History informs us

Brendan Nelson delivers a passionate defence of Australian history as he launches David Kemp's A Liberal State in Sydney. The following is an edited transcript of the speech.

One of the paradoxes of our human condition is a tendency to take for granted those things that are most important to us in our lives. Whether it's the magic and vitality of our youth, which we certainly don't fully appreciate it until it's gone forever, our physical health and emotional resilience, our Australian citizenship, whether conferred by birth or by choice, affording, as it does political, economic and religious freedoms.

To live in this country, where faith co-exists with reason, free academic inquiry, an independent judiciary and a free press.

It is tempting to settle for the popular mythology and imagery of our history while neglecting the vision; the sacrifices and the hard-won policy debates that shaped the country, the men and women who gave us what we have and made us who we are.

When I told a friend I was going to be the director of the Australian War Memorial, he said to me: "You're wasting your life. You've got far more important things to do for Australia than rearrange its history." In response, I said in part: "Well, it actually has a lot more to do with the future than it does the past." As we face unseen, emerging and increasingly threatening horizons, we must be clear about who we are and what it is we believe, truths by which we live, the values that define us, which we believe are worth fighting to defend.

The most important year in this country's history, after 1788, is 1942. It was also the year in which T.E. Elliot wrote, "A people without history is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern of endless moments." When little else in the world makes sense, history is the defining discipline. It carries extraordinarily important lessons for us and the future that we seek to shape. It can demolish prejudice. It is a reminder, as David has documented so magnificently in his towering work, that there are hard decisions that have to be made, and the importance of making them and not shying away from them. And it can also inspire and point us to new horizons.

The Greeks coined the word character. They called it the impression left in wax by a stone seal ring, the stamp of personality. Character, whether of individuals or of nations, is informed by worthwhile intrinsic values or virtues. Those values that define us as Australians have come to us through our triumphs as a people and our failures, the men and women whom we choose to honour and revere and also villains. And the way as a people we have been shaped and defined by adversities and how we will be shaped by those that are coming.

Our values are not the subject of a social media posting. They're not a statement of what we're doing today, or what we think we're going to be doing over the next week, or even what we think we're going to be about for the next one or two decades. They are enduring and are deeply rooted in the history and as I said, the men and women who made us and gave us what we have.

When the late Senator John McCain, whom I regard as a true and great champion of the Republican Party in the United States, came to the Australian War Memorial for a one-hour visit, which went for two and a half hours in May, 2017, I said to him of the Memorial, "This is where we reveal our character. It's hard to understand us until you come here. And indeed, why we're allies of the United States and not just good friends. Here, we reveal our values." I said to him, "And our interests are our values." And he said, "Our values are our interests," something which he subsequently raised publicly with President Trump.

We cannot, in facing our future, in the most consequential geopolitical realignment in our lifetimes abandon what Arthur Schlesinger described as ‘historic purpose’. We have to be informed by a sense of not only who we are, but from where we have come.

David’s book is a towering masterpiece. David, I wish that it had been written 30 years ago and that I had read it before I had the privilege to serve the Liberal Party and the people of Bradfield in the Australian Parliament. It is informative, it's easy to read, it brings understanding and enlightenment to who we are and where we are today. There is much in this in particular that should be read by our contemporary Liberal Party leaders.

David sets the framework for all in the introduction:

"This is the story of how Australians fought a bitter political battle over how they were to be governed, and how they came to decide, despite the urgent demands of special interests for privilege and, notwithstanding the passion of those who promised salvation through the wisdom of government, that they believed the good society was one in which they could control their own lives and express their individuality. Government's role, they still believed, was to empower them to achieve their dreams.”

And then,

“the liberal democratic state was one in which power was checked, balanced and devolved, in the interests of preventing its arbitrary exercise against citizens, eroding their liberty to control their own lives. The battle of ideas between utopian socialism and liberalism was therefore a battle over the nature of the Australian state. Hence the title of the book.”

