Australian Politics and the Carrick Era

Dr Graeme Starr is a Visiting Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of the Australian Catholic University. He has written extensively on politics and public policy and taught at several major Australian and American universities and has held a number of advisory positions in government including Senior Private Secretary to the Minster for Defence and Minister for Communications. His publications include Variety and Choice: Good Schools for all Australians (2010); The Liberal Party of Australia: A Documentary History (1980); Political Parties in Australia (1978). His most recent book is Carrick: Principles, Politics and Policy (2012); On Tuesday 4 June 2013, Graeme Starr addressed The Sydney Institute to discuss the life of former Liberal MP Sir John Carrick.

AUSTRALIAN POLITICS AND THE CARRICK ERA

GRAEME STARR

Several years ago, I was persuaded that there had to be a biography of Sir John Carrick. I was easily persuaded. I had a personal interest in the era in that this year, 2013, marks 50 years since I took my first job in politics as research officer at the historic Ash Street Liberal Party headquarters.

There were, of course, more substantial reasons to tell the story of the Carrick era.  After all, he was for more than two decades the principal organiser and philosophical conscience of a major Australian political story.

Then he became a senior federal minister, leader of the government in the Senate, political confidant of three of Australia’s four longest serving prime ministers (as protégé and strategic advisor of Sir Robert Menzies, colleague of Malcolm Fraser, and mentor of John Howard), and a leading policy-maker and reformer of Australian education at all levels from early childhood to university.

Further, it was widely agreed that he was among the two or three really influential people in what had become the most successful party in Australia’s federal history.  When judged by its electoral record and as demonstrated by its capacity to adapt when confronted by pressures for change, this success is beyond dispute.

Like many people, I have found it curious that such a successful party has been so notoriously reluctant to tell its own story. Oddly for a party that is seen to be a conservative force, it tends to shun its past and remain mute about its heroes, often leaving its story as the hunting-ground of its opponents, too often with unhappy results.

Where Labor supporters write books, erect statues and name city squares for even the failures among their former leaders, Liberals tend to treat their former leaders a bit like mad uncles. There is no-one as lonely as a former Liberal leader.

The various autobiographies by prominent party leaders have not told us very much about their party. Indeed, even Sir Robert Menzies’ autobiographical books really told us little about the party he established – his “child” as Gerard Henderson called it.

While I was easily persuaded about the need for a biography, I was not so easily persuaded that I should be the one to write it.  I knew that Sir John was very reluctant to be the subject of a biography. Indeed, when I raised it with him he spent quite a bit of time trying to convince me to drop the idea altogether and to write instead on the decline of the Ottoman Empire.

Fortunately, he finally agreed to cooperate, and he did so most generously. I did not have to go quite so far as to offer not to mention his name in his biography, but I did promise that my focus would not be on his life but on the three elements essential for assessing the validity and worth of public life – principles, politics and policy.

Next year, 2014, will mark the seventieth anniversary of a long era in our political history, book-ended by the clash of political outlooks, but marked by an extraordinary stability in the shape of the party system. I would chance the wrath of legions of political scientists by offering the view that the reason for this stability can be found in the political architecture designed by people like John Carrick and a small group of people who reinvented our politics in the 1940s.

Within the settled party system, however, the individual parties are dynamic, constantly changing. A central problem in understanding Australian politics is that most studies seem necessarily to be snapshots, showing the parties frozen in time. Such is the pace of change in our parties now that any contemporary study would fall quickly from a picture of “what the parties are” to “what the parties were”.

Many forces change the character of a political party. Electoral reform, for example, always has consequences, intentional or unintended, for the nature of the parties.  Most if not all reforms of course have just this in mind. Indeed, whenever we hear the words “electoral reform” we should check the silverware.

Whatever the cause, our political parties are not what they used to be. The important questions are – have politics changed so much that the parties no longer carry out, or can be expected to carry out, the important functions that once made them such important instruments in the political and public policy processes and, are our politics and our parties in a state of decline?

One way to find answers to questions like these is to focus on one of our major parties and some of its key people at a critical time in its history. No other party is more appropriate for this focus than the Liberal Party and the little group of political architects who shaped its principles, politics and policies in the Carrick era.

Principles

There is a useful historical tool known to a little group of disciples as the Ohio 1895 theory of history. Back in 1895, there were only two motor cars in the entire state of Ohio. One day, the two owners took their cars out for spin at the same time and the inevitable happened. They crashed into each other. This gave rise to the Ohio 1895 theory of history. Whenever there are two similar entities existing at the same time, they will inevitably clash.

