Charles Richardson on the Liberal Party & the 'moral middle class'.

Judith Brett, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard, Cambridge University Press, 2003

Not surprisingly, most attention to this book has focused on Brett's treatment of the Liberal Party's recent past--especially her love/hate attitude to John Howard. The real virtue of Brett's book, however, is the way that she shows how the Liberal Party's current position is deeply rooted in its history, including its prehistory.

Although she sticks doggedly to the term "Liberal', Brett's argument really comes down to a claim that the Liberal Party and its predecessors have always been conservative parties. Howard's strength, in her eyes, is that he has made this conservatism believable again, 'recreating a language of social unity and cohesion for the Liberals after their thirteen-year association with economic liberalism'. Although she overstates both his and his party's respect for individualism, Brett recognises that, fundamentally, the Howard ascendancy represents a repudiation of liberalism.

The truth about Howard is that his primary sympathies are neither with the working-class 'battlers' nor with the individualism of liberal economics, but with the traditional middle-class conservatism that has always been the mainstay of the Liberal Party. Even his anti-intellectualism has a long history, which Brett obscures a little by suggesting that the 'moral middle class' once encompassed artists and intellectuals. (The Menzies speech that she quotes on page 155 actually just says that the middle class are consumers of intellectual products, which is a rather different thing.)

The book's story starts further back, with Alfred Deakin, whom Brett portrays in remarkably uncritical terms. He is "tolerant' and 'open-minded', his racism and xenophobia are glossed over and his eminence grise, David Syme, never even gets a mention. Conversely, she is unfair to Deakin's opponent, George Reid, the Free Trade party's only prime minister. Reid was a Gladstonian liberal, who led a reforming administration in New South Wales in the 1890s with Labor support. Because he was an antisocialist, however, Brett cannot help seeing Reid as a conservative. A reference on page 28, for example, to the 'Liberal and Reform Association of New South Wales' omits the fact that this was Reid's party.

Ironically, Brett's description of the party's ruling ideology as 'Liberal' makes it appear even more conservative than it was, because liberalism as distinct from conservatism pretty much drops out of the picture. To some extent this is a reflection of what actually happened. But there were dissenters. Where are the rebels who defied Menzies on the Communist Party Dissolution Bill? Or Bert Kelly and the critics of tariff policy? Or Steele Hall and the battle for democracy in South Australia? But this liberalism is invisible, as it is in the ALP's history as well: Labor's role as the residual heir of nineteenth-century radical liberalism is ignored.

When liberalism reappears in the 1980s it is confined to economics. Like many commentators, Brett overstates the extent of the Liberal Party's commitment to economic liberalism, even at the high point of the early 1990s. She says of John Hewson that 'the party loyally supported him through the [1993] election campaign', but in fact party dissent had forced Hewson into an embarrassing backflip only months before the election, from which he never really recovered. Hewson maintained power through the party's Left, which was never comfortable with his economic policy.

Brett thinks that Howard has been 'astonishingly successful', but the jury is still out on that claim. So far his record in electoral terms is less than stunning. Compare him, for example, with S.M. Bruce, cited by Brett as a leader out of touch with the middle class and with limited electoral appeal. In the three elections Bruce contested as leader, he averaged 50 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote, not far from John Howard at 50.6, or for that matter Robert Menzies at 50.7. Malcolm Fraser (51.9) did better than any of them, but he is not a favorite of Brett's.

(One element in her criticism of 'neo-liberalism' is the assertion that the Liberal Party's fall in membership was 'part of a long-term decline which accelerated during the 1990s'. But in fact the party's membership numbers, graphed as a percentage of population, show a remarkably smooth downward progression since the 1960s--on track to reach zero somewhere around 2010.)

Brett argues, correctly, that the Liberal Party both is and is not a class-based party. What it and its predecessors have represented is not strictly an economic class, but rather a class that defines itself by ideological criteria, a key part of its ideology being the claim that it constitutes 'the nation'. One therefore has the spectacle of a class that is identified in part by the (transparently false) denial that it is a class at all.

But while at one level Brett recognises that the claim is false, she regularly seems to take middle-class ideological pretensions at face value. Reading the pronouncements of Liberal leaders one repeatedly thinks, echoing Mandy Rice-Davies, 'Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?' It may be that she is merely trying to get the reader to see things from the conservative point of view, and this is not a bad thing--as A.J.P. Taylor says, 'a historian should start by appreciating the past'.

Brett rejects class as a determinant of party identification, only to embrace it, or something very like it, at other times. She explains the haemorrhage of the Liberal Party's middle-class vote in the Whitlam era by referring to public sector employees and their 'identification with the reforming potential of the state'. In other words, Whitlam's Labor Party appealed to their class interests. And no doubt this is partly true, but it misses the liberal potential that was always present in the ALP as its heritage from the nineteenth century Left. If etatisme were all there was to it, it would be mysterious how Labor managed to hold onto middle-class support in the era of the 'neo-liberal' Hawke and Keating governments.

In fact, ideology is a malleable thing. Once a particular sort of rhetoric is well established, be it conservative, liberal, Marxist or whatever, politicians use it to frame their views, regardless of whether they actually share its presumptions. Even those with a very different agenda have to use the accepted terms: witness the way in which the Soviet empire was dismantled in the late 1980s by people who still spoke a Marxist language. It is therefore not surprising to find Australian conservatives speaking the language of liberalism, individualism and Protestantism. Probably many of them believed it, but we cannot be sure.

Brett, however, is convinced that religion has been more than just ideological cover for class interests; those who disagree are accused of 'a reluctance to take religious belief seriously'. Maybe she is right. But surely the fact that Joe Lyons was accepted as leader of an overwhelmingly Protestant party despite his Catholicism counts as evidence against Brett's position. Yet, although Lyons figures prominently in the book (even appearing on the cover), as far as I could tell his religion is nowhere mentioned. The gap between rhetoric and reality is sometimes obvious:

Even for those like the Protestant Liberals who trumpeted their commitment to freedom and independence, this commitment was most keenly felt when they joined with their fellow free and independent citizens singing together one of the rousing anthems of Protestant Britain.

Yet this does not prompt any general reflection on the degree to which the non-Labor rhetoric was basically just humbug.

At other times, it is not even clear whether Brett recognises the irony herself. The discussion of conscription in World War I, for example, displays no awareness of the fact that opposition to the military, and to conscription in particular, had been one of the hallmarks of liberal thought in Europe; the issue split a Liberal government in Britain just before it did the same to the ALP. The spectacle of a 'Liberal' party being so blind to that heritage (or so consumed by class and ethnic hatreds) that it lined up behind conscription deserves more attention than she gives it.

The contrast with Brett's much-praised Robert Menzies" Forgotten People (Macmillan, 1992) is interesting. Her earlier book was a critique of Menzies and his ideological makeup: sharp and devastating, if perhaps unfair in places. But the current work largely forsakes criticism for analysis. Only occasional digs reveal some depth of feeling, as when Brett remarks that under Menzies, "Liberals were happy to leave the politics of grievance, envy and paranoia to Labor'--in other words, under Howard they have taken the other path.

Despite such caveats, this is a very worthwhile contribution to the small but growing body of serious literature on the Australian Liberal Party. No subsequent writers will be able to ignore Brett's argument.

Charles Richardson is a freelance philosopher based in Melbourne. He once spent 18 years in the Liberal Party and is now writing his own book about it.