Has Politics Really Changed – from Menzies to Morrison

At The Sydney Institute’s Annual Dinner held at The Star on Wednesday 27 March 2019, the Institute celebrated its thirtieth year. Guest speaker at the dinner was The Hon John Howard OM AC who was introduced by Sydney Institute Executive Director Gerard Henderson and thanked by Carmel Mulhern, Group Executive, Legal & Corporate Affairs, at Telstra. Newly appointed Sydney Institute Chair, Jacquelynne Willcox was MC for the evening which was sponsored by Telstra. Gerard Henderson’s introduction is published here following the address by John Howard.

 HAS POLITICS REALLY CHANGED – FROM MENZIES TO MORRISON

 JOHN HOWARD

Thank you Gerard. You haven’t lost your touch. You’re very, very good.

Can I start by saying I am really honoured that Gerard and Anne Henderson and The Sydney Institute have asked me to give this speech tonight. It’s a wonderful gathering of people, not only from the marvellous city of Sydney, but around the nation. But there is one person I want to especially single out tonight and that is the re-elected Premier of New South Wales. I still have a lot of faith in the political process of this country and I’ve long believed that there are two things that will ultimately be rewarded by the Australian people. Those two things are integrity and competence and you Gladys have both of them in spades.

I also, of course, as Jacquelynne has done, acknowledge the former premiers of New South Wales that are here tonight. Also my friend, the former Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott. Tony, as you know, leading a political party is not easy. Anybody who has had that experience will testify to it. And there’s a special place in the pantheon of any political party for those who have led that party from opposition back into government.

As you know, Tony, in the history of the party to which you and I belong, there are only four people who have done that – Menzies, Fraser, Howard and Abbott. But, tonight is also an occasion to celebrate the contribution of The Sydney Institute to the public life, not only of Sydney, but also of Australia.

In reflecting on my topic tonight, I instantaneously came to the conclusion that, more than anything else, politics is a contest of ideas. It’s not a public relations tournament. It’s not just a talkfest – although there’s a lot of talk involved in politics. But, fundamentally, it is a contest of ideas. And that is why an organisation like The Sydney Institute is so enormously important. Because it’s been a forum – and may I say a very balanced and bipartisan forum – for people interested in political ideas and the contest of those ideas. Over the years – and we were reminded of it tonight with the display of photographs – the Institute has provided platforms for people, famous people from abroad such as Dubcek and for others who’ve come from our own localities to engage in that great contest of ideas. I congratulate Gerard and Anne and all the team at The Sydney Institute for the way in which you have been a standard bearer for the contest of political ideas.

I was thinking tonight of how I could best encapsulate some of the changes that have occurred in Australian politics between Menzies and Morrison, when somebody rather rudely said to me that he didn’t really think Menzies could spell the word twitter. Fundamentally, that is probably as good a description as any to pinpoint some of the changes that undoubtedly have occurred. There are many of them. Probably the greatest change that has occurred is the geostrategic and geopolitical environment in which our country exists. When Menzies was prime minister, politics around the world and certainly in Australia, internationally speaking, was dominated by the Cold War, the Cold War between the West, led by the United States, and Soviet Union imperialism dominating not only the countries of Eastern Europe and other parts of the world – but also the politics of our own nation.

The most momentous domestic political event of that era, the great split in the Australian Labor Party in the 1950s, was a direct product of the impact of the Cold War on Australian politics. Now, in the years that have gone by since Menzies left us at the beginning of 1966, that environment has changed. We’ve seen the collapse of Soviet imperialism and we’ve seen the extraordinary rise of China. China was an ideological threat and a distant country that we didn’t really understand in the 1950s and 1960s. Now of course China is our best customer. And the strength of Chinese demand for Australian resources was one of the reasons why we dodged the real bullet of the global financial downturn more than ten years ago.

