A contingent triumph.(The (Strange, Recent but Understandable) Triumph of Liberalism in Australia)(Book Review)

The (Strange, Recent but Understandable) Triumph of Liberalism in Australia, by Bob Catley; Macleay Press, 2005, $34.95.

THE ROLE OF LIBERALISM in Australian politics has long been a vexed issue and a puzzle to those who study it. It is odd that those politicians who drew up a wonderfully liberal constitution in the 1890s should have turned around and put into practice illiberal legislation such White Australia once that constitution had been implemented.

For much of the twentieth century it was difficult to see much in the way of liberalism in operation in Australia, even by those calling themselves liberals. In the early 1920s Stanley Bruce proclaimed the demise of Free Trade liberalism and in 1930 W.K. Hancock stated that the true political creed of Australians was the use of the state to further individual rights and interests.

Hancock divined that most Australians did not want the implementation of socialism but neither were they rugged individualists who spurned the public teat when it was offered. Australian political culture was strongly democratic but only weakly liberal. For a number of generations Australians got used to the idea of a "protective state" under which the goal was economic independence in an industry protected by legislation or monopoly arrangements such as a news-agency.

Bob Catley is correct when he describes "the triumph of liberalism in Australia" as "strange, recent but understandable". By and large Australian culture had spurned the more robust varieties of liberalism since the 1880s, preferring in its place the social liberalism of Sir Robert Menzies, who was happy to use the state to protect individual interests. It took a major crisis to shake this cosy arrangement to its foundations.

The real issue is whether what followed in the wake of that crisis has really been a triumph of liberalism. Just as the Australian Settlement of the early twentieth century was a mutation of the liberal ideal under the pressure of a desire for legislation that is best described as "democratic", so it remains to be seen if similar pressures will not modify the reforms that have occurred since 1983.

Catley has a positive story to tell and he does so in an engaging fashion. Its importance lies in the perspective that it provides on the development of Australia during the second half of the twentieth century.