Extract from ABC News
Analysis
A number of post-mortems have been written about the Liberal Party in the wake of its historic loss in the Aston by-election last weekend.
Has the party lost touch with the electorate? Did it all start with John Howard?
I'd like to add something to the discussion that may help to explain how we got here, because it's not just a story of a few failed policies.
Are you conservative or liberal (or progressive)?
In 2023, Australia's younger generations are voting for progressive causes and they haven't been turning conservative at the same rate as previous generations had.
The Liberal-National Coalition (LNP) looks increasingly on the nose with the electorate, and some members of the LNP seem unable to understand why.
But as a political party, no matter what you think you stand for, you have to deal with the way voters see you.
You may see yourself as liberal, but if some voters think you're an unreconstructed reactionary they'll treat you as such at the ballot box.
For example, one of the founders of the Liberal Party, Robert Menzies, was great at convincing voters that a vote for Labor was a vote for communism.
Did it matter that Labor wasn't a communist party? No. But the perception that it was sympathetic to the communist cause helped to remove Labor from government in 1949, and keep it out of power through the 1950s and 1960s.
If you don't like the way voters see you, you have to convince them that you're something else.
Judith Brett, in her book Robert Menzies' Forgotten People, said people of her generation and political persuasion "who were young in the 1950s and 1960s," felt cultural life in Australia in the Menzies era was frozen by smugness, fear and indifference, and dominated by values and assumptions of a bygone age.
"Menzies in full evening dress, greeting Queen Elizabeth in 1963 with the lines 'I did but see her passing by, And yet I love her till I die,' was a ludicrous anachronism, holding Australia back from the bright new decade of youth, damming her energy and creativity behind a wall of cautious conservatism," she wrote.
Did that perception of Mr Menzies as a conservative clash with the "liberalism" he said he stood for?
To answer that question, it can help to remember the context in which Mr Menzies chose the name "Liberal" for his political party.
In September 1944, when Mr Menzies wrote to the leaders of the various non-Labor organisations then in existence and proposed holding a national conference to consider forming a new and unified political party, he was clear about his intentions.
"The time seems opportune for an effort to secure unity of action and organisation among those political groups which stand for a liberal, progressive policy and are opposed to socialism with its bureaucratic administration and restriction of personal freedom," Mr Menzies wrote.
The next month, in his opening speech at that conference, he said he hoped that by the end of the gathering everyone will "express our common adherence to the broad outlines of a liberal and progressive faith which will have in it the foundation upon which a new generation can really hope to build a new Australia".
Mr Menzies said his new political movement should also try to avoid falling back into old habits.
"We have, partly by our own fault and partly by some extremely clever propaganda by the Labour Party [sic], been put into the position of appearing to resist political and economic progress," he said.
"In other words, on far too many questions we have found our role to be simply that of the man who says 'No'."
"Once this atmosphere is created it is quite simple for us to be branded as reactionaries ... [but] there is no room in Australia for a party of reaction. There is no useful place for a policy of negation," he said.
And what should their new party's name be?
According to Graeme Starr, author of The Liberal Party of Australia: A Documentary History, there was no immediate unanimity about the choice of name.
Dr Starr said some Victorian supporters of Mr Menzies' new political movement had already considered various possibilities for the party's name and they'd rejected "Liberal" as unsuitable because of the declining relevance of the British Liberal Party. They also rejected "Conservative".
They preferred "National-Progressive" or "Progressive".
See their list below. It shows the names they considered and the comments they made about each one.
Now, that's not to say the views of those Victorians were representative.
Mr Menzies preferred the name "Liberal" and that's the name that was chosen by a committee. And two decades later, in his memoir Afternoon Light, he explained why he liked that name.
"Why 'Liberal'? This will need explaining to both English and American readers," he wrote.
"The Liberal Party in the United Kingdom is a survival of the great party of Gladstone and Asquith which for so many generations had disputed the field with the Conservative Party.
"When the Labour Party became, first, a force and then a major force, the Liberal Party became a residual party, destined to be a small group at Westminster," he said.
He said that diminished Liberal Party seemed content to cast itself as a third party, hoping to hold the balance of power between Labour and Conservative.
But that meant it never aimed for power in its own right and that's not what he wanted for his new party in Australia.
He had bigger ambitions.
"When, therefore, we decided to call the new and united party the Liberal Party, we were adopting no analogy to the Liberal Party in the United Kingdom," Mr Menzies wrote.
"On the contrary, we were aiming at political progress and power in our own right. We took the name 'Liberal' because we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary but believing in the individual, his rights, and his enterprise, and rejecting the Socialist panacea," he said.
Keynes was also a liberal
Fascinatingly, the British economist John Maynard Keynes also felt himself philosophically inclined towards liberalism, but in the British tradition.
In his famous essay Am I a Liberal?, he listed all of the problems he had with the Conservative and Labour parties in the UK at that time.
He said the British Labour Party was superficially more attractive, but on closer inspection it had severe problems, particularly with its aggressive Left flank.
"It is a class party, and the class is not my class," he wrote.