The other great changes that have occurred involve the structure of our political system. Political parties in Australia now are no longer anything resembling what they were in the 1940s and 1950s – that is mass movements of the population. Membership of political parties is smaller, and all political parties are fracturing at the edges. When I was growing up in politics in Australia in the 1950s, I operated under what I called the 40/40/20 rule – 40 per cent always voted Liberal, 40 per cent voted Labor, and 20 per cent moved around in the middle. Now I often feel that it’s a 30/30/40 system because the committed support of the parties has reduced. Let me give you an illustration.

The Australian Labor Party reached its nadir in the 1960s at the 1966 election, but the primary vote of the Labor Party was still 40 per cent. Yet, in the recent NSW state election, it was down to 33 per cent and it’s been at that level in some previous federal elections. I can say the same thing about the support base of the party which I’m still proud to belong to. Political parties now are far less representative of the people in the community who vote for them. The base of political parties is not only numerically smaller, but the membership is less representative of the community than it used to be.

We’ve seen some internal structural changes in the makeup of our political system. The career path of a political staffer didn’t exist in 1974, when I was elected to federal parliament. Every federal member of parliament had one staffer who was essentially an electorate secretary, who was a skilled stenographer. I was somebody who experienced that kind of support, by just one person. Since then, of course, so much of that has changed.

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The background, the occupational background of many of the cabinets now are very different from what they were years ago. It may surprise many people to know that the last Chifley cabinet, which, of course was defeated at the election of 1949, that cabinet included many people such as the then Prime Minister Ben Chifley, who had a very proud trade union background. But that cabinet also included five farmers, one dentist, two lawyers and one tobacconist. (Now that’s practically a criminal offence, these days.) By contrast, the Gillard Government had no farmers, it had predominantly the backgrounds of former party officials or union officials, it had two lawyers, one teacher, one diplomat, but conspicuously no person who had any kind of business experience. And whilst the data would be different, the same kind of observations could be made about the composition of different cabinets in different ministries on the Coalition’s side of politics.

So, a great many things have changed. But, of course, there are some things that have remained absolutely constant. The most important of those is what I said at the beginning of my speech. That politics is fundamentally a contest of values and ideas. I learnt that very early in my political life. In the end, if you stand for something consistently, even though you may not win every argument, and certainly may not win every election, you will ultimately win the respect and the support of the Australian community.

There’s something else, of course, about Australian politics that has not changed over the period from Menzies to Morrison. I was reminded of that when I was reflecting on the first ever visit I paid, way back in 1970s, when I visited the United States for the first time as Treasurer.  There I met Dr Alan Greenspan. He was then Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers – in the Carter administration – having been appointed to that position by President Ford. He shook my hand. “Ah Mr Howard” he said, “you’re from Australia aren’t you? You’ve got the biggest middle class in the world.” And then we started to have a conversation about the middle class in the United States and the middle class in Australia. And it was something.

That exchange has stayed with me ever since, and it is because it is so true about our country. There are many things that are part of what I call the Australian achievement – and one of those is that through a combination of policy, to which both sides of politics at various stages have made a contribution, we have built, indeed proportionately, the largest middle class of any developed country in the world. This was endorsed only a few months ago by an analysis produced by Credit Suisse which looked at the various economies of the world. It conclusions show just how middle class Australia really is.

Median wealth per adult in Australia was first place, just ahead of Switzerland. Only 6 per cent of people in Australia have wealth per capita below $10 000 US versus 18 per cent in the United Kingdom, and 28 per cent in the United States. Now those two figures drive home very strongly just how middle class this country really is. And that is its most enduring economic and social strength. If there’s one thing that I would plead with all those involved in Australian politics at the present time to do, and that is to hang on for dear life with our middle class character as a nation. Because it is something to which all of us instinctively aspire. One of the great things that this country has done has been to build that middle class. It was a legacy of the Menzies government and contributions have been made to it by successive governments.

