The ascendancy of One Nation in national and state polling – and its high primary vote in South Australia – is equalled only by the confidence of commentators seeking to explain it.

Central to most stories is the role of the Liberal Party. After all, it is from the Liberals that most One Nation voters have come. From that origin, two distinct camps emerge. These reveal, I think, two very different understandings of politics: how it works, the transmission of political beliefs, and the role of elites in society. Let’s label the first the ‘elite-driven’ story, and the second the ‘group-driven’ story.

The elite-driven story goes something like this: Over the last decade-and-a-half, the Liberal Party has been at war with itself. Increasingly it is living in a right-wing echo chamber (Sky News, radio shock jocks, the Murdoch media, etc). This echo chamber has pulled the party further and further to the right. The so-called ‘moderates’ are isolated. As a result, the Liberals have created the permission structures for voters to switch to One Nation.

The elite-driven theory would say that the Liberals have chosen to ‘normalise’ One Nation. In another world, they could have delegitimised it. They could have done a better job at demonising Pauline Hanson. They could have preferenced One Nation last. They could have ‘moved to the centre’, sending a message to voters that Australians don’t tolerate reactionary politics. Voters, in turn, would have heeded that message, recognising that Hanson is outside the mainstream and not in Australia’s interest. As one essay argues, politics has a strong aesthetic component - if elites get the messaging right, the votes will follow.

The group-driven story is quite different. It goes more like this: Over the last generation, a large number of voters became increasingly dissatisfied with the political settlement offered by the major parties. Voters have a pretty good idea about what they want on certain issues - they are less manipulatable than the elite-driven story implies. Some have gone to the Greens. Others vote in independents. Now a new group has emerged, motivated by a few salient issues: migration, cost of living, cultural change, a belief that the country is becoming harder to govern. The key political fact is not that elites made Hanson respectable, but that a substantial share of the electorate have come to that conclusion themselves. This is neither a good thing or a bad thing. But it is a thing.

The group-driven theory says trying to delegitimise One Nation through moral denunciation or strategic distancing may have limited effect. That is because the policy vacuum is real, not confected, and political distancing only works if voters are convinced of a viable alternative. If they are unconvinced, denunciation only reinforces existing political preferences. Political signalling by elites is not unimportant, but in democratic politics it usually follows voter demand first.

I’m oversimplifying here. There’s clearly overlap between the two stories. A middle ground might say that there is indeed a policy vacuum that One Nation is filling - but that is because the political class, or a power elite, are dividing and distracting Australians from the issues that matter most. The real difference between the two stories, in other words, concerns the role of elites in influencing public opinion.

I’ll put my cards on the table and say I’m sceptical of the elite-driven story of One Nation’s rise. Here’s the first reason: Voters don’t think that the Liberals have moved to the right:

This chart is surprising if you read a lot of the commentary today. Malcolm Turnbull absolutely thinks the Liberals have moved to the right. On the other side, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price thinks the Liberals have become Labor-lite. Putting aside who is right, this illustrates why the left-right labels are such useless tools of analysis! They are not objective measurements. People can disagree whether a political position/individual/party is to the ‘left’ or ‘right’. Not infrequently the same policy stance can be a ‘left’ issue in one historical period and a ‘right’ issue in another.

The left-right axis evolves over time. Once it was about whether Louis XVI was guilty of high treason. During the Cold-War it was a predominantly about economics. Today it is predominantly about culture. The 2025 Australian Election Study finds that the most polarised left-right issues are cultural issues:

Understanding this explains why the Greens, more than any other party, have undergone the biggest shift along the left-right scale since the late 1990s, in a leftward direction, if the AES is to be believed. Even more revealing is once you include voters’ own perceptions of their political positioning, the gap between Liberal and Labor from the ‘average’ voter is relatively even.

The second reason I don’t buy the elite-drive story of One Nation’s rise is that it doesn’t fit very well with overseas experience. I’ll give three examples:

• The British Conservatives under David Cameron/Theresa May/Boris Johnson, pursued fairly progressive climate policy and liberal immigration policy, but failed to stop the rise of Reform UK. In fact they succumbed to it more rapidly and significantly than what is happening in Australia.

• The Canadian Conservatives have been fairly successful at absorbing many of the voters, themes, and instincts that might otherwise sustain a separate right wing challenger. More than that, they are themselves a product of a political reckoning in the 1990s, when the Reform Party of Canada replaced the Progressive Conservatives as the main opposition. The merger of the centre-right that followed produced a new conservative alliance that didn’t ‘move to the centre’ but prosecuted a more consistent centre-right agenda. On the flip side, Mark Carney’s decision to dump Canada’s consumer carbon tax and restrict immigration did not give voters ‘permission’ to support the conservatives, but rather helped neutralise their opposition and return high polling numbers and electoral success to the Canadian Liberal Government.

• The 2016 Republican primary tells a pretty clear story: that the attempts of Republican elites to attack Trump early on largely failed. The voters knew what they wanted - for better and for worse! Over time, the strategy evolved to one of accommodation instead.

Finally, I don’t buy the elite-driven theory because it assumes voters to be far more manipulatable than they are. I’m not saying that individual ignorance isn’t prevalent, nor even that most voters have the ‘right’ opinions. But I do think large electorates often register durable, reality-based interests better than critics admit. For political actors closely involved in the democratic process, a defeat can be always be interpreted as ‘we were right, but we didn’t communicate our rightness effectively’. Maybe that’s true sometimes. But I don’t think it’s the healthiest assumption to make. The fallout from the Voice referendum is instructive here. It is probably true that the Voice campaign was ‘infected with disinformation’ - most campaigns are, especially referendums where the choice is binary - but ANU analysis of voting rationale suggests a far more nuanced story. People just didn’t think the proposal would do what it said it would.

Democracy has never really been about trying to find the ‘right’ answer in a collective sense. The expansion of the voting franchise developed over time, haphazardly and awkwardly, in some countries violently, in effect to minimise one group dominating another. It is the messy product of political class bargaining - not developed in a lab by social-choice theorists. People just want to be listened to, and over time they can develop deep policy preferences that, if not met, take on an added dimension - a symbol of whether the political class takes them seriously or not.

Victoria’s first constitutional crisis in 1865 came about from a tariff proposal that was so modest as to be barely protective. It wasn’t the material outcome that people really cared about. It was the signal sent by proposing it - that a new political constituency had arrived and would be listened to; that the young men who had swept the goldfields dry now needed work in the cities. Lloyd George’s 1909 People’s Budget had the same effect.

That is why I don’t think One Nation voters can be appealed to with dressing up traditional Labor/Liberal policy favourites in a different language. A signal has to be sent, and it may be one that the political class doesn’t like.

One Nation is now the second most popular political party at the national level. If you believe the latest Roy Morgan poll, it is the most popular state political party in Victoria. That tells you it’s not just about immigration, as central as that is, but a broad and deep-seated frustration at the political class. Whether that translates to seats in parliament will require the Liberals to remain rudderless and policy-lite, and for One Nation to evolve from a party of protest to a viable alternative government. We’ll find out in the fullness of time, as they say.

This is a new development of an old trend: the decline of the two major parties. Antony Green’s chart below tells a longer story:

Source: Antony Green, ‘The Success of Local Independents – Kooyong’, 10 February 2026

Because the category of ‘Other’ has long been splintered across different groups for years, and Australia’s system of preferential voting favours a two-party system, the bedrock of the Labor-Coalition division appeared largely unchanged, even as the crossbench in the House of Representatives began to grow. No more. The latest Newspoll has One Nation on a primary vote of 27 per cent, Coalition at 18 per cent, and Labor at 33 per cent.

Where are these One Nation votes coming from? We can find them across demographics, but the generational divide has garnered a lot of media attention. Have a look at the change in the Dec 2025 and Feb 2026 Redbridge/Australian Financial Review polls:

Source: See AFR’s ‘Liberals, Nationals in free fall as One Nation surges in poll’, Feb 2026

Note that the size of the centre-right vote among older voters was already greater relative to younger voters. The generational divide we see in One Nation is a new manifestation of an already-existing generational gap.

Just like the splintering of centre-right politics across the west, the widening generational gap is a western phenomenon. In Britain, ‘age, not class, is now the biggest divide in British politics’, according to one academic. About 75% of 18-24 year olds who voted in the Brexit referendum voted Remain. For 65-74 year olds, 34% voted Remain. For Australia’s Voice referendum in 2023, ‘Yes’ votes were skewed towards younger voters.

Source: ‘Detailed analysis of the 2023 Voice to Parliament Referendum and related social and political attitudes’, ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods

The story is similar in many other countries. This analysis of 21 western democracies suggests the link between age and voting preferences rose in the 1970s when the Baby Boomers started to vote, then declined, then rose again to record levels with Millennials and Gen Z coming of age.

The second interesting pattern is that generational replacement in the west seems to be particularly damaging for centre-right parties. Each successive generation is less likely to vote for the major right party. Indeed, the relatively small and stable generational gap among Labor votes is quite striking compared against Coalition voters:

First preferences to ALP by generation, 2001 to 2022

First preferences to Coalition by generation, 2001 to 2022

Source: Christopher Giuliano, ‘Voting patterns by generation at federal elections since 2001’, 28 March 2023

Why is the generational gap larger for the Coalition? One possibility is that the most salient policies associated with the Labor brand - health, education, social services - are less generationally divisive than the Coalition’s salient policy brand - immigration, national security, taxation. To the extent that ideological conflict in western democracies are increasingly over cultural issues, the generational divide becomes more stark. Labor’s core base of the labor movement, and its old brand of class politics, has historically had broad cross-generational support.

To give a sense of the generational change, have a look at the differences in first-preference voting by age between the 1966 election (using data from the 1967 Australian National Political Attitudes Survey) and the 2025 election (using Australian Election Study 2025).

Perhaps it is unfair to use the 1966 election as the baseline as it’s the last election fought by ‘old’ Labor before Whitlam modernised it. Old Labor was more masculine, working class, socially conservative, and ideological. It was outdated and in need of renewal. Still, the contrast is eye-raising.

Should the centre-right be worried? Narrowing the generational gap does not, of course, translate to electoral success. Look at the ALP in 2004; age cohorts can dislike a party equally. And even if successive generations are turning away from the major centre-right party, that does not necessarily mean they are becoming more left wing (although they are on average). There is growing support for new variations of right-wing parties among the young. Observe the doubling of support for One Nation among the Gen Z cohort, albeit off a small base. And more than any other western leader, Trump appears to have found a formula in appealing to the young, though it skews heavily towards young males.

The rise of One Nation is not just a generational story. Pauline Hanson has succeeding in attracting a particular kind of voter: someone who doesn’t live in a major city, doesn’t have a university degree, and doesn’t trust the major parties to make Australia better. Still, I think the generational story is connected to this. Most Baby Boomers didn’t go to university. Neither did more than half of Gen Xers. Yet in the 21st century, a tertiary education has become the ticket of entry to many professions, both by regulation and by social standards. The days of having a Ben Chifley as prime minister are probably over. Today, the parliament is dominated by tertiary-educated politicians who express a particular tertiary-educated outlook. For all the talk of diversity, on this metric the parliament has become decidedly less diverse.

To dig a bit deeper on this question I thought I’d briefly explore the Australian Election Study (AES) 2025, which covers not just voting intention but views on policy and values. Given we are less than a year removed from last year’s federal election, the data is still ‘fresh’. Naturally, there are limitations to the idea of a generational cohort as a meaningful unit of analysis. Speaking of ‘generations’ in the aggregate subjects oneself to a number of fallacies. To that extent, I raise the following as points of interest - and just to show some interesting charts.

Here is what we know:

Unsurprisingly, a higher proportion of older people lean to the right and vice versa … but it’s more complicated than that.

There seems to be a genuine cohort effect on whether respondents to the AES self-identify as right or left. This effect can be reduced but not explained away by other variables. However, there is one indicator that adds to the story quite a bit, which is sex.

Across every age cohort, women are more likely to self-identify as left-leaning than men. The gender gap appears to widen the younger the age cohort is. The gender effect has a notable impact on voting behaviour, with young females (Gen Z + Millennials) far more likely than young males to vote for the Greens.

I was hesitant to post the chart above because of the high margin of error for the younger cohorts when broken down by sex, but I think the broad pattern is clear enough and consistent with other polling. That is (1) middle aged Australian men are more inclined to vote for alternative parties (that aren’t Lab/Lib/Green) than other age/gender cohorts (2) the Greens are the most demographically polarised party in Australia (drawing substantial but narrow support from young women); and (3) Labor has relatively more consistency across age and gender than the alternatives. (I’m not inclined to believe the 40% figure for Gen Z men and the Coalition, and I’d take the specific Gen Z percentages here with a grain of salt.)

This poses a challenge for the Greens to grow support beyond their core base, although as a minor party there is less expectation that they do. The challenge for the Coalition, as a major party, is more profound. A lot of ink has been spilled on their political infighting and factionalism, but they have had a tough (but not impossible) job in threading a needle through a highly polarised electorate, particularly, as we shall see, on cultural issues.

One of the largest generational policy divides is immigration.

Immigration is One Nation’s signature issue and always has been. So it’s unsurprising that older cohorts who exhibit a greater preference for immigration reduction are more likely to turn to Pauline Hanson. We know from the Redbridge poll that the overwhelming “Key Issue” that One Nation supporters prioritise is immigration:

Why are Boomers and Gen X particularly averse to current immigration levels? One of the interesting patterns of AES 2025 is that the generational gap disappears on a number of immigration related questions:

Proportion of respondents who support the following statements:

What’s going on here? The first point to make is that questions on the impact of immigrants on Australia are about empirical observation, i.e. what do you think is happening? In contrast, the question on whether immigrant numbers should be reduced/increased is a normative question, i.e what do you want to happen. Across generations, respondents appear to have a similar distribution of observations, but not on the normative question. The one exception is the question on immigrants and crime.

Assuming respondents are answering the survey honestly, there is a clear pattern of bundling opinions together. Nearly 1 in 3 Boomers and 1 in 4 Gen Xers want sharp immigration cuts and also think Aboriginal rights have gone too far. There is a coherent “traditionalist bundle” of opinions: opposing certain Indigenous reform like Treaty or Truth Telling, scepticism of climate change, reduction in immigrant numbers, pro-monarchy. Boomers and Gen Xers are more likely to hold this bundle of opinions than Millennials or Gen Z, who, in turn, are more likely to hold their own ‘progressive bundle’ of opinions.

Like other western democracies, Australia has become more polarised along certain social identities. What determines these identities is not clean, but we know that educational level, age, and gender are doing much more work in carving out political identities than they did in the post-war era. I’ve previously written about the rise of the professionalised society, and its political implications. There was a time when people predicted politics would become less ideological because educated people would simply debate the evidence and land with whoever had the right numbers. But this was a misunderstanding of history. It was the educated class that propagated ideology. And the rise of the internet and social media has made it easier for people of all stripes to work out the right political cues and develop a more consistent ideological outlook.

I want to finally take a look at AES 2025 polling on several policy questions relating to Indigenous Australians. Some questions show a stark generational divide, while others show none:

Proportion of respondents who support the following:

Why is Truth Telling and Treaty generationally divisive, but ‘greater participation’ and ‘practical measures’ not? Are the latter statements too broad to disagree with? Whatever the reason, there is survey evidence in AES and in other polling to suggest that Treaty and Truth Telling, while having broad support among progressives, are seen by a large number of voters as ideological rather than practical. ANU analysis of the Voice referendum results hints at a similar dynamic: ‘Amongst those who voted no, the factor that was most likely to be given as very important in influencing their decision was concern about dividing the country.’

Again, education explains much about different attitudes here. The generational gap is less obvious if you only include people with a university degree. (The sample for non-uni Gen Z is too low to be taken seriously). Further evidence it seems, that in western democracies there has been a social revolution taking place, but largely among the educated.

Proportion of uni-educated and non-uni-educated who agree with the following:

The British journalist David Goodhart has written compellingly that the political divide is no longer left vs right but dependent on one’s education, mobility, and attachment to place. The new identities, he argues, are Anywheres - highly educated, mobile, urban, socially liberal - and Somewheres - rooted in place, less mobile, less educated, socially conservative. The Somewheres might watch this Bicentennial video and wonder where that Australia has gone. Anywheres might enjoy the nostalgia but nonetheless be glad to see the back of it.

Goodhart’s book was published in 2017. Since then, even the Anywheres are in trouble. Wage premiums for the tertiary educated are falling. Homes are increasingly out of reach, particularly in the middle ring of suburbs once home to urban professionals. A substantial proportion of white collar work is process and compliance driven. Social status is increasingly unassured. If the system no longer works for the elites, then that is a recipe for a much deeper manifestation of reactionary politics.

When the first British axe was struck against the thick wood of Sydney Cove, the slim-faced deputy judge advocate, David Collins, the diligent and morally serious Royal Marines officer, reflected on the ‘stillness and tranquillity from which that day were to give place to the voice of labour, the confusion of camps and towns, and the ‘busy hum of its new possessors’.’ He hoped the new settlement would not be sullied by the ‘introduction of vice, profaneness, and immorality’, but he wasn’t hopeful. ‘[T]he habits of youth are not easily laid aside…’, he wrote; a worrying thought for an officer on the far edge of the world with a convoy of convicted criminals. He may also have been thinking of himself.

Collins could talk of progress and loss in the same breath because he had no idea what might eventuate. No one in Sydney Cove that day did. What to us is a symbolic day – Australia Day, 26 January; or, to others, Invasion Day – was not thought about in those terms by those living it. After an arduous eight-month journey, most were just happy to be alive. For a good number of convicts, almost all of whom never laid a foot on land on 26 January, there was likely a feeling of impending dread. When the British flag was planted at the head of the cove, they remained locked up in the darkness.

Whether the Sydney penal settlement was to be a prison site only, or the beginning of something more ambitious, or indeed was to fail and disappear in a generation, were all possible outcomes to be taken seriously by the new arrivals. Much depended on how they conducted themselves, and how they planned. For this reason, there is an unusual degree of order and tentativeness in the first year: the uncertain and sometimes hackneyed steps to ‘win over’ the Aboriginal inhabitants; the fair treatment of convicts; and the peculiarly enlightened behaviour of Governor Phillip. It is easy to forget the motivation here: that a wrong step, an argument gone bad, an unjust hanging ordered, could unravel the whole experiment very quickly, not only destroying the settlement but putting everyone’s lives at risk.

