prudential angle.
The Lyons United Australia Party (a Liberal predecessor party) government legislated a contributory social insurance scheme in 1938, covering old age, health benefits, disability, and widowhood. But it was abandoned before it began, causing Robert Menzies to resign from the Cabinet in protest. As Liberal leader at the 1946 and 1949 elections Menzies promised to bring in such a scheme. But despite Menzies being prime minister from 1949 until 1966 it never happened.
Initially the Menzies government explored such a system, but by 1952 the issue was reduced to the old age pension means test. One obstacle was the high cost of abolishing the means test for current pensioners. Murphy also points to the path dependency problem created by Labor’s 1940s expansion of the welfare state on a means-tested basis. Reforming existing welfare benefits and introducing new benefits were different political tasks. On the other hand, Labor had already made one vital step towards a contributory welfare system, bringing working class people into the income tax system. As Paul Tilley’s history of Australian tax shows, before WW2 the tax-free threshold for Commonwealth income tax was well above average weekly earnings.
This choice of a contributory versus a tax-financed welfare system intrigues me, as centre-right politics at the time were centrally concerned with preventing Australia from becoming socialist. Intrusive means testing requires the kind of bureaucratic intervention that the centre-right opposed in the economy. In 1952 Athol Townley, the minister for social services, criticised the means test, which he said ‘involves an obnoxious investigation into the affairs of individuals’. While whether or not there should be an age pension means test was an issue up until the 1980s, generally centre-right politicians have strongly supported these ‘obnoxious investigations’ into benefits eligibility.
In the break-up of Australia’s anti-communist political alliance, in the early 1990s after the end of European communism, Robert Manne and I took different political paths. But I still followed his work, with on one occasion significant benefits for my own career. When his ‘political memoir’ was published it went immediately onto my must- read list.
Early life
For me, the first quarter of Manne’s book – on his early life and education – was the most interesting part. His parents were Jewish refugees from Nazism just prior to WW2; his grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust. Robert was born in Melbourne in 1947. As Manne says, his family history made him ‘naturally sympathetic’ to refugees.
When Milton Friedman died in 2006 I wrote a blog post crediting him as an ‘enormous influence on my life’. I said back then that although few people call themselves ‘Friedmanites’, for many – including me – his writings guided us to a broader set of arguments and influences. Despite the subtitle Jennifer Burns gives her biography of Friedman -‘the last conservative’ – these were mostly ideas in the classical liberal tradition.
Classifying Friedman
Burns acknowledges that Friedman described himself as a classical liberal. But in the United States ‘liberals’ are the rough equivalent of social democrats or progressives in other countries. Tribally, Friedman was not one of them. His US partisan leanings were Republican, he was sceptical of ‘big government’, and he sometimes associated with people progressives hate.
If Friedman is a ‘conservative’, the word ‘last’ is doing a lot of work. It refers back to the post-WW2 synthesis of relative conservatism in social matters, private enterprise/free market economics and anti-communism adopted by ‘conservative’ political parties. Friedman more than anyone else turned the private enterprise part of this synthesis into a free market perspective. This combination of views still exists, but has faded as a political force. In the 2010s and 2020s populist figures like Donald Trump captured American ‘conservatism’.
For a non-American audience it is simpler to keep Friedman’s ideological classification as ‘classical liberal’.
John Stuart Mill is the only nineteenth century liberal intellectual still widely read and discussed in the twenty-first century, thanks mainly to his book On Liberty, published 150 years ago. In his time, several of Mill’s books were influential, particularly his Principles of Political Economy, but it is On Liberty that has lasted. It has been continuously in print since 1859.
On Liberty’s longevity makes it the most-read classic of the liberal canon. It retains an audience because the dilemmas Mill writes about— especially over when to regulate speech and behaviour that lacks clear harm to others—are nineteenth-century versions of issues that remain controversial today. Mill speaks to the present as well as the past. Quotations from him still appear regularly in the world’s English-speaking media; his ideas proving useful and his name adding weight to arguments made more than 130 years after he died.
Despite the book’s enduring popularity and influence, On Liberty is not undisputed as a liberal sacred text. Liberals as well as conservatives contest its arguments. Mill was a utilitarian, favouring those policies likely to produce the greatest happiness. Liberals in the natural or human rights traditions see utilitarianism as an insecure foundation for freedom, fearing that it justifies sacrificing the freedoms of some for the benefit of the many (anti-terror laws, for example). In On Liberty, Mill needs sometimes complicated arguments to move from utilitarian premises to liberal conclusions. Classical liberals—their adjective a response to the then new ‘social’ liberalism Mill helped usher in— question the priority Mill gave to ‘individuality’ over other forms of life, and his critique of the role of custom in social life.
Donald Horne’s Death of the Lucky Country, his attack on the dismissal of the Whitlam government, its title an allusion to Horne’s 1964 bestseller, was the first ever adult non-fiction book I owned. I have a vague memory of pestering my mother to buy it for me, the $1.50 price tag (still on the back of my copy) being beyond my budget at age ten.