We often hear our welfare system derided, and I’m sure our welfare system does have a lot of faults. But it also has an enormous strength. In many ways Australia has found the sweet spot when it comes to a balanced welfare system. In many ways Australia has found the sweet spot when it comes to a balanced welfare system. We don’t have the harshness of the American laissez faire approach. The state of the United States that my wife and I have visited a lot in recent years is Texas, because one of our children lived there for an extended period of time. It’s a wonderful state and it’s got some wonderful people – and it produced a wonderful president who remains a very good friend of mine. But it’s a state that has a huge prison population, and a population in jail way above proportionally the same prison population in Australia which has roughly the same population as Texas. One of the flaws of the American social welfare system is that it is a little too harsh and it does push people unavoidably into crime.

By contrast, of course, the European system is far too paternalistic. And it’s far too difficult to change. Yet, in between those two extremes, Australia has found a balance. In so doing, we have once again demonstrated another great strength of our country, something that we should be very proud of as part of the Australian achievement, and that is that this nation has an enormous sense of balance. We don’t have endless debates, in the way they occur in many other developed countries, about the respective roles of the public and private sectors, in areas such as health and education. We have 34 per cent of Australian students educated in independent schools, and they operate side by side with a public education system that underpins the basic provision of education, irrespective of people’s incomes, all over our various states. We have a health system, which for all its flaws – and heavens every health system has got flaws – is a very balanced one. It’s a balance of the public and the private. And this reflects a capacity that this country has had for generations which is to achieve a great sense of balance through a common sense application of our challenges.

I think of our nation’s British inheritance – and we owe much to the British for the country that we have. The good thing about our British inheritance is that we took the good things and we rejected the bad things. We took the freedom of the press, we took parliamentary democracy, we took the rule of law, we took by and large their sense of humour. But we rejected their class distinctions and the aristocracy and the obsession with people’s backgrounds. As a nation, we collectively decided to judge people on their basic individual worth and the contribution that they were willing to make to our society.

Now if that may sound like some kind of paean of praise for our nation, well, it is. One of our failings, and we have many failings, is that we are too ready to accept a denigration of our past. That we are too ready to misstate or understate the contribution that this country has made in so many endeavours. It still astonishes me, and I still address it at various audiences from time to time, how few Australians understand that the secret ballot was pioneered in this country. How few Australians understand that women in Australia had equal franchise and equal participation in elections decades ahead of women in the United Kingdom, the United States or many other countries around the world. These are basic achievements, but our understanding and comprehension of them is very, very poor indeed.

So, when I reflect on things that we have done well, and things that we have done badly, and how much our country have changed since the days of Robert Gordon Menzies as prime minister, I must also reflect on those areas where things have remained the same. There is still a fundamental respect in this country for our institutions, but we should keep that respect in good repair. We should not take it for granted that our institutions will always maintain that continuity of respect. We must work hard at reminding all of our citizens of the contributions that have been made to democracy around the world by us, here in Australia.

The political parties that now occupy the Australian political stage are still fundamentally two great constellations – a constellation of the left, centred around the Australian Labor Party, and the constellation of the centre right, centred around the Liberal Party and the National Party. Both need to understand that complacency does not have any kind of reward. Any assumption that support is automatic and continuous and without challenge, as the years go by, will be doomed to political failure and public rebuke. And what we are witnessing at the present time is an assault on the supremacy of both of those parties and there is fracturing at the edges.

I’m not an apostle of gloom and am in fact a guy who has remained very much of the view that those two constellations will remain dominant in Australian politics for years into the future. But for that to be realised, and naturally I look at it from the point of view of my own side of politics, we need to reassert the primacy of values, and the primacy of ideas. We need to understand that all major successful political parties are in some way either formal coalitions such as we have between the Liberal Party and the National Party, or collections of people with varied views.

I’ve often described my own political party, the Liberal Party, as being the broad church of people of classical liberal intent and of conservative bent. That doesn’t mean to say they’re neatly divided into two identifiable groups. What it means is that on most issues people are a mixture of the two. I’ve reflected on my own political career. I think of some of the mildly conservative stances I might have taken, and I also think, of course, of some of the more liberal, classical liberal stances that I’ve taken. Gerard will be aware of the long commitment I’ve had to labour market reform and the freeing of the industrial relations system in Australia. I see that very much as being an exercise in classical liberalism, the elevation of the role of the individual in the workplace. Of course, the march of history is still in favour of that.

