To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Liberal Party of Australia by Robert Menzies and others, the Robert Menzies Institute commissioned historians and political practitioners from around Australia to conduct original research into how the party was formed in each state and territory, what is unique about the political culture of each polity, how it operates as a federal entity, and the role of women in the foundation story.

The product of their labours is the landmark book, Unity in Autonomy: A Federal History of the Founding of the Liberal Party, which can be purchased here.

Editor Zachary Gorman unpacks the book’s premise in the introduction reproduced below:

 

How do you get a group of people who place a fundamental value on freedom of thought and action to consistently unite for political purposes?

This is a dilemma that has faced the Australian liberal tradition ever since the emergence of the party system. In many respects Australian liberalism is a pre-party phenomenon, having predated the advent of colonial democracy. In the nineteenth century, liberals successfully fought for basic freedoms like trial by jury, the end of convict transportation, and the onset of responsible government, and having won them, they came to dominate colonial parliaments such that they did not feel the need for permanent extra-parliamentary organisations. There were certainly differences of opinion between liberals who leaned conservative or radical, and these could produce heated electoral battles. But it was only in the late 1880s and into the 1890s when fully-fledged political parties came into being.[1]

The dawn of party organisation was epitomised by the birth of the Australian Labor Party and its methods were an anathema to the existing liberal political culture. Labor’s union dominated organisation would formulate the details of its policy, introducing an iron clad pledge to force parliamentary members to vote how they were told. MPs were thus transformed from the respected representatives of their local communities exercising ‘mature judgement’ and ‘enlightened conscience’ in the national interest,[2] into what liberals saw as mere ‘ciphers’ of a sectional labour movement. They were responsible primarily to their party, rather than their electorate, and this was seen as a flagrant attack on the principles of democracy.

The problem was that Labor methods proved to be quite effective both within parliament and in electioneering. Hence liberals felt the need to ratchet up their own party organisations in a manner that would encourage widespread and active participation, but crucially without shackling MPs and compromising core liberal principles. Their efforts generally proved flawed and fleeting, and were treated with suspicion by a large section of the population who came to view any party methods as inherently undemocratic. Such sentiment was particularly high in the lead up to the 1943 federal election, at a time when the One Party for Australia Movement advocated for the abolition of the party system, and they were joined by a host of independents and even a ‘Women for Canberra’ movement which all reflected a similar viewpoint.

As a former prime minister who had grown up around parliamentary politics and thought deeply about its workings, Robert Menzies believed that this was nonsense. A clear choice between competing approaches to governance was for him the essence of democracy; the ‘very idea of… voters in a country like this being so indifferent to the political future of their country that they are content to have no Party principles or Party allegiance, but take 74 random dips in the lucky bag at each election is the height of absurdity’.[3] He felt that ‘great parties’ had a vital stabilising effect, and gave the elector a greater say in how their country was run because they could achieve a clear mandate, as opposed to the horse-trading that went on with a crossbench.

In these circumstances, Menzies felt compelled to justify the utility and soundness of political parties from first principles. On 15 January 1943, in the 52nd episode of his long running series of Friday night radio broadcasts made famous by ‘The Forgotten People’, Menzies drew on ‘Edmund Burke, the greatest of practical political philosophers’:

[Burke] was himself never in a Cabinet and was never the slave of a Party. He had great detachment. He had great mental and moral powers. He was not a place-hunter. Yet, a hundred and sixty-three years ago Burke said, in language that need not be amended today:

‘Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed… Men thinking freely, will, in particular instances, think differently. But still as the greater part of the measures which arise in the course of public business are related to, or dependent on, some great, leading general principles in government [Menzies’s underlining] a man must be peculiarly unfortunate in the choice of his political company, if he does not agree with them at least nine times in ten.’

Dismissing the idea that party politics automatically involved subordinating an individual’s conscience, Menzies went on to say that:

The notion that the discipline of Party supresses and destroys the individual conscience is purely academic. In fourteen years as a Party politician I have on three occasions voluntarily resigned from office, and, as many people could tell you, there is nothing unusual about me. But the point is that three major matters leading to resignation each left me a Party member in general agreement with my fellows and, I hope, with an unimpaired conscience. There is always room, within the structure of a general agreement in broad principle, for the most acute differences in detail or application.[4]

Burke in this instance functioned not just as an answer to critics, but as a call to action. If Australia’s liberal tradition was to have a permanent political entity, it needed to be united around clear principles. The problem was that in recent decades Australian liberals had not been particularly good at formulating or expounding such principles. After coming together in the short-lived Commonwealth Liberal Party (1909-1917), liberals had found themselves in political parties based on specific circumstances rather than broad principles. Most recently, the United Australia Party had been founded to deal with the Great Depression, but had outlived the economic crisis which justified its existence – with disastrous results in terms of unity and at the ballot box.