And then David speaks with some eloquence and power about what I think has driven you all of your life David, and that is ideas. You say:

“Ideas although intangible and invisible, are in fact the principal directors of political life, because without ideas there is no motivation. People cannot act, movements cannot be formed, institutions cannot be constructed, policies cannot be devised, and human betterment will not occur. As the English liberal economist John Maynard Keynes once said, "The world is indeed moved by little else."

Then speaking of liberals he says:

"Australian liberals continue to grapple with issues arising from the nation's foundation and the meaning of those ideas for the state interventions that had already occurred: the state enforcement of morality, industry protection,  compulsory arbitration of workplace disputes, government service monopolies, organised marketing and industry licensing, and Aboriginal ‘protection'.”

And then of the Forgotten People talks, the foundation series of addresses again in 1942 which is our true north.

“The Forgotten People talks show Menzies at his most intellectually distinguished, dealing simply and clearly with weighty matters for the successful conduct of the war and for post-war policies, his vigorous opposition to the rhetoric of class hatred, to the use of racial hatred as an instrument of war, the proper purpose of wartime censorship, the financing of the war, the principles for rationalising industry to provision of the war effort, the role of women during and after the war, education during the war and the need for a massive expansion when the war had ended, and the need to give appropriate attention to planning for the post-war world.”

“He reiterated his strongly held view that the Labor Party's decision not to suspend party politics for the duration of the war was a grave misfortune for Australia and reminded listeners that it was a decision that he had done his very best to avoid, even to the extent of being prepared to serve under a prime minister drawn from the Labor Party.”

Then of values, the underlying disease of selfishness and irresponsibility that David writes. Menzies

“argued that after the war Australia should establish a contributary insurance scheme to discourage the entitlement mentality, emphasising the importance of wealth creation by private enterprise for a successful system of social security. He warned against the false expectation that the end of the war would inevitably bring with it a better life, in the absence of sound human values.”

His main emphasis was on the culture and values that underlay a liberal and decent society and needed to be rebuilt. As Menzies said: "Men will not necessarily be better because they are better off." And that is one of the key challenges that, of course we all want economic growth, we need it, but the fundamental question is toward what are we striving to grow? It is to build a better society, not only of prosperity and economic security and individual freedoms, but also so the inherent value and dignity of human life and social cohesion, which is something which Menzies himself identified: 

"The disease of selfishness and irresponsibility, if the new material order or an improved material order is to serve the biggest needs of mankind, it must be accompanied by a moral revolution, which will make every citizen feel that the wellbeing of his country is his own responsibility, that he is his brother's keeper, and that his stature as a citizen will depend far more upon what he gives than what he gets." He said this a long time before John Kennedy's inauguration speech.

David’s accounts of the political opponents of the Liberal Party speak not only to David's immense intellect, but also his character as a man.  Of John Curtin he says:

"Curtin embodied within his tormented self the irreconcilable forces at war within his party. He was the very symbol of its divided soul, identification with a version of the utopian mission of Australian unionism on the one hand, and with his country Australia, as a patriot, on the other, warred in his mind. His final decision that Australia was preeminent put him at odds with bitter foes in his own party for whom national unity was a goal of subordinate value and whose primary identifications were with the labour movement, not with the nation.”

"John Curtin's selflessness and decency in his treatment of others attracted wide praise and his desire to put Australia's interests first was recognised."

Of Ben Chifley, David writes:

"A decent and patriotic man, and a Catholic , was now in the front line in the battle for Labor's soul. He did not forget those who had attacked him in the NSW party. Nor did Lang -biding his time for revenge - forgive Chifley, nor could the new prime minister pardon those who had imposed such burdens on the vulnerable John Curtin from within Labor's ranks.

"Of all Labor's federal parliamentary leaders - as his church mobilised to join the battle against atheistic communism - Chifley would be the one who would at last summon the courage to take the fight to the revolutionary extremists in the Lang tradition that had done so much damage to the party and to the country…"

So to the 1946 election campaign. Menzies’ election campaign address is something if you have not read it, that I strongly recommend to you. History informs the choices, the decisions we have to make now. David writes:

"His appeal to women was not simply to women in traditional social roles, but also for a transformation in the role of women in Australian life." Menzies said this in 1946. "Tonight, I speak to the women of Australia with profound respect and gratitude. They have established an unanswerable claim to economic, legal, industrial, and political equality. I hope that the time will speedily come when we can say truthfully that there is no sex discrimination in public or private office, in political or industrial opportunity. We are all, men and women, citizens with a common interest and a common task."

