Bah, it's all the same to me

John Howard and the Conservative Tradition
by Norman Abjorensen
(Australian Scholarly Publishing 2008, 211 pages)

It's never easy to get a detached judgement on a serving or recently-retired politician, especially one as polarising as John Howard.  Norman Abjorensen's hostility to Howard would make his attempt problematic in any case, but what really hurts this book is Abjorensen's conceptual framework.

His underlying thesis is that liberalism and conservatism amount to pretty much the same thing -- "essentially one and the same with but minor cosmetic differences" -- and that they are both opposed to democracy, which is more or less synonymous with socialism.  Although I disagree strongly, a book arguing this contention could be very interesting.

Unfortunately, Abjorensen presupposes rather than defends it.  An argument that, on the contrary, liberalism and capitalism are deeply hostile to conservatism, can't even get started;  the conceptual resources aren't there to entertain it.  The whole category of progressive, individualist, non-statist thought, which most of us call "liberalism", just disappears.

This is a pity, because Abjorensen's topic is a fascinating one:  where does John Howard stand in relation to the intellectual roots of his party?

The story begins with the Fusion of Protectionists and Free Traders in 1909.  The Protectionists were nationalist, welfarist and xenophobic;  the Free Traders were more like a classical middle-class liberal party.  Philosophically they had little in common, but the class barrier kept them apart from Labor and they merged into a single party, from which our Liberal Party directly descends.

Unlike many historians, Abjorensen gives due weight to Fusion and the role of George Reid, the Free Trade leader.  He claims that Howard's ascendancy represents a revival of the Reid tradition:  a form of liberalism (or conservatism -- remember, they're the same thing) explicitly supportive of free markets and hostile to government intervention.  Joining a chorus of recent left-wing pundits, he labels this "neo-liberalism".

Many will be surprised to see Howard painted as a friend of the free market.  But the usual counter-arguments don't work against Abjorensen, because he has defined their premises out of existence.  He can happily concede, for example, that WorkChoices was about class conflict and authoritarian control, because for him that's what the free market is always about.

All sorts of reforms therefore get redefined as "neo-liberal" -- even Reid's trademark cause of free trade.  Although Abjorensen realises that protection served business interests and "blurred or even denied class divisions", he can't make the leap to see free trade as progressive.  Hence Bert Kelly's emergence is treated as part of the right-wing revolt against Keynesianism, while John Hewson -- liberal free marketeer, and a better candidate for Reid's mantle -- fails to appear at all.

Conversely, when Howard breaks with his party's tradition by defining himself as a conservative, Abjorensen doesn't see that as contradicting the free market agenda -- it's just an unusually frank instance of neo-liberalism.

Now, maybe most Howard-era economic reformers really were just authoritarian conservatives in disguise.  But if that's what neo-liberalism is (and since its recent usage seems to be a coinage of the left, they can make it mean whatever they want), then it just makes the absence of "liberalism" as a real category all the more obvious.

Stripped of the artificial construct of neo-liberalism, the similarity between Reid and Howard comes down to the fact that they were both lawyers, and that they were both from Sydney -- not quite enough to hang a theory on.

Abjorensen, however, is sure they are connected.  He cites Judith Brett approvingly against seeing Fusion "in purely class-model and economic terms" and says that on that basis "John Howard's rise and political success is difficult to explain and account for."  But Australia is much less of a class society than a hundred years ago;  the fact that Howard to some extent succeeded in building an ideological party doesn't mean that his Fusion predecessors were doing the same thing.  And it certainly doesn't mean they shared his ideology.

Abjorensen has a skilled command of Liberal history, and there is interesting material here.  But it is history with odd gaps;  because he is interested in the legacy of Fusion, we get an extended treatment of Bruce and Menzies, but not of leaders who started out in the ALP.  Yet surely Joe Lyons looks more like a precursor of Howard than Reid does.

It must also be said that Abjorensen has been poorly served by his publisher;  the proofreading is nothing short of appalling.  Almost every paragraph has sentences that lose the reader with wrong words or aberrant grammar.

Persevere, though, because Abjorensen is tackling important matters -- even if he typically deals them a glancing blow rather than a direct hit.