Of the estimated 1030 British in Sydney Cove on the evening of 26 January, 736 were convicts. With finite food and no gaol, this was a highly precarious social structure. Phillip’s strategy was to punish hard and fast, and across the board. Four convicts were hanged in February 1788 for stealing. Six soldiers were hanged the following year for the same crime. The most important institution in the first year was the storehouse. Food was rationed out equally regardless of social status; Phillip’s ration was the same as that of a male convict. The senior marines hated this rule but learned to live with it. It is within the first few months that we get glimpses of Australia’s future utilitarian ethos, encouraged by the concessions of authority to maintain an imbalanced social order.

Sketch of Sydney Cove, April 1788

This is the British settlement at its most naked and vulnerable. When the Fleet entered Port Jackson, those on deck watched the Sydney people on the high rocks, spears in hand. There were at least 29 clan groups in the Sydney area. It is they who have the upper hand in January. The French, who miraculously arrived at Botany Bay the same time as Phillip, constructed a stockade around their tents with the guns pointing outwards. They were afraid. Initially, Phillip sought a more enduring relationship with the First Australians, and we know from diaries and letters that some of his colleagues thought he was wasting too much time on this. Even in the first 12 months there was debate about what kind of relationship this should be. Should they try and integrate the Sydney people or keep them separate?

Phillip believed that the sheer technological and perceived civilisational advantages of the British would, in time, attract the Aboriginal population, if not to his way of living, then at least into his confidence. But months rolled by and the original owners showed no interest in politicking or diplomacy. Phillip and the British were confounded by this. The ‘Natives’, he complained in July 1788, ‘never come to us’. It occurred less to him than it did to others that the British way of doing things, remarkable though it was, might have struck the Sydney people as equally bizarre, impractical, and threatening. It is also possible, having experienced the arrival and departure of Cook in 1770, that they expected the British to pack up and leave. Why then get too close?

It’s a remarkable story, but still half a story. What we would give to know what those warriors were thinking on the high rocks, seeing that flotilla come through the heads, or what was being said on the outskirts of Sydney town as trees were felled and fencing erected, or what Bennelong reported back to his clan after escaping the settlement. In June 1788, the surgeon John White witnessed a huge congregation of ‘about three hundred natives’ at Botany Bay. What were they doing? These silences have long frustrated our colonial history. The story is incomplete and hampers our capacity to think about it objectively without filling in the gaps with whatever politics we bring to it. So much of our early colonial history is peppered with assumptions, when what it really deserves is questions.

‘First interview with the Native Women at Port Jackson New South Wales February 1788’, from William Bradley’s journal ‘A Voyage to New South Wales’.

The modern historian likes to think in systems and theory, but it is the lack of systems in 1788 that interests me most. Certainly, Phillip brought a ‘system’ of British law, though it’s not quite as simple as that. Sydney was a strange hybrid of military and civil law, both flexibly applied to maintain social order and harmony within the settlement. That it was not a pure military outpost but had a modicum of civil law might be Australia’s most consequential institutional decision of the last 250 years. Convicts, once “dead in law”, are suddenly given the capacity to sue. A convict who struck a marine is given a hundred lashes, but a marine who acted violently against a convict woman is given two hundred. This is not the rule of British law so much as Phillip’s interpretation of its moral foundations. There’s a flexibility to it because the stakes were too high to let procedure ride roughshod over a ‘just’ outcome. He nonetheless overrated its capacity to harmonise relations with the First Australians. He did not predict that commerce would so rapidly drive British expansion and not the orderly and enlightened beneficence of the British navy.

By the end of the year, anyone who wandered outside of the settlement did so at their own risk. Most often it was convicts who scattered into the night and never returned, or who stole stray spears lying on the beach, hoping to sell them. Phillip and the officers blamed the convicts for the retributive raids against them. At the beginning, the official policy for the colony was to establish a subsistence agricultural economy. No treasury was established and no town planning provided. The construction of private ships was forbidden, and mercantile trade was actively discouraged if not banned. Such modest ambitions no doubt encouraged Phillip to believe that an equilibrium with the Sydney people was plausible, but even he was forced to admit that there could be no satisfactory compensation for British encroachment. That Sydney developed in a way totally contrary to his expectations is one reason why talk of the ‘project’ of colonisation is misleading. No one controlled the development of Sydney.

The most unpredictable and shattering event arrived in April 1789, when large swathes of the Aboriginal population began to fall ill from what looked to be smallpox. This is one of the great mysteries of the early years. How could smallpox be transported on the First Fleet, lie dormant for 15 months in all manner of weather, and suddenly appear? There are many theories, none of them satisfactory, from blaming Maccassan fishermen in northern Australia to blaming the British for deploying biological warfare by distributing contaminated material. Treat all these arguments with a pinch of salt. Whatever the cause, it devastated the Sydney people and reduced their numbers dramatically. Phillip reported to London that around half the Aboriginal population perished. The risk equation of British colonisation flipped.

Contingency in Australian history has long been an endangered species, first almost succumbing to the Whig story of the long inexorable march towards liberal prosperity, and today by its mirror opposite, settler colonial theory, which posits the long inexorable march to genocide, or what Patrick Wolfe called ‘the logic of elimination’. Individual choices are flattened and imprisoned to the forces of history. Not only is this a fallacious approach to understanding the past, it is not particularly constructive either. If individual agency didn’t matter then, it doesn’t matter now. We’re either passively celebrating, or waiting for the revolution that will never come.

Why explain the messy contradictions away? If anything else, we miss out on the most human stories; the moments that give us a glimpse into our common humanity. In Inga Clendinnen’s marvellous Dancing with Strangers, we read about Captain John Hunter in 1791, an uptight and haughty officer who’s been invited to a corroboree. He finds nothing impressive about the Sydney people, until he notices a dance performed by the men, ‘placing their feet very wide apart, and, by an extraordinary exertion of the muscles and thighs, moving the knees in a trembling and very surprising manner’. His eyes widen, and he heaves himself up to try, failing. He tries again. So do all the other Englishmen, dancing long into the night. For an evening at least there is great laughter and camaraderie.

1. The quality of federal and state policy analysts is very high. That is not the same thing as saying that Australia’s bureaucracy is perfect and that we have nothing to complain about. But its problems – bloating, self-interestedness, less likely to provide ‘frank and fearless’ advice as in the past – are not due to a reduction in quality. If anything, over-education is a bigger problem than lack of training. You don’t need to have a Masters degree or PhD to be a good policy analyst in a state government department, but you’d be surprised how many people do.

2. As I wrote previously, the biggest change to the western administrative state over the last half-century, as I see it, is twofold: firstly, the marked growth in scope and domain of government regulation; and, secondly, the consequential pluralisation of authority among a plethora of statutory authorities, regulatory bodies, professional bodies, courts, tribunals, etc. I don’t regard this development as some kind of ideological project, though some might like it to be, but rather a response to the growing complexity of society, technology, and globalisation, all of which has had profound social consequences. This in turn has nurtured a culture of risk-management that necessitates still more public servants and analysts to administer it. This is at least one structural cause for bureaucratic bloat.

3. The expanding public service has necessitated the rise of the oft-demeaned ‘middle manager’. The middle manager is a generalist with no specialised expertise, or may have been an expert long ago but has found a new life as a coordinator of action. Against the protests of the idealists and disaffected, middle managers are in fact very necessary. The problem is a scarcity of people who can do both – manage and provide high quality advice and analysis. Managers without an intellectual framework are less likely to think strategically in a policy sense, and more likely to ‘manage upward’ and look to their superiors for direction. But their superiors also expect the teams below to provide the guidance, especially if the matter is complex. There are occasions when this creates what I’d call a feedback loop of ignorance.

4. My own experience suggests the language of economics is losing currency. People are sick of the nomenclature. Removing the word ‘efficiency’ from a slide deck increased its persuasiveness by 15 per cent. Even ‘productivity’ attracts eye rolls. Don’t even think about ‘utility’. That doesn’t mean economic reasoning is out of favour, but I think certain words have become indicators of lazy or automated thinking – an assumption that I don’t think is fair, but I understand it. Still, I regard this as a sad development with more bad consequences than good given the lack of satisfactory alternatives.

5. Having said that, people love numbers. Economic modelling trumps everything. Run a policy change through a CGE model, and it’s like receiving the word of God. However empirically dubious this exercise is – and for modelling certain state taxes I think it is very dubious – it is highly attractive to ministerial offices and departmental heads. Also, numbers require less theoretical reasoning than if one is giving a purely qualitative answer. This is another attractive benefit of modelling. If I was being cynical – and maybe I will be for this last observation – economic modelling also hides a lot of value judgments behind complex mathematics.

6. Younger analysts are much more adept at data analysis, but possibly less interested in theory. Many interesting data trends are uncovered, but their explanations aren’t necessarily better than in the past.

7. The culture of technocracy doesn’t quite know what to do with moral reasoning. I attribute this in part to the McNamara Fallacy:

“[T]he first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can’t easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist.”

8. With the above in mind, I mourn the decline of a standard liberal arts education. Policy choices are as much about values as they are about material outcomes. I think most people instinctively accept this, but there is a tendency to embed values behind the language of empiricism or regulatory standards. Long ago this was a conscious choice. Today I think many people adopt it uncritically and would struggle to think in alternative ways even if they had the choice.

9. Bureaucratic language is very real and hard to stamp out. Risk management is partly to blame. This is my conjecture: words or phrases are given a band of meaning instead of a specific meaning. This allows the bureaucrat to subtly qualify their advice without explicitly including a qualifying statement.

10. Timeframes for policy reform are getting longer and longer. Consider this modest example: Victoria’s attempt to phase out stamp duty on commercial property. The idea is that buyers of commercial property will pay a final stamp duty tax, but any subsequent sale will no longer incur stamp duty. A new land tax will kick in ten years after the initial purchase. Putting aside the monstrously complicated ‘transition loan arrangement’, this ‘reform’ will take decades given that turnover of commercial property is much less than residential. This is typical of a modern trend: ambitious policy goals coupled with very lengthy timeframes and risk averse regulatory apparatus. This benefits the originators of the ideas who won’t be around to see the policy hit critical mass and for the public to take (adverse) notice.

11. Outside consultants can be very useful but they muddy the waters when it comes to frank and fearless advice. Their job is to satisfy the client, and they want future projects. Ideally, the relevant departmental official should take their advice as input. In theory this shouldn’t disrupt the provision of honest advice. In theory.

12. In the first half of the 20^th century, and a little bit after, government ministers had very few sources of advice other than from their public servants. In 2025, they are inundated with many different sources of advice. The implications of this for the workings of government is more profound than I think people realise, and probably worth a future article.

13. For people thinking about it as a career, find good people to work with. Don’t worry about the subject matter. The people matter more.

- Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction

The literary critic, Wayne C. Booth, was the first to coin the term ‘unreliable narrator’. His definition is an interesting one and not altogether in accord with how later critics thought about it. Booth argued a narrator is reliable if they are speaking or acting in accordance with the norms of the ‘implied author’, the version of the author that the reader infers from the work itself. For example, a narcissistic narrator who positions himself or herself in the best possible light might actually be ‘reliable’ if the reader believes this to be consistent with the implied author’s own norms and ethics.

In a strange way we look upon the political memoir as ‘unreliable’ precisely because it is ‘reliable’ in Booth’s sense of the word. We expect the self-justificatory elements, the implied declaration that this is ‘their side of the story’, ‘as they felt it’. The implied, soft, or hard denunciations of political enemies. The golden thread that binds the narrative together – “The interesting thing about this period of history is that I was correct about everything.” We aren’t expected to agree with it or accept it as fact. For a certain type of reader, the more outlandish the better. It is the personality we are drawn to. We want their version, not the definitive account.

Here is the difficulty, then, of the Australian political memoir, and its very particular aesthetic. If the British version is ‘I am smarter than everyone else’, and the American version is ‘I am more patriotic than everyone else’, the Australian theme is ‘I am just like everyone else’. This is in keeping with its majoritarian democracy. It is important to inform the reader that one’s views reflect the 50^th percentile. Even the titles speak to a sense of ordinariness: George Pearce’s Carpenter to Cabinet (1951), Arthur Fadden’s Call me Artie (1969), Bob Whan’s Chops for Breakfast (2014), Gordon Dean’s A Simple Country Lad (2007).

This doesn’t make for great reading, even if we’d happily vote for them. We want to read about the unordinary and hear something new. The five books below reflect individuals who do not practice 50^thpercentile politics. They are idiosyncratic but interesting. They may not always reflect the ‘right’ opinions, but they are at least authentic, even unexpected. A good memoir puts an idea or an event in a different light.

Peter Walsh, Confessions of a Failed Finance Minister, (1995)

‘I vowed to myself that if I ever obtained a position of real political power, I would smash the officer class’, Walsh writes on page one. This is an angry and honest memoir, written by a former Labor minister with a chip on his shoulder and scores to settle. Paul Keating called him the Sid Vicious of politics, and you can see why.

Walsh was born in 1935 in a small town 205 kilometres east of Perth, in Western Australia’s wheatbelt region. He was the son of an Irish-Catholic-Australian father and a Protestant mother, and get-togethers with extended family usually involved arguments over religion and politics. The author doesn’t say so, but I wonder if this kind of familial conflict encouraged the kind of inner conflict that clearly haunts Walsh. He was the great budget-repairing finance minister under Hawke, and a Labor loyalist who believed in neoclassical economics as the pinnacle of the social sciences. He never fully reconciled the class struggle with utilitarian philosophy.

With his intellectual framework settled, Walsh saw corruption and departure from principle all around him. Of the Whitlam Government’s achievements, he said that its greatest beneficiaries, ‘at least on the outlays side’, were ‘those who gained sinecures in an expanded public sector and the white collar middle class in general.’ Understanding this, I think, is crucial to understanding the Hawke-Keating legacy, which was at least in part a reaction against Whitlam’s excesses.

The paradox of Walsh was that he was old-school Labor, harbouring a deep distrust of the white collar ‘progressive left’, but also an adherent to, essentially, free market ideals. ‘I used to believe that the ideal Attorney-General was a smart suburban solicitor, principally because they would be less likely to get into [Lionel] Murphy-mode social engineering than high flying academics or lawyers’ lawyers’, he writes. His relationship to the Liberal party is interesting. He hated rich people and thought ‘their politics’ cynical. But over time he came to hate hypocrisy more, and he retired believing that there was more hypocrisy on the left. He could argue for free trade and deregulation because he thought tariffs and regulation were instruments to protect the privileged classes.

Walsh thought of himself as a ‘failed’ finance minister because the pressures to spend more were too much. ‘I realised greed had beaten me’, he writes at one point. The enemies in this book are special interests, and politicians who claim to be representing the downtrodden but are protecting their own skins. The hero in this book, though a bit player, is Bill Hayden, the one outstanding Whitlam minister in Walsh’s mind, principled, kind, but overtaken by the Bob Hawke tsunami. He movingly describes Hayden announcing his resignation to Cabinet:

‘As Hayden approach to door, I went too and shook his hand. So walked out of the Parliament and Party the boy from South Brisbane who had known deprivation in childhood, overcome the twin handicaps of limited education and defective hearing, risen to be a respected Treasurer and Leader of the Opposition, and who deserved to be Prime Minister more than most who have been.’

There is a sense that Walsh saw the end of old Labor in Hayden, and the emergence of a new, more professionalised and progressive party that he did not recognise or like.

Enid Lyons, Among the Carrion Crows, (1972)

Enid Lyons was nervous about her first party meeting. In August 1943, she was elected to the federal seat of Darwin, making her the first woman to be elected to the House of Representatives. ‘How would a woman fit into the club atmosphere of a party room?’ she asked herself. ‘Even the men, whose hitherto inviolate realm I was invading, were probably not free from some degree of apprehension.’

As it turns out the meeting was a success. Lyons was even nominated for Deputy Leader. She leaves happily, but is approached by an ageing Billy Hughes, 81 years and into his 43^rd year of parliament. He is an ancient figure; half hobbit, half Nosferatu, old enough to remember the torchlight rallies of Sir Henry Parkes. He takes her hand. ‘Ah, my girl, it was very pleasant to see you there today; ah, very pleasant. But, ah, remember! Let there be no talk of the equality of the sexes. Ah, there you sat, like a bird of paradise among the carrion crows!’

This is a very good memoir. Much better than contemporary reviews made it out to be. I suppose interesting people still have much of the same flesh and blood quality as everyone else, and it’s only when they are gone that their distinctiveness is recognised.

Enid Lyons was a formidable political figure that largely managed to break through the gender boundary, but not entirely. She was married to Joseph Lyons, Australia’s tenth prime minister until his death in 1939 while in office. Enid was therefore ‘Joe’s wife’, though in hindsight we now know how much he relied on her for political advice. Her contemporaries resented having to compete with her for influence.

This is a book about what it was like to be the first woman in the federal Lower House. If Enid was born in 1950, rather than 1897, this book would be written very differently as a feminist text. As it is, we are given the views of a conservative doing something decidedly radical. That makes for an interesting tension and avoids narrative cliché.

Alfred Deakin, The Federal Story, (1944)

Deakin’s Federal Story was published posthumously, deliberately so. It is in many ways a cruel book. Written in the lead up to 1901, on the eve of Australian Federation, there is something of the wounded victory lap in The Federal Story. ‘Affable Alfred’ spares no one who stood in the way of national union. Consider his infamous character sketch of political rival, George Reid, the obese Free Trade premier of New South Wales, and later federal opposition leader and (very briefly) prime minister:

‘Even caricature has been unable to travesty his extraordinary appearance, his immense, unwieldy, jelly-like stomach, always threatening to break his waistband, his little legs apparently bowed under its weight to the verge of their endurance, his thick neck rising behind his ears rounding to his many-folded chin. His protuberant blue eyes were expressionless until roused or half hidden in cunning, [and] a blond complexion and infantile breadth of baldness gave him an air of insolent juvenility. He walked with a staggering roll like that of a sailor, helping himself as he went by resting on the backs of chairs as if he were reminiscent of some far-off aboreal ancestor. To a superficial eye his obesity was either repellent or amusing. A heavy German moustache concealed a mouth of considerable size from which there emanated a high, reedy voice rising to a shriek of sinking to a fawning, purring, persuasive orotund with a nasal tinge. To a more careful observation he disclosed a splendid dome like-head, high and broad and indicative of intellectual power, a gleaming eye which betokened a natural gift of humour and an alertness that not even his habit of dropping asleep at all times and places in the most ungraceful attitudes and in the most impolite manner could defeat. He never slept in a public gathering more than a moment or two, being quickly awakened by his own snore…’

It goes on.

