Judith Brett on the Australian Liberal Party
Judith Brett is one of the very few commentators who actually get conservative politics in Australia. Her insights follow on from her special understanding of the two 'great' Liberal Party Prime Ministers of the postwar period, Robert Menzies and John Howard. Brett's essays in her anthology, Doing Politics: Writing on Public Life (2021), demonstrate an instinctive grasp of what made these 'giants' of the non-Labor stage stand out. It was not so much the longevity of their terms in office, although their run of electoral successes certainly distinguished them from other Liberal leaders. It is Brett's view that it was was Menzies' and Howard's defining political rhetoric that elevated them to pillar-status. Their words, in the 1942 radio broadcast Menzies' Forgotten People and a 1995 party pamphlet The Australia I Believe In , went beyond a standard rehearsal of catch-all phrases and platitudes. Instead these examples encompassed an invitation