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Charles Richardson on the Liberal Party & the 'moral middle class'.

Article Excerpt
Judith Brett, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard, Cambridge University Press, 2003

Not surprisingly, most attention to this book has focused on Brett's treatment of the Liberal Party's recent past--especially her love/hate attitude to John Howard. The real virtue of Brett's book, however, is the way that she shows how the Liberal Party's current position is deeply rooted in its history, including its prehistory.

Although she sticks doggedly to the term "Liberal', Brett's argument really comes down to a claim that the Liberal Party and its predecessors have always been conservative parties. Howard's strength, in her eyes, is that he has made this conservatism believable again, 'recreating a language of social unity and cohesion for the Liberals after their thirteen-year association with economic liberalism'. Although she overstates both his and his party's respect for individualism, Brett recognises that, fundamentally, the Howard ascendancy represents a repudiation of liberalism.

The truth about Howard is that his primary sympathies are neither with the working-class 'battlers' nor with the individualism of liberal economics, but with the traditional middle-class conservatism that has always been the mainstay of the Liberal Party. Even his anti-intellectualism has a long history, which Brett obscures a little by suggesting that the 'moral middle class' once encompassed artists and intellectuals. (The Menzies speech that she quotes on page...

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