"If I am going to pursue sectional interests at all, I shall pursue my own ... the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie."
By that point in the 1920s, Mr Keynes was already coming to believe that future economic problems would require governments to deliberately aim at controlling and directing economic forces in the interests of social justice and stability.
But how could you trust governments?
He said government abuses in the 1920s, by Fascism on one side and Bolshevism on the other, with socialism offering no middle course, made it hard to see how any government could be entrusted with the power to meet those technical challenges.
"I suggest, nevertheless, that the true destiny of New Liberalism is to seek their solution," he said.
"I incline to believe that the Liberal Party is still the best instrument of future progress — if only it had strong leadership and the right programme," he said.
Of course, a decade later, Mr Keynes would end up revolutionising economics when he published his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
His book would inspire western democratic governments, after World War II, to rebuild their peacetime economies with deliberate efforts to create full employment.
In Australia, that full employment policy platform was introduced by Labor leaders John Curtin and Ben Chifley between 1945 and 1949, and when Mr Menzies won the 1949 election his Liberal Party inherited that economic program.
And over time, Mr Menzies would come to boast of his own record on full employment.
He was also proud of his government's role in creating the "Australian Dream" of widespread home ownership, by deliberately intervening in the housing market, as Dr Cameron Murray reminded us recently.
He believed it was really important to get as many Australians as possible into home ownership.
In some ways, Mr Menzies was the type of liberal leader who Mr Keynes could entrust with more power to push the economy in certain directions.
Neoliberals say liberals aren't true liberals
Which brings us to the final sections.
None of this is to say that when the Liberal Party of Australia was founded it was the same as the Liberal Party in the UK.
It's not saying that Mr Menzies thought his party represented "progressive" values in the way we use that term today.
And it's not saying his Liberal Party wasn't conservative, because, being the unified party of Australia's political right, it clearly had large conservative elements.
But which camp did Mr Menzies personally fall into?
Perhaps a way of answering that is to look at how people on the political right came to view him (and his party).
And that's where Friedrich Hayek comes in.
Mr Hayek was an Austrian economist and one of the founders of "neoliberalism."
He was very good friends with John Maynard Keynes, but they had severe disagreements on economic matters and Mr Hayek spent his life trying to rid of the world of Mr Keynes' influence on economic policy.
When neoliberalism came to Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, its policy prescriptions helped to dismantle our old full employment framework.
And lots of its energy was directed against traditional conservatives and liberals for their perceived failure to provide an alternative to the direction in which Australian society had headed in the post-war years.
In 1960, Mr Hayek wrote an essay called Why I Am Not A Conservative, which was a harbinger of that radical mood.
"The liberal today must more positively oppose some of the basic conceptions which most conservatives share with the socialists," he wrote.
"What the liberal must ask, first of all, is not how fast or how far we should move, but where we should move. In fact, he differs much more from the collectivist radical of today than does the conservative."
Mr Hayek said his own political philosophy was often described as "conservative," but that's not what he was. He also wasn't really "liberal," despite having used that descriptor at the start of his essay.
He said his actual position most closely reflected the Whigs of yesteryear, who were the true party of liberty.
"What I have called 'liberalism' has little to do with any political movement that goes by the name today," he wrote in that 1960 essay.
"What I should want is a word which describes the party of life, the party that favours free growth and spontaneous evolution. But I have racked my brain unsuccessfully to find a descriptive term which commends itself," he said.
When neoliberalism arrived in Australia
Nineteen years later — in 1979 — the founder of Australia's first neoliberal think-tank (the Centre for Independent Studies, created in 1976), Greg Lindsay, revived that 1960 essay of Mr Hayek's.
With Australia's economy suffering from stagflation, Mr Lindsay said traditional conservatism offered little help for the country, and as an intellectual force, true liberalism had been all but dormant "for most of this century".
He said he wanted to rekindle the flame of liberalism by reviving the traditions of "classical liberals" like John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith, who had "unleashed mighty forces for freedom".
"Human energy, enterprise and markets were to be set free to create and produce to the benefit of all," he wrote of their influence.
"Taxes were reduced or abolished, controls and regulations eliminated from land, labour and capital alike. The entrepreneur was at last set free."
We know where that movement eventually led.
Fast forward to 2023, and Australia's LNP coalition and the Labor Party have both championed neoliberal policies for years, to varying degrees.
In that time, wealth and income inequality have increased, housing experts have declared the Australian Dream of widespread home ownership dead, and successive governments have failed to take climate change seriously.
Recently, a former Reserve Bank governor, Bernie Fraser, said neoliberalism had made Australia less fair and more unequal, and it had hampered the RBA's ability to improve the welfare and prosperity of all Australians.
And on the whole, voters are increasingly abandoning both major parties in Australia, but they're abandoning the Liberals in a more pronounced way.
Would it be instructive to ask Australians what they think liberalism stands for, and what it would take for them to vote Liberal again.
A vast improvement in housing affordability? An abundance of full-time jobs that pay well? A huge effort to repair our natural environment and overhaul our energy system? Reform of our tax system to improve intergenerational equity?
If a party committed to that I'd vote for them.
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