Australian politics can be understood in these terms. Throughout most of our history as a nation, and certainly in the past 70 years, we have had the clash between two conflicting but possibly equally legitimate outlooks. One is optimistic about what people can do for themselves, but pessimistic about what governments and institutions can do for them. The other is optimistic about what governments can do for people, but pessimistic about what people can do for themselves. One looks to individuals, the other looks to classes.

One recognises the value of federalism as a means of reconciling the benefits of unity with the advantages of diversity. The other seeks instinctively to centralise power. One looks first for opportunities for people to fix their lives, while the other (in the slogan taken up recently by the Prime Minister) says “we will fix it for you”.

Our theory suggests that these two outlooks must clash. The clash was most obvious in the watershed election of 1949 and 1975. Future historians might look back on 2013 as an equally noteworthy example.

Chief among the shortcomings of the Liberal Party’s predecessors was that they were unable to articulate clear and agreed statements of their party principles. Menzies stressed this when he called the various people and groups together to form his new party in 1944. “We have no comprehensive statement of our political objectives,” he said. He repeatedly returned to this “all important matter”. A party with no a platform was no party at all.

The Liberal Party founders were firm in the view that the organisation, as the trustee of the party’s philosophy, was responsible for the platform, which served as the solid foundation on which the parliamentary party was expected to construct its policies.

The young party took this issue up and the development of a coherent platform and statement of beliefs was among the first important tasks undertaken. Here in New South Wales the party’s founding president and mentor, Sir William Spooner, encouraged his young General Secretary to write a little booklet titled The Liberal Way of Progress, which influenced party thinking across the country.

The principles at the root of the platform are now well known and understood. They reflected the outlook that was so optimistic about the individual and apprehensive about the state. They recognised the value of federalism. They placed equal stress on rights and responsibilities.  They acknowledged the importance of virtues like voluntarism, the family, choice and the role of authority as a check on the threat of raw power.  And at the state level they focused squarely on education – as a responsibility of the state.

In terms of “then” and “now” these were then seen as liberal values, but they now seem to be regarded curiously as conservative. Some people like to debate those terms, but I’m not sure that it really matters.

Along with these ideas as the roots of policy, the articulation of principles also dwelt on important organisational principles.  Most important among these were the area of funding with a strict code to isolate the policy-makers from knowledge of the sources of funds, and the pre-selection system, the integrity of which was held to be sacrosanct.

These were matters strictly reserved for the party’s extra-parliamentary organisation.  Some have referred to these as the “Carrick principles” – right for an earlier time.  Wise and experienced parliamentary leaders still respect them.

Politics

The tasks of protecting these principles, and of protecting party leaders from the temptation to play fast and loose with them, are among the important responsibilities of the party’s General Secretary – or the State Director as the job is now called.

This was always a job for a person who has learned a few useful survival skills.  John Carrick learned some of these skills as a POW. (He calls those three and a half years “an enduring learning experience”.) Within weeks of returning from the war he took a “temporary job” with the new Liberal Party, became General Secretary and occupied the position for the next quarter of a century.

This was a vital position requiring a political architect. It was the key to successful campaigning to win office for the young party and then to hold office during the long period of Coalition government.

The severity of the challenges facing the Liberal Party in its formative years cannot be overstated. It faced a Labor Party with formidable leaders in people like Curtin and Chifley, while its own leader inspired the chant that it would never win with Menzies.  The Liberal Party had to shape its organisational base in the political vacuum left by the old United Australia Party, which, after some successes in the 1930s, had proved to be an evolutionary failure bound for political extinction.

In forming the Liberal Party, Menzies had outlined the defects of the UAP. He had stressed the failure to present a clear platform or statement of principles on which policies could be expected to be based, of course, but he insisted that significant structural problems had to be overcome if a stable political system was to be established and maintained.

A party that fails to deal with these sorts of problems, he argued, is a failed party and not likely to be able to serve the useful functions that are expected of legitimate parties in a democratic political system.

The political science textbooks tend to agree on the major functions of democratic parties. Among the various functions usually described are: recruiting and promoting political and government leaders; giving direction to the power struggle; providing a vehicle for articulating interests and developing issues; serving as a means of aggregating interests, building coalitions, and reconciling differences; giving direction and making sense of the policy agenda; and playing a role as instruments in the operation of government.

