When the war is over
We have a duty to revive liberalism and wind back the power of the state in post-pandemic Australia. By Nick Cater.
On a late autumn evening during the darkest days of World War Two, Robert Menzies delivered a radio talk describing the pathway Australia should follow once victory had been won.
Australians and the freedoms they enjoyed had never been in such peril. Three weeks earlier, 152 Japanese bombers escorted by 36 Mitsubishi fighters had unleashed a deluge of munitions upon Darwin. Tunnels in Sydney’s Town Hall station were being converted into air raid shelters and, within a fortnight, Japanese submarines would enter Sydney Harbour and fire missiles at naval vessels at anchor. Yet Menzies, confident that Australia and its allies had the courage to win the military conflict, turned his attention to the culture war and the creeping threat of socialism.
It would be laughable to compare the coronavirus with our wartime enemies, despite the virus’s suspicious origins in China, a country ruled by Communists who wish to overturn the peaceful rules-based order that has been our protection for the last 70 years or so. Yet in some ways, the public health campaign that consumes us now is not dissimilar to the total wars we fought last century. The emergency powers evoked by our governments resemble those imposed in wartime. Much of the machinery of state has been directed towards the campaign and priority has been given to warfare over the needs of non-combatants. And once again our liberties are at stake, this time not from the intentions of a hostile enemy but from what we are doing to ourselves.
Four years ago, 75 years to the minute after Menzies’ Forgotten People address, his words were heard again on the Macquarie Radio network in a moving recitation by actor Peter Cousens. Among the 300 people who witnessed the speech as it was delivered live in Old Parliament House were three former Liberal leaders, two of whom had lost their jobs to the same Party Room challenger. Their common nemesis, the serving prime minister, was diplomatically seated on a separate table. Agreeing on the order of proceedings had taken some negotiating, since the protocols guiding precedence are somewhat fluid in such circumstances. As the event’s organiser, I kept the proposed finale for the event to myself, to avoid complicating matters still further.
The Forgotten People broadcast is not short. Menzies was allotted 45 minutes in the schedule by 2UE and its affiliates, beginning at 9.15 pm on May 22, 1942. I was concerned that such a lengthy performance and the complexity of the language might test the attention span of an audience in the age of Twitter. In commercial radio ears are money. Would Macquarie Radio’s management blame me for selling them a pup?
I left my seat and moved to the back of the room where I could watch the audience react. From the opening words to the powerful conclusion, Cousens had their undivided attention. No one glanced at their phone or was struggling with the weight of their eyelids. The audience responded to Menzies’s ironic dry humour with wry laughter and were transfixed by the melody of the crafted oration. This was much more than a journey back in time, however. The message of Forgotten People is enduring and speaks directly to our contemporary challenges.
“The great vice of democracy - a vice which is exacting a bitter retribution from it at this moment - is that for a generation we have been busy getting ourselves on to the list of beneficiaries and removing ourselves from the list of contributors, as if somewhere there was somebody else's wealth and somebody else's effort on which we could thrive.
“To discourage ambition, to envy success, to have achieved superiority, to distrust independent thought, to sneer at and impute false motives to public service - these are the maladies of modern democracy, and of Australian democracy in particular.”
The 35 radio talks in the Forgotten People series, broadcast weekly in 1942, were a feat of intellectual leadership without parallel in Australian public life. Published as a book the following year, they framed the philosophy that united a fractured centre right under the banner of the Liberal Party of Australia in 1944 and remain a source of inspiration and instruction to this day. Menzies’s thoughts gave the party the intellectual clarity and moral purpose that enabled it to win 19 of the 29 federal elections it has fought. The secret of the party’s electoral success, despite the human frailties of its members, is not difficult to fathom. When the party remains true to the principles Menzies articulated, when it empowers the unorganised and un-self-conscious middle class, it does well. When it becomes distracted by the interests of the rich and powerful, special interest groups or rent-seekers, it fares badly. It is as simple as that.
No centre-right party in the English-speaking world has been blessed with such a firm foundation. Other conservative leaders have inspired us over the years, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan for example, but none of them had the opportunity to shape their parties at conception nor is it certain that they had the fortitude and intellect to have done so. The Liberal Party, and its permanent Coalition partners, has been in office in Canberra for 50 of the 75 years since it fought its first election, a record better than Republican presidents, or centre-right parties in Britain, New Zealand and Canada.
Yet socialism, like coronavirus, will probably never be eradicated and will always remain in our system. The utopian instinct it satisfies is alive in every generation, and the expansion of higher education that begun under Menzies provided a fertile environment for it to spread. Communism, as Marx and Engels conceived it, has thankfully had its day. Its essential thinking, however, that the state is better able to manage human affairs than an independent people, is as strong as ever. The instinct to order society from the top, with coercion if necessary, rather than trust citizens to establish social order by consent, grows stronger. If we have learned nothing else from this pandemic, we have surely learned that.
