The Liberals
by Dean Jaensch
Allen & Unwin
It is easy to exaggerate the current problems in the Australian Liberal Party. Five years ago, the prophets of doom seemed to have ample justification for their dark forebodings. Now they have far less: there is a Liberal or Coalition government in six of the eight States and Territories, and several of those seem likely (at least from this distance) to be returned at their next elections. On any assessment, therefore, there has been something of a Liberal renaissance, one which seems reasonably sustainable.
Achieving sustainability is, of course, one of the problems that the various Liberal Parties must address; and their electoral success at the State level may indeed hinder reasonable and necessary efforts at institutional reform. But the central problem, the problem addressed here by Dean Jaensch, is the performance of the Federal Liberal Party. With defeats in five successive Federal elections recorded since 1983, it is now probably not an exaggeration to describe it as being in crisis. The record is still not nearly as desperate as Labor's nine successive defeats between 1949 and 1972, but there may be reasons -- perhaps mostly historical -- for believing that the Liberal Party is less able to cope with continuous defeat than Labor.
The principal strength of this study is that it does offer a historical dimension to the recent turmoil: roughly the first third of the book is a useful thematic summary which brings us up to the Fraser years. Jaensch's approach is clear from his first sentence, where he states that "The Liberal Party is 100 years old". This mildly provocative beginning enables him to demonstrate how very long-standing some of the elements of the current crisis are: the loose, quasi-federal structure of the party; the vague and problematic nexus between the lay and parliamentary parties; the reliance on leadership as a substitute for durable institutional structures; and, not least, the ideological disparateness inherent in the party.
The last point is in some ways the most fundamental. Jaensch reminds us -- most convincingly in the case of the 1909 Fusion between Deakinite and Reidite, and less so, perhaps, of the preceding years -- of the curious hollowness at the core of the successive Liberal Parties. So much of the impetus for their foundation and continuing existence has been the need simply to have a non-socialist party. The resulting process of perpetual loose coalitions tends to explain most of the other elements identified by Jaensch.
By one of life's grosser ironies, the ideological problem is now pressingly acute for the Liberal Party. The effective death of socialism as an idea in good currency (however strongly it survives in practice) may well turn out to have removed the principal raison d'etre and unifying principle of the Liberal Party. At the very least it has lent a considerable urgency to the need to settle on some acceptable ideological identity, a need scarcely felt in, say, the first five or six Fraser years.
In the longer run this phenomenon may have fatal consequences; in the short run, the economics of party organisation will ensure that something like the present party will survive. (Voting systems are important here: the introduction of proportional representation in New Zealand may well see the emergence of a fairly conservative party which could form marriages of convenience with rather smaller "libertarian" or "social market" parties). Whether by accident or design, the ALP has managed the post-socialist transition much more successfully, having succeeded so far in recreating itself -- in image if not in substance -- as the natural party of the centre, of responsible economic management, of suburban Australian conservatism.
POLICY ANALYSIS
In the meantime, the stresses of failure seem likely to continue for some time to prevent the Liberals from achieving even the flimsy policy consensus of the Fraser years. Policy paralysis since the 1993 defeat seems nearly total; not least because the grossly mendacious overkill of Labor's campaign has effectively sterilised some quite significant areas of policy. (Labor is, of course, paying a high price for this: in the light of its severe fiscal problems, for instance, closing off the option of a new broad-based consumption tax must now seem pretty stupid. Its inability to affect the rate of unemployment by even a smallish amount of labour market deregulation must now, too, seem a high price to have paid for the ACTU's support).
Lacking other, more formal means for arriving at that consensus, and with serious tensions not only between "wet" and "dry", but also between "progressive" and "conservative", the traditional way of achieving policy unity -- essentially to impose it from the Leader's office -- still seems to be the obvious resort. With Hewson a seriously weakened leader, the obstacles were apparently insuperable. It is still too early to tell how Alexander Downer will cope; but it does seem likely that the desire to avoid the Fightback! dilemma, and thus to deal only in very broad policy generalisations, may serve the second purpose of avoiding too much internal policy squabbling. That, of course, can only be a temporary strategy.
Very much the same difficulties apply to the Party's organisational problems. Indeed, in terms of the Party's long-term needs, John Hewson's greatest failing may turn out to be not that he lost the unlosable election but that he failed to use his immense personal authority, in 1990-91, to force reform of the Liberal Party's structures.
Personality -- not being all that amenable to the normative theoretical constructs of standard political science -- does not play much of a role in Jaensch's book. This makes for a curiously bloodless tone throughout. It also leads him, perhaps more importantly, to overlook the key difficulty of the last few years. For while the Federal Liberal Party does have to reconcile its ideological problems, and to settle on a credible and appropriate ideological identity, the root cause of its instability since 1983 has been in personalities. In this sense, the Party's essential task has been to find a way of burying forever the apparently irreconcilable rift between Andrew Peacock and John Howard. It may well be that the elevation of Alexander Downer marks the completion of that task.
There are other, fairly basic, problems with book.
It is not well edited, nor adequately proofread. A faint air of second-hand fact pervades it, as if there was too much hasty recourse to old newspaper files. The grasp of fact is not always sure. (Western Australian readers will be surprised to learn -- on page 199 -- that a "wet" Liberal Reform Movement emerged in that State in 1991).
It is not at all clear at whom the book is aimed. It comes equipped with Harvard references, and an academic superstructure of models and taxonomy. But it seems, on the basis of style and seriousness, to be directed at a more or less popular audience, perhaps even including concerned members of the Liberal Party, who might want to find some answers to the obvious questions. The difficulty is that the academic models are descriptive, and far from being prescriptive of success. The academic camouflage tends to hide from the reader the fact that Jaensch has no more good advice to offer the Liberals than most commentators, and somewhat less than a few.
Like many, he barely conceals his distaste for economic rationalism and has considerable difficulty in separating the technocratic rationalism of Fightback! from any more authentic version of liberal market economics. And like many, he seems unable to see that his advocacy of the politics of inclusion is a poor substitute for a policy framework which actually does something about our major problems such as unemployment. Of course the Keating ALP is better at cuddling up to every conceivable interest group and at locking in their votes, but the resulting policy paralysis -- all too evident in Labor's impotence on unemployment -- carries with it the implications of much more serious failure.
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