As important as they are, governments might get along passably well for a while without political parties capable of serving these functions.  The system would probably tolerate such a party, although it could not expect to survive for very long.

There is one function, however, that is vital to the system and which no serious and responsible party can neglect. This is the requirement to operate as an important part of the electoral process and to participate in the crucial but delicate task of keeping elections fair and honest.

At their best, our parties served this function quite well, although it is true that parties have from time to time been involved in some pretty devious electoral gambits.  Nevertheless, without responsible and well organised parties watching each other, elections would have much less integrity and meaning.

The architects of the Liberal Party recognised the important functions and became convinced that, if their party was to be successful, to survive and contribute usefully, it had to get its organisation right.  There were people on the other side of politics who, I’m sure, were equally responsible and concerned about their party.  Our focus here, however, is the contribution of the Liberal Party – the new kid on the block – and the influence of John Carrick on it.

Leaders like Menzies, William Spooner and later Bob Cotton, together with rising state secretaries like Carrick and his Victorian counterpart John McConnell, set about building an organisation infused with antibodies to insure that it could resist the sorts of viral infections that had brought down earlier Australian parties.

They succeeded, overcoming the organisational problems identified by Menzies and changing the face of Australian politics. These problems related in the main to the importance of finance, party membership, local community branches, support staff, the corrosive threat of factionalism, and election campaigning.

Finance

The party’s funding code was still working well in the Carrick era so that the fund-raising and policy-making functions could be isolated from each other, although state parliamentary leaders had sometimes to be called to order because of occasional lapses of memory about their responsibilities.

This, of course, was before taxpayers were required to subsidise political parties, making them rich beyond their former dreams of avarice.  It was also before the introduction of the public disclosure system, which was aimed at undermining the effectiveness of the party funding code and, among other consequences, introduced the problem of institutionalised extortion.

These “reforms” had unfortunate consequences for the parties.  They became much more professional, but they declined as effective, mass-membership organisations.

Membership

Under the UAP, the notion of mass membership had become essentially a fiction.  The combined numbers in the various organisations that came together to form the Liberal Party were probably considerably less than thirty thousand – smaller than most of the major interest groups. Even fewer could be regarded as active members, mainly because they had no real role in policy-making, candidate selection, election campaigning or in any other major political process.

By 1950, however, people were given good reasons to join. The party then had more than 44,000 members in New South Wales alone, and 187,984 across Australia.  It was agreed that the key to party survival was in maintaining these sorts of numbers and keeping the members active.

Branches

Similarly, the branches in the earlier parties were mostly phantoms that rarely met and had no really important function. They were used for little more useful than organising numbers for factional purposes. Thus, they were more of a hindrance than an asset.  The new party had to build up a branch structure from almost nothing.

By 1950, there were 430 branches in New South Wales (including 216 in country areas) and there were 1,651 branches across Australia.  By the 1970s, one branch had 900 members and many branches had several hundred active members.

More important than numbers, most branches grew big enough to be regarded as microcosms of their local region and representative of most of the social, educational, religious, professional, business, sporting, local government and other organised interest groups in their community.

This meant that the party branches were able to perform an important conduit function for two-way communications between policy-makers and their constituencies.   To some extent this function has been taken over by opinion polling and by electronic communications technologies, but it is doubtful that it is done as effectively.

Staff

The secret to building and maintaining the membership of the party and the active branch system was the network of field officers, some thirty or more full-time professional organisers located in the marginal and hard-luck electorates as the eyes and ears (and occasionally the hammer and whip) of the General Secretary.

In most cases, these field officers were more important to the prospects of the party than the candidates and parliamentarians they had to manage.

Factionalism

 Most importantly, while there were active individuals advocating policies to the left and right of the party consensus, the party was remarkably free from the mischief of institutionalised factionalism.  Through the alert work of the field staff, the party was able to detect and control any incipient internal threat to organisational unity and thus maintain the integrity of pre-selections and other important processes.

The fractious groups – like “the Uglies” and “the Group” and their ideological descendants – that were later to Balkanize the party in some regions were yet to erupt and to become institutionalised in their mischief.  The General Secretary did not have to waste the party’s time dealing with the chieftains of warring tribes and the people of little consequence within them.

Campaigning

The primary practical function of a political party must be the election campaign.  Today, or since governments decided in effect to subsidise the advertising and public relations industries by channelling public funds to them through the political parties at election time, political campaigns have become almost a thing of the past.  They have been largely replaced by mere advertising or publicity campaigns.