It’s interesting to reflect that when Bob Menzies ceased being Prime Minister of Australia, 64 per cent of all Australians in the workforce belonged to a trade union. Now that is only 15 per cent, of which 10 per cent are to be found in the private sector. Paradoxically enough, the existing industrial relations system of this country, affords a greater role of the trade union movement than it did some 15 or 20 years ago. But it’s a reminder to all political parties that allegiance is not something that can ever be taken for granted.

If I have a criticism of public discourse at the present time, it is that it has lapsed too readily into the belief that it can all be solved by slogans. When we think of changes that have occurred in the Australian community and which affect politics in a superficial way, none has been more dominant of course than the change in the role of media. When I left politics – or shall I put it more honestly, when politics asked me to leave – in 2007, there was no Facebook, there was no Twitter. I thought YouTube was very exciting when I, with the assistance of people like David Luff who’s here tonight, placed material on YouTube. But social media has had an enormous impact. Yet, we shouldn’t allow it to have a permanent impact. We shouldn’t allow it to rob us of a capacity to engage in civilised discourse. I still believe that the Australian people will listen to an argument in favour of economic reform. I believe this as somebody who has been involved in debates on economic reform for many years, both in responding to sensible reforms proposed by a government that I opposed, in my years as opposition, but also in reforms that my government advocated. The Australian public will listen to reform provided two conditions are satisfied. They’ve got to be satisfied that it’s good for Australia, because at heart Australians do care about the collective welfare of their country. They’ve also got to be satisfied that the less fortunate, the vulnerable in the community, will be carefully looked after.

One of the most difficult of the economic reforms which I was involved in was the introduction of the GST. The reason we ultimately won that argument was because those two conditions had been satisfied. In the end, the people accepted, albeit grudgingly on the part of many, that we needed that tax reform. They were satisfied that the provisions made for the vulnerable were adequate.

So, let me say to all of you tonight as we gather to honour an institution which has made a contribution to sensible reasoned economic, political and cultural debate, that the Australian people remain not only optimistic, but they remain open to persuasion if you can make your case. You won’t win the argument by slogans. You won’t win the argument by bigotry or prejudice. And you won’t win the argument trying to persuade a fundamentally middle class community that inequality is rising, because inequality in Australia is not rising. The middle class character of the country has been retained. You won’t win those sort of arguments with that sort of excessive rhetoric. But you can win an argument based on values. You can win an argument which appeals to the patriotism of the Australian community. And you can win an argument if you satisfy the Australian community that the policy you are arguing for is one that is going to look after the more vulnerable in our community.

Gerard, to you and Anne and the members of The Sydney Institute, thank you for the contribution that you have made to sensible, reasoned debate in our country. There’s nothing more exciting in public life than to feel that you’ve been involved in an argument and in a debate. It’s really terrific if you’ve won the argument and the debate – but it is fundamentally satisfying if you can at least say to yourself that you’ve had the opportunity of putting the argument, that it’s been a genuine contest of ideas, and the Australian public have made a reasoned decision and a reasoned conclusion. And you, in The Sydney Institute, should be very proud of the contribution that you have made to that process over the last 30 years.

 

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INTRODUCTORY REMARKS BY GERARD HENDERSON

 

The Honourable John Howard OM AC needs no introduction.  He is one of best known Australians. So, tonight, I will use the opportunity to talk about The Sydney Institute in our 30^th year before I talk about John Howard in his 80^th year.

I want to thank my chair Jacquelynne Willcox and her predecessors (especially Nick Johnson who has just stepped down), my other Board members and their predecessors along with our members and corporate supporters.  And our present and former staff – including my friend John Kunkel who worked at the Institute as a young man and is now the Prime Minister’s chief-of-staff.

The Sydney Institute has developed a great sense of camaraderie which is more evident when Joshua & Michelle Berger take the Institute family, at least once a year, around Sydney Harbour in their yacht the M.Y. Tango.  I should also thank Sky News which films our public talks – this makes it possible for our many supporters outside Sydney – along with many young supporters with family commitments – to follow our program on television.

