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 to a vast range of voters to identify themselves as uniquely valuable Australians.

Brett's argument on political technique is quite neatly expressed in her summarising remarks about an American literary critic called Kenneth Burke (1968):

     "Burke has rescued the term 'rhetoric' from its rather limited use to dismiss language no longer felt, and revived its central meaning of the art of using language to persuade and influence the self or others to particular ways of seeing, feeling about, and acting in the world. The central rhetorical device in such attempts is identification ― the identification of things in such a way as to induce identification with them."

Menzies and Howard were masters of political rhetoric in this especially creative sense. They were designers of an electoral space that middle class Australians were pleased to inhabit. More accurately, they were inventors of a collective voter-personality that a large part of the body politic found familiar (or flattering) enough to want to put on. 

In effect, Menzies and Howard became unifiers of the unorganised. Each leader, speaking in their own time and to their generation, brought together the non-Labor classes; those 'others' who were not the unionised working class were now nominated as an unappreciated 'central' population ― general, average, ordinary, neither very rich nor very poor ― who were really the unsung heroes of democracy, "the backbone of the nation".

The personal qualities Menzies said he most admired belonged to the "intervening range, the kind of people I myself represent in parliament ― salary-earners, shop-keepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers, and so on". He was addressing Australians at the nadir of the Second World War, after the fall of Singapore, and asked them to consider what sort of society they wanted when the conflict was over: "Are you looking forward to a breed of men after the war who have become boneless wonders? Leaners grow flabby, lifters grow muscles". This was smart wrap-around politics, a promotion of 'us' to the high moral ground, and contested a territory usually occupied by the Labor Party.

In similar vein, Howard revised Labor's ownership of Anzac mythology, wresting the reputation of egalitarianism and mateship from its traditional roots. According to his updated version of the noble 'centre', those who contributed most to the Australian society were never the noisy, complaining minorities. After a decade of Hawke-Keating, Howard spoke to "his battlers", an alienated majority of silent sufferers.

     "Powerful vested interests seem to win the day when it comes to duchessing the government and accessing to public funding. The losers have been the men and women of mainstream Australia whose political voice is too often muffled or ignored ― the families battling to give their children a break, hardworking employees battling to get ahead, small businesses battling to survive, young Australians battling to get a decent start in their working lives, older Australians battling to preserve their dignity and security, community organisations battling the ever-expanding role of intrusive central government".

Howard pitched his appeal in the same feel-good language that Menzies used. He empathised with "the men and women of mainstream Australia", those battling to get ahead or simply to maintain their existing standard of living. Howard's battlers wanted to hear about their righteousness. They required reassurance about their unalterable centrality to the nation's achievements and security. Howard, like Menzies before him, recognised this 'need', the fundamental anxiety and uncertainty that accompanied them in their day to day lives. And he ministered to them the soft words of self-pity.

Neither of the Liberal Party giants were very original in their descriptions of non-Labour 'others'. Concepts like 'the silent majority' moved in and out of fashion during the twentieth century. What marked their rhetoric out though, was its mass recruitment of conservatives into a functioning coalition of political supporters, 'a party of individuals' who recognised themselves and each other in the images supplied.