Liberal nastiness

Boris Frankel, who has been known to rail desperately against just about every development in academic thought in the humanities since the 1970s, called in 1992 for a new way forward - a way that would reject both New Right economic rationalism and the new “productive culture” being pushed by both major political parties and (through the Accord) the ACTU. At the heart of his rejection of 1980’s politics was his (moral) disgust at the amoralism of it all.

But at the end of his book, From the Prophets Deserts Come, a disarming conclusion: if his “alternative visions and practices fail to emerge, then don’t despair. It is most unlikely that Australian society will collapse altogether in catastrophe or crisis. Rather,” he prophesised, “it will just become nastier, more brutish, more demoralisingly devoid of civic morality and co-operation.

He added sardonically:

Of course, nothing that a good alarm system, police force and privatised prison system can’t deal with. Or perhaps, like millions of affluent Americans, you may be able to afford to live in private “villages” or suburbs where the “unpleasantness” of public squalor is kept at bay by private police forces.

If you are fortunate enough to have a full-time paid job or enjoy life-time training in the new “productive culture”, what you have to look forward to may be loss of environmental resources, urban blight, increased poverty and homogenised “cultural difference” through numerous media outlets.

But at least there will be consolations. When you are feeling a little depressed or bored, what a relief it will be to instantaneously tune in to all the new global channels in order to be comforted by the news that exactly the same types of socio-economic and environmental problems are confronting our “global competitors”.

Written, let’s remind ourselves, in 1992. Sure, it’s a cynical extension of any anti-modernist diatribe this side of Thoreau. It’s also a staggeringly accurate prophecy of the Howard Years, from the point of view of those who were repelled by him and his “Strong Leader” style.

But others, for whom Frankel’s paragraph makes little sense, were attracted to the Liberal Party during Howard’s reign.

“It’s no secret that healthy environments attract healthy people”, declares the author of a widely-read blog on the subject of effective leadership style. The vice versa truth is implicit. “You attract the people your system invites”, warns Bruce Wasserstein, CEO of the American investment bank Lazard.

It seems clear from the past week’s events that the Victorian Liberal Party is not a healthy organisation. A couple of 20-something “Dries” for whom “Red Ted” Baillieu’s leadership is as a rag to ideological bulls get busted for their disloyal website (stupidly traceable to their own computers). These guys joined the Liberal Party during the long Howard decade. In retaliation, they try to drag as many “Wets” down with them as they can.

Professor Judith Brett provides an invaluable last-word analysis of John Howard’s political decline in Exit Right (Black Inc, 2007). Invaluable, because it contains a grid upon which to order one’s thoughts for that half of the voting population whose souls suffered through more than a decade of what they saw as increasingly nasty and unnecessarily divisive politics.

Using Graham Little’s original concept, Brett characterised Howard’s leadership style as one based on an idea of something approaching perpetual war. Always us v them (with “them” being Late Night Live-listeners, refugee-lovers, tree-huggers, gay marriage activists, humanities department academics, unions and especially Labor), Howard was the man for a crisis: batten down the hatches, loyalty at all costs to the fearless leader, disloyalty is death.

Brett correctly predicted Howard’s electoral defeat by arguing that a time comes when the crisis simply can’t be manufactured anymore. Voters saw through the spin when they couldn’t in 2001.

But if this was true in a general sense, what of those who were attracted to the Liberal Party during these years of war and victory?

When I became eligible to vote, Howard had been Prime Minister for nearly three years. While at Adelaide University between 2000 and 2005, I swung from a rather apolitical middle-class populist-conservative type to a relatively radical “Howard hater” for whom the ALP was too “right-wing”.

I didn’t stop being middle-class, and in hindsight I did not abandon some rather fundamentally social-liberal ideals of equality and fairness. But among the factors that prevented me from becoming a Young Liberal - I voted once for Chris Gallus, and even held in my hands a Liberal Party membership form - was the general character of the Young Liberals themselves.

With one or two exceptions, these guys - and they were mostly guys - were bafflingly right-wing. With one or two exceptions, they were “boat shoe” types - their fathers were important people, they came from such mysterious places as Prince Alfred College and Pulteney Grammar, and they all wore the same collared, button-up shirt.

But more than that - much more than that - was what I can only describe as their political “nastiness”. It’s not just that these people were homophobic, xenophobic and more than a little sexist; it’s that they seemed proud to be these things.

Gay people were “selfish hypocrites”, one young man told me, because they were “demanding rights which were not theirs and never have been. Gays are bigots and hypocrites: if straight people don’t agree with them they all label them as homophobic”. “I don’t need to read about men choosing to be gay,” said another. “That’s their choice to do something they weren’t created for. Why should I defend such a blindingly stupid choice?”