Generations of historians have relied on The Federal Story for an ‘insiders’ account of federation. The less critical of them tend to take Deakin at his word (a chief defect of David Hill’s history a few years back). But the most interesting sections are the diversions from the story. Deakin’s assessment of British politics in 1900 is fascinating and original. But the main thrust of argument, that Victoria was a force of good and New South Wales the villain, is unreliable.

Alfred Deakin was the most significant political figure in the first ten years of the Commonwealth. He was not the first Australian prime minister, but he was the first strategic mastermind. If The Federal Story reads as gossip, the ‘Straussian’ reading of it is that change comes about through political will, and political will is generated by grand ideas and grand people. In this sense, it has a cousin in Don Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (below).

One final word – do not read the sanitised first edition. Find the later versions edited by historian John La Nauze, or, later, Stuart Macintyre.

Margaret Tucker, If Everyone Cared Enough, (2024)

Before there was Truth-Telling, there was Margaret Tucker’s 1977 memoir If Everyone Cared. As far as I know, this is the first conventional autobiography written by an Aboriginal Australian woman.

Tucker, or Aunty Marge, was a Yorta Yorta woman born on the Warangesda Mission in south-western New South Wales, in 1904. She died in 1996 at the age of 92. At 13, she was taken from her family and sent to the Cootamundra Domestic Training Home for Aboriginal Girls. Her memoir is therefore one of the earlier published accounts by the ‘stolen generation’, and her recollection of this moment deserves wide reading. She was a founding member of the Australian Aborigines’ League, and a participant at the 1938 Day of Mourning protest on 26 January. She was part of a delegation that famously met with Joseph Lyons. She was awarded the MBE in 1968. This is a political memoir of a very different kind to the others on the list.

In 2024, a new version of Tucker’s memoir was published, retitled If Everyone Cared Enough: Her Story Reclaimed. This is the ‘uncensored’ version; the 1977 edition having been edited to remove the more colloquial language and storytelling style, and to ‘soften’ the more political statements. But this is still, mostly, a non-political book – not in the sense that history is whitewashed – far from it. Rather, Tucker avoids making partisan claims, nor does she express herself in language that we might today categorise as ‘identity politics’. Her framework is Christian universalism, inspired by her work in Moral Rearmament, a moral movement that attracted many adherents in the postwar years. ‘I thank God for helping me to see that ‘people are people’ and it is not colour that matters, but character’, she writes. This ethos forms the spine of the book.

Moving to Melbourne in the 1920s, Tucker was influenced by and involved in the Communist Party of Australia. For Aboriginal activists at the time, the CPA was one of the few vehicles to advocate citizenship rights. This part of her life is downplayed in the book, partly, I suspect, to make her story more palatable to ‘average’ white Australians living through the Cold War, but also because Moral Re-armament was an especially anti-communist organisation, and it was Christian ideals that Tucker mostly identified with at the time of writing. The book’s title, ‘If Everyone Cared Enough’, is taken from a speech she heard at a Moral Re-Armament conference.

I read this book alongside the Yoorrook Commission’s Truth Be Told report, published earlier this year (which I’ll write about at some point). Tucker’s life runs throughout the Yoorrook report, but it is largely her radical politics it is interested in. Her memoir, which is the story of an individual, and Truth be Told, which is the story of a system, complement each other to a degree, but they also sit somewhat uneasily next to each other. Yoorrook’s framework is settler colonialism, or what Patrick Wolfe called ‘the logic of elimination’. Everything is interpreted from that lens. Tucker’s book, written in the 1970s, is not written in the activist language of today. Nothing about ‘systems’, none of the legalism used by human rights lawyers. This will be a weakness to more ‘progressive’ readers, but it shouldn’t be. It nonetheless complicates what ‘truth telling’ really means. Tucker lived two intellectual lives and interpreted her hardships through both lenses. Like many of her generation, she suffered in the missions but drew on its ethical and religious teachings to craft a universalist message that appealed to a wide section of the community, culminating in the remarkable 1967 referendum. It’s hard not to see some wisdom here that’s been lost.

Don Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, (2002)

Don Watson is one of Australia’s great contemporary wordsmiths. Between 1992 and 1996 he was Paul Keating’s speechwriter and adviser. His memoir of those years stands as one of the great books on Australian history period.

In Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, Watson plays Nick Carraway to Keating’s Jay Gatsby. This is the memoir of an observer, but an opinionated and thoughtful one. Keating is the romantic hero of the book, in the nineteenth century German sense of the word; a melancholy figure who thought big thoughts and hated men who thought small. His hero was Jack Lang, the great hater of Australian politics. But Watson makes clear that Lang’s appeal to Keating was his inner confidence at having everything worked out. Lang had a framework for thinking about the world and explaining it. As Keating said, he thought in black and white, never grey. This was Lang’s appeal and the cause of his undoing, as it was for Keating’s.

All good memoirs serve as a history of the era they take place in. This is the great strength of Recollections. Two things stand out in particular: firstly, the primacy of economics in the formulation of policy in the prime minister’s office. Watson was not an economist and describes this dispassionately, if not a little cynically:

‘Those who professed it were attached not just to the idea of the free market – all of us were attached to that – but to a whole worldview, a web of meaning and belief by which all events were interpreted and all potential actions measured. That was what they meant by the ‘main game’. They believed, furthermore, that they were on the side of history; their ideas were irrefutably the right ones, that what they did was the best hope for the nation and its people – the last best hope, indeed, of mankind.’

There was a confidence to policy formulation in the 1990s – in Australia and abroad – that I don’t believe exists anymore. I wonder sometimes what role this has played in the stagnation of big reform. In the early-to-mid 2000s, behavioural economics was the popular subfield that made a name for itself by questioning the assumption of rationality that was said to underpin the old neoclassical models. Then the Global Financial Crisis arrived and dealt a blow to the more utopian ambitions of the field. In Australia, the Monthly essays by Kevin Rudd, and, much later, by Jim Chalmers, are attempts to find a replacement framework, but they are not really satisfactory; full of contradictions and more reflecting the musings of clever political advisers than a new and formidable intellectual discipline.

The second insight of Recollections is the mindset of the political staffer. Watson gives a full and detailed account of the 1996 election campaign. For all the talk of ‘retail politics’ and speaking to the ‘average’ voter, the hive mind of the political office is decidedly insular, with no peripheral vision. Every word in a speech is calibrated. Every stumble by the opposition could change the race overnight. Watson describes John Howard’s second campaign week as ‘gruesomely bad’. ‘After he looked and sounded terrible on the Friday evening news we thought the morning’s papers must hit him hard enough to open cracks’, he writes. Alas, nothing. Only news about the rugby.

Part Three covers the events in the House of Representatives from 2pm until 3.15pm when it was adjourned, and the tumult that followed. The first half of 11 November 1975 is a story of pressure building. The second half is about its release. There was a lot of emotion that afternoon, but of the non-violent kind. Nobody was attacked. I wonder if that would be the case today.

Over the last fifty years, the Dismissal has been written about as a continual source of lessons. What does it say about Australian democracy? What does it say about the future? In the early years the answers were very grim. Constitutional experts pondered whether any government that didn’t have a Senate majority would find itself perpetually challenged. I think the journalist Michelle Grattan is probably correct in finding that the Dismissal has become ‘an interesting political story, rather than a continuing political cause, or even a salutary lesson’. In some ways, the more important lesson is what came after: the democratic clock continued to turn. With any luck, future historians will devote more space to telling us why.

1.50 p.m.

Paul Keating was serving his 21^st day as Minister for Northern Australia on 11 November 1975. At 31 years, he was the youngest of Whitlam’s ministers, and one of the most promising. He was surprised, then, when Whitlam stormed past him in Parliament House, having only just returned from the Lodge, and turned to look at Keating. “You’re sacked!” Whitlam barked, keeping a brisk pace. Keating had no idea what was going on.^[i]

Whitlam walked towards the House of Representatives and spotted Arthur Dryster, the Parliamentary Liaison Officer. ‘[Kerr’s] done a Game on us!’ he said, walking into the chamber.^[ii]

He meant Sir Philip Game, Governor of New South Wales in 1932 who sacked premier Jack Lang at the height of the Great Depression. Whitlam liked historical analogies and used them regularly. When in December 1972 he took on thirteen portfolios in the so-called duumvirate with Lance Barnard, he compared himself to the tiny administration of the Duke of Wellington and Lord Lyndhurst of 1834.

Image: A young Paul Keating seated next to Whitlam. He later said that if he were in Whitlam’s shoes, he would have had Kerr arrested. I’m not sure that would have made things better.

For public servants, confusion reigned. John Menadue, Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department, earlier found himself conferring with Whitlam while the new government was calling him back to Parliament House. He knew Whitlam had been sacked, but not that Fraser had been commissioned to lead a caretaker government. At 1.50 p.m. he walked into Fraser’s office and was told the news. Fraser said he planned to pass supply as quickly as possible. He wanted all the paperwork prepared for royal assent by 4 p.m.^[iii] Menadue rushed off to work with the Attorney -General’s Department. ‘I was in overdrive’, he later recalled. Things were happening fast; too fast to understand the gravity of the crisis.^[iv]

2 p.m.

The House of Representatives resumed. Bill Hayden, Whitlam’s Treasurer, walked into the chamber and sensed an ‘unsettling atmosphere of stillness’. Some were aware of what had happened. Others weren’t. The censure motion that began that morning continued. Frank Crean rose to speak and defended Whitlam’s government as if nothing had happened. Hayden sat next to Joe Berinson MP, who turned to him and said “Well, it’s all over. Kerr’s sacked us”.^[v]

At 2.20 p.m., the Speaker Gordon Scholes called on ‘the Member for Wannon’ to make a statement. Whitlam’s head was bowed. A wall of noise exploded from the Labor benches. There were shouts of ‘This is war!’ Fraser spoke:

‘Mr Speaker, this afternoon the Governor-General commissioned me to form a government until elections can be held…’

The Government benches erupted in furore. In the public gallery upstairs, about twenty sixth-graders from Glenorchy, Tasmania, sat dumbfounded. Their teacher picked a hell of day to visit Canberra.^[vi]

Fraser continued:

‘The purpose of the commission is to permit a deadlock between the Houses of Parliament to be resolved and to return Australia to stable government. It will be my sole purpose to ensure that Australia has the general election to which it is constitutionally entitled and which has so far been denied it. Until the judgment of the Australian people has been registered at this election my Government will make no appointments or dismissals or initiate any new policies.’

He then read out the Governor-General’s statement. He moved that the House adjourn while papers were prepared for a double dissolution. The motion was lost, 55 votes to 64. Fred Daly, the former Leader of the House, moved to suspend standing orders. The motion was carried.

Whitlam rose and moved a want of confidence in Fraser’s caretaker government. He spoke briefly. The supply bills having been passed, he said, the majority party in the House of Representatives can resume government. The motion was carried.

3.15 p.m.

Scholes suspended parliament. Before and after the House was in session, panic swept through the ministerial offices. Staff were frantically packing up, shoving material into boxes, bags, whatever they could get their hands on. They feared that Liberal staffers might barge in and claim what was theirs. The building had become, by the 1970s, a rabbit warren of sorts; its narrow corridors and tiny offices not even remotely fit for purpose. Its nooks and crannies were considered fire traps, and just nine of its 98 rooms met public service standards. On a normal sitting day, the place was chaotic.

In the office of the House Speaker, Gordon Scholes, staff called Government House to book an appointment with Kerr. With Fraser having lost a no confidence motion, Scholes wanted Whitlam recommissioned as prime minister. They were told over the phone that Kerr was busy. When Scholes himself returned to the office he called Government House himself, demanding an appointment. He got one for 4.45 p.m.

Whitlam called Buckingham Palace. He spoke with Martin Charteris, the Queen’s Private Secretary. He said he was calling as a private citizen. He calmly explained what had happened and expressed the opinion that he should be re-commissioned as prime minister now that supply had been passed and Mr. Fraser lost a no-confidence motion. He did not ask to be re-instated. He suggested that Charteris should speak with Kerr to ascertain what was going on. ^[vii]

Meanwhile, Fraser was working hard in his office to have the double dissolution papers prepared for Kerr. He called Menadue several times to check on progress. There was not much he could do. Menadue was pushing his own staff and the Attorney-General’s department as hard as he could. He was told the process usually took two days. They had an hour.

The inquiries desk at Parliament House reception was bombarded with phone calls. Nervous members of the public demanded to know what was going on. But the parliamentary staff were at a loss. Almost everyone was starved of information. Kerr’s statement of reasons had been delivered to the press boxes upstairs, but these raised still more questions. The poor parliamentary staff, used to giving information about directions and the building’s history, now had to brief panicked callers on the reserve powers of the governor-general.^[viii]

3.40 p.m.

Menadue arrived at Fraser’s office with the documentation. Clarrie Harders, Secretary of the Attorney-General’s Department, was also there. Fraser told Harders that Kerr might want advice about the vote of confidence carried against him in the House.^[ix] He took the papers and passed them to Senator Ivor Greenwood, a former barrister, to look over. Fraser signed the letter to the Governor-General, and took the proclamation to dissolve parliament, as well as the certification of the supply bills. He left his office for Government House.

The crowd outside the building was growing. Chants of ‘We Want Gough!’ began to swell. Overwhelmingly they were Labor-leaning and mostly young. A small group of protestors walked over to the flag pole and lowered the flag to half-mast, ‘to symbolise the death of democracy’.^[x]

Fraser and Harders pushed through a large crowd in King’s Hall and again out the front of the building. Fraser was jeered by the crowd as he hopped into the car with Harders. On the ride to Government House, Harders told him that it was up to Kerr to decide what to do with the House resolution against Fraser; that Kerr had, it seemed, exercised his reserve powers in withdrawing Whitlam’s commission, and the option to stay the course or change his decision remained open.^[xi]

Image: Malcolm Fraser leaves Parliament House for Government House on 11 November 1975. There are shouts of ‘Sieg Heil!’ and ‘Fascist!’ from the crowd as his car departed.

4 p.m.

The actor and comedian, Garry McDonald, arrived at the steps of Parliament House dressed as his character Norman Gunston, the ‘little Aussie bleeder’ journalist. McDonald was eating at a Sydney Chinese restaurant when his producer called and told him to get on a plane to Canberra immediately. In the air, McDonald changed into costume and went straight to Parliament House after landing. He interviewed Bill Hayden on the front steps (“I think you’re sending me up!”) and was rebuked by Bob Hawke (“Look, it’s a bit too serious for that”). He turned to the crowd and asked them “is this an affront to the constitution of this country?” (Cheers). “Or was it just a stroke of good luck for Mr. Fraser?” (Boos). “Thanks. I just wanted to know.”^[xii]

Fraser arrived at Government House and was taken immediately to Kerr’s office. The Governor-General gave royal assent to the supply bills. Fraser advised that the constitutional criteria for a double dissolution was met. Harders joined the meeting after speaking with the Solicitor-General. He told Kerr what he had told Fraser in the car: that Kerr had exercised his reserve powers by withdrawing Whitlam’s commission; that the House resolution against Fraser was something for Kerr to consider in exercising his discretionary power. Kerr responded that he was aware of Whitlam’s majority in the House before he acted. The House resolution did not change the matter.

4.45 p.m.

Around this time David Smith, Kerr’s private secretary, departed for Parliament House. As in 1974, he was to read, on the front steps, the proclamation dissolving parliament. In 1974, he read it to an audience of no one. This year the sea of people was so thick – around 3000 – he couldn’t even climb the stairs. He was ushered through the side door and reached the top of the steps through King’s Hall at 4.45 p.m.

Whitlam got there first. He arrived with thunderous roars of approval. Moving to the microphone, he said:

‘The emissary from the governor -general who dissolves parliament usually comes from the front steps of the parliament to do it. On this occasion he’s had to come by the back passages. Now I’m certain when he appears, you will give him the reception he deserves. And thereafter, I might have a few words to say myself.’

David Smith emerged to read the proclamation dissolving parliament. He was drowned out by boos. As he read, Whitlam pushed forward to stand over his shoulder. Smith never forgave him for ‘the back door’ comment or for what he believed at the time to be an intimidation tactic of standing so close. After he finished, Whitlam took the microphone again.

‘Ladies and gentleman, well may we say God Save the Queen because nothing will save the Governor-General.

The proclamation which you have just heard read by the Governor-General’s official secretary was countersigned ‘Malcolm Fraser’ who will undoubtedly go down in Australian history from Remembrance Day 1975 as Kerr’s cur.

They won’t silence the outskirts of Parliament House, even if the inside has been silenced for the next few weeks.

The Governor-General’s proclamation was signed after he already made an appointment to meet the Speaker at a quarter to five.

The House of Representatives had requested the Speaker to give the Governor-General its decision that Mr Fraser did not have the confidence of the House and that the Governor-General should call me to form the Government. . . .

Maintain your rage and enthusiasm through the campaign for the election now to be held and until polling day.’

Image: The iconic photo of David Smith reading the proclamation dissolving parliament as Whitlam stands over his shoulder.

Doug Anthony, the Nationals leader, was standing in the crowd behind Whitlam. ‘It was quite frightening’ he recalled. The crowd was angry, cursing any Liberal they could see.^[xiii] Smith returned inside and placed notices on the entrances to both chambers. He took a car back to Government House and cleared his desk. He opened his diary and wrote, “Phew, what a day!”^[xiv]

Scholes met with Kerr at 4.45pm. He spoke bluntly. He felt Kerr had acted in bad faith. He wanted Whitlam re-commissioned as prime minister. Kerr told him it was too late and that parliament was dissolved.

4.50 p.m.

After the meeting, Kerr called Harders. He spoke about the House resolution. Harders repeated the advice he had given him earlier. Ultimately, the exercise of the reserve powers was up to his discretion. He had to decide how to use it. The call suggests Kerr was nervous.

For the Liberal Opposition, it was time to celebrate. Liberal and National Senators congregated in the Senate party room and popped champagne. A few went to the balcony, wine glasses in hand, and began taunting the crowds below.

5 p.m.

Whitlam arranged a press conference early in the evening. He said that Kerr gave no indication in the morning of his decision to dismiss him. He said that supply had yet to run out when he sought a half-Senate election and had been passed later in the afternoon anyway.^[xv] ‘How does it feel being the first Prime Minister since Federation to have been sacked by the Crown?’ a journalist asked. ‘I’m the first for 200 years since George the 3rd sacked Lord North!’ Whitlam joked. He declined to speculate about Kerr’s motives or the political effect of the decision. He was asked whether he had been ‘in touch with Buckingham Palace or with London about the actions of the Governor-General’. Whitlam said: ‘The Governor-General prevented me from getting in touch with the Queen by just withdrawing the Commission immediately. I was unable to communicate with the Queen, as I would have been entitled to do, if I’d had any warning of the course that he, the Governor-General, was to take’.