Another aspect which comes through in David's very well-researched and detailed writing is how Menzies, in the early 1960s, worked very carefully to erode support within the Liberal Party for the White Australia policy, to bring Aboriginal Australians into mainstream Australian life in every sense of the word, and create those conditions which would come in the middle of that decade for the referendum, which of course he initiated, for 1967, and of course the abolition of the White Australia policy.

In April, 1965 Menzies addressed the Federal Council of the Liberal Party at the Hotel Canberra, where he'd stayed during the meetings of the Unity conference in 1944, when they were establishing the Liberal Party. And he said this:

"We are twenty-one today and we have the key to the door. That's something we ought to remember politically. We have indeed been either fortunate or wise or a mixture of both, because one of the outstanding things about this party, twenty one years old, is that it has secured the support in Australia, I am quite convinced,  of the young and ardent who are ambitious and self-reliant … Australia would not have made the enormous advances that it has made if it had been a community of people of dependent minds. The fact that Australia has grown as it has demonstrates that we are a people of independent minds who aim to be contributors as well as beneficiaries.”

He said, as David writes, "that the Liberal Party won their support because it had not been conservative, but innovative." And Menzies said, "Over the whole of this period of fifteen, sixteen years, since 1949, we have won because we have been the party of innovations. Not the party of the past, not the conservative party dying on the last barricade, but the party of innovations… these were evidences of a lively mind and a forward-looking heart. This is the whole thing that we must continue to remember and act upon in the years ahead.”

Finally,

“In his defence of liberalism during the 1940s, Menzies had reached out for the ‘impossible’”. The political correctness of the day was that capitalism was finished, that socialism was taking over, the British were going down that road. Menzies resisted all of that, convinced in the liberty and the freedoms and the creativity of the individual.

Therein, as David so powerfully reminds us in the book, liberalism is not about having power for its own sake. It's about how power can be used to shape the future of the country that we need for the next generation. As John Howard said to us so many times, David, that, "Once the mob," as Howard would say, "think that you've run out of ideas, that is when they will look to the other side." We, as Liberals, must be led by men and women who are prepared to fight for the things in which we believe that are essential for the future of the country and not simply to regard keeping and sustaining power as an end in itself.

David is a proud alumnus of Scotch College, of Melbourne University. He has a PhD in political science from Yale. As you well know, he was an advisor to Malcolm Fraser when he was prime minister. I wish he'd been advising him once he stopped being prime minister, David. But he's also, of course, written extensively about Robert Menzies, about Malcolm Fraser, about liberalism, our own political history and has been an immense and giant contributor to our intellectual life.

David, after 11 years as professor of political science and politics at Monash University, was elected to be the member for Goldstein in 1990. He was a shadow minister. When we won in '96, he was minister for schools and vocational education. He also supported the prime minister in reforming the public service and the finance minister in privatisation. He went into cabinet as minister for employment, education, training and youth affairs. Then that was passed to me. Then he was our minister for environment and heritage.

He was president of our party in Victoria from 2007 until 2011, and as Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at Melbourne University, put his considerable intellect to this project. This book is the fourth in the series. In thinking of introducing David, I thought if someone asked me, as I have now been asked, about David, I regard David as decent, honest, extraordinarily intelligent, clear-minded, decisive, a man who is motivated by public duty to dedicate his life, apart from being a husband and a father, to do the very best that he can, to leave a better future for the next generation and to never allow liberals to forget who we are. Thank you.

This is an edited transcript of a speech delivered by the Hon Dr Brendan Nelson AO at the Sydney launch of A Liberal State by the Hon Dr David Kemp AC. Purchase the book here.