UNITY IN AUTONOMY – THE CONCEPTION OF THE LIBERAL PARTY – ZACHARY GORMAN

August 2024 marked 80 years since Robert Menzies brought together the dysfunctional groups of non Labor political associations and the remnants of the United Australia Party to found a new party to be called The Liberal Party of Australia. Over two conferences in Canberra and Albury at the end of 1944, the Party took roots and would go on to win government from the Labor Party in a stunning victory in December 1949. On Thursday 28 November, former Australian Prime Minister The Hon John Howard OM AC and former National Party leader and Deputy Prime Minister The Hon John Anderson AC launched Unity in Autonomy – A Federal History of the Founding of the Liberal Party at The Sydney Institute. They were joined by the Robert Menzies Institute’s director Georgina Downer, The Sydney Institute’s Anne Henderson and Unity in Autonomy contributing editor Zachary Gorman.

UNITY IN AUTONOMY – THE CONCEPTION OF THE LIBERAL PARTY

ZACHARY GORMAN

They say that every book of history reveals as much about the time in which it was written as the time which it seeks to explore. And while Unity in Autonomy: A Federal History of the Founding of the Liberal Party was produced to make an enduring contribution to Australian historiography, coinciding with the 80^th anniversary of the party’s formation, it was indelibly shaped by the aftermath of the 2022 federal election.

That poll highlighted two aspects of Australia’s political culture, that have roots stretching back before federation and which have never really gone away. The first is that Australia remains a pervasively federal nation, formed by the joining together of six separate democracies that had all developed their own independent political cultures. And for this reason, even to this day national political parties have to appeal to vastly different constituencies in say Victoria or Queensland. So, to understand our democracy, you actually need to understand what are now eight distinct polities. Hence the book has chapters exploring the creation of the Liberal Party in every state and territory, each written by a specialist author who can bring local insights to the topic.

The second revelation of 2022 is that the Australian liberal tradition has always had a notable streak of “independence”, embodied in the enduring freedom to cross the floor, that makes it liable to fracture. The modern Liberal Party is the successor to nineteenth century colonial parliaments, in which most members were elected as independents who described themselves as liberals, without being bound to a formalised extra-parliamentary organisation. This liberal ascendency viewed the birth of Labor’s rigid party structure and caucus pledge as a threat to how they understood democracy, and liberals were therefore reluctant to take on these methods themselves, despite their clear electoral advantages. Moreover, even without this pre-history, people who place a fundamental value on their “freedom of conscience” are inevitably going to herd about as well as cats.

This centrifugal tendency was at an all-time high in the lead up to the 1943 federal election, when the One Party for Australia Movement fought for the abolition of the party system, a range of new centre-right parties entered the political arena, and an influx of independents led to a record number of candidates standing for parliament. There was even a Women for Canberra Movement, bearing some similarities to the Teals, and Anne Henderson’s chapter explores how this rising tide of female political participation powerfully shaped the formation of the Liberal Party. The result of liberal fracturing in 1943 was an electoral wipeout which here in New South Wales left the United Australia Party (UAP) with just four MHRs.

Hence, one of the key tasks which faced the liberal movement and particularly Robert Menzies, once he was elected Opposition Leader in the aftermath of the poll, was how to overcome this tendency. Their solution was “unity in autonomy”; clearly articulated principles which could unite disparate liberals across the continent, while providing them with enough local control and variation that they would not feel the impulse to break away and do things their own way.

The book begins with David Kemp’s chapter arguing that the Liberal Party was explicitly founded as a “party with a philosophy” championing the individual at a time when both foreign autocracies and local technocrats were seeking to subordinate people to the state. The main lesson is that Liberals actually need to believe in things if they want cohesion and victory. Their predecessors in the UAP found tremendous success under Joseph Lyons in defeating the Great Depression via disciplined fiscal conservatism, but it was the exhaustion of this raison d’etre that had seen them come apart.

Menzies sought to unite liberals around a timeless set of principles, that would not have this problem of an in-built shelf-life. But he equally needed to demonstrate that his side of politics would be willing to stand up for what it believed in, rather than giving lip service. For this reason, the 1944 Powers Referendum was crucial to the successful creation of the Liberal Party, just as the Voice Referendum has helped revive the party’s fortunes in modern times.

When the Powers Referendum was first proposed, many on the centre-right equivocated. Seeing that John Curtin had just won an election landslide, it seemed as though the cultural zeitgeist was moving in favour of centralisation and a vastly increased role for the state. So even though this violated core liberal principles, some thought it might be best to back “Yes” to salvage some electoral popularity. In the end, both Percy Spender and Billy Hughes took this route, and they would ultimately find themselves suspended from the parliamentary UAP, leaving it with just two New South Wales members.

But where they saw danger, Menzies saw opportunity. He was acutely aware that referendums tend to fail if they are properly scrutinised, so he decided to head the “No” campaign, and then use the momentum generated from the victory to form an enduring party. The book explores how in many states the Australian Constitutional League, formed to prosecute the “No” case, fed into the new Liberal organisation.

But Sherry Sufi demonstrates that in Western Australia the secessionist Dominion League was likewise essential, speaking to the fact that each state had its own idiosyncrasies that continue to be important to this day. The unique LNP situation in Queensland was foreshadowed in the Queensland People’s Party maintaining a separate branding until 1949. The New South Wales Liberals were long dominated by a Mosman and Vaucluse aristocracy that presaged the affluent and narrow appeal of the Teals, producing an extended period of opposition. And Tasmania, as Stefan Petrow eloquently puts it, was a “conservative arcadia” in which the Labor Party managed to find success by out-conservative-ing their Liberal opponents, until the Greens and the new progressivism they represented pulled the ALP to the left.

The book concludes with John Anderson and Terry Barnes examining why the Country Party declined to join the rest of the centre-right in forming the Liberal Party. With the enduring Coalition epitomising the “unity in autonomy” premise of allowing for localism and difference of opinion, while maintaining a powerful common purpose and combined action.

With the enduring Coalition epitomising the “unity in autonomy” premise of allowing for localism and difference of opinion, while maintaining a powerful common purpose and combined action.

While the book takes inspiration from 1977’s The Emergence of the Australian Party System, which likewise took a state-by-state approach to understand the formative period of 1890-1910, it is quite distinct from the existing histories of the Liberal Party, notably those of Gerard Henderson and Ian Hancock. As editor and a contributor, I firmly believe that it shines a new light on not just the party, but also the complexities of our democracy.

Even in the brief time between conceiving of Unity in Autonomy and it being published, the odds of the Liberal Party reaching its 100^th anniversary have greatly increased. This is surely testament to the strengths of how the organisation was devised. But it also reflects the depths of the wellspring of Australian liberalism, which as our nation’s oldest political tradition, stretches back not to 1944, but closer to 1788. As an immigrant society, the values of opportunity, legal and political equality, and individual freedom are baked into our DNA. The Liberal Party can claim no monopoly on them. But surely after 80 years, it has been entrusted with a special duty to uphold them.