Remembering Andrew Peacock

The Hon Andrew Peacock AC with Heather Henderson AM, only daughter of Robert Menzies.

The former Liberal leader appealed to the forgotten people as confidently as Menzies, who endorsed him as his successor in the seat of Kooyong. By Nick Cater.

Andrew Peacock’s passing denied him the right of reply to the weekend’s more extravagant tributes. It is doubtful Peacock would have agreed with the eulogy by the ABC’s Laura Tingle on Twitter that declared him “one of the last liberals in the Liberal Party”.

Her colleague Geraldine Doogue tested this contentious thesis with Niki Savva on ABC Radio National. Savva begged to disagree. Peacock was not “the last of the great liberals because Malcolm Turnbull is still out there”.

An ex-prime minister who is “out there” is seldom of assistance to former colleagues or, indeed, the country. The chief occupation of former leaders should be to ­burnish their legacy while occasionally biting their tongue. Courtesy demands they deliver their sage advice, if they have any, in private.

Peacock’s legacy as a leader is not easy to assess, since he held few domestic portfolios in government and was never prime minister. His silent grace in retirement, however, and commitment to promoting his country no matter who was in power, qualifies him as one of the greatest ex-leaders since Robert Menzies.

In so far as his 1984 and 1990 campaign speeches reflect the prime minister he might have been, Peacock’s liberalism is barely distinguishable from that of John Howard, Brendan Nelson, Tony Abbott or Scott Morrison. He appeals to the forgotten people as confidently as Menzies, who endorsed him as his successor in the seat of Kooyong.

“Our Liberal policies will encourage men and women who want to have a go, who want to achieve a better life for themselves and their families,” Peacock declared at his campaign launch in Melbourne in November 1984. “That’s what I believe in — that’s what the Liberal Party believes in and that’s what Australia is all about.”

Two weeks later, Peacock shaved 2 per cent off Labor’s margin, gaining 16 seats to Bob Hawke’s nine in an expanded House of Representatives. Labor blamed boundary changes that Hawke had instigated. Hardly anyone seemed to hear the tectonic groans beneath the political landscape, let alone imagine what it would look like in 20 years or so.

Peacock’s dignified silence after leaving parliament leaves the debate about his legacy frozen in time, featuring barely remembered battles during the longest period in opposition. The semantic distinction between Liberals and small-l liberals, and the epithets wets and drys, are quaint relics from that period. The arguments over economic policy then raging fiercely have long since been settled. The personalities that lent spice to the debate have retired.

Peacock was among those who were nervous of the consequences of the economic deregulation unexpectedly embraced by the Labor Party in office. He clashed frequently with Andrew Robb, later to become his chief of staff, but then an economist with the National Farmers Federation, one of the chief proponents of free-market reform. His damp views put him at odds with his bone-dry deputy, Howard.

The gallery’s misinterpretation of this healthy policy discussion as an ideological split shows how little it understands liberalism. Liberals are wedded not to ideology but principles. The way those principles are applied to the challenges of the day should always be a matter for free and frank discussion. Those who would want to portray Peacock as the prototype of today’s self-styled moderates struggle to find evidence. Setting aside Peacock’s pivotal role in the independence of Papua New Guinea, it is hard to name a single progressive cause to which he was unusually attached.

It was the Labor Party that was hunting for causes to satisfy the hunger of its expanding intellectual base. Labor’s claim to be the workers’ party was beginning to look shaky. The national 4 per cent swing in 1983 came despite a 4 per cent swing against Labor in Tasmania, where Hawke’s ecological zeal seemed to threaten working-class jobs.

The expansion in the House of Representatives makes it hard to read the demographic undercurrents of the 1984 election. It is clear, however, that despite Hawke’s popularity and larrikin personality, some working Australians were beginning to have their doubts. It would be another 12 years before the implications of the inversion of the political rules became clear, when large swings to the Coalition in western Sydney, Queensland and other working-class heartlands ensured Howard’s victory.

The defection of the workers continued under Howard and was to resume with the election of Tony Abbott in 2013. The trend briefly reversed in 2016 under Turnbull, a leader more at home in Double Bay than munching a sausage sandwich outside Donnybrook Public School where a 7 per cent swing against the LNP helped end the career of Turnbull’s youthful confidant, the member for Longman, Wyatt Roy.

In 2019, Morrison not only put the Coalition back on track but advanced the frontier further in the outer suburbs and regions. The flip side was a loss of skin in the inner suburbs, such as Kooyong. If Peacock were to be reincarnated as the next preselected candidate, he would find it a very different proposition. However, he might take heart from the telegram he received from Washington on the morning of the 1966 Kooyong by-election, lovingly preserved in a glass frame by his successor, Josh Frydenberg: “Confident that Kooyong will stand fast — Menzies.”

With the benefit of hindsight, the change in the political dynamic that began in Peacock’s time is easier to trace. The expansion of the universities and the cultural changes that began in the 1960s gave rise to a left-wing intelligentsia whose utopian dreams frequently clashed with the practical outlook of everyday Australians and threatened their jobs. Centre-left parties throughout much of the developed world were beginning to feel the force of the wedge.

Peacock’s opportunity to lead came a decade too early to exploit the trend. In any case, he was easily portrayed as a silvertail, and he might have found it harder than Howard to win the battlers.

None of this should be allowed to diminish his substantial legacy in foreign policy, his contribution to rebuilding the party after its 1983 defeat, his talent as a campaigner and his public-spirited commitment to diplomacy after leaving parliament. Howard’s election in 1996 was hardly the death of Liberalism. Rather, it was the revival of the broad church of which Peacock was very much a part. We mourn his passing.