5.30 p.m.

Fraser arranged a press conference of his own. The questions were more hostile. Mungo MacCallum was seen ‘giggling with emotion’.^[xvi] One journalist incorrectly referred to Fraser as ‘Mr. Whitlam’. ‘You’ll get used to the change’, Fraser shot back. He said that an election would be held before the end of the year. He was asked how history would judge his actions that led to Whitlam’s dismissal. ‘It will be vindicated by the judgment of history because Australia will get a responsible Government again.’ He declined to speculate about future policy and appointments. ‘Would you accept the principle now that if a Labor-dominated Seante disrupted your Budget, it would have the right to reject it?’ Fraser answered: “If we had behaved as this Government has behaved, yes”.^[xvii]

Evening

Fraser and his staff had dinner at The Lobby restaurant near Parliament House. The mood was triumphant. Menadue was invited but declined. Fraser’s Chief of Staff, Dale Budd, later took a car to Canberra Airport to collect Tamie, Fraser’s wife. They drove to the Commonwealth Club ‘where she met her husband as prime minister for the first time’. They were elated.^[xviii]

The mood inside parliament house was sullen. Bill Hayden watched ‘various Labor MPs and senators … wandering about looking stunned.’ He saw one group, ‘arms linked around one another’s shoulders … singing, off-key, ‘The Internationale’ and ‘The Red Flag’.^[xix]

Another group of Labor parliamentarians gathered at Charlie’s restaurant. At one point in the evening, Billy Snedden walked in – Fraser’s predecessor – and the room fell silent. The ice was broken when Bob Hawke got up and invited Snedden to sit with them. According to one journalist present, ‘Snedden reciprocated by directing some colourful epithets at the new prime minister’.^[xx]

Whitlam returned to The Lodge alone. He had told his wife Margaret to stay in Sydney, given her commitments, and thinking, incorrectly, that the situation could be resolved in his favour. He did not expect the day to end as it did. He tried to sleep, but couldn’t.

Image: An older Whitlam, holding up a copy of Kerr’s letter that dismissed him from office.

^[i] Laurie Oakes, Crash Through or Crash: The unmaking of a prime minister, (Drummond: Richmond, VIC: 1976), p.10

^[ii] A.E. Dyster, Note for File: Double Dissolution – Events of 11 November 1975, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, NAA A1209 1975/2448

^[iii] John Menadue, Note for File – The Dismissal of Mr. Whitlam, and Appointment of Mr. Fraser, as Prime Minister, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, NAA A1209 1975/2448

^[iv] John Menadue, Things You Learn Along the Way, (John Menadue: 1999), p.217

^[v] Bill Hayden, Hayden, an autobiography, (Angus & Robertson: Primble, NSW: 1996), p.279

^[vi] Canberra Times, 12 November 1975, p.1

^[vii] Martin Charteris to John Kerr, 17 November 1975, NAA

^[viii] Canberra Times, 12 November 1975, p.1

^[ix] Note for File, Clarrie Harders, ‘Confidential: Constitutional Crisis – 1975’, in ‘The Dismissal – Governor General – Discussions with Secretary of Attorney-General’s Department’, NAA M4081, 2/17

^[x] Canberra Times, 12 November 1975, p.1

^[xi] Note for File, Clarrie Harders, ‘Confidential: Constitutional Crisis – 1975’, in ‘The Dismissal – Governor General – Discussions with Secretary of Attorney-General’s Department’, NAA M4081, 2/17

^[xii] The Australian, ‘Little bleeder on the dismal day he made us laugh’, 9 November 2020

^[xiii] Paul Kelly, November 1975, (Allen & Unwin: St. Leonard’s, NSW: 1975), p. 275

^[xiv] David Smith, Head of State: The Governor-General, the Monarchy, the Republic, and the Dismissal, (Macleay Press: Paddington, NSW: 2005), p.256

^[xv] A transcript of the press conference is available here: https://whitlamdismissal.com/1975/11/11/whitlam-post-dismissal-press-conference.html/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

^[xvi] David Kemp, ‘Red Felt Pen on Green Paper’, in Sybil Nolan (ed.), The Dismissal – Where were you on November 11, 1975?, (Melbourne University Press: Carlton: 2005), p.43

^[xvii] Canberra Times, 12 November 1975, p.14

^[xviii] Dale Budd, ‘D-Day’, in Sybil Nolan (2005), p.48

^[xix] Bill Hayden (1996), p.281

^[xx] Mike Steketee, ‘A Full-Throated Roar of Protest’, in Sybil Nolan (ed.) (2005), p.26

In Part 1, I describe the morning events leading up to Whitlam’s sacking. In this post, I describe the disarray afflicting Parliament House at lunch time. For those who know the story well, one of the great oddities of the day was Whitlam’s decision, after being dismissed, to go back to his residence and eat a steak. That meant no Labor Senator was fully aware of the dismissal until after they had unknowingly passed the Supply Bills.

It continues to be a remarkable story.

1.15 p.m.

Malcolm Fraser was escorted to the Governor-General’s study. Kerr greeted him and said that he had withdrawn Whitlam’s commission. Fraser, stone faced, said nothing.

Kerr said he was prepared to commission him as caretaker so long as certain conditions were met. He said that Fraser would have to bear some of the responsibility for Whitlam’s dismissal should he accept the commission.

‘Your Excellency, I will accept that responsibility’, Fraser said. Kerr went through the conditions they had discussed earlier: that Fraser had to guarantee supply, that he could not undertake any new policy initiatives or make new appointments; that as caretaker he make no enquiries into the policies or activities of Whitlam’s government. Fraser agreed he would advise a double dissolution.

‘I think it is important to swear you in immediately and I will do that now’, Kerr said. David Smith, Kerr’s private secretary, arrived with a Bible and some documents. Fraser signed a formal letter accepting the commission. Kerr swore him in on the Bible.^[i] ‘It was an emotional moment for all three of us, particularly for Fraser, for we all realised the enormity of what was occurring’, Smith later recalled.^[ii] Kerr told the new prime minister he would forego the usual tradition of opening a bottle of champagne. Fraser nodded, shook Kerr’s hand, and departed.

Image: The Governor-General’s study. The room where Whitlam was sacked and Fraser was commissioned as caretaker prime minister.

Seated in his car, Whitlam instructed the driver to go back to the Lodge, the official prime minister’s residence. He called his wife, Margaret, who was in Sydney hosting a lunch at Kirribilli House. He told her the news. ‘He can’t sack you. You’re the Prime Minister!’ she said. He explained the situation. ‘You should have slapped his face and told him to pull himself together’. She was furious.^[iii]

Margaret wanted to come to Canberra, but her husband told her to stay in Sydney. He could fix this, he said. Whitlam then called John Menadue, head of the Prime Minister’s Department, and asked him to come to the Lodge immediately.

Back in Government House, the air force aide-de-camp, Alf Allen, burst into the drawing room where Lady Kerr was interviewing the three army captains for Captain Stephen’s position. ‘He sacked him!’ Allen said. ‘He sacked the prime minister’. The army captains sat shocked; one of them, Bill Denny, later recalled that he thought Allen meant Whitlam’s deputy, Frank Crean, was now prime minister.^[iv]

Moments later, the Governor-General entered the drawing room. ‘Well, I’ve sacked your prime minister’, Kerr said. ‘I’ve put another one in his place. God help us all. And I think you better put another 100 police on the front gate’.^[v]

1.30 p.m.

Whitlam’s principal private secretary, John Mant, and his speechwriter, Graeme Freudenberg, arrive at the Lodge. They found Whitlam sitting alone in the sunroom eating a steak. Whitlam looked up. ‘I’ve been sacked’, he said. They smile at what they think is a joke. Freudenberg chuckles. ‘No. I’m serious. Here’s the letter’. He pushes the document across the table. He asks Mant to contact several of his colleagues and have them come to the Lodge immediately.

In parliament house, Fred Daly sits in his office eating a chicken sandwich with his staffer. An official from the Prime Minister’s Department pops his head in the door and tells Daly that Whitlam wants to see him. ‘What for?’ Daly asks. ‘I don’t know’, the official responds. ‘Well go away and find out’. The censure motion was scheduled to resume at 2 p.m. and Daly didn’t want to risk losing it. The official came back and said, ‘Don’t know, except they want you up there [at the Lodge] straight away’.

Reluctantly, Daly got up and left. By the time he arrived, Frank Crean, David Combe and Menadue were also there. ‘We’ve been sacked’, Whitlam said to Daly. ‘Who?’ Daly replied. ‘The whole lot of us’, said Whitlam.

‘He can’t do that’, Crean said. ‘I’ve got a speech here to say he can’t do it’.

‘You know what you can do with that speech’, Daly cracked. Whitlam tells the group he’ll ring the Queen.^[vi]

Image: Gough and Margaret Whitlam outside the Lodge, the prime minister’s Canberra residence. In happier days.

In Government House, David Smith calls Malcolm Fraser’s office. His chief of staff, Dale Budd, answers. ‘You’re now working for the prime minister’, Smith says. ‘He is on his way back. He wants to see Senator Withers, Mr. Menadue and Mr Yeend as soon as possible’.^[vii]

The front doors of King’s Hall, Parliament House, swing open and Fraser walks into the lobby accompanied by Tony Eggleton, the Liberal Party federal director. They pass the young Liberal member for Bennelong, a thirty-six-year-old John Howard. They exchange pleasantries. Howard notices that Fraser is carrying a bible in his right hand.^[viii]

Budd is busy making calls when Fraser enters the office. Ian Castles, a senior official in the Prime Minister’s Department, is on the phone. Budd tells him that Fraser is now the prime minister. ‘Who is this?’ Castles demands. He thinks it’s a prank call. Fraser grabs the phone and tells Castles what has happened. ^[ix]

1.40 p.m.

At the Lodge, Whitlam drafted a motion of no confidence in the new government. He intended to move it when the House of Representatives resumed. Given his party had a Lower House majority, the idea was that Speaker Gordon Scholes would adjourn proceedings and forward the carried motion to Kerr, who would have little choice but to reinstate Whitlam. With sharp and narrow focus, Whitlam and his colleagues work through their strategy, not realising that no Labor senator had been told the news.

In Fraser’s parliamentary office, the Liberal leadership team gathers. Fraser enters the room looking very serious. ‘Reg’, he says, looking at the Liberal Senate leader, ‘how long would it take you to get Supply?’ Reg Withers looks surprised. ‘Hell, Malcolm, are we crumbling at this stage? We ought not to, you know. Are you serious?’ Fraser continues: ‘Yes, Reg, how long would it take for you to get Supply?’ ‘Ten minutes’. ‘You’ve got five’, says Fraser, turning to his deputy, Doug Anthony. ‘Doug, you’re the deputy prime minister’. He pauses. ‘I’m the prime minister’.^[x]

2 p.m.

Outside, journalist Mungo MacCallum was enjoying lunch and a glass of red wine. In the distance he sees Laurie Oakes running into the building. How strange, MacCallum thought. Laurie never runs.

Inside King’s Hall, the Labor MP, Vince Martin, ran up to veteran journalist, Alan Reid. He told him that Kerr sacked Whitlam. ‘You’re kidding’, Reid fires back. ‘Crean just told me. He’s been up at the Lodge. Whitlam told him’, Martin says.^[xi]

Image: King’s Hall, (Old) Parliament House, Canberra

At a fast pace, Reid stalks the corridors looking for Crean. He can’t find him. He walks into the office of Doug Blake, the Clerk of the House of Representatives. Blake tells him that Kerr’s decision will be announced in the House shortly. Reid dashes up the stairs to the press gallery. He calls the TV stations and starts dictating the news. He returns to King’s Hall and finds Reg Withers. Neither can fully believe it. As they’re talking, Reid spots his first Labor Senator, Doug McClelland, and calls out to him. McClelland walks over but Withers gets pulled out by a staffer. McClelland shrugs and walks off into the Senate.^[xii]

The chamber starts to fill. Before he enters, John Button, a Labor Senator, is told the news by a journalist. Confused and unnerved, he walks over to his Tasmanian colleague, Merv Everitt, and reports what he heard. Everitt, ‘intelligent and tough-minded’, doesn’t seem surprised.^[xiii]

Image: The Senate chamber in (Old) Parliament House, Canberra.

Word is quietly passed around the Liberal Senators. A colleague approaches Peter Baume, the NSW Senator; ‘Do not allow your expression to change, but Whitlam has been sacked’, the colleague says. ‘Malcolm is Prime Minister and we will get the budget as quickly as we can’.^[xiv]

Reg Withers approaches the Labor Senate leader, Ken Wriedt. He tells him that if he puts forward the Supply Bills, the Opposition will pass them. Wriedt just stares at him. He walks over to his deputy, Don Willesee, and Doug McClelland. ‘There’s something strange here’, he tells them. Why have they changed their minds? He walks over to Button, who was calling him to the chamber door. Button tells him there’s a story going around that Whitlam’s been sacked. ‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous’, Wriedt says. ‘Send someone out to check it.’^[xv]

He dithers. Withers approaches him again. ‘Are you going to move these bills, or are we?’

Image: Reg Withers, the Liberal Senate leader. ‘I’m just a boy from Bunbury. I’m not a clever man’. When it came to Senate procedures, he was very clever.

A parliamentary liaison officer walks into the chamber and tells McClelland that Whitlam has been dismissed. A further message is quickly conveyed to Wriedt and McClelland from Whitlam’s office. But having had no direct communication with Whitlam, or anyone from the Lodge meeting, Wriedt introduces the supply bills – his government’s own bills.

In four minutes, they are passed.

^[i] Sir John Kerr, Matters for Judgment: An Autobiography, (Macmillan: South Melbourne: 1978), pp.364-66

^[ii] Sir David Smith, Head of State: The Governor-General, the Monarchy, the Republic, and the Dismissal, (Macleay Press: Paddington, NSW: 2005), p.249

^[iii] Jenny Hocking, Gough Whitlam: His Time, The Biography Volume II, (The Miegunyah Press: Carlton: 2014), Chapter 11

^[iv] Ibid.

^[v] Troy Bramston, ‘What John Kerr said after dismissing Gough Whitlam’, The Australian, 10 October 2025, https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/god-help-us-all-what-john-kerr-said-after-dismissing-gough-whitlam/news-story/844446326891af684aea2f76572db50e

^[vi] Fred Daly oral interview with National Library of Australia, 1983, https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/553845

^[vii] Dale Budd, ‘D-Day’, in Sybil Nolan (ed.), The Dismissal – Where were you on November 11, 1975?, (Melbourne University Press: Carlton: 2005), p.46

^[viii] John Howard, Lazarus Rising – A Person and Political Autobiography, (Harper Collins: Sydney: 2011), pp.114-115

^[ix] Dale Budd in Nolan (2005), p.47

^[x] Tom Frame, A Very Proper Man – the Life of Tony Eggleton, (Connor Court Publishing: 2022), pp.183-4

^[xi] Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt, Alan ‘The Red Fox’ Reid: Pressman Par Excellence, (New South: Sydney: 2010), pp.278-279

^[xii] Ibid.

^[xiii] John Button, ‘Out of a Blue Sky’, in Nolan (2005), p.18

^[xiv] Peter Baume, ‘A Soldier Regrets’, in Nolan (2005), p.63

^[xv] Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston, The Dismissal: A Groundbreaking New History, (Viking: 2015), pp.223-224

If the practice of History is the investigation of four questions – what, when, how, and why – the Dismissal historiography leans overwhelmingly into the ‘why’, with intense disputes over the ‘how’. Despite an abundance of primary material and secondary narratives, there are surprisingly few neutral accounts of the ‘what’ and ‘when’ of 11 November 1975. Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston have provided the most forensic detail, perhaps even the definitive version; but even their interpretation of its meaning and legacy is contestable.

Thanks to a plethora of first-hand recollections in memoirs, book chapters, essays, articles, oral interviews, to say nothing of contemporary press reports, personal diaries, correspondence and government documents – the latter now available to the public in the National Archives of Australia, it is possible to reconstruct the scenes of 11 November 1975 in minute detail.

I thought it would an interesting exercise to recreate the scenes of that momentous day, sunrise to sunset; to take at face value the perspectives and emotions of both sides, including protagonists, bit players, and passive observers. I thought it would be interesting to tell the story not just of Whitlam and Fraser, but of Parliament House more generally, and the ripple effect of Kerr’s decision throughout Australia. For those alive at the time, it was an unforgettable day.

I have a conflict of interest in this story, because my father was an adviser to Malcolm Fraser at the time of the Dismissal. Despite my striving for objectivity, the unconscious works in mysterious and not-so-mysterious ways. At the very least I hope to add some information and colour that has previously been missed or underplayed.

Whitlam and Fraser were villains to their opponents and heroes to their supporters. The ‘sacrifice’ of Gough made him a legend in his own party, even as Labor took concerted steps to move away from Whitlamism. Fraser’s relationship with the Liberal Party deteriorated after he left politics and continued its gradual descent until his death in 2015. The irony is that Australia’s greatest political crisis centred on two men of whom there was much to admire. We could do worse than have a Whitlam or a Fraser in parliament today.

* * *

Prelude

‘Remember son, all our problems come out of a clear blue sky’, the Labor Senator Jim McClelland told his younger colleague, John Button, in the early days of the Whitlam Government.^[i]

Not since Australians carried British passports as citizens of the Empire, or used the British pound, or rationed petrol and butter, or flew exclusively propellor planes; when they listened to the radio because there was no television; when photographs were black and white, and immigration was strictly white – this was Australia last under Labor rule, in 1949. Gough Whitlam may not have delivered modernity, but to many he symbolised it.

Button thought of McClelland’s comment some weeks after Whitlam was sacked. The sky was a brilliant blue on the morning of Tuesday, 11 November 1975. The Canberra sunrise is radiant and sharp when the weather’s right. It washes over Lake Burley Griffin and scatters into tessellations of light. The springtime air is cool and crisp, and it is unusually quiet. The placidness is broken by arriving jet planes carrying political staffers and public servants.

