A Liberal State: Australia 1922 – 1966. David Kemp. Miegunyah Press

In 1936, a somewhat open-minded woman arrived by boat into Circular Quay. Inevitably enough, her name was Mabel; her adventurousness had resulted in a torrid affair with a married man, a Lieutenant Dewar, on the voyage from India. The ship had made it to Australia, but Mabel didn’t make it in. She was barred entry on the grounds that her entanglement with Lieutenant Dewar had made her a person of bad character. Not wanted in our golden land was, to give her full name, Mrs Mabel Freer. 

Yes, the irony! There was nothing freer about Australia. Mabel had landed in one of the most repressive democratic nations on earth. 

David Kemp, former Howard government minister and political scientist, is honest enough to include the Freer article in A Liberal State, his account of how liberalism “won” in Australia in the years between the Bruce government and our Sir Robert’s retirement in 1966, but, wow, he has his work cut out for him, as the anecdote suggests. But this is volume four of a projected five-volume history.

It is a labour of love, of classical liberalism, and of duty — for David is the son of C.D. Kemp, founder of the Institute of Public Affairs, which was liberal within living memory (and brother to former Senator Rod, a set of spare parts for David).

The book is… well, it’s a doozy. It’s an elegantly written, vastly detailed, forcefully argued history of a half-century of politics and ideas dedicated to the proposition that Australia is a deeply liberal society which drew on its reserves of such in the difficult 1920s to 1940s, to avoid the various illiberalisms others fell into — from full socialism to fascism, or Franco-style dictatorship. Later, this great good sense defeated Labor’s renewed push for government takeover, and put it permanently beyond reach. 

That core argument gives the book a strategy to keep up a cracking pace and focus, but at the cost of departing far from the complex reality of the time it is describing. Indeed, the reader acquainted with the period might wonder how Kemp even gets going. After all, the period the volume practically begins with the defeat of the Bruce government’s attempt to abolish the arbitration system, accompanied by the setting of some of the most comprehensive and dirigiste tarriffs in the world, the election of the very leftish Scullin government, the uneasy stalemate of the UAP years, before the Curtin-Chifley extasis, and then a decade or so of another long stalemate.

There’s a trick here, and I’m sure Kemp does not know he is doing it, which is to use the widest possible definition for liberalism — including the “social” liberalism of T.H. Green and others, which lay at the root of democratic socialist parties, including Labor — and then retreating to the limited form of classical liberalism, or a strong tilt towards it, as liberalism’s true form. 

Given what Australia was really like, this soon gets Kemp into contradictions, some of them hilarious. Writing of the political revolution staged within the torpid Nationalist Party (the major ’20s non-Labor pary), by Robert Menzies and Wilfred Kent-Hughes, he then has to acknowledge the latter’s drift away from the golden ideal, instanced by Kent-Hughes publishing a four-part article series “Why I Am a Fascist”. He wasn’t really a fascist, Kemp notes — just provocative. That’s one way of talking about it. Trickeeee, and there’s a lot of that work to do in asserting liberal primacy in the period, including Menzie’s warm words for Hitler in 1938. 

The notion of a liberal victory as a key determining moment is staged by combining the social/classical switcheroo with an overvaluation of Labor’s radical left in the early 1930s, when the party adopted the socialisation plank of its platform. Kemp wholly exaggerates the power and significance of the half-dozen Labor members who believed in “full socialism” (or as Kemp, in one of his many off-brand use of common pol-sci terms, inaccurately calls them: “utopian socialists”). The campaigning groups Labor organised ahead of the expected 1932 election Kemp portrays as close to Castro’s Cuban brigades.

Though he tries his best, Kemp finds it impossible to really accept that there are useful ways of thinking about society other than through the atomised individualism of classical liberalism. He does his best, but his slip always shows:

Although Curtin had moved away from his earlier infatuation with revolutionary socialism, he still carried considerable prejudice from his earlier utopianism, including the anti-capitalist attitudes expressed through class war rhetoric….

Infatuation. Rhetoric. Aside from being bad history (Curtin was never a “utopian” in any normal use of the term), there’s the usual persnicketiness of doctrinaire classical liberals. They can’t believe it is possible to think collectively, as a genuine perception of the world. It must be a put-on. Though there are many characters ably portrayed in the book, the one missing is Australia itself, its people demanding from the ’20s to the ’40s a government that will stop the collapse of the “actually existing Commonwealth” they had achieved.

Truth is, communism or fascism were never a likely go in Australia, and constructing them as the alternatives allows Kemp to paint a heroic narrative out of more mundane steady socio-political institutional reproduction. Because, really, if Australia from the 1920s to the 1960s was a “liberal” society, does that term mean anything?

The state decided your pay, your working conditions, what goods you could bring in or buy, propped up the whole manufacturing sector, eventually imposed rural monopsony, ran utilities and transport, banned thousands and thousands of books, produced the school readers that transmitted ideology, wouldn’t let you drink in public after six or with a meal, and so on. 

And that is the restrictions on white men — the allegedly free subjects! Kemp is more honest than most liberals on matters Indigenous, but his range of theoretical influences is too small to see race relations not as aberration, but as a Schmittian “state of exception”. Applied to the Indigenous in the refusal of practically all rights and citizenship, this was neither aberration nor time lag but acted as an “other”, guaranteeing our solidarity and identity as a unified Anglo-Celtic white people. 

Truth is, we were a collectivist nation, whose citizens gained a great deal of meaning in their lives from such state and society conditions, with only a few bohos kicking up a fuss until the 1960s. If Australia then resembles any place now, it is Viktor Orban’s Hungary, the showpiece “illiberal democracy” of our era. If Australia has more than a remnant whiff of that (hilariously, Kemp as minister was part of a government which tried to ban the entry of, wait for it, Eminem, the lily-white “bad boy” of 2000s hip-hop), it’s because we are drawing on our own collectivist traditions, good and bad.

No matter how much Kemp would like to draw Australia into a grand British liberal intellectual tradition, in this useful, illuminating, pacily written and forcefully argued but ultimately delusional (and perhaps infatuatedly filial) work, one has to conclude that, like Mabel, we were a lot Freer before we got to Sydney Cove.