The art of statesmanship
The leaders of today must revisit the timeless values of a liberal democratic society if they are to address the political challenges of our time, argues Alexander downer as he delivers the john howard lecture for the menzies research centre.
John Howard was one of the two greatest leaders of the Liberal Party. The other was of course Robert Menzies. I have the rare honour to have met every leader the Party has had since it’s foundation. Some had great charm, some raw determination and vaulting ambition. No, some is the wrong word. They all had vaulting ambition! Some were intellectually gifted, some were cunning and even a little devious. And all those who rose to the greatest office in the land as prime minister did good things for our country.
But what were the qualities of Menzies and Howard which made them great?
Well first of all, they were guided by their values and their convictions. They operated within a very clearly defined framework. They were certain in their beliefs and they were confident that the policies they pursued which grew out of those beliefs would be successful. That confidence was vindicated in both cases.
Their success didn’t just revolve around sensible, practical and effective economic policy, although that was an important part of both the Menzies government and the Howard government. Their success was broader than that. They understood the challenges of the nation and they defined its goals.
Both Menzies and Howard were passionate believers in what Menzies called selfless individualism. That is, they rejected the popular postwar shibboleths of state control and the subjugation of the will of individuals to the will of the collective. This was a much bigger issue than economic management though both leaders derived their beliefs in competitive markets reflecting consumer choice and consumer priorities from their commitment to individual freedom. They also knew that the free exercise of choice by consumers would ensure efficient allocation of capital and therefore stimulate productivity and economic growth. It was about how society should be structured, how decisions should be made and who should make those decisions. They were leaders who put individual choice at the front and centre of their policies.
The Menzies government had to confront an era of both change and danger. The country had to be rebuilt from the privations of war and sacrifice. But these were not easy times: as Asia decolonised so the Cold War lapped it’s shores. A dangerous and bloody war erupted on the Korean peninsula, Communist insurgents tried to seize control of what was then called Malaya, Indonesia confronted Malaysia and war raged in Indochina. In this tumultuous environment Australia needed a strategy and Menzies’ values helped him find one. He believed that like-minded freedom loving countries should work together to underwrite their security. Specifically he did that through the creation of the ANZUS alliance. The point is this: at a difficult time for what we now call the Indo Pacific, everyone knew where Menzies stood. There was never any doubt about that. Menzies didn’t need opinion polls to tell him how best to secure the interests of Australia and other like-minded countries.
So too with John Howard. At home he knew that for Australia to succeed its had to keep reforming a market based economy. Economic reform is seldom popular and it requires both courage and effort to persuade the public that it is in the nation’s best interests. With the Howard government‘s new tax system, it achieved that. Howard knew that if Australia didn’t keep reforming its economy, productivity would lag and growth fall away; Australia would stagnate and slip behind its competitors.
And internationally, John Howard shared the conviction of Robert Menzies that Australia’s security above all lay not just in its defence force but in securing strong alliances, especially with the United States. The controversial decisions the Howard government made to support the Americans in both Afghanistan and Iraq weren’t about political convenience and opinion polls. Those decisions were about ensuring that liberal democratic allies stuck together in confronting global challenges. It didn’t make any sense for Australia to be nothing more than an a selfish ally of convenience. Alliances will never work unless they have broad if not universal application.
So much of what I’ve just said seems self evident in retrospect but at the time the values and policies of Menzies and Howard were ridiculed and attacked by their political opponents. The reason they seem self-evident now is because both Menzies and Howard won the political debates of the time. Sometimes they were popular, often they were not but these two men were leaders of conviction and courage and pressed on regardless.
We remember Menzies and Howard today in the same way as we remember a small number of great leaders in the postwar era. We remember Conrad Adenauer for his capacity to rebuild postwar Germany as a active member of the western alliance and the liberal market economy. West Germany had choices and deep debate about whether to be neutral in the Cold War or to back the liberal democracies. Adenauer persuaded them to do the latter.