The news that morning was predictably bad. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that final payments were being made to aged care homes and facilities for the disabled.^[ii] The government was running out of money. Since 15 October, when the Liberal opposition leader, Malcolm Fraser, announced the Coalition’s intention to block supply in the Senate, the entire federal apparatus was living off the fumes of the Supply Acts passed in May, together with a few special appropriations bills. After November, the money would be gone.

Even the politicians felt the pinch of austerity. Travelling expenses were restricted; parliamentary committees were prohibited from meeting outside of Canberra; official Christmas Cards were ruled out “except in very special cases”.^[iii]

Whitlam slept little the night before. He arrived in Canberra on a VIP flight he happened to have shared with Fraser. He went straight to the Lodge, arriving a little after midnight, to work on a draft speech with Graeme Freudenberg, his astute and literary speechwriter. “How was Malcolm”? Freudenberg enquired. “He seemed cheerful enough”, Whitlam replied. ^[iv]

Image: Fraser and Whitlam shaking hands at the Lord Mayor’s banquet in Melbourne, 10 November 1975. Ron Walker, centre, was then the Lord Mayor of Melbourne.

The Liberal opposition had given notice of a censure motion and the prime minister wanted to be prepared. The feeling was that something had to give in the next day or two. Most believed that the supply crisis could be resolved in one of three ways: a backdown by the Opposition, an agreement between the two parties, or a half-Senate election without the Opposition’s agreement, funded, hopefully, by a temporary scheme of government credit – assuming the Liberals still wouldn’t pass supply. Fraser was adamant that only a general election could resolve the dispute.

Whitlam had no intention of obliging Fraser. But if he advised the Governor-General to dissolve parliament and to hold an election that calendar year, House or Senate, he had to move in a matter of days.

The media were inclined to think that Fraser would crack. There were rumblings in the shadow cabinet, the backbench, and the party members themselves, that things had gone quite far enough. “A few supporting, quite a few against” was how a Liberal senator described local branch sentiment over blocking supply.^[v] And that was in October! Fraser’s personal popularity had never been worse, and most of the public, if the polls were to be believed, wanted the budget passed. A forthcoming issue of The Bulletin, sent to the printers on the morning of 11 November, had as its front cover a disoriented looking Fraser, with little stars and birds orbiting his head like a cartoon character, the headline reading “Fraser: Man in a Muddle”.

The cover story was written by Robert Drewe, a young Bulletin contributor and not yet the accomplished author he would become. He was sent to Fraser’s office in October to write about the allegedly aloof and patrician Liberal leader. Fraser was tall and imposing but looked tired; ‘[h]is face is not so much grey as fawn colored; pasty from late nights and strain and not enough fresh air.’ With a disarming smile, Fraser was warmer than the caricatures suggested, but still Drewe struggled to read him. He could tell that Fraser was intensely driven and thought about the supply crisis in deeply moral terms. Morality, Fraser said, is ‘very important to me’. He thought Whitlam failed ‘to set the proper standards of morality for himself and his colleagues’. That was, he implied, the basis of his decision to block supply – there were too many moral failures, too many scandals, the Khemlani loan affair the biggest of all. It justified the government’s resignation because the nature and scale of it was so outside the normal processes of responsible government.^[vi]

7.00 a.m.

Fraser also slept poorly on the night of 10 November. He began the day with a discreet leadership meeting around seven in the morning. That was the other thing Drewe learned about him, having been woken once by a Fraser phone call. He was an early riser.

Tony Eggleton, the Liberal federal director, was worried. ‘[I]f Malcolm hadn’t achieved an outcome that day, there were lots of people who would probably not have continued to support him with his strategy’, he later said.^[vii] There was one cause for confidence: the ‘Vice Regal Notes’, issued the previous day and published in the morning papers, revealing that Sir John Kerr had met with the Chief Justice of the High Court, Sir Garfield Barwick. It looked as if the Governor-General was ready to move.^[viii]

Fraser believed there was a high likelihood that Sir John Kerr would intervene. Before he decided to block supply, a small group of Liberals game planned the likely outcome of a deadlocked Senate. Among them was Bob Ellicot, the Shadow Attorney-General, armed with Hebert Vere Evatt’s book The King and his Dominion Governors, which outlined the Governor-General’s reserve powers.^[ix] Ellicott was convinced that if the Liberal senators held firm, Kerr would have to sack Whitlam and dissolve parliament. Fraser accepted this advice and subsequently pressured Kerr, subtlety and not-so-subtlety, to take a central role in resolving the dispute. As early as 18 October he told the press that “some action from the Governor-General could clear the way for a general election quite quickly”.^[x] News of Kerr’s meeting with Barwick signalled to Fraser that something was afoot.

8.30 a.m.

Fraser called the chief electoral officer, Frank Ley, asking about election timetables. Ley told Fraser that if a half-Senate election was to be held on 13 December, action would have to be taken “either today or tomorrow at the latest”. Fraser asked if the same applied for a House of Representatives election. Ley said yes. After the conversation, Ley contacted John Menadue, head of the Prime Minister’s Department, to let him know about Fraser’s enquiries. He asked Menadue to tell Whitlam.

The prime minister was making phone calls of his own. He spoke to David Combe, the Labor national secretary, about a forthcoming meeting with Fraser scheduled for 9 a.m. He told Combe that he didn’t expect anything to come of it. His plan was to announce a half-Senate election after the meeting. Combe had another suggestion. Present the supply bills to the Senate one more time, he said, just in case a Liberal or two crossed the floor. He heard rumours that some of the Opposition were ‘just about ready to cave in’. He asked Whitlam whether he was sure Kerr ‘is O.K.’. ‘Yes’, Whitlam responded.^[xi] He had made up his mind to push through. He thought the Coalition’s tactics a raw display of political opportunism that would backfire. From his point of view, the polling was good news and justified his course of action.

9.00 a.m.

Government House on the Yarralumla estate was as tranquil as ever. Kerr’s Official Secretary, the formal and dark-haired David Smith, recalls a busy kitchen preparing for a luncheon and household dinner. The butler and footmen were setting the dining table. Outside, the gardener inspected the wreath of poppies that Kerr was to lay at the War Memorial.^[xii]

Smith and Kerr settled into the study and went over the documents drafted the previous day. They included a formal letter dismissing the prime minister, together with a statement of reasons. Smith had been provided with Whitlam’s letter advising a half-Senate election, provided to him in advance by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.^[xiii]

Whitlam arrived at Parliament House a little after 9am and was late to his meeting with Fraser in the prime minister’s suite. He was joined by Frank Crean, the Deputy Prime Minister, and Fred Daly, Leader of the House of Representatives. Fraser was accompanied by Phillip Lynch, the Deputy Liberal leader, and Doug Anthony, the leader of the Country Party.

Whitlam sat on the lounge chair and spoke first. He wanted Fraser to pass the budget. If this didn’t happen, he would recommend a half-Senate election to the Governor-General. Fraser reiterated his position that only an election of the House of Representatives was acceptable. Whitlam said he would defer an early half Senate election, which had the potential to shift the numbers in Labor’s favour, if supply was passed. Fraser rejected this. He asked Whitlam if he intended to seek a half-Senate election without supply. Whitlam replied in the affirmative. ‘You know, Prime Minister, the Governor General can make up his own mind what to do’, he told Whitlam. ‘You can’t necessarily assume he will do just as you advise’. ‘Nonsense’, Whitlam responded. He would have a half Senate election and would not accept any temporary supply to fund it. He wanted the whole budget passed immediately.

Whitlam applied as much pressure as he could. Fraser, however, appeared unflappable. Daly and Crean looked on with puzzlement at his confidence. Daly was in a poor mood and had been since his wife, Teresa, died a month earlier after a long illness. Early one morning he found her sitting on the edge of the bed, asking for a doctor. Before he could find a phone number, she was gone. He knew then he wanted out of politics. He had no appetite for Fraser’s obstructionism. He had huge admiration for Whitlam. Doug Anthony recalled Daly being ‘belligerent’ at the meeting.

‘They seem very cocky’, Crean said to Whitlam afterwards. The whole conversation lasted about thirty minutes. At the end of it, Fraser asked Whitlam not to tell the press about the meeting’s stalemate. Whitlam agreed.

The prime minister called John Menadue into his office. He told him that the Liberals thought Kerr wouldn’t agree to a half-Senate election. This he didn’t believe; he thought they were bluffing.^[xiv] Observing Whitlam, Crean, & Daly, Menadue thought they were ‘clearly taken aback by the mention of the likely response by the Governor-General’. Whitlam said it might be better to speak to Kerr first before he told his parliamentary team of his plans. He asked Menadue to get in contact with Government House.

Menadue called Kerr. He told him Whitlam wanted to come to Government House immediately. Kerr responded that that would be inconvenient; could Whitlam see him after the Remembrance ceremony? Menadue said Whitlam had to speak on a censure motion and wouldn’t be free until after 12.30pm, after which they would ring on their way to Yarralumla.

Menadue reported all this Whitlam, who rang Kerr immediately. The Governor-General sounded friendly and apologised for not speaking earlier; his grandson was ill and in hospital. They exchanged pleasantries and Whitlam informed him that the Senate deadlock remained unresolved. He intended to seek a half-Senate election for 13 December, as well as a referendum to allow for simultaneous elections for the House and Senate. They agreed to speak after the House adjourned.

Whitlam was assured by this conversation and said so to Menadue. He was confident enough to raise it with his parliamentary team that morning.

9.55 a.m.

After speaking with Whitlam, Kerr called Fraser’s office. He asked about the meeting with Whitlam. Fraser told Kerr that no agreement was reached. Kerr asked the Opposition Leader to keep their conversation confidential. Kerr had not made a decision, but were he to, he wanted Fraser’s assurances that certain proprietaries were agreed to. Fraser’s grip on the phone must have tightened as he grabbed a Coalition joint-party agenda paper, turned it over, and scribbled Kerr’s conditions. The Governor-General asked Fraser to:

1. Call a double dissolution election

2. Lead a caretaker government

3. Make no policy changes as the caretaker government

4. Take no action against Whitlam or his ministers over the loan affair. There should be no royal commission into Whitlam’s government.

5. Obtain supply today

6. Dissolve parliament today

Those standing in the room heard only Fraser’s short, staccato responses. But once the conversation ended, it was clear that Kerr intended to intervene that day. The situation was so unprecedented that Fraser and his office were still unsure of what might unfold. Was Kerr actually going to sack Whitlam, or just threaten him with dismissal? What if Whitlam agreed to call a general election – would he remain prime minister? What if he reacted in some unpredictable way? The nervous tempo of the morning intensified.

Image: A copy of the note Fraser wrote in his 9.55 a.m. phone call with the Governor-General, John Kerr. Source: Sydney Institute, https://thesydneyinstitute.com.au/blog/debunking-conspiracy-theories-the-dismissal/

10.10 a.m.

Whitlam strode confidently into the government meeting room. Caucus was already underway. Somewhat inexplicably to the prime minister they were debating the merits of financial assistance to Old Sydney Town, an outdoor museum that recreated convict-era Sydney. ‘This is like the Bishops of Constantinople discussing the colour of their raiments while the barbarians were laying siege to the city’, Whitlam said.^[xv] To a relieved Caucus, he declared he was going to call a half-senate election. Applause broke out; the stalemate seemed at an end.

10.30 a.m.

Fraser walked into his own party room meeting. He looked less confident; ‘tense and emotional’ was one description.^[xvi] He told his party to hold firm. He said that the crisis would likely be resolved shortly. He did not tell them about Whitlam’s decision to call a half senate election. He did not tell them about Kerr’s phone call. He wanted party unity and resolve. Doug Anthony spoke after Fraser and said “we must stay firm. The next twenty-four hours are the most vital in the entire history of our parties”.^[xvii]

11.00 a.m.

Standing in King’s Hall, the main reception area in parliament house, journalists waited for the Coalition members to emerge. News of the impending half-Senate election had been leaked. As the first batch of Liberal and Country MPs arrived, they were asked about Whitlam’s intention to call a half Senate election. They hadn’t heard about it. ‘Fraser’s been too scared to tell them’ one journalist quipped.

Philip Lynch, the Deputy Liberal leader, called a press conference in the Whips office. There were more journalists than usual. He apologised for what would be an anti-climactic announcement. He said the supply crisis was not debated and their position hadn’t changed. He was asked about the half Senate election. “We believe events will work themselves out”, he said. “We believe the present course is sound for reasons which will become apparent to you later”.^[xviii]

Lynch and Fraser knew that their backbench were increasingly unsettled. Among the most nervous was Ian Macphee, a new Victorian MP. He and several backbenchers met for coffee before the House resumed. Most concluded that a respectable retreat had to be found.^[xix]

11.45 a.m.

Members of parliament filed into the House of Representatives. Speaker Gordon Scholes took the chair and read prayers. Fred Daly, the Leader of the House, called on the Opposition Leader to move his censure motion.

Fraser stood up at the despatch box. He called on the House to censure ‘the Government and its ministers’ for their ‘stated intention to govern without the approval of the Parliament to the Appropriation Bills; for concealing from the Parliament the procedures and practices which it intends to follow in the event of the Appropriation Bills failing to pass; for the grave threat to the Australian Constitution resulting from the attempt by the Prime Minister to reduce the power of the Australian Senate; and for the risk to democracy in the failure of the Government to call a general election in accordance with custom and convention’.

Watching from the gallery above was the thirty-two-year-old wunderkind journalist, Laurie Oakes. He liked to credit himself for ‘causing’ the 1974 double dissolution election by breaking the story of the ‘Gair Affair’. Now he looked down at the chamber below, puzzled at the seemingly ‘lacklustre and perfunctory’ Fraser speech.^[xx]The Labor members looked happy and confident. They knew a half-Senate election was coming. Some had already contacted their spouse to cancel holiday plans. They did not give a second’s thought this Fraser line: ‘A Governor General may have to act as the ultimate protector of the Constitution. [Whitlam] ignores that prerogative’. His argument was simple: Whitlam and his ministers couldn’t pass supply; therefore they couldn’t govern. If Whitlam didn’t call an election, he might be forced to.

12.10 p.m.

The prime minister thundered back his defence; that Fraser’s actions were unconstitutional and unprecedented, opportunistic and unprincipled. Consider the repercussions of what the Opposition was doing, he argued. Any government that didn’t have a majority in the Senate could be held hostage. Fraser was getting more desperate, Whitlam said; his language more hysterical. Everyone could see the Opposition was in a weak spot.

About five minutes into Whitlam’s speech, Fraser’s office received a phone call from David Smith. Dale Budd, Fraser’s Chief of Staff, answered the phone. Kerr wanted to see Fraser. Smith said that Whitlam was going to Government House once he finished speaking. After that, Kerr would see Fraser. He couldn’t give a specific time; just keep an eye on Whitlam’s car, Smith said. Budd had the message sent to Fraser who was still sitting in the House. The Opposition Leader took the note, read it, got up, and left.^[xxi]

12.35 p.m.

Whitlam finished his speech by amending Fraser’s censure motion to censure the Opposition instead; a strong theatrical gesture in need of an audience – most MPs were distracted by the pending half-Senate election. The radio was already broadcasting the news. The mood in Fraser’s office was of nervous anticipation. Tony Eggleton, the Liberal Federal Director, remarked to one Fraser staffer, ‘There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip’. Fraser returned to his desk and called his wife, Tamie. ‘Whitlam is going to see the Governor General. You may see a prophecy fulfilled.’^[xxii]

Fraser hung up and walked down the corridor and through King’s Hall to the exit. He bumped into the veteran journalist, Alan Reid. ‘Where are you off to?’ Reid asked. Fraser replied he was off to meet the Governor-General after Kerr had seen Whitlam. ‘What does [Kerr] want to see you about?’ ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t told’, replied Fraser. ‘I suppose it’s to get my version of this morning’s discussions.’ ‘Well, they didn’t get far – Gough’s got you over a bit of a barrel.’ Reid thought Fraser looked serious, even gloomy. ‘Maybe’, Fraser said. He hopped in the car and was driven off.^[xxiii]

12.40 p.m.

Budd called David Smith to let him know that Fraser was on his way. ‘Has the prime minister left yet?’ Smith asked. Budd didn’t know. He hung up and raced outside to see if Whitlam’s car was still there. It was. Running back to the office, he called Smith and said Whitlam hadn’t left. He tried to contact Fraser’s car by radio, but with no luck.

Whitlam left the House after his speech and went to his office. John Menadue passed him the letter to the Governor-General advising a half-Senate election. Whitlam put it in his coat pocket and told Fred Daly and Senator Doug McClelland that he was off to see Kerr. He told McClelland he wanted to the supply bills brought forward into the Senate after lunch. He then left.

Fraser was the first to arrive at Government House. He was greeted by Smith and Captain Chris Stephens, Kerr’s aide-de-camp, at the state entrance and taken to the waiting room. He was told that Whitlam hadn’t arrived yet. Smith engaged him in small talk while Whitlam’s car eventually pulled up at the private entrance. The prime minister was taken to Kerr’s study by Stephens. ‘The successor is being interviewed in there’, the Captain said, pointing to a private drawing room. He meant his own successor as aide de camp. Whitlam later remembered it more ominously.

1.00 p.m.

Kerr was sitting at his desk when Whitlam entered the room. He stood up and shook hands with the prime minister. Stephens departed and closed the door.

‘I have a letter with the advice which I gave you on the telephone this morning’, Whitlam said, placing his hand inside his coat pocket.

‘Before you say anything, Prime Minister, I want to say something to you’, Kerr responded.

‘You have told me this morning on the phone that your talks with the leaders on the other side have failed to produce any change and that things therefore remain the same. You intend to govern without parliamentary supply.’

‘Yes’, Whitlam replied.

Kerr told Whitlam he had to have parliamentary supply to govern. Given he couldn’t get it, and was not prepared to go to the people, he had decided to withdraw his commission.

In Kerr’s account of the conversation, Whitlam ‘jumped up, looked urgently around the room, looked at the telephone and said sharply, “I must get in touch with the Palace at once”.’ Whitlam denied ever saying this. But Kerr recalls saying, in response, ‘It is too late’. ‘Why?’ Whitlam asked. ‘Because you are no longer prime minister’ Kerr replied, handing him the formal letter withdrawing Whitlam’s commission, together with the statement of reasons.

‘I see’, Whitlam said. He took them and stood up. ‘The Chief Justice agrees with this course of action’, said Kerr, according to Whitlam. Whitlam reminded him that he had advised Kerr not to seek the Chief Justice’s advice on the supply matter. ‘We shall all have to live with this’, Kerr said. ‘You certainly will’, Whitlam replied.

