(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)
(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

My cafe proprietor: “Can I move you to another table? The Wednesday morning coffee group is coming in. They need 10 seats.”

Me: “They’re very regular.”

MCP: “Yeah. They get a grant from the council.”

Me: “To have coffee?”

MCP: “Yeah. Some sort of social outreach… I’m not objecting!”

— Exchange that occurred while I was writing this article.

L to the A to the C to the H… The old adage — better stay silent and have people suspect you a fool than speak and leave them in no doubt — can be adapted in the case of Lachlan Murdoch to “shut up so people don’t think you’re Kendall Roy”.

The clown prince of News Corp let us into his thoughts in the opinion section of The Australian on the occasion of the launching of the Centre for the Australian Way of Life, courtesy of the Institute of Public Affairs and, presumably, the deep pockets of Gina Rinehart. It was so suspiciously on the talking points of the IPA’s war for Western civilisation — most strikingly an obsessive focus on lockdowns and COVID mandates — that it read like it had been written for him by the IPA’s warrior monks eager to validate our great southern land, product of the voyagings of enlightened explorers. 

There were the usual flat contradictions — “journalism should never be activism” up the top, and bragging about News Corp’s pro-vaccination campaign in the middle — but the body of the work repeated the right’s main contention: that Australians have a professed passion for freedom, currently suppressed by the elites. Haha. We don’t. We’re not like the US at all.

From the start we were a collective society, the frontier no sooner established than the state was occupying the space of it. Most of colonial expansion into the Australian continent was a state-based project, and white Australians rapidly developed a “statist subjectivity” in which national development was conceived in terms of what the state would do. 

The constitution — which Kend- Lachlan describes as a fusion of UK and US traditions — is nothing of the sort. The US constitution is a revolutionary document, establishing a new order and calling forth a new type of person to constitute a new society by their free action. The Australian constitution is an administrative document of electoral procedures for an imperial dominion then still subject to a UK final say, and with the sole freedom guarantee being that of religion — intended mainly to limit Catholic-Anglican sectarianism.

Jews continued to be subject to limiting quotas in immigration, the universities and the professions until well into the 1950s and beyond. Indeed, by not enumerating specific freedoms, the Australian constitution made us less free than the UK, whose unwritten constitution gave space for the judiciary to find implied freedoms. 

To keep the place going, the state was expanded through the 20th century. The industrial system made any sort of individual or collective bargaining impossible, and specified the nature of different professions and jobs to the last iota. The entire wool clip and wheat crop was bought up by the government. The tariff and protection system was the most comprehensive in the world and could be used not only economically but culturally — the import of electric musical instruments was banned to stop the spread of jazz.

Two hundred people are listed as “indentors” in the 1950 Sands and McDougall Melbourne directory — a vanished profession, that of having a licence to import a specific good. Ironically, News Corp appears to have that licence for US culture war propaganda.

This system was accompanied by the most comprehensive censorship system in the Western world, in which the most anodyne books with mild sexual content were banned, and home-grown versions subject to relentless prosecution. When our Sir Robert Menzies famously switched his vote from Liberal to DLP after his retirement, it was because of his successors’ abandonment of heavy book and film censorship.

So repressive was the mainstream Australian political culture that most of the work of extending freedom was done by the Communist Party, through the Melbourne Film Festival, repeatedly testing censorship rulings in court. (It’s weirder than that. Many people cite The Australian Financial Review’s “Modest Member” column of farmer/MP Bert Kelly in the 1970s as the first sustained dissident voice on economic statism. He was beaten to the punch by the Trotskyists, who were arguing for free trade from the 1960s onwards on the grounds that protection simply froze capitalism in place and raised costs for workers.)

At the state and municipal level, public owned utilities dominated everyday life from city building to transport. Many expanded into the private market using state economies of scale.

In Victoria the Board of Works had its own network of farms (using treated sewage as fertiliser), the railways owned a customer creche, its own bookstall chain and orchards (for its fruit juice bars); the tramways ran parks, fun fairs and brass bands. No one batted an eyelid.

Shop-owning hours were rigid, limited and policed; planning laws enforced a zoning system which expelled thousands of residents from the CBD after World War II and made any sort of mixed-use areas pretty much impossible. White Australians lived in a society whose space was defined by the state, and it was control of the state that politics was fought over. Black Australians were subject to a literal apartheid system controlling where and how they could live, travel, be educated, work, everything.

What is most striking about this regime, contrary to the News Corp IPA fantasy, is how little opposition there was to it. Censorship was the cause of a few bohemians — effectively the Sydney libertarian push and the communists. No one except a few academic economic eggheads questioned the statist economic approach. Everyone understood what these big rules were for: to minimise inequality in a way that made a meaningful life possible for the widest number of people (the racial stuff aside, of course, which was pure control and oppression).

The small absurdities were not enough to create large public movements to overturn them. Mass movements in Australia had either a labour or religious character until the 1960s. After that they were social movements. The “green bans” movement, for example, was oriented to collective urban life.