We also remember leaders like Thatcher and Reagan not just because of their personalities and their splendid communications skills but because of their courage and their convictions. Their convictions turned out to be right. They took head on the prevailing orthodoxy of a mixed economy and promoted liberal market solutions which worked. Their convictions that the Soviet Union had to be confronted and ultimately defeated were ridiculed and decried at the time by supporters of detente and Ostpolitik but turned out to be heroically right. For someone who believes in the virtue of the selfless individual as a core value, the Soviet Union was anathema. That is why Reagan described it as the evil empire.
What then are the challenges of today?
There are two aspects to this question. First, there is the one of values. Over the last few years the values debate has been won by the progressive left, as they now like to call themselves – being ashamed of the term socialist! They have captured what journalists now would like to call the zeitgeist of the era. They are happy to see an ever growing proportion of GDP controlled by the state, thereby undermining the core value of freedom of the individual and limiting productivity growth. On social issues, they have become passionate advocates of identity politics. We are not defined as human beings as creatures made in the image of God. We are defined by characteristics over which we have no control such as our race, gender and our sex lives.
This trend towards the progressive left has been accelerated by both climate change and the pandemic. Climate change has been an opportunity for the progressive left to exercise massive interventions in the economy. That does explain why they are such enthusiastic supporters of measures, many of which are likely at best to be ineffectual. Climate change is seen as a way of injecting the state into many aspects of society and expanding the role of government by increasing the regulation of society.
Just in case you’re wondering, I don’t think climate change is a myth. It is happening. But it is best addressed by investing in research and development in new technologies including nuclear technology rather than imposing greater central control on every aspect of society by the state. All political parties, be they on the left or the centre right need to be addressing the issue of CO2 emissions and adaptation measures. But to use this issue as a way of destroying aspects of a liberal society is going in the end to be counter-productive.
It was the pandemic which accelerated this process of enhanced state control. Governments, for right or for wrong, took control of almost every aspect of society denying individuals the right to choose how they responded to the threat of Covid. What is more, the huge increase in spending which was associated with lockdowns worldwide and which in turn has generated both inflation and higher interest rates, has taken away notions of individual choice and effort.
Adding to this encroachment of the state into every aspect of our societies has been the development of identity politics. Although identity politics may have had its philosophical origins in France, identity politics in a political sense has emerged from the United States. It makes me smile to remember how we Liberals have always been attacked for being too close to the Americans yet the progressive left have swallowed like a whale consuming krill almost every aspect of the American identity politics debate.
When a black man was tragically murdered in Minneapolis, this led to demonstrations even in Australian cities. Yet the murder of the Uigher people in Xinjiang is largely ignored by the progressive left. I can understand the George Floyd issue capturing the public debate in the United States but for it to have spread to other parts of the western world speaks volumes not just for the soft power of the United States but the evolution of identity politics as a concept.
What is surprising is that outside of some elements of the United States’ polity, the opponents of the progressive left have seldom fought back. They have simply talked of modifying some of the excesses of the progressive left but in turn have subconsciously conceded the intellectual ground to them. They have offered nothing more than management.
For most of my life right thinking people have regarded a society structured around race as anathema. We abhorred apartheid, we denounced discrimination on the basis of race in the United States, we celebrated the evolution of multi racial societies. More than that, we abhorred discrimination against women and I never thought it was right to demonise homosexuality.
But in recent years, the progressive left has shifted society to a new era of discrimination. Now we are to discriminate against men, against white people, against what is rudely described as cisgender people. If discrimination was wrong, well, it still is. What is more, pitting people against each other on the basis of their gender and their race is deeply divisive.
We need to learn the lessons of history. Societies which have been divided into tribal groups, ethnicity and race are doomed to catastrophic failure. Ethnic identity was at the heart of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, ethnic divides catapulted the Balkans into bloody conflict in the 1990s, racial divide made South Africa a bitter and unsustainable society. The societies which have worked best have been built on the foundations of tolerance not division and they are societies which respect and treasure each individual person regardless of their physical characteristics.