Kerr told Whitlam he would probably win the election. He said the polls looked good. Whitlam looked pale and said nothing. They shook hands. Captain Stephens returned to escort the former prime minister silently back to his car.^[xxiv]

Image: Kerr’s letter terminating Whitlam’s commission.

^[i] John Button, ‘Out of a Blue Sky’, in Sybil Nolan (ed.), The Dismissal – Where were you on November 11, 1975?, (Melbourne University Press: Carlton: 2005), p.16

^[ii] Sydney Morning Herald, 11 November 1975

^[iii] The Canberra Times, 6 November 1975

^[iv] Paul Kelly, The Dismissal, (Angus & Robertson Publishers: Sydney: 1983), p.291

^[v] The Canberra Times, 21 October 1975

^[vi] Robert Drewe, ‘Fraser: The Man in a Muddle’, The Bulletin, 15 November 1975, pp.12-14

^[vii] Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston, The Dismissal: A Groundbreaking New History, (Viking: 2015), Chapter 14

^[viii] The Vice Regal Notes, published in newspapers on 11 November 1975, but released by Government House the day before, is an often-missed aspect of the story. In remarks to others, Whitlam noted that on the flight to Canberra on 10 November, Fraser and his deputy, Phillip Lynch, appeared deep in conversation and ‘up to something’. In his memoirs, he claims that the commonwealth driver who later took Fraser and Lynch from the airport overheard them say “He doesn’t know anything about it. All we have to do is now hope that the press don’t get hold of it, because then it could all blow up in our faces”. Naturally enough, Whitlam thinks conspiracy. In fact, the more likely explanation is that they are talking about the Vice Regal Notes.

^[ix] Jim Carlton interviewed by Rob Linn in the Old Parliament House political and parliamentary oral history project, 2011, National Library of Australia

^[x] Sydney Morning Herald, 18 October 1975

^[xi] Laurie Oakes, Crash Through or Crash: The unmaking of a prime minister, (Drummond: Richmond, VIC: 1976), p.4

^[xii] David Smith, Head of State: The Governor-General, the Monarchy, the Republic, and the Dismissal, (Macleay Press: Paddington, NSW: 2005), p.240

^[xiii] Ibid., pp.242-243

^[xiv] John Menadue notes, NAA

^[xv] Jenny Hocking, Gough Whitlam: His Time, The Biography Volume II, (The Miegunyah Press: Carlton: 2014)

^[xvi] Paul Kelly (1983), p.294

^[xvii] Ibid.

^[xviii] Ibid.

^[xix] Ian Macphee, ‘A Matter of Principle’, in Sybil Nolan (2005), p.58

^[xx] Laurie Oakes (1976),

^[xxi] Dale Budd, ‘D-Day’, in Sybil Nolan (2005), pp.45-46

^[xxii] David Kemp, ‘Red felt pen on green paper’, in Sybil Nolan (2005), 42

^[xxiii] Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt, Alan ‘The Red Fox’ Reid: Pressman Par Excellence, (New South: Sydney: 2010), pp.277-278

^[xxiv] Only two men were privy to this conversation: Whitlam and Kerr. Both gave their account of it in their memoirs: see John Kerr, Matters for Judgement: an autobiography, (Macmillan: South Melbourne: 1978); and Gough Whitlam: The Truth of the Matter [this title was a play on Kerr’s own memoir], (Penguin Books: New York: 1979). The biggest inconsistency between the two accounts is Whitlam’s declaration of ‘I must get in touch with the Palace’. In his memoir, Whitlam insists he never said it. David Smith, more than three decades later, told Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston that Kerr reported this remark to him, though he claims that Kerr initially said that Whitlam was leaving the office when he said it. As I will show in Part 2 of this story, one of the revelations of the ‘Palace Letters’ – correspondence between Kerr and the British Palace – is that Whitlam did indeed call Buckingham Palace that day, but not, as Kerr feared, to have the Governor-General sacked. Just to complain.

Consider the following Sydney Morning Herald editorial written in 1981 about Andrew Peacock and his rivalry with Malcolm Fraser:

‘He must articulate a philosophy of Liberalism which is both different to Mr Fraser’s and more attractive than it. To be convincing, that philosophy must be fleshed out with fairly definitive ideas for changes in policy.’ (SMH, 8 June 1981, p.6)

Even as late as 1996, John Howard – more often described as a conservative than a liberal – was comfortable in elevating what he called ‘Australian Liberalism’ as the primary force of centre-right politics:

Liberalism now has an opportunity, unparalleled for almost fifty years, to consolidate a new coalition of support among the broad cross-section of the Australian people. It will only prove enduring if Liberalism continues to relate its fundamental values and principles to the concerns and aspirations of the Australian mainstream, rather than the narrower agendas of elites and special interests. (1996 Sir Robert Menzies Lecture, 18/11/1996)

Howard is talking about something more than a political philosophy, or what we might call small-l liberalism. He’s describing a political movement – Liberalism – with a capital L.

Today, federal and state Liberal leaders don’t really talk about upper-case Liberalism anymore. Sometimes ‘liberalism’ appears in headland speeches, but more as a rhetorical ornament than a declaration of faith. No one talks about ‘Liberalism’ as an Australian political grouping. Not in the way Menzies did in 1946: “Liberalism brings to you the only real hope of a free, friendly, prosperous, and growing Australia”, or Harold Holt in 1966: “[I] look forward proudly to carrying the banner of Liberalism as your leader for many successful years ahead”.

The liberal heritage in Australia goes back to the colonial era. It’s the dominating creed of Australian politics – including for Labor, though they tend to avoid the term. It’s also an amorphous doctrine, shape shifting into different guises to suit the times. Liberals are therefore prone to split. Federation began with two ‘liberal’ parties: the Protectionists and the Free Traders, who together controlled almost two-thirds of the House of Representatives after the 1901 election. In newspapers, political journals, and on the hustings, they each staked their claim for the ‘true’ Liberal mantle.

Image: Alfred Deakin (Protectionist) and William McMillan (Free Trader) spilled plenty of ink in their day over who was the ‘true’ liberal. This exchange is from the short-lived journal United Australia (1900-2)

Entire volumes could be devoted to the meaning of liberalism. Suffice to say, both Deakin and McMillan believed they were advocating a principled politics, anchored squarely in the public interest and untainted by special interests, or prejudiced by old world hatreds of class or religion. They believed that the State worked best when it was building up individual capacity rather than collective security. How the State actually did this was of course open to fierce debate.

I think of Australian liberalism in the twentieth century as composing of two halves. The years 1901 to 1945 is the story of liberal regression. The years 1945 to 2001 is the story of a liberal reawakening.

The first half involves three external shocks: the Great War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. These shocks stalled Australian growth – economic and population growth – and fuelled the worst periods of political and industrial conflict. New settlers over this period – 700,000 – was barely a blip compared to the 5.8 million that followed between 1946 to 2001. Australian protective tariffs were the highest in the developed world in the 1920s and 1930s; around triple the global average. Days lost to industrial conflict were staggering, averaging a yearly 1,174 days per thousand employees between 1927 and 1943 – compared with 295 in Britain, and 717 for the United States.

This was a disaster for Australia’s prosperity and civic culture. And of course, liberal ideas were a political casualty. Whatever gains were made by the ‘fusion’ of the Liberal Protectionists and Liberal Free Traders in 1909 had been lost by 1943. Even the Fusion Liberals had a central organisation – the Australian Liberal Union, established in 1912. The United Australia Party (UAP) had none. Liberalism had been diluted by the Hughes-led Nationalists, which was fundamentally a wartime party, and stayed relatively dormant under the leadership of Joseph Lyons, an ex-Labor premier and federal treasurer, whose core objective was to get Australia through the Great Depression without collapsing into further civil and economic strife.

When the Victorian liberal, Herbert Brookes, shut down his state-based People’s Liberal Party in 1917 to make way for the Nationalists, he hoped that ‘sometime, somewhere, who knows, we may gather together under another banner but with the old principles still strong in our souls.’ With that, he turned off the light, and it stayed off for almost thirty years until Menzies switched it on again.

This is, at least, how I conceptualise the modern day Liberal Party - a post-war effort to return centre-right politics back towards a distinctly liberal and Australian political tradition. As early as 1929, Menzies, then a state politician in the Victorian parliament, advocated returning the Nationalists to liberal principles:

I am a Nationalist, but I recognise that of recent years the party has shown too great a tendency to play for political safety…What is needed, rather, is that Nationalism should re-state its political faith on definitely Liberal lines! That it should cease to toy with reaction on the one side, or a mongrel Socialism on the other; and that above all it should steadfastly pursue its political objectives without too much half-hearted consideration of what other parties or groups may say.

After John Curtin’s landslide election victory of 1943, Menzies found his opportunity to lead that project at the federal level.

There is another story behind the liberal revival in post-war Australia – a revival that ran across both Labor and Liberal. (Calwell’s postwar migration program, Whitlam’s modernisation of Labor, Hawke’s embrace of economic reform – all were influenced by the liberal revival). That is the exhaustion and idealism following the Second World War.

The generation of Menzies had it tough, at least those born in the 1890s: old enough to fight in the First World War, marry and earn a living during the stagnant 1920s, stagger through the Great Depression, and, if one’s child was born shortly after returning from combat, see that child fight – and possibly die – in the Second World War. I think of this as the Unlucky Generation.

To get a feel of this period, I recommend reading My Dearest Brown Eyes – Letters Between Sir Donald Cleland and Dame Rachel Cleland during World War II. Donald Cleland was a lawyer who served in the Australian Imperial Force, and later held an administrative position in Port Moresby. He went on to serve as the inaugural federal director of the Liberal Party. His correspondence with Rachel, his wife, is a rare glimpse into the political psychology of war-time and post-war Australian centre-right politics. Consider this paragraph written by Rachel, in August 1941:

‘I feel somehow that this is not only a war between Nazidom and Freedom but that there is also a tussle going on right through the whole life of every nation. And that is a tussle going on between age and youth, between the forces of reaction and progress – between the ‘love thy neighbour’ attitude and all it implies and the ‘look after my own’ attitude. I know which side you and I have always been almost unconsciously on. But we’ve never even analysed our society and the forces behind it. We have previously associated ourselves with bodies and people whose motives we must now study.’

I find that last sentence revealing. The war invites a re-examination of their political bearings. They are searching for a revitalised political identity. They are rejecting ‘reaction’, just as Menzies did in 1929. The pushback against reactionary conservatism is a common thread through Australian liberalism.

The Liberal Party of Australia was born at an October 1944 conference; a gathering of all the disparate forces of Australia’s centre-right. A motion of unity was moved by the timber merchant, E.K White, an eccentric and idealist who once served, and was wounded, on the Western Front, and who founded the ill-fated Liberal Democratic Party in New South Wales. His son, flying for the RAAF, was killed in action that July.

Whatever was to be the fate of the new Liberal Party, Robert Menzies was certain of its name. He had written the following a year earlier, in August 1943:

‘The name United Australia Party has fallen into complete disregard. It no longer means anything. Many of my own strongest supporters in my own electorate decline to have anything to do with the Party as such. It is a great misfortune when the name of a political party means nothing. The word Labour does. The name Country Party is self-explanatory. If we are to build a new Party it must have a name which expresses our true and permanent point of view; and having got that name we should not chop and change every few years as we have in the past. My own opinion is that our side of politics should stand for Liberal Democracy. After all, this is one of the natural classifications of political thought, Fascist, Communist and Socialist being among the others. I therefore believe that we should set about establishing a LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY’.

In the end, of course, the centre-right settled on simply ‘Liberal’. At the 1944 October ‘Unity’ conference, a small committee was established to recommend a party name. Its chair was the South Australian Premier, Thomas Playford, then leader of the Liberal and Country League – the only centre-right premier in Australia, and the only state-based centre-right party to retain the name ‘Liberal’. E.K White, another member of that committee, recollected the discussions some decades later:

‘I put the case for the Liberal Democratic Party and Playford for Liberal and seeing we were about 50 – 50 and the die hards of the UAP had not so far won a point, and in the interests of peace and progress we compromised and accepted Liberal.

I was also sure that this was the name Sir Robert Menzies wanted and since we had at least half of our original name the Liberal Democrats were reasonably happy.’

‘In my last letter I mentioned Menzies and the new party’, Donald wrote to Rachel in late October. ‘I am so glad you agree with the name. It is the only one’.

Not everyone agreed with it. James Shaw, Secretary of the Country-National Organisation of Queensland suggested the ‘Australian Nationalist Party’; the Western Australian delegates suggested ‘United Australia’ (still!), ‘Commonwealth’, ‘Liberal-Democratic’, or ‘Democratic’; the Queensland Women’s Electoral League suggested ‘The Australian People’s Party’. The conservative Victorian newspaper, The Argus, reported that ‘Some delegates [to the October 1944 Unity Conference] are privately a little uneasy about the name Liberal though when challenged to produce a better one, they are stumped. They apprehend that Liberal expresses an abstract philosophy rather than a material interest.’ (The Argus, 16 October 1944, p.2)

In 1943, at least one author from the newly-constituted Institute of Public Affairs
(Victoria branch) was concerned that the ‘Liberal’ brand was tainted by the demise of the British Liberal party. ‘Liberalism’, however much a force for good, seemed too old fashioned, too backward looking. An alternative list of potential names was drafted:

Image: A 1943 memorandum drafted at the Institute of Public Affairs

It’s a fascinating document, revealing the depths to which the ‘Liberal’ brand had fallen by the early 1940s, making Menzies’ renewal of it all the more remarkable. I think he understood something quite fundamental: that an enduring political party must have enduring ideas, easily articulatable to the lay person but not speaking down to them, and that a party name should be reflective of these enduring ideas.

I think of this episode quite a bit. Today, the media talk of ‘conservatives’ and ‘moderates’ in the Liberal Party. Those terms don’t really mean anything. They are a vibe, not a philosophy. There’s a smell of the interwar period about the current state of Australian liberalism. In this current era of liberal regression, its good to be aware of liberalism’s history and its import.

In 2011, Victoria’s short-lived Liberal government announced its plan to redevelop Fishermans Bend, the industrial low land north of the West Gate Bridge near Port Melbourne, into a high-density urban precinct. ''The Kennett government had a vision for Docklands, the Cain government saw [a vision for] Southbank - and now the Baillieu government has a vision for Fishermans Bend” said the Minister for Planning, Matthew Guy.

Fourteen years later and the results aren’t great. Victoria’s Auditor General found the project grossly behind schedule. Many planning documents are still in draft stage and there is no monitoring of progress, despite promises to do so. The approval process for developing just one hectare of land was described by Nicholas Reece, then the deputy-mayor, now mayor, as so ‘tortuous’ that ‘I think you’d probably need a PhD in planning to understand the circuitous route that it has gone through’. Just take a look at the volume of documents relating to the project, from a consultant-led review of car parking opportunities, to a social history of the area, to a guide to the resources of the social history of the area.

The Auditor-General’s report is eye raising, but not as much as the official response from the Department of Transport and Planning. The departmental secretary, Jeroen Weimar, wrote that ‘much has changed since the [2018 Framework] was released’. The changes? ‘[A] pandemic, new terms of Government, multiple machinery of Government changes and the emergence of significant new Government policy, including the release of Victoria’s Housing Statement in 2023’.

Put aside the fact that the current ‘framework’ arrived seven years after the policy was announced. I’m interested in the excuse of ‘new terms of Government’ – not a change of government, mind you, but the mere passage of time between electoral cycles. Even the predictable rhythm of democracy has become an impediment to action.

Letters like these are worth keeping in mind amidst all the commentary over last week’s productivity roundtable in Canberra. Danielle Wood, Chair of the Productivity Commission, has been banging the drum for a ‘growth mindset’ to reinvigorate economic dynamism. Wood argues that growth has been deprioritised by the modern ‘demand for governments to “do something” every time an issue emerges’. She makes this point under the shadow of startingly bad productivity numbers: less than a quarter of Australia’s 60-year average.

This is not a problem unique to Australia. Western economies around the world are struggling with below-average productivity. It's not a coincidence that the roundtable arrives at the same time as the ‘Abundance’ agenda in the United States is gaining momentum, popularised by the journalists Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein. They make a similar case for pro-growth policies that promise to liberate America’s supply side from suffocating red tape.

The history of how we got here is just as interesting as the policy prescriptions. There’s an unspoken undercurrent in all these discussions about productivity, that governments find it harder to do real economic reform. Danielle Wood hints at a deeper political problem – ‘a decline in bipartisanship, the influence of vested interests and the 24/7 media cycle’. The Grattan Institute have previously spoken of a policy ‘Gridlock’ that has characterised Australia post-2007:

Grattan Institute, Gridlock: removing barriers to policy reform, 2021

I want to suggest a different angle: Australia’s productivity problem is cultural and political, rooted in the rise of a professionalised society that has fragmented authority and slowed decision-making.

There is no conspiracy behind this development; it was not engineered by any government, or secret cabal of elites. It is just the direction that most developed economies have taken, for a myriad of technological, political and economic reasons.

This is not a new argument. Earlier this year the American author Marc J. Dunkelman published Why Nothing Works, a useful companion to Klein and Thompson’s Abundance. He tells the following story: in the 1960s, progressives began to push back on government by erecting new administrative guardrails to stop centralised power walking over people’s lives. Progressives didn’t want homes bulldozed for highways anymore. They didn’t want to breathe in pollution. They didn’t want pristine environments or heritage buildings forced to make way for development, or for animals to become endangered. They responded by establishing what Dunkelman calls a ‘vetocracy’, a new political-administrative order where formal and informal veto points exist that can kill any unpopular government project.

The more conservative version of this argument was articulated by Christopher Caldwell in his 2020 book The Age of Entitlement. He sees the proliferation of vetoes as more reflecting a new rights-driven regime launched by the civil-rights movement. In this story, America has effectively established a rival constitutional order, reorienting power towards the courts and federal agencies.

The latest iteration of the ‘What Went Wrong?’ genre

Both these books are provocative, but also very American, emphasising American causes to problems that seem to be global in scope. They identify political activists as being central to the story – and maybe they are – but activists are usually responding to deeper changes that have taken place in society. What are those changes? Here’s my tweak of the story, albeit crude and overgeneralised, and with an Australian bent:

• At some point in the 1970s there was a higher proportion of white-collar workers in Australia than blue collar workers. The affluent generation of the Menzies era had educated themselves, bought a suit, and entered the professions. There were six universities in 1945. By 1972, there were fifteen. And to get to these universities, Australians extended their schooling beyond the age of 15. The proportion of 15-18 year olds in school rose from 18% in 1954 to 32% in 1964, and kept growing.