Asylum seekers, too, were “selfish” and “undeserving of our charity”, because they “jumped the queue that most people are happy to wait in, by using their relative wealth to bypass the proper system”.

Another young man, a law student, told me that “I can say that the views of the majority within [the Liberal Party] are not those of classical liberalism or whatever it was that Menzies desired. Of course there are some who think like this, but there are many more conservatives - people with ‘prejudices’ like me. I don’t so much question why I believe something,” he went on. “That is probably in your eyes a major shortfall; however I only have to justify my views to myself and to God.”

Yet another told me that “I have never pretended to be a down-the-line liberal. I am a conservative. We do not pigeon-hole ourselves by the writings of someone else, but rather believe in something based on our own morals and principles. I find this method is far more justifiable, as we are not sheep in someone else’s flock.”

And another: “I will continue to read military history and literature on command and leadership, because it’s the soldier who brings us freedom and protects us from tyrants.”

Imagine my shock when I involved myself in student politics and learned that the South Australian Young Liberals were, by contrast, mild. Readers may have seen the footage broadcast in June 2006 on Lateline, of Young Liberals at a National Union of Students conference chanting “we’re racist, we’re sexist, we’re ho-mo-phobic” and singing God Save the Queen over the top of an Aboriginal elder welcoming the students to country.

The previous year, the Monthly carried Chloe Hooper’s exposé of the Young Liberal federal conference in Hobart - the one where she found lots of budding “conservatives” competing for right-wing kudos by slagging off about gays, “illegal immigrants”, women having abortions, and Malcolm Fraser.

The new Liberal member for Mitchell (in Sydney’s north-west), 30-year-old Alex Hawke, was at that conference, then in his capacity as president of the New South Wales Young Libs. Hawke was apparently banned by his party from giving interviews before the recent election. We don’t know why, but educated guesses abound.

At times, reading John Hyde Page’s The Education of a Young Liberal (which you can’t do now if you haven’t already - it was recalled in March last year pending legal action) is not much different to reading journalist David Greason’s account of extreme-right organisations in the late 1970s in I Was a Teenage Fascist.

These branch-stacking, god-fearing, radical-right Young Liberals don’t take too kindly to criticism.

In February this year, Malcolm Fraser - hardly a raving leftie - criticised the Victorian Liberal Party for its ideological branch-stacking and its propensity to stifle dissent. The response was immediate - and vicious.

“Who cares what this old irrelevant man has got to say anyway [?]” wrote one blogger on The Age website. “I wish he was not still a burden on the taxpayer as he and Gough and other[s] are.” “If ‘thousands’ are abandoning the party it’s because of the limp wristed drift to the left,” declared another. A “senile old fool”, proclaimed a third. For many of the Young Liberals I know, Fraser is akin to Satan.

Given that its highest office is now the Brisbane City Council, it might be wise for the Liberal Party to take the Nationals’ statesman Bill Baxter’s advice and be “brutally realistic”. Australians, it seems, have voted against nastiness. But after a decade of “Strong Leadership” during which foundational cracks in non-Labor were papered over by federal election results, all that seems to have happened is that young people of the sort described above joined the Liberal Party in large numbers. And rather than having their rather extreme views challenged by some centralising hegemonic influence within the Party, they are, by all accounts, having them affirmed.

In the years to come, we will be in a better position to assess the historical significance of Howard’s “Strong Leader” style. But following the new government’s National Apology to the Stolen Generations on February 13, we undoubtedly saw an immediate consequence.

In his political need to placate the attack-dogs of the rampant Right, Brendan Nelson gave a “Sorry” speech that nevertheless relied on the very same comforter myths the Apology was intended to refute - especially that which seeks to excuse the behaviour of past governments on the basis that they had “good intentions”. Nelson’s speech was incredibly offensive, both to those supporting the Apology and to the Stolen Generations themselves: this was made clear by those who spontaneously turned away from screens broadcasting the speech.

In the blinkered, ideological cocoon the party has woven for itself, not even this could be seen. “I don’t believe anyone who attentively listened to Brendan’s speech would have been anything other than very satisfied with it,” said Tony Abbott the following morning.

Howard’s “Strong Leadership” may have won the Liberal Party elections. It does not appear to have resolved the fundamental cracks in Liberal ideology that emerged during the 1980s. And, given the tenor of the people who were attracted by Howard’s “tough” lines, it may have done the Party much more long-term harm than good.