For this reason, Menzies and numerous other liberals believed that the UAP needed to be replaced by ‘a party with a philosophy’ – an impetus made all the more powerful by emotionally-charged wartime contemplation of the question ‘what kind of Australia are we fighting for?’ Menzies answered the question through his series of 105 radio broadcasts, but as the following chapters document, this was just the most enduring and influential of many explorations of what liberalism meant which were produced in the 1940s.

Menzies’s position as ‘first among equals’ when it came to espousing Australian liberal thought during this era is similar to his role in the founding of the Liberal Party. As Ian Hancock put it, Menzies was ‘necessary for the Liberal Party’s creation but not sufficient for it to happen’.[5] Debate over Menzies’s centrality is an important theme explored in the existing historiography on the founding of the Liberal Party, from Gerard Henderson’s Menzies’ Child, Hancock’s National and Permanent?, John Nethercote and Nick Cater’s Road to Freedom, and most recently in Nicolle Flint’s chapter in The Menzies Watershed.[6] This book finds its originality in picking up another point raised by Hancock: that the party cannot have a single founder since it scarcely exists as a single entity, and is instead made up of the state and territory divisions.[7] In doing so, it also takes inspiration from P Loveday, AW Martin and RS Parker’s thoroughly federal The Emergence of the Australian Party System, which focused on the period circa 1890-1910.

The premise of this volume is to examine the foundation story of each Liberal Party division, in order to shine a light on figures that deserve to be better remembered, understand what is distinct about the varied political cultures that make up the Liberal Party and the Australian polity more broadly, and get a better grasp on how the party juggles the complexities produced by the fundamental liberal value of local autonomy. At a time when federal election results suggest great disparities between what voters want out of the party in places as diverse as Queensland and Victoria, and when the party system ushered in 80 years ago shows signs of fracturing, the book has a timely resonance. Yet the aim is that its original research will make an ongoing contribution to our understanding of the Australian liberal tradition which will stand the test of time.

While the book is centred around telling the story of (almost) eight divisions, it must first establish the ‘leading general principles’ that united Australian liberalism’s disparate adherents. In chapter one, David Kemp examines what being ‘a party with a philosophy’ involved and why it has proven essential to the Liberal Party’s success and endurance. He skilfully unpacks how politics is a battle of ideas, and that it is the depth of the wellspring of liberal ideas – which can be traced all the way back to Magna Carta – that give liberalism its great strength and cultural resonance. Yet, in the context of Australia in the 1940s, it was Menzies who distilled liberalism’s essence in a manner that saw its potential to both facilitate progress and protect the political process from degenerating into a competition between special interests. Through his Forgotten People broadcasts and then the Unity Conferences, Kemp argues that Menzies created a ‘narrative’ that was powerful enough to carry Australia’s liberal and conservative forces along the road to cohesion and victory.

Even with a clearly articulated philosophy, the problem remained that some liberal principles could prove centrifugal in rejecting all central authority or direction. Andrew Kemp’s chapter explores how this and other anti-party tendencies had greatly inhibited the Liberals’ predecessors, but were ultimately overcome in a delicately balanced approach to organisational federalism. Despite the continuous complaints of federal party organisers, it was a forlorn hope that state organisations would cede their autonomy to a centralised body. The task was to find a workable way of ensuring they did not need to, something which the energising effects of the bank nationalisation issue helped to provide. The chapter is particularly illuminating in its demonstration that it was not Menzies alone who was captivated by the power of ideas; there was an animating spirit of the era that inspired a whole generation of party organisers.

Anne Henderson’s chapter makes it clear that this spirit captured a number of pioneering liberal women, whose role in the party’s early success would prove crucial. She highlights that despite the UAP’s ultimate demise, the party had been highly successful in broadening the centre-right’s appeal to encompass a much larger segment of Australian society than had previously been the case. Through the remarkable figure of Enid Lyons, this broadened base would be carried over to the new Liberal Party, which was made to realise the direct imperative of having policies and positions for women. While their parliamentary representation still had (and has) significant room for improvement, the party learned that it needed women not just as voters but as energetic activists, and they in turn learned that the party could give them a greater say in public affairs than older female-exclusive organisations like the Australian Women’s National League.

Having set the scene at a national scale, the stories of each division form overlapping puzzle pieces which fit together to make a more complete picture than any single narrative could achieve. We begin with the ‘mother colony’ of New South Wales; the epicentre of the nineteenth century’s pervasive liberal culture and home to the prototypical Australian Liberal Party in Joseph Carruthers’s Liberal and Reform Association. My chapter looks at how from these great heights, NSW descended to become one of the most divided states at the time of the Unity Conferences, and one where Labor achieved a reputation for being a natural party of government. I argue that the latter came about from a combination of the narrow north Sydney base that the NSW Liberals came to represent, and NSW Labor’s reputation for approachable conservatism. Although one should not discount the possibility that the home of George Reid and the free trade tradition had been alienated from liberalism by the post-federation victory of tariff protectionism, and subsequent Melbourne-centric orientation of centre-right politics. It is perhaps no coincidence that the centre of political gravity has shifted northwards as Australia has come to re-embrace an older mercantile heritage.