ABS, FIFTY YEARS OF LABOUR FORCE: NOW AND THEN, 2011

• The new jobs required an education. They were not the typical jobs of yesteryear. They were service-driven and knowledge based. The long expansion of technological innovation, globalisation and the division of labour generated more demand for these jobs. They were executive and managerial roles, administrative and supervisory, often research based. They paid well and people wanted those jobs. Almost all employment growth since 1966 has been in the service sector. In 1966, the two most common occupation groupings in Australia were ‘Tradesmen, production process workers and labourers’ and ‘Farmers, fishermen, timber getters’. In 2021, it was ‘Professionals’ and ‘Managers’.

• What do we mean by ‘professionals’? They are people in occupations that have some control over of their own labour market because they offer specialised services that require human capital. Education and certification are the pathways to get this human capital, but also to extract rent from it.

• The new professional earned more and was better educated. Increasingly, they were spread across both sexes. They were a different social beast to the petty bourgeois world of small proprietors. They were, and are, more liberally minded and tolerant; they want more than physical things, but they are less religious. They want a better environment, and nicer towns and cities that are safer. They also want a more equal and just society. They are more engaged in political matters, and they fit themselves comfortably in the political nomenclature of the day; but they are inherently distrustful of authority.

ANU survey of political attitudes, 1967; extract from David Kemp, Society and Electoral Behaviour in Australia, 1978

• Why do they have these characteristics? The American political scientist, Ronald Inglehart, argued that prosperity and education encouraged greater self-expression and ‘permissivenes’. The Harvard sociologist, Daniel Bell, argued that the knowledge economy, or post-industrial economy, prioritises theoretical knowledge and expertise over old moral codes. Probably the older moral codes had a functional logic that became less relevant in the modern world (mass communication that spreads information, the increasing importance of government institutions to regulate social life, etc).

• In the 1950s, American sociologists became increasingly interested in the new social codes of the professional class. David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) depicted a new mass urban-suburban life more attuned to peers and mass media, and less dictated by long-standing custom or the old codes of duty and self-discipline. C. Wright Mills observed this status anxiety in White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951), where success in large organisations and services requires ‘selling oneself’, blurring the line between private and public life and setting the stage for a new kind of social ethics. William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) – still one of the great books of the 20^th century – found this social ethic working itself out in real time as the new management science elevated conformity, processes, and consensus above individualism. Over time this has seeped into broader social attitudes.

When dust jackets were good.

• Because knowledge production is the engine for growth in this new economy, the new class of worker has more political power. Policy problems are recast in technical language and built upon modelling and theory (increasingly codified in professional guidelines, regulation, etc). Armed with this knowledge, the new worker became a key broker of government policy and regulation. They can use this power to ‘buy’, among other things, clean air through environmental regulation, nicer towns through stricter heritage and zoning laws, equality through anti-discrimination legislation.

• In subtle ways, the methodology of government changes, favouring expert solutions and codified knowledge. And so government answers the demands of the new professional worker by creating consultative boards, statutory authorities and independent watchdogs, community impact hearings, multiplying the decision nodes inside the state so the new worker can have their say. According to the Australian Government Organisations Register, there are currently 1,331 government entities and bodies.

• The old politics of distributive bargains between ‘labour’ and ‘capital’, mediated by a small political elite, has become rights-based and process driven. Governments are trying to manage more goals with more stakeholders, making the old politics of a small but centralised command impossible. The practical answer has been to multiply decision makers, but there are now fewer direct leavers in the hands of elected officials to effect big change without dismantling vested interests that have become institutionalised within the state.

• Still, the welfare gains from this new system are real. Australians live longer, are healthier, more prosperous, and we treat each other better. We are a more equal society, and certainly safer. We are less patriarchal. We spend more on those who need it. The scientific method works and empiricism is good – when done right.

• But it does create new challenges which we don’t have easy political answers for. Young people can’t buy homes because the regulatory state stops them building homes. Fishermans Bend can’t develop without ticking an array of regulatory boxes that are themselves conditional on what happens across multiple government agencies. Credentialism stops people getting the jobs they want without paying the ‘ticket’ of the right credential. And although we are a service economy, regulatory overreach restricts service supply, so things are more expensive.

• As a side note, there’s an argument that the professionalisation of work has led to a convergence of aesthetics, where building interiors, architecture, cars, media, and brand identities gravitate towards the same safe formulas. “Best practices” become codified at the expense of local traditions and ‘high brow’ or idiosyncratic taste. Alex Murrell’s essay on this phenomenon is well worth a read.

• Rent-seeking in society is more subtle when rules proliferate and authority is fragmented into many decision-making processes. On top of that, too many of our best and brightest go into compliance jobs – lawyers, consultants, accountants, HR Professionals, financial advisers, ‘analysts’ – that have little productive value beyond helping others navigate the rules. Data from the Australian Law Reform Commission reveals a Commonwealth statute book equal in size to 533 copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses. That is only one source of rules. There are many more.

  

At least the Australian Law Reform Commission has a sense of humour!

• The rise in non-market sector employment and spending is accelerated by these developments. The ‘state’ has, of course, expanded since industrialisation in the 19^th century, and indeed earlier than that. And there are direct explanations for the growth of the ‘care economy’ (ageing population) and its low productivity (Baumol’s cost disease). In this sense it is a phenomenon with a simple explanation. But the difference between the ‘care economy’ and previous welfare-state projects is that delivery and access are now built around credentialled professionals. Diagnosis is the ticket to entry in the National Disability Insurance Scheme, driving the cost blow-out. In the child-care sector, labour has been the main driver of cost growth; centres abide by strict staff/child ratios and by law can only employ credentialled staff (or those working towards a credential). Award wages are further are linked to qualifications.

• This is not an argument against subsidised care services, or regulation intended to make our society safer. I am more interested in how professionals, which are, as one sociologist said, ‘monopolies of competence’, define policy problems and solutions in their own terms, which tend to reinforce or strengthen their status. The story of state expansion from the mid-20^th century onwards is the pluralisation of decision making characterised by a transfer of political power to a wide network of professionals.

• This transfer of political power represents an allocation of authority away from elected officials. I think this is one reason why ‘reform’ has been particularly hard over the last 20 years. The dispersion of power has given rise to a number of veto-groups, per Dunkelman, who represent something a little different from the ‘old’ elites of moneyed interests and organised labour. They are instead the knowledge elite, whose expertise has vastly improved our state capacity, but like any collection of individuals with economic power, acts to protect their own self-interest.

What to make of this? About twelve years ago, the conservative American political scientist, Stephen M. Teles, coined the term ‘Kludgeocracy’, a state of affairs in which government becomes so complex as to be almost incoherent, sucking in time and money from citizens who are trying to comply with the rules, or even simply to understand them. He predicted, correctly, that the major debates in the future ‘will concern the complexity of government, rather than its sheer scope’. That is what the Abundance agenda is about.

When I was an undergraduate, I heard many scholars in the humanities bemoan the ‘neoliberal’ zeitgeist that worshipped competitive markets as the arbiter of all that was good. And yet government continued to grow. Of course, markets did make a comeback in the late 20th century. But my interpretation of the so-called ‘neoliberal’ revolution is, partly, the dominance of economics, theoretical knowledge and empiricism in the design and advocacy of public policy. In Frank Bongiorno’s political history of Australia, Dreamers and Schemers, he suggests that the market reforms of those years were ‘not a response by the political class to the pressing demands of the citizenry, so much as the project of an elite commanding key positions in government, unions, bureaucracy, think tanks and universities that had become convinced of the need for policy transformation’. Maybe that’s overstating it - Hawke, Reagan and Thatcher turned out to be pretty popular - but there’s something there.

If the kludgeocracy is real, there’s no simple policy cure. But if we take history as our guide, technological innovation that disrupts social and political power tends to affect institutions. The printing press democratised information and spread ideas. The steam engine facilitated human mobility. Will the coming age of AI strike a blow against credentialism and the professionalisation of work? Or will it be regulated away into a corner? Maybe we will continue to muddle on until we are forced to change.

There are promising signs that our democracy is preparing for some kind of policy response. Look at the general consensus around the red tape burden that emanated from the productivity roundtable. There’s always improvements to be made at the margins.

A good first step for any leader is to frame the problem in moral terms. To make any policy contest a contest about values. To avoid framing the problem as bad technocracy vs smarter technocracy. Political rhetoric is becoming a lost art. Compare the one sentence paragraphs and two-clause sentences of Albanese, packed with tricolons and slogans, to the cumulative build-up of ideas that we used to hear. Not an earth shattering idea, I know, but if politicians can’t lead the way in pushing back on their own professionalisation, what hope is there for the rest of us?

In 1948, Schlesinger invited 55 “experts”, mostly historians, to give each US President a grade of Great, Near Great, Average, Below Average, and Failure. He published the results in Life Magazine, on 1 November 1948, the day before Harry Truman’s re-election.

Life Magazine, 1 November 1948, page 65

It took more than half a century for this parlour game to cross the Atlantic. In 1999, BBC Radio 4’s Westminster Hour asked 20 historians to rate every 20^th century British prime minister. Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, and Clement Atlee topped the list.

Seven years earlier, Australia’s Canberra Times asked a mammoth “300 political scientists and historians” to nominate their country’s five greatest prime ministers. Of those that responded, John Curtin, Ben Chifley, Alfred Deakin, Robert Menzies, and Gough Whitlam proved the most popular. Researchers from Monash University have continued the tradition, twice, in 2010 and 2020. It is now a full-blown academic exercise.

Canada, France and Germany are also in on the act. Together, a few patterns emerge. Wartime leaders always rank high on these lists (Germany excepted!), which makes sense. Leadership is never more important than in a crisis. America has Lincoln and FDR; Britain has Churchill; France has De Gaulle; Canada has King; Australia has Curtin. Mid-century social democratic leaders tend to poll well too as the ‘founders’ of the modern welfare state. And if the list goes back far enough, we tend to like founders in general. Americans like Washington, Canadians like John A. Macdonald, and Australians like Alfred Deakin – if they know who he is, which probably isn’t many.

There’s a limitation to this exercise, though; at least in a parliamentary system. Multi-term governments have their good days and bad days. Malcolm Fraser’s first term was better than his last. Same with Howard, Hawke, and Lyons. How do we rank them overall? What weighting do we give each term, each achievement, each failure?

Ranking the parliamentary term rather than the prime minister tells a more interesting story. We can focus on policy achievements with greater specificity. We can separate the good terms of multi-term governments from the bad. And in cases where multiple prime ministers covered a single term – the 2^nd federal parliament had four – we can put personalities and political hijinks aside and focus on the actual output. This is worth keeping in mind when the commentariat decry the ‘chaos’ of leadership changes. Chaotic for the political parties? Yes. For the country? Less clear.

This gives us a better sense of how democracy works. The parliament is the legislative body, not the prime minister, and governments are more than their leader alone. When we vote, we ask ourselves what the next two or three years might look like, and how satisfied we were by the previous term. For political tragics, ranking the term and not the leader adds a twist to a well-worn exercise.

Below is a chronological list of each federal parliamentary term since 1901:

For the purposes of my own rankings, I’m adding a cut-off date of 2013. I want to avoid recency bias and not talk about contemporary politics, despite what a wonderful decade it’s been in our national life.

What makes a successful government? In Australia, as in most countries, no one can agree in the moment. A ‘landslide’ election win requires something like a two-party-preferred vote above 54 per cent. A smashing mandate still means that almost half the electorate disagrees.

Every seemingly ‘objective’ metric of success has its limitations. Menzies won the most elections. Does that make his government the ‘best’? Winning elections doesn’t tell us much about legislative achievement, although it does tell us something about voter preferences, which are important (and often underrated in academic discourse).

Economic performance seems an obvious metric: GDP growth, productivity, low unemployment and low inflation. But how much of these can be traced back to the policy actions of the incumbent government? The causal connection between legislation and wealth distribution is perhaps clearer, but even then, it’s hard to disentangle policy from deeper structural patterns and institutions in an economy, let alone assess the policy trade-off of between equality and efficiency.

The neutral method of assessing a government’s performance might be to ask how successful they were in achieving their stated aims. But what if those aims were, in your opinion, terrible? It's impossible to rank governments without some underlying set of values, even if these go unmentioned. Consider the ranking of prime ministers from the 2020 Monash University survey:

Source: Paul Strangio, ‘Prime-ministerial leadership rankings: the Australian experience’, Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol.57, No.2, (2022), pp.180-198

Six of the top nine prime ministers are Labor. Perhaps that’s unsurprising coming from a survey where each of the 66 respondents is a ‘scholar working in the fields of Australian politics/history’. We would expect a survey of academics to be thoughtful but left-leaning. The author explains this result by pointing to the ‘durable interpretation of Australian party politics … that Labor has been the party of ‘initiative’ and its opponents ‘the parties of resistance’. In short, Labor prime ministers and their governments have been more inclined to drive transformative change.’

Let’s call this the social-democratic interpretation of change. It understands Australia’s success as relying on activist government imbued with strong ideals and prepared to undertake big reform in the national interest. Writing in his memoirs, Gough Whitlam remarked that his government ‘gave primacy to the Parliament itself as the chief instrument of social reform [my emphasis].’ ‘Our programs were essentially legislative programs’, he continued. ‘By November 1973, Cabinet made 1675 decisions, 254 bills had been presented to Parliament, 223 had been passed, and 39 reports by the 94 inquiries, task forces and commissions had been tabled’.

The late philosopher Michael Oakshott might have said that Whitlam was emblematic of what he called modern rationalism, the belief that the conduct of political affairs was a ‘matter of solving problems’. Whitlam takes pride in the quantity of bills passed and decisions made because each is representative of a problem solved; and parliament is the engine room of problem solving.

We get a sense of this perspective in Frank Bongiorno’s recent political history of Australia, Dreamers and Schemers. The book symbolically opens with Whitlam’s funeral, and the reader is reminded of a time when politics was ‘bold, idealistic, and grand’. The ‘big changes’ that occurred in Australian history, the author argues, ‘depended on people willing to resist complacent utilitarian appeals to majority interests and consensus opinion’. Good things happen when people make the right decisions. I don’t think Bongiorno meant exclusively politicians here, but the image of Whitlam’s funeral as the book’s opening is telling.

There is another interpretation of change – call it a ‘conservative liberal’ interpretation – that understands social change as a product of what F.A. Hayek called ‘spontaneous order’: countless individuals making decisions according to their own goals and local information. Government’s role is to manage change, not drive it. ‘It is human beings right through the community who do things’, Robert Menzies said, ‘who think out things, who get on with them.’ When he retired in 1966, he told his Kooyong Electorate Committee that the ‘real achievement’ of his government was not legislation but administration – ‘good, clean, honest and sensible administration’. Menzies was no Hayekian in the economic sense, but he would have sympathised with Hayek’s critique of politics as an exercise of social engineering. He thought it a little ridiculous to cloak political ideas, which at their core had moral roots, in the scientific language of technocratic governance.

Whitlam and Menzies thought about politics very differently. Menzies didn’t really think in terms of legislation or decisions made. He once wrote of the ‘art of politics’ as conveying ideas to the public, ‘to provide exposition, persuasion, and inspiration’. I don’t think that meant he was uninterested in legislative reform. But he was more interested in what might be called the civic culture of a nation, specifically liberal democratic culture and the shared values and social structures that underpin it. His essay ‘Politics as an art’, makes this case indirectly.

Perhaps Menzies should have thought more about reform. That is a criticism of his prime ministership, fairly or not. Nonetheless, academic discourse probably overlooks his conceptualisation of politics in favour of Whitlam’s. The latter obviously resonates more at an ideological level, but it’s something more than that. Academic discourse is metric driven and very rationalist, probably overconfident in its ability to understand political and social phenomena. There is a lot to be said for this approach, of course, but it has become hegemonic.

All this is to say that the standard criteria of success (policies that lift living standards, extend liberal rights, defend Australia from external threats, etc) could be supplemented with additional factors that are otherwise downplayed in typical rankings. Another way to phrase it might be: what constitutes ‘good, clean, honest and sensible administration’?

Aside from the obvious points of prudence and non-corrupt behaviour, good government in a liberal democracy should, at the very least, nurture the conditions of liberalism in a cultural sense, recognising that democratic institutions work best under the conditions of a liberal and democratic culture. This in turn requires the recognition that individuals and communities pursue different ends, which cannot be reduced to single metric. I see the following factors as important:

Upholding freedom of the individual as the core cultural value

o A liberal democracy rests on the idea that citizens can make reasoned choices and be answerable for them.

o Leaders should draw on a core moral grammar centred on ethics – responsibility, truthfulness, reciprocity, dignity – that does not treat people as instruments of power, or groups them into identity-blocs.

o Good government safeguards the conditions for individuals to be ends in themselves, and guards against bureaucratic drift that encourages impersonal national objectives and KPIs.

Encourage a healthy civic culture

o A healthy civic culture is balanced: citizens are not overly passive and apathetic, but neither are they perpetually mobilised. Governments should encourage ‘potentially active’ citizens who can mobilise when necessary, by making clear the responsibilities of citizenship in a liberal democracy.

o Governments should guard against primary relationships and everyday community life from being saturated by politics, which erodes social cohesion and trust.

o Governments should support civic plurality through free press, independent courts, federalism, and strong electoral competition.

Primacy of rational discourse in politics

o Governments should lead by example when it comes to the rules of engagement in politics, by encouraging reasoned public debate over the irrational pull of hyper-emotions.

o Political leaders in a democracy should listen, give reasons when making decisions, and accept evidence. When the disagreement is moral, this should be articulated within the bounds of mutual respect.

Macroeconomic stability as a pillar for social trust and political legitimacy

o A strong civic culture depends on a reasonable degree of predictability in economic life so that citizens can focus on long-term participation.

o A good government avoids the temptations of disruptive fiscal or monetary policy if it puts long-term macroeconomic stability at risk.

Based on the above, I see a revised set of rankings as having a mixture of consensus picks and more idiosyncratic choices, at least relative to what’s out there. ‘Crisis’ governments – those that are forced to confront existential challenges – are our most important. Unlike most lists, I include Joseph Lyon’s UAP government in this category. Curtin deserves his high ranking, at least for his first term when the Japanese threat was at its most potent. Billy Hughes, as the prime minister during WWI, was a significant leader, but fatally flawed by his illiberalism and divisiveness at a time when national unity was a core priority. I see his final term as Australia’s worst government term since federation.

