Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics

The Hard Right in Australia

Dominic Kelly

• Publisher: Black Inc.
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781743820766
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Political history at its best. This is the story of the hard right in Australia – of how Ray Evans and his boss at Western Mining Corporation, Hugh Morgan, became the pioneers of a new form of right-wing politics whose forceful reshaping of public debates transformed Australian politics. With a calm gaze, forensic detail and a dry wit, Dominic Kelly shows how they did it.
Starting in the mid-1980s, Evans set up four small but potent organisations: the H.R. Nicholls Society (industrial relations), the Samuel Griffith Society (constitutional issues), the Lavoisier Group (climate change) and the Bennelong Society (Indigenous affairs). Their aim was to transform public debate on key issues.
Morgan and Evans had an energy that bordered on fanaticism. They lobbied politicians and wrote op-eds. They were born intriguers and colourful rhetoricians, with a wide influence that famously included treasurer-to-be Peter Costello. It was Bob Hawke who called the H.R. Nicholls Society 'political troglodytes and economic lunatics'; yet in their dogged pursuit of influence, the hard right made an impact. From successive backdowns on emissions targets to the rejection of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the efforts of hard right conservatives continues to be felt today – not only on the right but across mainstream public policy.
Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics is a compelling case study in how some very determined people can change a political culture.

1

IDEAS AND INSTITUTIONS OF THE AUSTRALIAN RIGHT

FOR A LONG TIME IN AUSTRALIA, as political historian Judith Brett writes, “to be called a conservative has more often been an accusation than a self-description.”¹ Australians who would have been natural supporters of the Conservative Party if they were British were reluctant to adopt the term. Robert Menzies explicitly rejected the label “conservative” when he led the formation of the Liberal Party in 1944–1945. “We took the name ‘Liberal’ because we were determined to be a progressive party,” he explained in his memoirs, “willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary but believing in the individual, his rights, and his enterprise, and rejecting the Socialist panacea.”²

Although conservatives are generally resistant to unnecessary change, they tend not to oppose change at all costs. This is important, and it is a convention traceable to the birth of conservatism as a concrete political idea, which stretches back to the eighteenth-century Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke. A member of the British parliament from 1765 to 1794, Burke was a resolute defender of social, political and religious institutions that developed organically, for they, he asserted, contain inherent forms of wisdom that remain beneficial for current and future generations. On this basis, conservatives are hostile to any political project that aims to overthrow established institutions in the pursuit of abstract ideals, whatever their supposed good intentions. However, even Burke explicitly acknowledged that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”³ Philosophers and political theorists have been debating and refining his ideas ever since, yet Burke’s core principles remain at the heart of modern conservatism.

The contemporary Australian right is made up of a variety of institutions that have coalesced around a few core ideas and values. This chapter will outline the most important ideas and institutions that paved the way for the rise of the New Right and, more specifically, the single-issue advocacy groups that are the subject of the book. First we need to look abroad, because although Australia is geographically isolated from the western world, its political traditions have always drawn inspiration from its great and powerful friends the United States and the United Kingdom.

Post-war conservative movements in the United States and United Kingdom

The post-war period in American politics saw the rise of a new conservative movement, whose ideas would gradually come to dominate the Republican Party and spread throughout the western world. An important milestone for this new conservatism was the 1953 publication of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, a comprehensive history of Anglo-American conservatism that identified six canons of conservative thought: belief in divine intent; affection for traditional life; acceptance of society’s natural orders and classes; conviction that private property and freedom are inseparable; belief that humans are governed more by emotion than reason; and wariness of enforced change and innovation.⁴ In identifying and espousing the concept of a unified American conservative tradition that had evolved since Edmund Burke’s seminal Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Kirk’s book “dramatically catalyzed the emergence of the conservative intellectual movement.”⁵

One of those inspired was the young Yale graduate William F. Buckley Jr, who founded the magazine National Review in 1955 and would go on to become America’s preeminent conservative intellectual. National Review and other anti-communist, “neo-conservative” publications such as Commentary magazine, under the editorship of Norman Podhoretz, and Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell’s journal The Public Interest, became essential reading for American conservatives in the following decades.⁶ American neo-conservatism grew out of a small group of predominantly Jewish New York intellectuals who had abandoned the leftist radicalism of their youth. Instead they became virulently anti-communist, and relentlessly critical of the failings of American liberalism. This phenomenon was largely a backlash against the liberal-dominated post-war era, which culminated in the mass social movements of the 1960s. Neo-conservatives feared that increasing permissiveness was leading to social fragmentation and breakdown. In a famous line, Kristol described a neo-conservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.”⁷

In 1964 hardline conservative Barry Goldwater won the Republican presidential nomination against the party’s establishment candidate, Nelson Rockefeller. Though he went on to lose the election to Democrat Lyndon Johnson in a landslide, Goldwater’s nomination signalled the arrival of movement conservatism in mainstream politics, an arrival that was confirmed by Ronald Reagan’s election as governor of California two years later.

