David Kemp's retirement from politics marks the end of a family tradition unique in Australia. In the 1940s his father, Charles, wrote the manifesto that determined the economic policies of the Menzies government. In the 1990s David Kemp as the leader of the "dry" faction in Victoria helped set the Liberals' agenda on tariff reform, economic deregulation and small government. He was responsible for radical policies on university deregulation, school funding, and national literacy testing. He presided over the privatisation of the Commonwealth Employment Service and the introduction of work for the dole, and argued against signing the Kyoto Protocol. With Kemp's departure there will be a shift in the location of the intellectual leadership of the Liberal Party. Victoria has always been considered the "jewel in the crown" of the Liberals. In electoral terms this is now no longer the case. After the last federal election Liberals held 15 lower house seats in Victoria, compared with 21 in NSW. In policy terms, although Peter Costello will most likely be the next Liberal leader, the key influences on the party will be from NSW. Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Brendan Nelson are all from Sydney. Beginning with his time as a senior adviser to Malcolm Fraser, there have been few issues of national significance with which David Kemp has not been involved. On the afternoon of November 11, 1975, Fraser read from Kemp's scribbled handwritten notes to announce to the House of Representatives that two hours earlier John Kerr had sacked Gough Whitlam. The image Fraser presented as prime minister was very much the product of Kemp's advice. After the Liberals' loss at 1972 federal election, Kemp, then a 31-year-old academic, wrote an article entitled "A Leader and a Philosophy". He passionately put the case that only a strong leader could bring the Liberal Party back from the wilderness. In a little more than a year, Malcolm Fraser became leader. In 1979 Kemp became professor of politics at Monash University. Following on from his doctorate work at Yale University in the US, he was the first political scientist in this country to identify a growing trend in the electorate. Australians were less likely to vote according to their "class interest" and more likely to vote according to a set of emotional and intellectual values. Today this might seem obvious, but at the time it was a controversial conclusion. While state director of the Liberal Party in the late '80s, Kemp collaborated with those such as Alan Stockdale, his friend from their time as students at Melbourne University, to introduce a sharper policy focus to the party. The long-term legacy of the work of Kemp and others was the Kennett government's reforms. Kemp's preselection for the blue-ribbon bayside federal seat of Goldstein in May 1989 -- when he defeated Ian Macphee -- was tumultuous. That outcome and the selection of Peter Costello in Higgins symbolised the ideological shift that had taken place in the Liberal Party over the previous decade. Macphee was opposed to everything that has since come to be called "economic rationalism". That there has been no serious challenge to the prevailing economic philosophies of the Liberal Party since the late '80s is not evidence that opposition has been silenced. Instead, it shows that there is no alternative to "economic rationalism" that is not intellectually bankrupt. In government, Kemp established the policy framework for many initiatives, not all of which he was able to implement. As a minister, Kemp at times betrayed a tendency to allow facts to speak for themselves. The cabinet recoiled at what it feared would be the electoral impact of his proposals to loosen government control over the tertiary sector. However, he did succeed in fundamentally changing the way non-government schools in Australia were funded, allowing many more low-income families to exercise choice. As environment minister, probably his greatest achievement was the negotiation of a plan to save the Murray-Darling basin. He believed that his opponents, if provided with sufficient evidence, could eventually be won over. In this regard he displayed his classical liberal belief that all individuals have the capacity to make reasoned choices, and that because of this, government should intervene in people's lives as little as possible. Consistent with this position, as a university student in the early '60s he campaigned for gay law reform, something that comes as a surprise who see him only as a caricature of a "new right" warrior. David Kemp's influence on the Liberal Party over the past three decades can only be matched by that of John Howard.
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