A Party For All Australians

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The Liberal Party established in Albury 75 years ago this week – and elected into office for a record term five years later – was founded on sound, popular principles. By David Furse-Roberts.

The Riverina city of Albury looms large in Australia’s political history. It is where Robert Gordon Menzies held a conference to establish the constitution for the modern Liberal Party of Australia 75 years ago, on December 14-16, 1944.

The party had been formally founded two months earlier in Canberra, but it was in Albury where the party proclaimed its broad vision for Australia, a vision that has remained the dominant force in Australian politics ever since.

“We must show that the old system of liberal democracy can and will produce sounder progress, more generous citizenship, a higher code of life, and a squarer deal for all than political ideas thrown up by the historic oppressions of Europe,” Menzies told his fellow delegates.

Against this international backdrop of wartime fascism and communism, together with the ascendency of democratic socialism under a Federal Labor government on the domestic front, Menzies held that “there can never have been a time in the history of Australia when such a party was more needed”.

Menzies laid the groundwork for Australia’s most enduring political party of the broad centre-right. With the Liberal Party surviving intact since 1944, it has long outlasted even its longest-surviving forerunners on the Australian centre-right. Its unbroken seventy-five years of existence has far exceeded the eight-year lifespan of Deakin and Cook’s Commonwealth Liberal Party and the 14 years of the pre-war United Australia Party. The longevity of the modern Liberal Party over several decades owes much to the strategic planning and vision that Menzies brought to the Albury conference. In his own address to the conference, Menzies remarked that “we have been able to evolve a machinery that will inevitably bring into existence in the fullest sense a party of an Australia-wide character”.

The achievement of Menzies at Albury in 1944 was made all the more remarkable by the fractious state of Australian centre-right politics during World War II. The immediate forerunner to the Liberal Party, the UAP, had disintegrated since it lost office to Labor in October 1941. Its state divisions were depleted and the party as a whole was widely perceived as no longer relevant and out of touch with public sentiment. With the centre-right in need of a new political movement, Menzies used his leadership, political nous and negotiating skills to weld together 18 disparate organisations across Australia into a cohesive political force. At Albury, Menzies observed that the growing importance of national politics warranted nothing short of an “Australian political organisation”.

In addition to bringing a new party into being, the Albury conference formulated the internal mechanics and procedures of the Liberal Party to accord with its freshly minted constitution. A Federal Secretariat was set up to provide means for economic and political research, and to establish efficient contact between the party and the public. To administer the party’s affairs, a Federal Executive was established followed by the creation of separate state executives.

To give direction to policy-making, the conference established a joint standing committee on federal policy consisting of six Liberal MPs chosen by the parliamentary party and six non-parliamentary members chosen by the Federal Council together with the party’s parliamentary leader. Aware of the danger for public policy to become too remote from life, Menzies said that members of the party would have an effective voice in shaping policy. In other initiatives, the conference settled on a pre-selection plan for prospective candidates and vowed to ensure that the new party would be involved in the “closest collaboration” with the existing Country Party.

Reflecting Menzies’ own Liberal philosophy, a noteworthy feature of the party formed at Albury was the place it accorded to women. From the outset, Menzies envisioned a “joint and equal partnership” between men and women in the operation of the Liberal Party. At Albury, he presciently remarked that “women are unquestionably destined to exercise more and more influence upon practical politics in Australia”. Of the Liberal Party, Menzies said that “now we have an organisation in which all distinctions are gone” where men and women worked equally for the one party. The birth of the Liberal Party in Albury thus marked something of a watershed for the greater participation of women in Australian politics and public life.

Most importantly, the Albury conference was a significant moment for Australia as whole. In his address to the conference, Menzies enunciated a vision and a philosophy that would resonate with all Australians, not just those who would vote for his new party. Appealing to universal human values, Menzies spoke about the dignity, significance and responsibility of all individuals, reminding them that they were their “brother’s keeper”. For Menzies, this was the “essence of liberal democracy” and the party he had just founded would work towards realising this ideal for every Australian. In his address at Albury, Menzies emphasised that the creation of the Liberal Party never represented an end in itself, but rather a means to an end in the struggle for freedom and human dignity.

The Albury conference, therefore, was not only the birth of a party, but Australia’s first step towards a modern, mature democracy affirming the freedom and worth of all citizens.