Unlike most academic rankings, I don’t discount moderation and I don’t elevate ‘reform’ as something sacred in its own right. I give greater weight to parliaments that let social change evolve naturally from below, so long as the change is in a liberal direction and government policy and rhetoric is consistent with liberal norms. I judge more harshly macroeconomic recklessness. Whitlam’s brief first term, which had many socially liberal and probably overdue changes, was accompanied by an unusual degree of economic negligence. His last term was atrocious in this regard. Similarly, I don’t buy Keating’s ‘recession we had to have’ (incorrectly targeting the current account), so Hawke’s last term-and-a-half ranks poorly, despite two very good terms at the beginning.

Here is how I see it:

Ranking of every parliamentary term, 1901 - 2013

Some thoughts:

o Curtin’s first term remains Australia’s most celebrated, but the UAP war time government deserves re-examination. Until Japan struck Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941, Australian attitudes to the war ranged from ambivalence to confusion. Here is a forgotten fact: a week before Pearl Harbour was hit, Labor published a pamphlet listing its achievements in Opposition and its plans for government. There is only one direct reference to the war. If that is a failure of Labor’s, which it is, it is also a failure of the UAP, who never fully controlled the war narrative when Japan’s motives were unclear. Paul Hasluck’s assessment of Menzies’ first term remains the most persuasive: administratively a success; politically a failure. He never ‘unified’ the country, if such a thing was possible at that point. Menzies’ much maligned ‘business as usual’ remark, made as Hitler marched through Europe, probably reflected his preference for calm deliberation than to invoke the kind of aggressive jingoism that Hughes did in WWI. Still, there are worse failures. Anne Henderson’s 2014 book Menzies At War suggests much was achieved by the time Curtin took over, with the war apparatus largely set up and ready to go the extra mile once Japan entered the fray.

o Joseph Lyons’ government remains one of the least studied, but most important. It is hard to understate the rapid deterioration in Australia’s political culture in the 1920s and early 1930s. Communist front groups and right-wing paramilitary organisations became embedded in the civic fabric. Australia’s high level of debt encouraged the NSW Premier, Jack Lang, to try to repudiate his government’s own debt obligations and place Australia alongside the banana republics of Latin America. Wilfred Kent Hughes, a key figure in non-Labor politics and a future Menzies minister, wrote an article in November 1933 titled “Why I have become a fascist”. Business leaders urged John Monash, before his death in 1931, to become a dictator. That gives us a sense of the times. Lyons’s ascendency at this point, leaving Labor and aided by an unprecedent social movement of citizens groups, remains one of the most dramatic moments in Australian democracy. His first term can be interpreted as one of the great high wire acts of politics, holding together a coalition aimed at restoring financial and institutional credibility to Australia, and to cool the political temperature at a moment when it could have easily exploded.

o Hawke and Howard’s first two terms rank highly for their economic liberalism. The economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s had more conservative origins – in the literal meaning of the word – than the ‘neoliberal’ narrative lets on. Take the floating of the dollar in 1983. The collected speeches of John Phillips, an RBA official, later a Deputy Governor, are worth reading to understand how central bankers effectively lost control of monetary policy as practiced in a world of fixed or managed exchange rates. Financial innovation and new Asian markets created new pressures, and the dollar float was an attempt to find the best policy solution that offered long-term stability. Not every reform program between 1983 and 2000 can be interpreted that way, but a lot can. Hawke’s style of ‘consensus’ governing, and Howard’s budgeting and ‘mainstream’ values, while not perfect, played their role in transitioning Australia through difficult policy decisions deemed to be in the national interest.

o Malcolm Fraser had a very good first term and a very bad third term. He may not have emphasised it at the end of his life, but Fraser’s priorities coming into government were overwhelmingly economic. Spending was stabilised and incrementally reduced until 1982/3 when the lid was taken off again. Inflation was halved in the first term. For a time, he indexed personal income tax brackets, an idea whose stock keeps rising. His administrative law reforms made it easier and cheaper to challenge Commonwealth decisions, shifting power away from bureaucratic discretion. His policy of ‘new federalism’ was worth a shot – another noble failure that attempted to give a share of the income tax base to the states. His is the first government to take in Asian refugees and migrants at scale, ending White Australia in practice if not legally. Unfortunately, the macroeconomic mistakes in his last year ruined much of the earlier gains.

o Paul Keating’s only full term as prime minister was pretty good but self-destructive. His was a bipolar government, waging a fruitless culture war on old national symbols – the flag, the monarchy, the Gallipoli legend – while continuing a steady stream of good policy, locking in enterprise bargaining, creating a national competition policy, a suite of Commonwealth asset sales, and further tariff reductions. Keating stands as one of the romantic prime ministers, but there can be a degree of unwavering dogmatism in romantics. He strove towards a new vision for Australia, but democratic leaders need to accept to some degree the country they have. Deeply loved by a small section of policy elites and Labor faithfuls, he alienated many others and lost in a landslide in 1996.

o Menzies fourth term was his best. Unlike most multi-term governments, Menzies grew into the role after a rocky start. He consolidated his hold on Australian politics and was at his best around the middle of his prime ministership. The Australia-Japan Commerce Agreement in 1957 was controversial for its time and hated by many Australians still traumatised by the Pacific War. Yet they would be the first country to grant Japan Most Favoured Nation status, re-orienting Australia’s economic future towards Asia. Menzies lent the agreement a moral argument. White Australia began its slow disassembling; the infamous dictation test was abolished in 1958 and replaced with a universal entry permit system. The Murray Report into universities was launched in 1957 and followed by the creation of a national system of Australian public universities, coupled with significant new capital expenditure. Menzies had a romantic view of higher education quite out of favour with current thinking; far less utilitarian with a deep faith in a values-based liberal education. This was the apex of the Menzies Era.

o Going first is always hardest. Buried in Alfred Deakin’s personal papers, held in the National Library of Australia, is a private note Deakin scribbled to himself in the months leading up to 1901. He is aware that every decision the first federal government of Australia makes will set a precedent for future governments. Not just policy, but even the minutest of decisions: the names and structure of government departments, the way ministers are chosen by the prime minister, and whether the prime minister is even called the ‘prime minister’. As precedent builders, Barton and Deakin set the tone for the new commonwealth as a liberal society. They were moderate in their language and conciliatory in their politics. They saw the Constitution as foremost a democratic document to be protected, not expanded upon by greater federal powers. They tried, unsuccessfully, to enfranchise Aboriginal Australians in the 1902 voting bill. But White Australia will forever be the black mark on the federation-era, a period of widespread racialist thinking. Perhaps the best that can be said for Barton and Deakin (mostly Deakin) is that they were more liberal than most parliamentarians in their humanity.

o Billy Hughes is Australia’s most interesting prime minister. That doesn’t make him good. Hughes arrived in Australia at the age of 22 and spent his first two years as a vagabond. Self-taught and self-motivated, he was wilier and more cunning than any prior or subsequent prime minister. His politics was confrontational and unapologetically zero-sum, a style that suited the burgeoning labour movement in colonial New South Wales, but which damaged Australia. The country was less free, poorer, and angrier after he left office. The big legislation in his final term was designed largely for political advantage. His War Precautions Repeal Act 1920 was notable for what it did not repeal, maintaining draconian sedition laws, speech crimes and limiting freedom of assembly. The Immigration Act 1920 similarly incorporated war time powers into peacetime immigration laws, empowering the government to make arbitrary deportations while significantly extending the list of ‘prohibited immigrants’. The Industrial Peace Act 1920 was a ham-fisted expansion federal power over labour disputes. Tariffs went up, economic management was weak, and politics became so unworkable that Hughes kept parliament in recess for six months to save his own skin.

o Stanley Melbourne Bruce was the right man for the wrong job. At the Country Party’s behest, Bruce replaced Hughes in February 1923. In many ways a brilliant and sincere public servant, Bruce’s weakness was trying to govern like a businessman when what Australia needed was values-based leadership and a revitalised civic spirit. He is known for ‘Men, Money, and Markets’; but governments aren’t firms and bad public investments aren’t held accountable by the risk of bankruptcy. Bruce and the state governments borrowed big and invested poorly, although his creation of the Loan Council was a sound institutional attempt at enforcing discipline. Nonetheless, Australia teetered towards a balance of payments crisis even before the Great Depression arrived. Bruce’s greatest strength was his own personality, forging the enduring Country-Nationalist/liberal coalition, and regarded as one of Australia’s most effective diplomats, particularly in his post-parliamentary career. His final term was a disaster, to this day the shortest federal parliament in Australian history (7 months and 11 days). Having failed to centralise and expand federal power over industrial disputes, Bruce reversed course in 1929 and attempted to vacate the field of IR almost entirely. A rare case of a government breaking down completely. What to Bruce might have been the rational outcome of a bad negotiating hand, was to his own party a lack of statesmanship and principle.

o Gough Whitlam should have called an election in 1975. Bruce’s 7-month term in 1929 was unfair, but the prime minister at least accepted that his position was untenable. In November 1975, Whitlam should have come to the same conclusion. He could not countenance a backdown or an election, but worse, he could not articulate an alternative. The Senate blocked supply and he believed his government could limp on without parliamentary approval of appropriation. A plan to pay public servants by drawing on commercial bank credit was rightly characterised by Malcolm Fraser, the opposition leader, as ‘one of the most serious actions of a government since federation’. There is an argument that the Governor-General, John Kerr, should have given Whitlam more warning about the dismissal. The real story is that everyone including Whitlam knew that was a possibility. The crisis that followed damaged trust in Australia’s institutions, at least from one section of the community. If Whitlam is not the sole bearer of blame, he deserves a large chunk of it.

o Billy McMahon wasn’t Australia’s worst prime minister. But he wasn’t great. Character assassination is an art form in Australian politics, and unlikeable leaders become easy targets. Billy McMahon has long been the easy target in political lore, boasting an impressively harsh wikipedia page (“devious, nasty, dishonest - he lied all the time and stole things”, the journalist Laurie Oakes said of him). But the 27th parliament led by Gorton and McMahon was a surprisingly productive one, with several noteworthy if modest achievements. The Liberal government began and implemented the withdrawal from Vietnam; passed the Commonwealth’s first child care bill; achieved some modest financial deregulation by allowing banks to trade as principals in foreign exchange markets; joined the OECD; provided significant funding for the arts; and began the process of Aboriginal land rights. All of this, of course, amidst a rocky term of government undermined by a fractious cabinet and two prime ministers who seemed a step down from what had come before. Spending was too high and contributed to the stagflation of the subsequent government. More importantly, as Whitlam was to prove, Australians were ready for something more ambitious.

Burton arranged to have messages broadcast in Canberra’s two cinemas asking for the prime minister’s whereabouts. Evatt was unwell at the time; Frank Forde, Curtin’s deputy, was also unavailable. And so Burton sat alone with Churchill’s cable, the fate of Australian troops in the air.

Just before midnight, Curtin reappeared. He had been walking around Mount Ainslie for more than an hour. He quickly dictated a message back to Churchill demanding the troops return home.

This story was recounted by Burton more than half a century later. We know that memory is fallible even shortly after the fact. Even so, whether this particular incident happened seems beside the point. It feels true because Curtin often ‘wasn’t there’. In January 1942, as the Japanese stormed their way down the Malay peninsula, Curtin took a train back to Perth for a rest. He was afraid of flying, and a train ride to Perth in 1942 took about three days. As the carriage crawled westward, news arrived that the Japanese had taken Rabaul, the Australian administered territory of New Guinea. Around a thousand Australian troops were captured.

Very quickly, it became clear that Singapore would be lost. Churchill’s war cabinet rushed to consider abandoning reinforcements and blowing up navy and military installations. Curtin was still on the train. It was left to Evatt and Frederick Shedden, the head of the Defence department, to correspond with Churchill. This was the genesis of the ‘inexcusable betrayal’ cable to the British government, urging Singapore’s defence. The inflammatory language suggests it was dictated partly by Evatt.

Curtin got sick often. During the Burma crisis, he was hospitalised with a gastric attack. It was left to Forde and Evatt to lead the War Council meetings. Curtin found the whole Burma affair overwhelming. He was haunted by the thought that the Australian troops might not make it home. He found it impossible to sleep. The reporter Harold Cox recalled the prime minister looking ‘the picture of a complete physical wreck’.

In the telling of history, it is the interpretation that counts. Is Curtin a man overwhelmed by events, or a leader fuelled by empathy, who suffered as the nation suffered? Here are two myths, each with supporting data points.

There is a third myth too: the Labor myth. Curtin’s stature is further enlarged in this telling. He is more than a beloved national leader, but a critical inflection point in Australia’s development as an independent, social-democratic, and fully self-conscious nation state.

Anthony Albanese’s recent John Curtin Oration re-prosecutes the Labor myth. Curtin, Albanese claims, ‘revived’ in Australia ‘the confidence and determination to think and act for ourselves’. He gave Australia a ‘foreign policy anchored in strategic reality, not bound by tradition’. Where Menzies declared war ‘because Britain is at war’, Curtin declared war because Australia’s interests were imperilled. Australia’s alliance with the United States, Albanese says, is ‘a product of Curtin’s leadership in defence and foreign policy’. He quotes Keating: ‘Curtin began us thinking in our own terms’.

There is even a fourth myth - call it the Liberal myth. The story centres not on Curtin but on the party he led, a rogue’s gallery of socialists and isolationists who kept Labor out of power in the 1930s by a combination of radical obstinacy and militant behaviour. Federal Labor, the myth goes, was utterly unsuited to wartime government. They had no initial interest in a European war, even if the enemy was Nazi Germany. They initially opposed Menzies’ major wartime measures – the National Security Act 1939, the National Registration Act 1939, and the reintroduction of compulsory military training, but eventually came to accept all of them, even expand them, largely thanks to Curtin. They refused to be part of a national government, despite British Labour doing so with Churchill. Curtin knew his party would implode in such a coalition.

In 2010, the late historian John Hirst re-assessed the Curtin legacy in his book Looking for Australia. This essay has been reprinted as part of a newly published collection in John Hirst – Selected Writings (2025). It remains the definitive ‘revisionist’ account of Curtin, but it is the Labor myth he substantially rejects. Hirst’s Curtin is not a heroic figure but still admirable. He was a shrewd politician that offered stability of government; something that Menzies could not provide. His personal quirks – his intense asceticism – was unusually befitting an age that required unprecedented sacrifice. His internal pacifism had a core emotional truth to it, which every Australian understood, that the human cost of war was incalculably large. The British loved Churchill but were content to vote him out once the fighting was over. Australians would have enthusiastically kept Curtin had he not died before the war ended.

Hirst’s Curtin was an imperialist, not the progenitor of modern Australian nationalism. As he reminded Roosevelt in early 1942, Australia was ‘the only white man’s territory south of the equator’. The English-speaking peoples had an ethnic interest in seeing Australia saved. ‘Australia stands for and with the Empire’, Curtin said, and ‘the Empire stands and fights for liberty and freedom wherever liberty and freedom are in danger’. When he did manage to overcome his fear of flying, he travelled to London to argue for more formal imperial integration, not less, including the creation of a permanent Empire consultative body.

Albanese’s assessment of Curtin neither answers nor acknowledges the revisionist account. It’s a strange speech that would make even the Labor-sympathetic historian raise an eyebrow. ‘John Curtin is rightly honoured as the founder of Australia’s alliance with the United States’, he says. Really? Not even Penny Wong went this far in her Lowy Institute address commemorating the 75th anniversary of Curtin’s ‘looking to America’ statement, published in the Melbourne Herald on 27 December 1941. As she notes, Roosevelt was ‘astonished’ by that declaration. She could have added that he thought it was a poor attempt to wedge the British and Americans.

Roosevelt ordered Australia’s ambassador, Richard Casey, into the White House to tell him ‘that if it was thought that such a statement as Mr Curtin had made would help Australia with the United States’, he should think again. When General Macarthur escaped the Philippines in March 1942 and arrived in Australia, it was out of strategic necessity to establish a base in Australia, not the gravitational force of Curtin’s rhetoric.

The ‘looking to America’ story has taken on a myth of its own. By contrast, Curtin’s predecessors had made their own ‘look to America’ declaration seven months earlier; Roosevelt even assured the then-prime minister, Robert Menzies, that America would defend Australia against Japanese aggression. But this episode is not attached to any myth or narrative of importance.

Curtin’s statement now symbolises Labor’s elusive quest for an ‘independent foreign policy’. Of course, as Gavin Long, the editor of The Official History of Australia in the war of 1939-45, has argued, in appointing Macarthur as Supreme Commander, ‘the Australian Government made a notable surrender of sovereignty’. Henry Ergas and Alex McDermott go a step further to argue that there is no better example in modern Australian history of subservience to a greater power.

The most interesting thing about Albanese’s speech is its construction, though hardly original, of an origin myth of Australia’s national maturity. It seeks to replace the uncertainties of history with the certainty of symbolic destiny. In this sense, he understands something that his opponents increasingly do not – the role of symbolic narrative that help societies make sense of themselves. Myths are not falsehoods so much as symbolic interpretations of reality. They are intended to answer the question, “What does it all mean?”

It's not a coincidence that Australia’s ‘best’ prime ministers are those with the most resonant myths. They are remembered not simply for what they did, but for what they came to represent. Their perceived greatness is a function of the myths that surround them. Poor old Joseph Lyons – one of the most popular prime ministers Australia has ever had – but devoid of political descendants and without a myth to speak of!

Myth is necessary but so is the act of demythologising. We should understand the functions of myth. Historians should find out what actually happened, what people did, what their intentions were in doing it. Even then, it is impossible to ignore the voice in all our heads whispering, “what does it all mean?”

Curtin’s legacy is more drenched in myth than any other prime minister. In times of crisis – and 1942 was Australia’s most existential moment – leaders are transformed into symbols. Those symbols are reinforced by good or bad decisions, obviously, and Curtin made good decisions for the most part. Given what happened in Burma, he was correct to the bring the troops home, even if there were good reasons to send them there. His manoeuvring to edge his party closer to a policy of conscription worked.

Still, I’ve always been intrigued by the comparison with Billy Hughes, Australia’s prime minister throughout most of the First World War. Hughes was energised by the war and seemed to extract sustenance out of it; the greater the crisis, the larger he became. Curtin was the opposite. The war depleted him, then killed him. And yet, Hughes polarised Australian society and left it bitterly divided. When Australians saw Curtin, they stopped to applaud.

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