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November 6, 2005
I picked up a copy of Judith Brett's Quarterly Essay, 'Relaxed and Comfortable: The Liberal Party's Australia' in Canberra last week. An irreverant but insightful visual representation of Howard's Liberals can be found here.
It needs to be acknowledged that John Howard, like Menzies before him, has a mastery of the political tradition of Australian liberalism and a great ability to adapt that tradition to changing circunmstances. His political career has been marked by quick footedness and firmness in the face of opposition as well as defeat and rejection.
The back cover blub to the Quarterly Essay highlights the importance of nationalism. It says:
What is the Liberal Party's core appeal to Australian voters? Has John Howard made a dramatic break with the past, or has he ingeniously modernised the strategies of his party's founder, Sir Robert Menzies?
For Judith Brett, the government of John Howard has done what successful Liberal governments have always done: it has made its stand firmly at the centre and presented itself as the true guardian of the national interest. In doing this, John Howard has taken over the national traditions of the Australian Legend that Labor once considered its own.
Her big point is that Liberals govern for the nation and not sectional or class interest and they (eg., Alfred Deakin) opposed Labor's picture of Australia as divided between two conflicting classes---bosses and workers --or irreconcilable interests--- capital and labor--as a way of understanding the polity or the nation. So the Liberals (eg., Robert Menzies) appealed to the people left over or forgotten ---the middle middle class, or the small business people and the self-employed. The appealed to the middle class was in terms of individual values--individual moral qualities or virtues, strength of character, respectability and a sense of responsibility.
Howard's response to Keating in the 1996 election was to voice, and rework, Deakin's argument against sectional class interests (he adds the new social movements and cultural elites to the list) and Menzie's argument looking after the powerless forgotten middle people; and then to talk about the whole community and uniting the nation. In doing so Howard stands firmly in the consensual centre with his electoral package of free market economics, social support for ordinary suburban families and an assimilationist nationalism.
But where does liberalism end and conservatism begin in Howard's appeal to family and nation? Howard, after all, does identify himself as a conservative.
Placing the emphasis on the family and nation does displace the individualism that acts as a foundation for liberalism. Brett is aware of this. She says:
The family as an interdependent, mostly biologically based social unit resists dissolution into an association of rights bearing individuals, in particular the relationship between parents and child. This marks the fault-line within contemporary politics between small "l" liberals and those who call themselves conservatives, and it runs through both the Labor and Liberal parties.
Similarly with appeals to nationality, tradition and community--mateship.
But there Brett leaves it. Nationality and family does undercut the argument about Howard appealing to the individual virtues of the middle class, does it not. Brett's thesis is that Howard's Australia is a liberal Australia of virtuous individuals. She does not see the conservatism of kin as family, neighbourhood as community and nationality as one Australia as a traditional response to the decay of the stable world of meaning in the globalized world of late modernity. The meanings and values of of stable liberal world have emptied out and we individuals find ourselves increasingly standing alone in the world struggling to make sense of the changes, the increasing violence and not feeling too good.
Ther Liberal Party's Australia is a conservative Australia as much as it is a liberal Australia.
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