One might assume that Victoria has taken the opposite trajectory, but Stephen Wilks’s chapter reveals that the Port Phillip district still took a while to establish itself as ‘the jewel in the Liberal crown’. This was in large part due to the peculiarities and strengths of the Victorian Country Party, which not only resembled Labor’s ‘sectional’ approach to politics but was more than happy to work hand in hand with the ALP. However, it also reflected problems endemic to the various Liberal divisions, including a power struggle between the organisation and parliamentary party that in Victoria culminated in disendorsements, expulsions and flirting with the adoption of a Labor-style pledge. Wilks suggests that despite some early bloodletting, these battles hardened a robust extra-parliamentary organisation which ‘proved itself to be more than a revamped UAP’, and which would lay the platform for Henry Bolte’s extended electoral dominance.

If Victoria was the spiritual home of the Liberal Party providing the largest section of Unity Conference delegates, Queensland was the opposite, with the Queensland People’s Party declining Menzies’s invitation and enduring with its own branding into the late 1940s. Lyndon Megarrity’s chapter explores how of all the states, Queensland arguably had the most idiosyncratic political culture, shaped by geography, an unusually broad distribution of population, and more recently its proximity to the war. While the QPP reflected a liberal opposition to socialism, it had a significant anti-party element to its rhetoric, and its support for compulsory unionism – a principle which Menzies had spent a whole Forgotten People broadcast denouncing as an attack on freedom of association[8] – gave a policy manifestation to the QPP’s temporary separation from the Liberal project. While the QPP ultimately fell into line with its interstate counterparts, its story reveals Queensland’s distinctiveness as would be realised in the modern LNP – and indeed Megarrity also tracks how mergers with the generally larger Country Party have a long prehistory in the sunshine state.

South Australia also witnessed a Coalition merger in the early 1930s, but it was so successful that it might otherwise be forgotten since the Country side of the equation has since been fully absorbed into the state’s Liberal division. Baden Teague’s chapter charts how far ahead SA was of the other states, not just in terms of Coalition relations, but in having a unified and electorally successful extra-parliamentary organisation, the Liberal and Country League, that was able to attend the Unity Conferences as a single entity. Teague argues that because the South Australians got their house in order and fully bought into the mission, they were able to give Menzies tremendous support which facilitated the creation of the nation-wide Liberal Party. The overwhelming South Australian predominance in the National Service Group – Menzies’s splinter group within the UAP that presaged his political revolution – provides clear evidence that SA may even rival Victoria in its role in the foundation story.

Western Australia’s distance from the eastern states might lead to an assumption that it was far from being at the centre of events – indeed many of its leading Liberals had first become involved in politics specifically to campaign for secession during the 1930s. But as Sherry Sufi documents, WA punched above its weight in providing the party’s first federal director and achieving the Liberals’ first change of government at the 1947 state election. WA’s isolation meant that it had a particularly strong interest in upholding the Liberal Party’s principle of organisational autonomy, but Sufi maintains that its early electoral success was based on universal campaigning lessons such as good candidate selection, shrewdly targeting specific seats, and working closely with the Country Party.

While WA can boast of being the first state division to win government, Tasmania holds the unenviable distinction of being the last.[9] Like their beleaguered New South Wales counterparts, Tasmanian Liberals had to contend with a distinctively conservative Labor Party – epitomised by the fact that it was once led by future UAP Prime Minister Joseph Lyons. But unlike NSW which had geographic and demographic reasons for its Labor dominance, Stefan Petrow suggests that Tasmania should have been the state ‘most politically fertile for non-Labor’. In a thoroughly detailed study of not just the birth of the Liberal division, but the history of its predecessors, his chapter reveals that great efforts being put into fostering an extra-parliamentary organisation do not automatically result in electoral dividends, particularly if there are failures in leadership and policymaking. A telling insight into the fickleness of seeking electoral success is how after deliberately moving on from older MPs in the name of placating a demand for a fresh and vigorous outlook, post-election prognostications complained of the excessive youth and inexperience of candidates. Nevertheless, Petrow concludes that in recent years Labor’s university educated membership and flirtations with the Greens may have eroded its conservative reputation and therefore the electoral advantages it once enjoyed.