In addition to the publications mentioned above, the new conservative movement institutionalised itself through the establishment of a new kind of think tank. These organisations, prominent examples of which include the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (founded in 1943), the Heritage Foundation (1973) and the Cato Institute (1977), were to become materially and ideologically central to the cause of movement conservatism. Abandoning the non-partisan principles of the first wave of think tanks, which had emerged in the early twentieth century, this new form was “more engaged in selling predetermined ideology to politicians and the public than undertaking scholarly research.”⁸ Also new was the concerted effort to engage with the wider public. While the more established think tanks were concentrating their efforts on maintaining relationships with the political elite in Washington, the new guard, while of course continuing to cultivate contacts in Washington, attempted to communicate directly with ordinary people via newspapers, radio and television.

The guiding economic ideology of many of these conservative think tanks was what came to be known as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has been defined by David Harvey as “a theory of political-economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”⁹ The so-called “Austrian School” economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises had been developing these ideas for some decades. In 1947 they founded the Mont Pelerin Society, a key institution in the history of neoliberalism, which Hayek envisioned as “something halfway between a scholarly association and a political society.”¹⁰ The Society formalised their position as the most prominent intellectual critics of the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, which promoted full employment and stable currencies by regulating demand, and dominated western economic policy from the 1940s to the 1970s. In the United States, the leading intellectual proponent of neoliberalism was the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman.

A significant neoliberal landmark was the Heritage Foundation’s twenty-volume, 3000-page Mandate for Leadership: Policy Management in a Conservative Administration. Produced for the incoming Reagan administration in 1980, this unprecedented publication was the work of more than 300 people across twenty project teams.¹¹ President-elect Reagan was appreciative, and fourteen Heritage Foundation staff were appointed to his transition team. An eleven hundred–page abridged version of Mandate for Leadership was published for the general trade in 1981, and the book made The Washington Post bestseller list.¹² A second edition, Mandate for Leadership II: Continuing the Conservative Revolution, was produced upon Reagan’s re-election in 1984, and the series continues to this day, albeit in a less comprehensive form.

Heritage Foundation president Edwin Feulner visited Australia in 1985 and gave a lecture in which he explained the importance of think tanks in the Anglosphere:

Ideas like Supply Side economics, privatisation, enterprise zones, and the flat tax are produced by individuals first – the academic scribblers, as Keynes would call them. Milton Friedman and Stuart Butler in the United States and Madsen Pirie in the United Kingdom, for example, explain, and expand the ideas. They are the first-hand dealers in ideas. But, it takes an institution to help popularise and propagandise an idea – to market an idea. Think tanks are the second-hand dealers of ideas. Organisations like the Institute of Economic Affairs or the Adam Smith Institute in London, my own Heritage Foundation in the United States and the Centre of Policy Studies and the Centre for Independent Studies here in Australia host conferences, lectures and seminars and publish policy reports, books and monographs to popularise an idea. Through “outreach” programmes an institution can promote an idea on a continuing basis and cause change. But this takes time.¹³

Here Feulner provided the clearest expression of the vital role of think tanks in propagating ideas. No matter how persuasive their ideas, individuals can only do so much. For the nascent Australian single-issue advocacy groups, this amounted to a fundamental principle.

As Feulner indicated in his Australian speech, neoliberalism was also having a huge impact in the United Kingdom. The most important think tanks in the British movement were the Institute of Economic Affairs (founded in 1955); the Centre for Policy Studies (1974), which Margaret Thatcher helped to found while an Opposition frontbencher; and the Adam Smith Institute (1977).

The founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs, Sir Antony Fisher, was an especially important figure in the worldwide neoliberal movement. Fisher was a successful farmer who, after reading Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), a canonical text in the early history of neoliberalism, sought the author’s advice about how he could help influence the political process. Hayek told him that becoming a politician was a waste of time, and that he would be better off “forming a scholarly research organisation to supply intellectuals in universities, schools, journalism and broadcasting with authoritative studies of the economic theory of markets and its application to practical affairs.”¹⁴ Fisher went on to help found a number of think tanks in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, as well as, in 1981, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. The Atlas Network (as it is now called) was designed as a way of institutionalising the process of helping to create and support free market organisations. Its most recent institute directory lists 494 partners in ninety-four countries.¹⁵

Although the United States and the United Kingdom are the countries that Australia tends to emulate the most, the intellectual and institutional transformations described above were of course not confined to the Anglosphere. As Harvey argues, “there has everywhere been an emphatic turn towards neoliberalism in political-economic practices and thinking since the 1970s.”¹⁶ American and British think tanks played a pivotal role in neoliberalism’s eventual triumph as the dominant economic orthodoxy of the late twentieth century, and this had much to do with the strategic distribution of ideas via the think-tank model. The Adam Smith Institute’s Madsen Pirie once said of his organisation: “We propose things which people regard as being on the edge of lunacy. The next thing you know, they’re on the edge of policy.”¹⁷ Richard Cockett, whose work Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution charts the British neoliberal movement from its 1930s origins through until its eventual triumph with Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election victory and her subsequent dominance of British politics in the 1980s, largely supports this assertion, arguing that free market think tanks “did as much intellectually to convert a generation of ‘opinion-formers’ and politicians to a new set of ideas as the Fabians had done with a former generation at the turn of the century.”¹⁸

Liberalism, conservatism and the Liberal Party of Australia

In Australia, the complicated mix of liberal and conservative political philosophies on the non-Labor side of politics stretches back to the merging of the Protectionist and Free Trade parties to create the Fusion Party in 1909. Various alliances were attempted in the decades that followed before non-Labor once again fell apart during World War II.

In 1939 Robert Menzies had become prime mi...