The presence of our 25th, 28th and 29th prime ministers for the anniversary recital of Forgotten People, together with our 12th prime minister’s daughter, Heather Henderson, was a testimony to the enduring strength of the Liberal tradition Menzies founded. The man who was to become Australia’s 30th prime minister was also present. The then-treasurer was occupied with the task of restoring the Budget to balance, fired by the Liberal conviction that the money we carelessly refer to as government money has been taken from citizens or borrowed on their behalf. Dealing with the legacy of Labor’s spending sprees is an obligation that can absorb Liberal governments, but it is not their only purpose. There is a moral as well as an economic imperative: the restoration and protection of dignity and justice that is almost always eroded by Labor’s levelling schemes. Addressing them requires a degree of emotional intelligence that economically focussed governments sometimes find hard to muster, but as Menzies was fond of reminding Liberals, the most important things in a civilised democracy cannot be measured in pounds, shillings and pence.
“If the motto is to be "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you will die, and if it chances you don't die, the State will look after you; but if you don't eat, drink and be merry and save, we shall take your savings from you", then the whole business of life would become foundation-less. Are you looking forward to a breed of men after the war who will have become boneless wonders? Leaners grow flabby; lifters grow muscles. Men without ambition readily become slaves.”
There have been many backseat drivers as our governments have tried to steer an uncharted course through this pandemic. I have been one of them, believing that there is a different road that could have been taken, one that would have jarred less with our liberal principles. This is not to diminish the achievements of our governments, who have demonstrably saved lives that would otherwise have been lost. The challenge of dealing with a novel virus as infectious as this one that preys particularly upon the elderly and sick, the people towards whom we have a duty of care, is considerable. Our leaders have been called upon to make weighty decisions with limited information or time. Australia is blessed with a world-class health service and lockable borders, both of which have served us well. The cause of much of what has gone wrong has its origins in our unusual Constitution with its divided responsibilities and the age-old problem that the governments who spend most of the money don’t have to raise it.
Nevertheless, there were other strategies we might have adopted that would not have carried such an immense human cost. There were plausible solutions that would not have required the state to trespass so far or so insensitively into our personal lives, that would not have required draconian policing or the deployment of the army on our streets. The control of social behaviour by the enforcement of arbitrary state regulation is part of daily life in some countries, but it is not the way we do things here.
Social order in Australia is maintained with a force more powerful than coercion. In a tolerant liberal democracy like ours, the rules are willingly obeyed by people who have regard for the welfare of the community of others to which they belong. Consent is the binding force of Australia’s social fabric and the rule under which our police should operate. They are not members of a disciplined hierarchy operating at the government's command, but citizens in uniform who secure the willing co-operation of the public to ensure obedience to the law. They must refrain from usurping the powers of the judiciary, recognising that it is not their job to judge guilt or punish the guilty. These conventions are part of our precious inheritance of liberalism. We should not lightly disregard them, especially under the pretext of protecting the public. Ultimately, the rule of law, common law and the separation of powers provides the best protection any people, anywhere, could desire.
Liberals, in contrast to libertarians, understand that there are circumstances when our liberties must be curtailed, since our rights are attached to a duty to safeguard the rights of others. Our concern to protect everyone’s health as best as we can and prevent avoidable deaths in a pandemic will, of course, require the temporary curtailment of some freedoms. Liberalism, however, is a philosophy, not a rule book, where duties and rights are balanced by common sense. One person’s right to a healthy retirement, for example, untroubled by a novel virus that can be particularly cruel to a people of a certain age, should be respected as far as we can. Yet that right is not absolute. It must be balanced against the freedom to worship, the freedom to earn a living or operate a business or the freedom of teenagers to mingle with their peers to alleviate adolescent distress.
In everyday life, these are matters that free people who respect the rules can generally work out for themselves. When that decision is made by a chief health officer we are in trouble, for while we expect public health experts to be better versed in virology than the rest of us, none of them possess the wisdom of Solomon.
As liberals, we don’t seek perfection from our bureaucracies, we just pray that the exceptional powers they have been granted will not last. We long for the day when QR codes, permits for interstate travel and two-metre rules are just a bad memory. We look forward to partying like it’s 1945 when the tape is removed from park benches and we can stand upright in a pub with a beer in our hands. Those of us who put on a paper mask rather than one made of cloth as a gesture of hope that all things must pass, trust we will one day be vindicated.
Menzies was studying law at the University of Melbourne when emergency measures were enacted in World War One. His prize-winning essay, ‘The Rule of Law During the War,’ written in his teens, demonstrates a clearer appreciation of the delicacy of freedom than many of our adult leaders have shown today:
“Some infringements of the ‘Liberty of the subject’ are inevitable in any war. Such infringements have been considerable during the past two years; the power of the Executive, has been much increased, and the full authority of the common law Courts greatly hindered.