While the ACT Division has not gone so far as to embrace the Greens, it is unique in being the only Liberal division to have formed a formal coalition with left-of-centre MPs. Gary Humphries’s chapter offers both an academic and an insider’s view into how Liberals have tried to organise, survive and win government in what is effectively enemy territory. In doing so, he reveals how the ACT offers up some significant conundrums for the principles of Australian liberalism. Firstly, how do you reconcile a belief in subsidiarity and decentralisation with a city that is itself the product of centralisation? Secondly, to what extent should a ‘party with a philosophy’ adapt or mollify its philosophy to suit the local culture? The whole premise of Unity in Autonomy is that the party should reflect local conditions and local wishes, but only so far as that it never compromises the core principles which give it its raison d’etre. Those conditions and wishes appear to be uniquely resented when it comes to Canberra, partly due to their exception from mainstream Liberal opinion, and because the affluent constituency which supports them is subsidised by the national taxpayer. However, it should be pointed out that ‘horizontal fiscal equalisation’ means that the latter has been true of many of the states over the years.[10]

Both the ACT and Northern Territory Liberal parties got off to a belated start due to a lack of truly democratic institutions through which to contest the battle of ideas. But while the ACT Liberals eventually won independence from NSW and their own fully-fledged division, the NT Liberal Party (which was oddly tied to the Victorian Division) had only a brief existence. Its main significance, as documented by Shane Stone, is acting as the midwife for the birth of the Country Liberal Party, along with its similarly defunct Country Party counterpart. Nevertheless, NT Liberals still deserve recognition as the Territory has gone on to have a disproportionate national influence, embodied by Stone himself. The CLP is also interesting as the ‘fourth member’ of the federal Coalition, with a unique non-binding convention that its House of Representatives members are expected to sit with the Liberals, while its senators are expected to sit with the Nationals. This raises questions as to what truly differentiates the parties, particularly given its implication that had Jacinta Nampijinpa Price won Lingiari in 2019 she may have effectively become a Liberal – removing the impasse over portfolio allocations that occurred prior to her being appointed a shadow minister.[11]

In his memoir Afternoon Light, Menzies said that in ‘substance’ the Coalition parties had ‘the same political philosophy’,[12] but this does not appear to have been his view 20 years earlier. In the final chapter of the book, John Anderson and Terry Barnes explore just how close the Country Party came to joining the unity push and merging with the new Liberal Party. They note that there were numerous obstacles, including the fact that the Country Party was essentially as divided and fractious as their UAP cousins, but one of the main opponents appears to have been Menzies himself. In pushing for a party united behind ‘leading general principles’, he did not want those principles to be muddied by alleged sectionalism. But in a way, the Country/Nationals Party and particularly the Coalition itself, can be seen as the ultimate embodiment of Unity in Autonomy, as they allow for localism and difference of opinion, while maintaining a powerful common purpose and combined action. Both elements have proven essential to the successes of the previous 80 years, and maintaining both will surely prove as essential in any successes to come.

[1] This varied between the Australian colonies. For a detailed account see P Loveday, AW Martin and RS Parker, The Emergence of the Australian Party System.
[2] Edmund Burke, ‘Speech to the Electors of Bristol’, 3 November 1774. Menzies would refer to this in his 30 October 1943 broadcast on ‘The Sickness of Democracy’.
[3] Robert Menzies, ‘The Party System’ Broadcast, 15 January 1943.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ian Hancock quoted from correspondence with Georgina Downer, 1 February 2023.
[6] There are earlier works which related to the topic, such as Katherine West’s Power in the Liberal Party or Graeme Starr’s The Liberal Party of Australia: A Documentary History, which are cited throughout this volume. But they did not have the sense of perspective, provided by the party’s endurance, to function as true foundation narratives.
[7] Hancock, National and Permanent?, pp. 3-4. Some states already have thoroughly researched books covering the foundation and history of their division, including Hancock’s The Liberals: The NSW Division 1945-2000, however, they do not have the comparative element which is essential to this volume.
[8] Robert Menzies, ‘Compulsory Unionism’ Broadcast, 14 August 1942. Later published as chapter 24 of The Forgotten People and other Studies in Democracy. An attempt to abolish preference to unionists in government employment (itself a form of compulsion) had also notably been one of the issues over which Liberal Prime Minister Joseph Cook had called a double dissolution in 1914.
[9] This is complicated by the fact that the Queensland Liberals were the junior Coalition partner, but even they had a premier for a week after the Country Party’s Jack Pizzey died in office in 1968.
[10] Barring mining booms and other causes of exceptional prosperity, the smaller states have been subsidised, though seldom to a level that can be described as affluence.
[11] There was commentary both before and after Price’s appointment over the fact that it made the Nationals ‘overrepresented’ in the shadow cabinet.
[12] Menzies, Afternoon Light, p. 55.