UNITY IN AUTONOMY LAUNCH – JOHN ANDERSON

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.

 LAUNCH OF UNITY OF AUTONOMY

JOHN ANDERSON

It’s a great honour to be here.

And thanks to Zachary Gorman, the editor of Unity in Autonomy: A Federal History of the Founding of the Liberal Party, along with Georgina Downer and the team at the Robert Menzies Institute for the wisdom of including a chapter on the Country Party – which, as you know, in time became the Nationals.

All the Liberal Party leaders who became prime minister after defeating incumbent Labor governments understood the need to govern in coalition with the Country Party/Nationals. This was so with Robert Menzies in 1949, Malcom Fraser in 1975, John Howard in 1996 and Tony Abbott in 2013 – as will be the case if Peter Dutton comes to office in the first half of 2025.

The Nationals contribute to the Liberal Party’s success – and the Nationals ensure

that that there can be a right-of-centre Coalition government. In return, the

Nationals become part of a right-of-centre government.

I would like to say at the outset that I owe Terry Barnes a great debt of gratitude because he put a lot of time and effort into pulling together the chapter that appears under my name. Terry beavered away at finding some pretty old source material, which every good historian does, and my plea would be that I’m too busy, but the truth might be that I’m not a good enough historian to have dug it all up. So, I really wanted to thank you very much indeed for your broader contribution, but also everything that you put into this work.

There’s no doubt that trust is important in any set of relationships – to bastardise the Biblical saying, whenever two or three are gathered, trust becomes an issue. If we trust those around us, we can work together cooperatively to achieve better outcomes for everyone involved. To the extent that we don’t trust those around us, we’re looking for the exit. That’s human reality, we look for safety, we look for security.

There’s the world of difference between a trustful community and a community that isn’t. For example, the research globally, by leading economists, points to the reality that prosperous societies are trusting societies. High trust societies are societies that do well economically. And this is relevant to our national life today at a time when, as David Brooks in the US puts it, never before have we been as atomised, as divided and as untrusting in Western cultures, as we are today.

I mention that because, in his book Lazarus Rising, John Howard said that as leaders of the Coalition we trusted each other completely. That was true, even though we didn’t always agree. The times when we had sharp differences though, were resolved in a civilised way, on the basis of trust and negotiation. And I’ve always believed that’s the right and proper way for coalitions to behave.

What had happened during the Hawke Labor government years was that the farm communities and rural communities’ leadership started to sharpen its thinking. The influence of the New South Wales Farmers Association, for example, was quite profound. For my own part, I have to say since he’s here today, I remember sitting as a young member of the National Party, at National Party conferences, hearing Nick Greiner outlining, with clarity and with logic, what he was seeking to do in New South Wales – in a way that was quite compelling. Andrew Robb was having a great influence in those days in agripolitics, so was Ian McLachlan. I represented two and a half of the wealthiest and most productive agricultural shires in Australia. They wanted a better economic environment in which to operate. So, I went into the National Party room in 1989, at a time when there was great ferment in rural politics in Australia, to ask what was the best way forward? What were the great priorities? And, rightly, the view emerged increasingly, that what was good for the Australian economy was also good for regional Australia.

Regional Australia prospered in the same set of circumstances as the nation prospered, and the emphasis was on productivity, on tax reform, on debt reduction. I remember saying to the House once, in response to a question, that the floating dollar produced a currency that on average was lower than when it had been set by the politicians, greatly to the advantage of farmers. Note that a one per cent reduction in the value of a currency was worth more to farm income across Australia and rural communities than a one per cent cut in interest rates.

This was an amazing statistic, but with this sort of economic literacy playing out vigorously in my own party room – the old guard versus the new – by the time we’d got to 1996 we were ready for government. It had taken a long time and speaking for my own party it was largely because we’d had vigorous debate, we’d really listened to people who understood economics, to people in our own sector who were leading, and not following opinion polls and what have you.