Successful political campaigns were those where an entire party – tens of thousands of volunteers – was active on the ground, engaged in ongoing and continuous campaign activity, ever-mindful of the fact that an election was always imminent.  This called for big ideas, policies based on sound principles, candidates chosen with integrity, a lot of shoe-leather and sweat at the grass-roots, well-cleansed electoral rolls, and many members well-trained to “harvest the vote”.

The central message of every successful political campaign in the Carrick years was his often-repeated admonition – “you can’t fatten the pig on market day”. His prescription for campaigning was simple and profound:

 There is no particular magic in huge expenditure. . . You don’t need all the bells and whistles – all the slogans and focus groups. All you really need is to explain the big issues to the people in words they understand – even the very complex issues like those in 1975 – and you let the people decide. They usually get it right.

It is in their campaigning roles that the parties have become more “professional” rather than “mass membership” organisations.  As such they might be said to be “in decline”.

Policy

Good, sound policies on the big issues were obviously an essential ingredient in the recipe for electoral and party success. Good policy was almost invariably based on principle tempered necessarily by politics. And good policy was about action, not rhetoric.

Principle was not allowed to descend to the level of blind ideology.  The politics was always pragmatic and based on research, by which I certainly do not mean focus groups or opinion polls, but the careful examination of such questions as “will it work”, “is it fair”; “who benefits”; “can it be improved”; “can we afford it”; and “how hard do we have to work to convince the voters that it is right”.

When researching some years ago for a chapter for a book on policy in the Menzies era (which corresponded with the Carrick era), I found repeated calls for attention to three broad policy directives. The first related to a perceived public demand that, in the wake of the depression and war, Australian policies should be aimed at overcoming our international vulnerability and establishing our security from potential adversaries. The second was the related perceived need to expand our national self-sufficiency, meeting our national needs by means of policies to encourage exploration, innovation and development.

And third was the need for policies that maximise the scope of choice and opportunity for the individual, contributing to the national goal of egalitarianism in practice rather than simply in rhetoric. This objective covered many areas of policy – such as health, social welfare, employment and housing – but none more important than education.

This, of course, brings us back to my starting point. If we are to consider the question of John Carrick and the Australian political agenda, if we are considering the broad topic of politics “then” and “now”, and if we are thinking of politics in its finest sense, then we must conclude on the issue of education.

From the first day of his term as Minister for Education, Carrick made it clear that his commitment to principle was practical, not simply ideological, and much more than just lip-service.  Let me read you one short quote from my biography:

They put on my desk a pile of letters for me to sign on Disadvantaged Schools … I asked them what it was about and they said that there was a policy of Disadvantaged Schools brought in by the Whitlam Government and that we send out money to individual schools.

 So, I picked up the first one and it said Bunbury School in Western Australia was a Disadvantaged School. I said “I’m sorry, but I’ve never been to Bunbury. Have you asked the state government whether it feels that Bunbury school is more disadvantaged than others?”

“No, we haven’t,” they replied.

 So I sent them all back to the state ministers and said that we had these requests and what did they think of them. The idea that a minister sitting in Canberra could know what was going on in a Redfern school or somewhere else is absolute nonsense.

My biography of Carrick naturally has education as a major focus.  I found that his approach to education – the underlying preoccupation through most of his political life, probably even at this very moment – is summed up in his observation on the purpose of schooling:

The key to education is motivation at the parent’s knee…Schools exist to help parents to educate their children by promoting intellectual, social, physical, aesthetic, moral and spiritual development.

The implications of this were written into the NSW Education Act, largely drafted by the Carrick Committee and taken as a model in other states.  Education was to be based on three principles: 1) Every child has a right to receive an education; 2) the education of a child is essentially the responsibility of the parents, and 3) it is the responsibility of the state to ensure that every child receives an education of the highest quality.

From his work in the 1950s and 1960s with Menzies in reinforcing parental choice by introducing assistance to families with children in Catholic and other non-government schools, to his role as Federal Minister of Education, to the influential “Carrick Report” on schooling in New South Wales, and his continuing pioneering work in early childhood education, John Carrick has been a primary force in the progressive reform of education at all levels.

This reform was achieved, moreover, by providing certainty to parents and to schools, but without the wild rhetoric of a “revolution”, without undermining the value of choice and diversity, and without risking the consequences of letting the Feds into the classroom.