This appeared last week:
Why are the Liberals so bad at telling their own success story?
Australia owes its existence to liberal thinking and was built on the firm foundations of its creed: individual freedom, the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, the family as the bedrock of society, equality of opportunity, enterprise, liberty and a fair go. Pictures: News Corp
10:00 PM August 22, 2025
Why are the Liberals so bad at telling their own story? This is not just a critique of incumbent MPs and senators; it has held true of the party for decades.
Stories and mythologies matter. They are the scaffolding of identity and meaning. We live in the stories we inherit, and for the better part of the past half-century the Liberals have allowed their opponents to shape the national tale. Labor casts itself as the party of progress and ideas, the architect of every great reform, while painting the Liberals as dull, reactionary administrators. That frame has become the shorthand of our history.
But history shows that when it came to shaping the nation itself, it was the liberals who laid the foundations. Australia was born of liberal ideals, yet the party that bears that name has rarely claimed its inheritance.
This is not to deny Labor its achievements. It has much to be proud of. But re-reading its history in the lead-up to the 50th anniversary of the dismissal of Gough Whitlam underscores that Whitlam’s enduring achievement was not in reshaping the nation so much as remaking an ossified Labor Party.
Whitlam described himself as “the first of the middle-class radicals” and infuriated Labor’s old guard, none more so than Arthur Calwell. In 1966 Whitlam branded the ALP executive “the 12 witless men” and came close to expulsion. Two years later he briefly resigned the leadership after another clash, prompting Calwell to rage in a telegram: “You are not, and never were, a Labor man.”
Whitlam prevailed, liberalising Labor and recasting it as a party of the middle class.
With his 1972 triumph Whitlam began shaping the tale that progressivism consigned the Liberals to history’s margins. That myth, burnished over time, became a powerful weapon in Labor’s political armoury.
History also highlights another truth: Labor has been uneasy with the Constitution since 1901 because it had no hand in writing it. As former minister and historian David Kemp notes in A Free Country, the ideas that governed Australia at the turn of the previous century “were principally those of Britain’s liberal intellectual culture”.
The authors of the Constitution were classical liberals who valued the rule of law, parliamentary government, property rights and liberty.
Lessons of history
The defining moment in our history was the birth of a nation, and it was an entirely liberal project.
This should be the wellspring of the modern party’s identity, if only it could work out how to embrace it.
And here is something you won’t hear in Labor speeches: much of the labour movement opposed Federation.
In NSW those who supported it were expelled, while in Queensland some feared it might weaken the campaign against “coloured labour”.
In 1901 all parties supported the White Australia policy, but none more enthusiastically than Labor.
In his book I Remember, former NSW premier Jack Lang called it “Australia’s Magna Carta”, proudly noting that the “total exclusion of coloured and other undesirable races” was etched into Labor’s first federal platform in 1900.
He admitted it was about race, but also about wages: “From the start it was a simple bread-and-butter issue.
Australian workers were simply trying to defend their own living standards.”
That Labor would want to bury this history is understandable. That it continues to recast the past to accuse others of racism is unforgivable.
Yet when Foreign Minister Penny Wong delivered the 2022 Whitlam Oration she ignored Labor’s record and declared: “Gough described racism as the ‘common denominator’ of a whole range of Menzies-era foreign policies.”
The White Australia policy remained in Labor’s platform until 1967, and its old guard fought Whitlam and Don Dunstan to keep it.
The final vestiges were not erased until 1971. It was the governments of Robert Menzies, Harold Holt, John Gorton and William McMahon that progressively dismantled White Australia between 1958 and 1971. Labor under Whitlam followed; it did not lead.
Wong’s charge of Menzies’ foreign policy racism also jars with a remarkable wartime radio address by Menzies.
He condemned Curtin government propaganda that sought to stir racial hatred of the Japanese, calling it “fantastically foolish and dangerous”.
He said “hatred is the mark of a small man” and warned that if war bred only bitterness, then peace would be “merely the prelude to disaster and not an end of it”.
Wong also claimed Whitlam shifted Australia’s perspective of Asia.
Menzies made his mark
Yet it was Menzies who set about rebuilding relations with Japan in the shadow of the war. He backed the 1952 peace treaty and the reopening of embassies in Canberra and Tokyo, and in 1953 told Australians it was time to move on from the conflict.
Former Labor industry minister John Button had the grace to acknowledge the significance of this in his book Flying the Kite: “In the early 1950s prime minister Menzies invited a small delegation of Japanese industrialists to Australia. It was, in the post-war climate, a courageous and prescient invitation.”
Nippon Steel’s Eishiro Saito later described the visit as a seminal moment in the relationship. From that point, Australia’s exports of coal and iron ore to Japan began a steady climb until Japan became our largest trading partner.
It was Menzies who signed the 1957 Commerce Agreement in Tokyo, and who later hosted prime minister Nobusuke Kishi in Canberra. Australians knew Kishi’s past. He had been imprisoned as a suspected Class A war criminal until 1948 because of his role in Japan’s wartime government.
Think about that in context: many Australians still loathed Japan, and some in Menzies’ own government, such as Alexander Downer’s father, were former prisoners of war.
To invite Kishi and forge this partnership, at this time, required remarkable political courage. Union protests greeted the trade deal and Kishi’s 1957 visit, the ACTU warned of lost jobs and ex-servicemen’s groups condemned any reconciliation with Japan.
Yet it is Labor’s caricature of Menzies that endures, and the blame for that lies with the Liberal Party’s failure to tell its own story.
Wong’s speech also repeated the line that Whitlam “withdrew our troops from Vietnam”. But by the time he came to power in December 1972, all combat troops had already returned and only some advisers remained.
Vietnam is not the only case where Labor overreaches and Liberals undersell their record. Whitlam is routinely credited with the explosion of Australian arts in the 1970s, yet it was Liberal prime minister Gorton who created the Australian Council for the Arts in 1968 and launched the Australian Film Development Corporation in 1970, contributions that largely have been forgotten.
The Liberals cannot win a battle they do not fight. And in the history wars, they are scarcely in the ring. Some, such as Kemp, John Howard and Tony Abbott, have tried to rebalance the books. But it should be the work of every Liberal MP and senator to reclaim their heritage in our national story.
Since its birth this nation has had two great political traditions, and for 124 years they have served us well. Labor’s story is well told. The Liberal story must be retold, beginning with its intellectual roots. Australia owes its existence to liberal thinking and was built on the firm foundations of its creed: individual freedom, the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, the family as the bedrock of society, equality of opportunity, enterprise, liberty and a fair go.
This tradition is timeless, and as vital now as ever. Unless the Liberal Party can tell that story to a new generation, it risks being written out of history.
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To me the key issue is that the current Liberals are – in most States- - a disorganized rabble who are not actually electable! Australians seem happy with centrist to slightly left governments almost everywhere and until someone can make a strong case for change I suspect the status quo will prevail!
The Liberals have a lot of work to do pretty much everywhere, and until that is done the status quo is likely to persist!
Anyone have any suggestions for them?
David.
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