All that enabled us to move forward in an atmosphere of trust. It’s not to say it was easy, especially the first few years; and it’s easy to forget that we’d been in opposition for a long time. The only two people who had a Cabinet experience as such were John Howard and John Moore. The rest of us had to start learning from scratch how to run a department and juggle the demands of things like expenditure review committees and big constituencies and all of the vagaries that went with life in government. But, bit by bit, we pulled it together and made a reasonable job of it.

Going back to the point about trust and the importance of trust, it worries me enormously that you can see in research right across the Western World that trust is breaking down. The ANU has been doing some valuable work on trust in the political system in Australia. The Australian National University has been tracking it since 1971. It’s a pretty dismal graph of a long-term decline in trust in the Federal Parliament and the occupants thereof generally described. There used to be, however, major blips when the government was exchanged by the people for a fresh approach. There was a massive blip in confidence and trust in the government in 1996 – but it wandered away and the graph continued on its merry way south after a reasonable length of time. There was an even higher blip in 2007 when Kevin Rudd was elected, but it collapsed almost immediately. And the only real little blip since then was when Prime Minister Scott Morrison closed the borders at the beginning of Covid; that injected some trust back into the system, but the picture overall is pretty abysmal.

You think of the Banking and Financial Services Royal Commission and the way in which the fall from grace of many of the majors has impacted. The AMP’s official historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote that when it was established and became a roaring success, led in no part if I remember correctly by John Fairfax of Fairfax fame in the city, that AMP became the most trusted institution in the emerging country after the churches. Where are we today in terms of trust? The Royal commission left people wondering whether you could trust any financial institution with your buck. That’s a bit blunt and it’s a bit crude but you get the point that I’m driving at. This breakdown of trust is a very serious issue.

So, what’s the good news. Well, the good news is that you’re all here tonight participating in the rebuilding of our culture. You’re all here because you’re committed to us restoring a sense of unity of overcoming the devastating impact of atomisation and identity politics, the salami slicing of our culture into many little groups who instinctively resort to insisting that I and my friends are right and everybody else is wrong. Which destroys trust. I don’t think we understand the impact on trust of the atomisation of our culture and the emphasis all the time on our identity as opposed to the things we hold in common.

But we are seeing a tremendous effort to try and highlight again the failures, for want of a better word, of wokeism. You still get asked what wokeism is. It’s an African American term, which means that you are awakened, when you understand that the essential line between good and evil is based on skin colour. That’s actually what it is, you’ve been awakened. It’s critical theory in essence. And there’s a massive push back against it.

Whatever else you can say about the United States and the recent presidential election, the fascinating fact is to be found in how women voted in far larger numbers for Trump than they said they were going to in the polls. Why? Many of them have sons, they’re sick to death of their boys being described as toxic simply because they’re male. On my podcast series, one person commented, “I am a black working man. A certain American former president said that I should vote according to my skin colour, but actually I’m more concerned about feeding my family as a working American than I am being told to vote on the basis of the colour of my skin.” Evidence is now emerging that because of the overreach, in this age of wokeism, young men in particular are moving away from a culture that describes them as toxic simply because they’re masculine. They’re saying that’s not me, I don’t want to be like that.

Jordan Peterson has opened the door on this. The reason young men flock to hear him is that he tells them they’re not toxic simply because of their gender. The first time I heard him speak I wondered what he meant. He stood up in front of a largely youthful male audience and said, “Don’t think a therapy culture will provide the answers to your problems.” I thought what does he mean by that? He said, “Well, in a therapy culture, you’re either a victim or you’re a victim maker.” It seems that today everyone’s a victim, and yes, there are victim makers, and the victim makers nearly always turn out to be people of my gender and my skin colour. As a result, young men are saying this is just not good enough, I don’t want to be like that, I’m not all that bad.

The seeds of real hope are there at a time when frankly we are at a civilisational moment. We really do need to pick ourselves up. We really do need to re-establish belief in the foundational varieties that our forefathers gave us. We need to stop demeaning ourselves by decrying the men and women on whose shoulders, as a free and prosperous society, that we stand. And you’re all participating in that.

Zachary, I think that your work and the Robert Menzies Institute’s work, everything that you’ve done down there with Georgina Downer, is fantastic. It’s a privilege to play a little role in your work as a staunch Coalitionist.