In the 1970s, the Australian state also became a world pioneer in “lifestyle” and public safety campaigns, inaugurated with the “Life. Be In It.” campaign. We became so good at this that the Scandinavians came over to study how we did it. (History repeats: in 1907, the Harvester judgment — our biggest commitment to the state as guarantor of security — sparked a revolution within the European left and catalysed the split between social democracy and revolutionary system. “The Australian system” was debated until the start of World War I. We are net exporters of social statism.) 

Our idea of the good society was one of “positive freedom” — creating the conditions to flourish by applying the state to everyday life — not “negative” freedom of limiting the state’s impact on everyday existence. The US’s intellectual roots are in the proto-liberalism of the 18th century. Ours are in the “social liberal” tradition of Bentham, Wakefield, TH Green, the Fabians, once it had already separated from the “classical” liberal tradition by the time we really got going. 

When this path was abandoned at the elite level in the 1980s, successive governments created a dual culture — one in which the yearning and moral instinct for community persists beneath the undoubted privatisation of life chances and the life path. This has resulted in a contradictory culture, in which universal services such as Medicare have wide support, but Australians are wary of grand schemes, big themes and anything that might even possibly damage the accumulative life path. Hence Labor’s strategic wariness about big picture stuff, even though that’s exactly what we need. Hence the apparently permanent stuckness of negative gearing, a single policy instrument driving the unfolding of generational and home-ownership life-security apartheid.

This has also seen the yearning for security and the ground on which to flourish transmuted to the individual psychological and the ever-expanding notion of “safety”. That’s where our traditions become self-defeating — such as the discussion over how the Will Smith-Chris Rock slap is going to make the Melbourne International Comedy Festival “less safe” for performers. Well, we wouldn’t want a comedy festival to have any character of risk, would we? Every festival show already has a taped “welcome to country” anyway, to put the audience’s mind on genocide, before some poor junior stand-up comes out and tries to do 40 minutes about why men don’t read horoscopes. This form of privatised safety is a world phenomenon, but we do it better/worse than most. 

But that residual commitment to social liberalism is why we also committed — with some regional variations, but not much — to comprehensive lockdown regimes and mandate certificates, and why the opposition to it could never cross a threshold into a mass movement, despite some impressive demonstrations.

Most people simply understood the rationale for the regime, and it was in that act of understanding — as a determinative action, not merely a passive acceptance — that their freedom occurred. In the US there were whole states where any sort of similar regime was impossible because of mass everyday disobedience — not in any programmatic way, but as a simple, mass non-compliance.

That is a different society and a different way of life to ours. You find this return to collectivism, this urge to it, reappearing again and again, like volcanoes bursting back to life. Even something like the state memorial service for Shane Warne became some sort of concert/festival planned by some conglomeration of the state, statutory authorities, sports orgs and their movers and shakers. It’s corporate and money elite propaganda of a sort as well, but if it were not responding to a core need it would not prosper. 

There was always a lot of small corruption, lassitude, featherbedding etc in the old system. It created a culture that many people found desperately boring — although it’s worth remembering they are the people who become the writers and artists. Their view of how it was doesn’t necessarily accord with those who, finding it pretty good, found no need to write agonised novels about it. The residual orientation of the country towards it couldn’t be better demonstrated than in the budget, which is built on the idea of a (selectively) enabling state. 

So Kend- Lachlan’s speech/op-ed isn’t a reflection on Australia. It’s an announcement of a recommitment to social-cultural engineering, authored by the network of News Corp, the IPA, corporate peak bodies.

How’s that going for them? Well, the Coalition is under attack in its heartlands from numerous independents whose political lineage is exactly that social liberalism of which I’m speaking. Driven out of the Liberal Party by Howard and co in the ’80s and ’90s, it now returns in independent form, with the notion of positive freedom and flourishing expressed through causes such as climate change and aged care.

At the very least, this will force the Coalition into a massive expense of money and, more importantly, time resources in seats they could have previously counted on — and whose faithful they could have sent doorknocking elsewhere. At best it will mean the hollowing out of the Liberal Party in the seats — Kooyong, Goldstein — formed around areas from which Menzies’ Liberal Party was built out of the ruins of the UAP. 

Kooyong and Goldstein would really be the bomb here. To end the career of the treasurer and the IPA’s star lower house member through a “social liberal” preference coalition of teal independents, Greens and Labor would be a decisive moment.

The odds are still against, on the grounds that a lot of people in those electorates would vote for a maidenhair fern if the Libs ran it as a candidate. But there’s also some delicious historical precedent. In 1941 parts of Goldstein were in the seat of Henty, held by independent Arthur Coles, former lord mayor and director of the eponymous conglomerate. The seat had been mostly independent-held since Federation. Coles, appalled by the Coalition’s disarray and unfitness for military leadership, pulled his support from the Fadden government, putting Labor in power. (By an incredible coincidence, Labor then put Coles stores in charge of vast swathes of civilian economic management.)

Should that reoccur, there and elsewhere, it can be attributed to the right getting high on its own supply, campaigning in the fantasy great south land of its own pipedreams, a place found nowhere on the maps of the explorers, Lachlan its hapless captain, with a bought commission, less Cook than cooked and steering the fleet into the doldrums.