I first met John Howard in the early 1980s when I was employed in the Commonwealth Public Service in Melbourne.

I was not a natural public servant.  My managers decided that I needed a morale boost and sent me for a training session which was expected to lead to a greater assertiveness in my work environment.

One afternoon in late 1983, just after returning from one of these sessions, the phone rang and a voice said: “Gerard, would you like to work for me?”  Seizing the moment, I replied, “Yes, who’s calling?”

And, so, it came to pass that I worked for John Howard in 1984, 1985 and 1986 when he was deputy leader of the Opposition and later leader of the Opposition.

I learnt much from my time on Mr Howard’s staff.  I was much impressed by his reliability and punctuality and his scrupulous honesty in handling parliamentary entitlements.  And, of course, then – as now – John Howard believed in many causes – including the importance of economic reform.  Also, he was a hard worker and a great family man.

I first got to know Janette Howard on a visit to China in 1985.  In Shanghai, we stayed in an historic hotel. After being shown to our rooms, I found that I had to share accommodation with a large rat. In panic, I went and knocked on the Howards’ door and advised of my plight.

Whereupon Janette said: “I can handle this”. She marched down to my room – and yelled and stomped on the floor. The rodent disappeared, not to return. As a man who admires strong women, I was mightily impressed.

At the end of 1986, I received a call from the Sydney businessman Jim Bain who asked me to take over an old organisation in Sydney with a view to reviving it.  Jim and Janette made a very generous personal financial contribution over three years.  Without Jim’s role we would not be here tonight. Thank you, Jim.

Following early successes, in May 1989 we closed down the organisation and established The Sydney Institute. In August, we formally launched The Sydney Institute with the (then) NSW premier Nick Greiner and the (then) NSW Opposition leader Bob Carr as guest speakers.

Towards the end of 1989, Lalita Mathias joined the Institute as our executive assistant. She had just arrived with her family on a plane from Bombay (now Mumbai) four days before.  Early in the interview, I asked Lalita: “Who is the premier of NSW?”  She replied “Nick Greiner”.  That was impressive – she started the next day and is still with us

From Day One, we had gender and political balance in our program – as the slide presentation tonight demonstrates. Kim Beazley was the first to give a public talk followed by private dinner.  When in government and opposition, Kim said publicly just how valuable the Institute was in providing a platform to both sides of mainstream politics. Gareth Evans made a similar comment. As has John Howard and others. I should mention in passing that Gladys Berejiklian first addressed the Institute in October 1997.

One afternoon at 41 Phillip Street, during the time of the Howard Government, the door-bell rang on the ground floor. A voice said: “I want to speak to Gerard.” I replied: “Who is it?” The person responded: “Let me in.” And so it went on for a while. Eventually I surrendered and pressed the door release button – and heard footsteps on the tiles below. The voice said: “It’s Paul Keating here”.  Whereupon I replied: “Sorry Paul, I thought it was some kind of nutter.” To which, Paul replied: “Mate, I am some kind of nutter.

In a recent discussion with Anne, I remarked on my surprise, when working with John Howard, how polite and helpful he was to the men and women in the Canberra Press Gallery – who were frequently so critical of him. Anne’s response was: “Well, John became the second longest serving prime minister in Australian history – and you ended up a mere scribbler.”

Speaking as a scribbler and a historian, I regard – in chronological order – Robert Menzies, Bob Hawke and John Howard as Australia’s greatest prime ministers in the modern era. They compare well with the most successful leaders of Britain and the United States in the same time frame.

John Howard’s great strength is that – agree with him or not – there is no doubt about where he stands on the key national and international issues of our time. Moreover, I have always admired his enormous personal courage in advocating, at times, unpopular and unfashionable causes – when the easiest thing to do would be to say or write nothing.

I am honoured tonight to invite Mr Howard to speak to The Sydney Institute on the topic “Has politics really changed? From Menzies to Morrison”.