I don’t remember exactly why I wanted Horne’s book; as a very young Liberal I was happy to see the Whitlam government gone. But recently reading Ryan Cropp’s excellent Horne biography, A Life in the Lucky Country, I can see why Horne appealed to my developing interests. He was a ‘public intellectual’ – the quotation marks because this term and perhaps role has faded – someone who bridged the world of ideas and general audiences. Horne’s books — he was as Cropp notes a prolific author – were always easy to read and, thanks to the secondhand bookshops that once existed in large numbers, usually affordable without parental financial assistance.
The full set takes us from the pre-liberalism of the late 18th century, when ‘liberal’ ideas and institutions were yet to be linked into the ideology of liberalism; through liberalism’s highpoint in the 19th century (volumes one and two); the twentieth century’s dismal first half when racism, protectionism, war, economic depression and utopian socialism broke liberalism but not democracy (volumes three and four); to the defeat of socialism after World War II covered in the later parts of volume four; to the story of volume five, which covers the revival of the liberal project in the 20th century’s final decades followed by stall and setback in the early 21st century.
The 40 years after Sir Robert Menzies retired as prime minister in 1966, having been in office since 1949, saw a liberalisation in which liberals were one influence among many. Kemp’s idea of ‘liberal project’, a policy agenda, is useful in understanding how Australia became a more liberal society despite ideological liberals not being numerous or always highly influential. Many people had reasons for overturning the ‘Australian settlement’ of the 1900s: white Australia, high tariffs, and a highly-regulated labour market.
In Australia’s division of political labour for the most part the people outside government calling for more liberal social policies and more liberal economic policies were different.
Liberal social policies were often promoted by single issue movements, at their core people trying to improve their own lives and not advance general philosophical ideals, although sometimes attracting support by appealing to broader principles (see Jon Piccini’s book on human rights in Australia).
Liberal economic policies were promoted by a broad coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, economists, business interests and think-tanks. In the think-tanks especially classical liberal philosophy was explicit, but in the other groups support for market mechanisms owed more to utilitarianism than freedom. The aim was greater and more efficient economic growth.
As in the immediate post-World War II period the Liberal and Labor parties provided the alternative governments. But ideologically party competition changed in the 1960s. Declining support for socialism within Labor and its increasingly university-educated and socially-liberal MPs and voters meant that attitudes to ‘liberalism’ were less of a divide between the two main parties. The Liberal Party often struggled to find a clear direction. Labor governments took the lead in ‘liberal’ reforms.
The firstthree volumes of David Kemp’s Australian political history told the story of Australian liberalism’s rise and fall between 1788 and 1925. In a global comparative sense Australia remained a liberal democracy in 1925, but ‘policy change by erosion’ (to use a Kemp phrase from another context) was undermining its liberal characteristics.
From a contemporary liberal perspective, Kemp’s third volume showed that key policy erosions such as the White Australia policy, protectionism and industrial arbitration came from governments that were broadly on the liberal side of the then dominant ideological conflicts. The increasing influence of socialist ideas, the growth of trade unions, and Labor Party electoral successes all threatened a more radical abandonment of liberal ideas and institutions.
This fourth volume in Kemp’s series, covering the decades from 1926 to 1966, is sub-titled ‘How Australians chose liberalism over socialism’. By 1966 the socialist threat to Australian liberalism, which began in the late 19th century and peaked in the 1930s and 1940s, had been defeated. But this was not a foregone conclusion. A Liberal State tells the story of how the semi-liberal order of 1925 survived the challenges it faced over the next 40 years.
A review of Sam Roggeveen’s Our Very Own Brexit., originally published on GoodReads in November 2019.
How vulnerable is Australia to the disruptive political developments in other Western countries – Trump in the US, Brexit and Corbyn in the UK, and the electoral devastation of former ruling political parties across Western Europe?
Sam Roggeveen, from the Lowy Institute in Sydney (disclosure: I have known Sam for many years and we had a recent private online discussion about his argument in this essay), is cautious but sees significant political risks. As in other countries, the Australian political parties that have been the foundation of post-WW2 stability have shrinking bases of support, leaving them open to internal insurgencies and political rivals.
One symptom of the old political system’s weakness, a rising vote for independent and minor party candidates, has been present for a long time. I wrote about this, as did many others, in the early 2000s and last year my Grattan Institute former colleagues published a detailed analysis of the characteristics and beliefs of minor party voters.
Chandran Kukathas’s The Liberal Archipelago is a contrarian book. Recent liberal (well, left-liberal) writers support special rights for minority groups to protect their culture, but believe groups should give their members liberal rights. Kukathas takes the opposite view. Minority groups should not be given special rights, but they can run themselves illiberally. If their members don’t like it, they can leave.
To understand why these contrary conclusions are reached we have to go back into liberalism’s history.
Kukathas returns liberalism to one of its original principles, toleration. Liberalism emerged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a response to European religious conflict. John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) is the most famous argument for toleration from that time, though Kukathas rates more highly Pierre Bayle’s Philosophical Commentary (1708).
Since this early period toleration has been a way of preserving peace. Forcing diverse groups into a common culture causes conflict, including violent conflict. Putting up with each other, advocates of toleration say, is the better option. Kukathas argues that this is not merely a compromise; it comes to be internalised in basic norms governing social relations.
Andrew Norton 
