In his autobiography, “Lazarus Rising,” John Howard, Australia’s second longest-serving prime minister, stated that the Liberal Party is the party of both Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill. It is the party of both conservatism and classical liberalism.
Historically, the Liberals have been electorally successful when espousing these philosophies simultaneously.
Edmund Burke, the 18th century Irish-born statesman, is considered the father of modern conservatism. He argued against the British Government’s attitude toward the American colonists, including its taxation policies.
Burke believed the colonists should enjoy the rights of all English citizens. On the other hand, he was very critical of the French Revolution, asserting that it was destroying the fabric of good society and its traditional institutions.
John Stuart Mill, the great English political philosopher of the 19th century, conceived of liberty as justifying the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control. He was a passionate advocate for free speech as necessary for intellectual and social progress.
Mill was possibly the first to argue against the tyranny of the majority, in which the majority of an electorate pursues exclusively its own objectives at the expense of those of the minority factions.
Menzies declared that he would stand up for the middle class “who are for the most part unorganised and unself-conscious. They are envied by those whose benefits are largely obtained by taxing them.”
In this discourse, Menzies went on to add:
“We say that the greatest element in a strong people is a fierce independence of spirit. This is the only real freedom, and it has as its corollary a brave acceptance of unclouded individual responsibility. The moment a man seeks moral and intellectual refuge in the emotions of a crowd, he ceases to be a human being and becomes a cipher.
“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.”
It seems, some 80 years later, in Australian democracy, nothing has changed.
Menzies observed it was: “dominated by what they now call ‘Liberals with a small l’—that is to say Liberals who believe in nothing but who still believe in anything if they think it worth a few votes. The whole thing is tragic.”
Sound familiar? The problem is that when the Liberal Party tries to become Labor-lite, it dismays its own best supporters without gaining any new ones.
In fact, in the 1972 election, disgusted with what the then Liberals had become, Menzies cast his vote not for the party he founded and led for 22 years, but for B.A. Santamaria’s Democratic Labour Party.
Menzies and Howard became long-serving prime ministers because they were conservative politicians of conviction.
As another successful conservative, Margaret Thatcher, stated in her Menzies lecture in November 1981:
“I count myself among those politicians who operate from conviction. Consensus is the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects. The process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?”
By contrast, lacking any depth, Morrison’s guiding principle is to be a little to the right of a very left Labor party—and that’s delivering us two left-wing parties. The results of this have been disastrous for Australia, at so many levels.
Maybe Morrison and the Liberals should acquaint themselves with probably the most famous quote attributed to Edmund Burke: “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”
