Birth of Liberalism was bigger than Gough Whitlam

January 2, 2015

Birth of Liberalism was bigger than Gough Whitlam

By Greg Melleuish

It is remarkable how historical narratives are constructed and then take hold of the public imagination. The death of EG Whitlam gives an opportunity to reflect on this process of ‘‘history making’’. According to the story that has grown up around Whitlam, Australia slumbered in the backwaters of empire until he dragged it into the modern world.

"Gough Whitlam bust" by Original uploader was WikiTownsvillian at en.wikipedia - Transfered from en.wikipedia. Licensed under GFDL via Wikimedia Commons

It is a story, and a good one at that, based on a number of assumptions. One is that history is the story of progress. The other is the old, and notorious, view of Australian history being between the ‘‘party of progress’’, also known as the Australian Labor Party, and the ‘‘party of resistance’’, the Liberal Party.

But historians always ask: well, how true is all this? It depends on several things, such as how one defines progress, which in this narrative is usually seen in terms of Labor policies. Hence we end up with a circular proof of the veracity of the narrative based on the idea that what Labor does is, by definition, progress.

However, narratives always provoke counter-narratives, as there is more than one way of interpreting events. History is also never predetermined; for example, if the ALP had won the 1961 election, which it lost by only a single seat and a few hundred votes, the Liberal Party might have assumed the mantle of progressive moderniser.

It all depends on how one puts the story together. It can be argued that in the wake of the traumas of the Depression and World War II, the Chifley government was taking Australia down the road to social democracy. The high point of this journey was the success of the 1946 referendum on social services.

The next step was Ben Chifley’s attempt to nationalise the banks. If he had succeeded Australia would certainly have become a different place. But it failed because it was deemed by the High Court and the Privy Council to be unconstitutional. (Yes, the ‘‘party of progress’’ was happy to take its case to Britain for adjudication where Doc Evatt managed to irritate the Privy Council.)

The failure of bank nationalisation was followed by the election of the Menzies Liberal government in 1949. The road to social democracy had come to a halt. Instead Australia was confirmed as a country in which private enterprise was the basic means for conducting the business of the country. Moreover, as David Kemp has demonstrated, the Menzies government set about restricting the size of government and reducing its debt.

The point is the election of a Liberal government in 1949, in the wake of the failure of bank nationalisation, established the course for Australia from that time until today. It was formative. The Whitlam government may have implemented policies in education, indigenous affairs and health, to name a few, but it did not attempt to turn the clock back to 1948.

In fact, the Whitlam government confirmed that Australia would continue to have a market economy through measures such as the reduction in tariffs. This was the precursor for the policies of the Hawke-Keating years.

This narrative makes 1949 far more important in Australian history than 1972 because the 1949 election changed the direction of Australia from social democracy to social liberalism.

Why then do we have a version of Australian history in which Whitlam looms so large? One reason is that Whitlam’s ascent to power coincided with the emergence of a new educated class in Australia that was the product of Menzies’ policies to assist the growth of universities.

Another is that Whitlam was a superb self-promoter. He claimed he was going to change the world and after his term in office wrote a book about how he had done it. The new university educated class was looking for a saviour and swallowed the Whitlam story. This is not say there may have been elements of truth in it, but the story was always, even before the event, grander than the reality.

Menzies was not a self-promoter in this way. His memoirs are far more modest. To find a self-promoter of similar proportion among Australian prime ministers one has to go back to Alfred Deakin.

The lesson is that one should always beware the hype when examining history. Too many people have simply accepted at face value Whitlam’s view of himself and his place in history. The study of history requires a certain capacity for detachment if we are to achieve a truthful account of the past.

Greg Melleuish’s new book Despotic State or Free Individual is published by Australian Scholarly Publishing.

This article was originally published by The Australian.