In Australia, egalitarianism has been a core value. We have not always lived up to that value throughout our history but despite our failings, we have held egalitarianism dear.
Today we are confronted with a decision over establishing the Voice, a forum for people of one race and only for people of one race. To assume that a percentage of Australians based on their race alone, not the myriad of characteristics which make up an individual, can set up a separate institution is inevitably going to become divisive. It says something for the proponents of this policy that they think a particular race of people is likely to have one set of opinions in clear distinction from the rest of society: that their opinions are based on the colour of their skin.
It speaks volumes for the success of the progressive left that those who fear the Voice will be divisive are cowered into silence by an avalanche of abuse and denigration.
This is but a minor challenge facing the believers in individual freedom. I would identify three other major issues which are going to be with us for a long time and all of which need to be addressed by the centre right of politics.
First, there’s the ageing of society. I’ve already spoken about economics and explained that the growing role of the state in managing the economy is not only likely to lead to a sub optimal allocation of scarce resources but also, more importantly, take away decision-making from individuals and transfer it to the state. Huge budget deficits on an unprecedented scale, ballooning public debt that, as we can now see, are inflationary and causing increases in interest rates. They have the potential to take away the freedom of individuals for generations to come.
Looking ahead, all the signs are that the role of the state is likely to grow unless attempts are made to address issues in a different way. We have an ageing population which will increase the burden on funding retirement incomes, so too with health expenditure. As things currently stand, an ever growing proportion of government expenditure will be dedicated to health and aged care. This was an issue flagged by the Howard government almost two decades ago but still we have no apparent answer to this challenge. The centre right of Western politics will have to think through creative solutions to this dilemma based on their core values.
As society pours an increasing proportion of its resources into an ageing population, that will have significant consequences for younger people. As things currently stand, there is a redistribution of wealth from young working people to elderly retired people. I may have a vested interest in that has a baby boomer myself but I don’t think society does. House building has not kept pace with demand and the dream of homeownership is now beyond the means of many younger people. That has huge social implications. I know the Morrison government gave a lot of thought to this issue but it needs to be a front and centre preoccupation for centre right political parties, for whom home ownership has been a central part of their vision for a property owning democracy in which all people have a part.
Secondly, we have to face the impact on society of technology. Social media, one of the consequences of the spread of digital technology, has many upsides. It does help us keep in touch with what is happening to our friends and families but also around the world. But social media has had a significant impact on the social interaction between people. It is herding people into narrow silos and within the silos, opposing views are subject to extreme abuse and denigration. What is more, it has led to less understanding of the interconnectedness of issues and the complexity of trying to resolve social and economic problems. We have seen a dramatic example of that over the last year or so.
People are demanding action on climate change and in particular a reduction in the use of fossil fuels to generate energy. On the other hand, they haven’t taken into consideration the impact this will have on energy bills, on the competitiveness of the economy, on inflation and ultimately on employment prospects. Yet all these things have to be balanced. I noticed with wry amusement Joe Biden spending over $1 trillion on reducing the dependence of the US on fossil fuels and winning the applause of progressives for that. But weeks later he was flying to Riyadh to beg Mohammed bin Sultan to increase Saudi oil production in order to reduce the cost of … you guessed it … fossil fuels!
Social media also substantially simplifies issues. That is all very well but it can restrict not just debate but thoughtful debate. It is one thing to be concerned about global warming but the consequences of global warming are very much debated and it is important that we are able to reflect on those consequences and make balanced judgements about what is overall best for society. It’s hard to do that through the simplistic and abusive screaming of social media.