“All these things may be justified by the gravity of the national emergency; by virtue of this alone do we acquiesce in such an extensive abrogation of the Rule of Law.
“Should the almost arbitrary power of the Executive prove to be anything else but temporary, a very great disaster would have befallen the English Constitution.”
As I write this essay in August 2021, I am confident the war we have been called upon to fight will be over by Christmas. Which Christmas I cannot say, nor does it seem clear what victory will look like, since the coronavirus shows no willingness to surrender. Whenever we reach this uneasy truce, the immediate task for liberals is reconstruction, to repair the damage to the liberal democracy we once imaged was the birth right of every Australian. We cannot be sure of that now.
We must begin by taking stock of transfer of power from individuals to the state and begin returning them one by one. We must emancipate our fellow citizens from the tangle of emergency rules that has enslaved them. There should, of course, be several thorough independent inquiries into what has occurred. But their aim will not be to punish or to shame, but to learn how to do better, since mistakes provide the knowledge for innovation.
Inevitably, it will require a little more humility from our governments which must reconsider what is properly their business and the risks which they should shoulder. When victory was declared against Japan, on August 15, 1945, Menzies was quick to recognise that Australia’s future lay in the hands of its people.
“The first task of government, therefore, is to restore what we call ‘private business activity’ instead of treating it, as Labour politicians frequently do, as Public Enemy Number One.
“I also ask you to remember that employment in public works is in its nature very spasmodic; that it provides temporary jobs, and that it very seldom offers a real prospect of continuous employment, with progress and promotion.”
Government cannot create jobs or prosperity except by sleight of hand. The wealth we will need to unburden future generations from the debt we have accumulated in the last 18 months will be earned by industrious and enterprising citizens. The role of governments is limited to the creation of the conditions in which competitive enterprise thrives. It is to encourage people to take risks and the hope of reward without the need to seek permission, knowing that the rules are fair. This is the kind of permissive society for which Liberals should crave.
Whatever it is that divides good people on the centre-right, we can be confident we have a unity ticket on this one. The economic arguments that split Liberals in the 1980s have been settled. Anyone who is still not convinced of the primacy of competitive markets in most sectors most of the time is in the wrong party.
As Cousens reached the powerful climax of Menzies’ Forgotten People address in Old Parliament House, the post-traumatic shock of the events in the Party Room eight months earlier momentarily lessened. Three quarters of a century after its delivery, Menzies’s rhetoric had an audience transfixed.
“I do not believe that we shall come out into the overlordship of an all-powerful State on whose benevolence we shall live, spineless and effortless - a State which will dole out bread and ideas with neatly regulated accuracy; where we shall all have our dividend without subscribing our capital; where the Government, that almost deity, will nurse us and rear us and maintain us and pension us and bury us; where we shall all be civil servants, and all presumably, since we are equal, heads of departments.
“If the new world is to be a world of men, we must be not pallid and bloodless ghosts, but a community of people whose motto shall be, ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’
“Individual enterprise must drive us forward. That does not mean we are to return to the old and selfish notions of laissez-faire. The functions of the State will be much more than merely keeping the ring within which the competitors will fight. Our social and industrial laws will be increased. There will be more law, not less; more control, not less.
“But what really happens to us will depend on how many people we have who are of the great and sober and dynamic middle-class - the strivers, the planners, the ambitious ones. We shall destroy them at our peril.”
Once the applause had subsided, and the passion of Cousens’s performance recognised by our gracious MC, Alan Jones, it fell to me to close the evening with a final unscripted performance. I began by asking Heather Henderson to join me on the platform as we acknowledged her father’s great legacy. I then acknowledged his successors one by own who led the federal parliamentary party in government or opposition, beginning with Harold Holt.
When I reached the name of John Howard and invited him onto the stage, some in the room could tell where this was going. Brendan Nelson duly stepped up, followed by Malcolm Turnbull and finally Tony Abbott. With press photographers present, armed with rapid-repeat shutters, inviting Turnbull and Abbott to share the same stage for the first time since the prime ministership had changed hands was not without risk. One frame capturing either or both looking anything but rapturous could land up on the front page, drawing attention away from a great performance and the enduring power of Menzies’s words. No such image appeared, nor do I believe one could have been taken.
We had been reminded that night why the Liberal Party of Australia had been put on this earth and why its philosophy of freedom is favoured by most Australians in most federal elections. We had been reminded of the power of ideas to unite and inspire a party and a nation. And we had been reminded that the political centre of gravity in Australia is neither Vaucluse in the seat of Wentworth nor in the towns along the Warrego Highway in the seat of Wright. The heart of our nation is in the indefinable place Menzies identified where the Forgotten People reside:
“I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the organised masses. It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race.”
This piece appears in Australia Tomorrow (Connor Court), an anthology of political essays by prominent centre-right thinkers, politicians and business leaders.