Writing in Quadrant magazine many years ago, John Howard argued: "In fighting the battle of history with the Labor party, Liberals must remember George Orwell's proposition: 'Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.' " Not only does Labor "wish to reinterpret Australian history to promote their contemporary political objectives," he argued, "but they also wish to do so to marginalise the contribution of the liberal-conservative side of Australian politics and entrench the Labor party as the only true product of Australia's political soil."
Howard wrote his essay nearly two years before he became prime minister, but his remarks are as valid today as they were in 1994. Indeed, his political disciples should bear his comments in mind when they hear Kevin Rudd and his comrades use history -- or their particular interpretation of history -- as a political weapon. On some issues, such as the Howard-Costello economic legacy, many Liberal backbenchers have recently defended their past. However, on other issues, such as education, immigration, environment or Aboriginal affairs, they have all too often allowed Labor to steal the nation's historical narrative and showcase its credentials as the party of reform and innovation.
By any proper reading of the past 60 years, however, it's the Liberals who have been the trendsetters. On education, it was Robert Menzies, not Kim Beazley Sr, who introduced state aid and ended a century of discrimination against Australian Catholics with his policy of direct Commonwealth funding of science blocks in all government and nongovernment schools. On Aboriginal rights, it was Harold Holt who presided over the 1967 referendum which allowed indigenous Australians to be counted in the census and regarded as full citizens. On the environment, it was none other than the dreaded conservative Garfield Barwick who was the first president of the Australian Conservation Foundation. It was Liberal immigration minister Hubert Opperman, much to the chagrin of Arthur Calwell and the union movement, who played the decisive role in abolishing White Australia; and it was Malcolm Fraser, much to the chagrin of Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke, who embraced a more liberal immigration policy when he stood up for the Vietnamese boat people. In fairness to Labor, the party helped kick-start the economic-reform agenda of deregulation and privatisation, but given the Prime Minister's recent repudiation of "neo-liberalism", this is a legacy the ALP is suddenly, and opportunistically, jettisoning.
Recently, advocates of Labor's we-own-history mantra have been having a field day over Australian women in politics. For good reason, the nation celebrated Anna Bligh, who became the first female elected premier last month. And it is true Labor has had other many accomplished women -- past and present -- who've served in the higher echelons of power. Think of deputy prime minister Julia Gillard and other federal ministers Penny Wong, Nicola Roxon, Tanya Plibersek and Kate Ellis, not to mention former (nonelected) premiers Joan Kirner and Carmen Lawrence as well as Northern Territory chief minister Clare Martin. But read the recent commentary about Bligh's historic success and you'd be forgiven for thinking that Tory women pale in comparison historically. They obviously have not read Anne Henderson's brilliant Enid Lyons: Leading Lady to a Nation.
Henderson, the deputy director of the Sydney Institute and a prolific author, has written an all-engrossing biography of the nation's first woman cabinet minister. These days, writes Henderson, young women are told they can't have it all: that parenting and a public life are too difficult to manage at one time. But Enid did just that, marrying future prime minister Joe at age 17; and eventually having 12 children. No mere housewife, Enid was a political animal and an integral part of her husband's campaigns, initially in Labor circles before moving to the conservative side. As Henderson says, they were a power couple long before the term became fashionable.
Add to this that she reared her football team of children as a single parent after Joe's sudden passing in 1939, that she was the first woman to a win a house seat (which was marginal during the Labor landslide of 1943) and then the first woman appointed as a cabinet minister in 1949, that she served on the ABC board for a decade, that she became a prominent radio broadcaster and prolific writer, including her two volumes of memoirs, and it is clear that this was one impressive lady.
As Henderson puts it, Enid defies many conventional leftist stereotypes for a feminist. Indeed, her success had everything to do with the voters' perception of her ability and nothing to do with her sex. Nor did her success have anything to do with feminist sloganeering. Her political rise came decades before the American sisters exported Emily's List to our shores; or before a director of the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency or a minister for the Status of Women arrived on the political scene.
Enid succeeded in politics while she raised a large family at a time when prejudice against women was supposedly universal. Yet she did not expect other women to vote for her in sisterly solidarity. Nor did she assume Menzies would appoint her to his cabinet to atone for man's patriarchal past. Bear this in mind when you hear Labor champion more gender quotas in parliament.
Which brings us back to the reluctance of Liberals to defend their party's achievements as well as the failure of the media to put current political events in their proper historical context. In fact, many Canberra journalists have no real feel for or interest in Australian political history before Whitlam -- which is to say, before many of them were even born. They should heed Cicero's wise maxim: "To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain always a child." A veteran Canberra journalist once told me how two colleagues in their mid-twenties did not even know who John Gorton was. No wonder, then, that the many journalists who greeted Anna's election as a political watershed in Australian history did not recount the story of Enid Lyons. They've probably never heard of her.
Whatever their political affiliation, however, Australians should see the record of Enid as a source of pride and achievement. Henderson's book should be required reading for any high school course on Australian history. And if Liberals don't have good enough memories to honour the nation's Leading Lady, remember that next month marks the milestone of another great conservative lady: the 30th anniversary of the Iron Lady's rise to power in Britain. As it happens, Enid Lyons and Margaret Thatcher met in Canberra in 1979, two years before the former's passing and just after the latter's landslide election. Now that is a legacy conservatives should also celebrate.
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