Thirdly, technological change is always with us and we need to try to anticipate where technology is going next. The advent of artificial intelligence – that is machine learning beyond what the human mind can compute itself – will have significant implications for how society works. Many jobs which currently exist will cease to exist. New ones will be created and as the nature of work changes so social attitudes will change with it. Artificial intelligence will create a number of substantial ethical and even regulatry issues. To what extent will we allow machines to make autonomous decisions particularly in relation to a battlefield.? If we are going to regulate artificial intelligence, how are we going to regulate it? And when it comes to international rivalry and even combat, to what extent will it be possible to get international agreement to limiting weapons systems driven by artificial intelligence rather than human beings. With the advent of quantum computing, these are going to be substantial issues for the statesman to consider over the next few years.
And that brings me to my fourth challenge, the rise of China. Unlike many commentators, I don’t believe in drawing a straight line trajectory of China’s economic and political growth. Indeed, there are signs that China’s relative position is beginning to flatline as growth tapers off. But China is a country of over 1 billion people and whether we like it or not it is going to continue to be a central player in global politics. Leadership requires a strategy and we do need a strategy for dealing with China. Put simply, we need to contribute to a power balance in the Indo Pacific region so that at no time will China be able to exercise hegemony over the region. If that were to happen then the region would become dangerously destabilised.
A power balance in the Indo Pacific region requires alliances. We have been successful in turning the trilateral security dialogue into the Quad and then developing the AUKUS initiative – which is about more than just nuclear submarines, it also contemplates collaboration on military level artificial intelligence and cyber security which will be the key battlegrounds of the future.
But it would be a mistake to think that containment of China is a sensible policy. Whatever we may think of the Communist party regime, we have to accept that China will be with us for the long term. A policy of containment would not contribute to the development of a mechanism for coexistence between the liberal democracies and China. The two key phrases that encapsulate China policy should be power balance and coexistence. An appropriate power balance will contribute to dissuading China from undertaking military adventurism, particularly in the South China Sea and Taiwan.
Coexistence means working with China in areas where collaboration makes sense such as dealing with climate change, pandemics and international terrorism. Although it makes sense to resist China’s cyber offensive ambitions and be wary of its own development of quantum computing and artificial intelligence, that is not an argument for cutting off our trade and investment relationship with China. That should continue to be mutually beneficial. It might superficially be popular to pursue a policy of containment of China but it is not a long-term policy. Statesmanship requires the capacity to think strategically in the medium to long-term, not just respond to the events of the day.
There are many other important issues which the statesman of the future needs to address and I haven’t time to touch on all of them here. But let me return to where I began. In our country as elsewhere there is a great need for statesmanship: statesmanship based on the timeless values of a liberal democratic society and a capacity to make judgements - not all of which will be popular about how to address the trends and the issues which we all face.
These days, too much of politics is nothing more than managerial expediency. How often in private conversations do you hear politicians saying that this policy or that policy may not be popular – they’ve done the polling and the public don’t like it. The challenge is to communicate with the public and explain to the public what policies are in the country‘s best interests. Great leaders are able to do that. It doesn’t take greatness to get opinion polls done and parrot back to the public what has been heard in those opinion polls. But remember, the public in general are preoccupied with their own daily lives and they are not spending hours and days contemplating macro economic trends, demographic challenges and the shifting tectonic plates of geopolitics. It’s the job of political leaders to draw these issues to the attention of the public and to persuade the public of the wise course to follow.
That was the genius of Menzies and Howard. They had four characteristics that all great leaders have: they understood history and the trends of history. They had political courage and when there were setbacks they simply hunkered down and prepared for the next battle. They didn’t despair and give up. They both had a capacity to understand the Australian public and the country’s moods without being slaves to opinion pollsters and political advisors with their cunning plans for electoral victory. And although both leaders were at times unpopular within their party and even spurned by the party in their early years, they learnt to manage their colleagues with supreme skill and diplomacy.
Such leaders do not come along very often. But they do come along.
This is an edited transcript of the 10th John Howard Lecture delivered by Alexander Downer on 13 December in Melbourne.