So by the early nineteenth century the three major ideologies of conservatism, liberalism and socialism existed in elaborated forms. That is to say, various classes and their ideologists had different visions of the political and social future that were really implicit critiques of the chaotically organised present in the name of values supposedly continuous with selected aspects of the practice and theory of the past. The moods and styles of this reference back to the essence of ‘the human’ as caught in embryo in the past are in each case different. The distinction of conservatism is its vivid nostalgia for the ‘orders’ and ‘ranks’, widening out into a naive and innocent materialism that finds just across in the pre-industrial hinterland of the eighteenth-century enviable patterns of hierarchy, subordination and virtue going back into the prescriptive mists, and only too recently shattered by the impious rationalist upstart and the misled plebs.

Incredible perhaps in the bourgeois democratised industrial capitalism of the late twentieth century. At least in Europe, however, there was a full-bodied continuity of relics leading back over the Great Divide in concrete practices, aristocratic families, old institutions, something like an objective correlative of memory. But Australia? Surely Australian conservatism must be a more imaginative not to say fantastic proceeding than most. Some would claim it died of apoplectic the yearnings same after time a past-substitute at about the same time as the bunyip aristocracy. But not so the editors and some of the contributors of Australian Conservatism.

Cameron Hazlehurst’s introduction tells us that although they have preferred to call themselves Liberals, Nationalists, Constitutionalists, Democrats, Free Traders, Country Partisans, even Democratic Laborites, politicians tactically choosing these names were really exponents of a conservatism typically Australian that must be distinguished from the British political current of the same name. We are assured that we have ‘indigenous traditions’ in this matter. But although the thirteen essays that follow are claimed to have ‘unity, coherence and authority’, no clear conception of conservatism emerges. In fact we steer between two stars, one vaguely theoretical and the other rather pragmatic.

Thus Australian conservatism is the conduct and creed of those content with society as it is, or as less government would make it, and dedicated to excluding from power the irresponsible poor and the dangerous ideologues of the left.

Which fails to pinpoint anything. The cunning pragmatism is misnamed ‘the genius of Robert Gordon Menzies’ and consists in that gentleman’s ability

to seize upon the identity of interest between what he called ‘the defensive and comfortable rich’ and the ‘frugal’ patriotic middle class, and to play upon their common fear of communism and bureaucracy.

Many of the essays that follow were originally unpublished theses and, self-concerned as such feats usually are, they do not do much towards clarifying the reader’s notions of what this specific conservatism might be. In fact we are reasonably lucky when they are showing us either the introduction’s status-quo-defending ideology (which it would be more accurate to describe as provincial corporate liberalism) or the organisational pragmatics starring Menzies as the phoenix rising from U.A.P. ashes. A lot of the time, as in Joan Rydon’s essay on non-Labor ascendency between the wars, or John McCarthy’s specific account of the 1932-39 or John Paul’s treatment of the Albert Dunstan machine in Victoria after World War I, the book seems to be going counter to whatever interpretation of Hazlehurst’s thesis one might get clear enough to maintain.

Rydon: ‘There are struggles over leadership and alliances. Non-Labor governments were a changing mixture of conservative, ex-Labor and Country Party men’.

McCarthy shows a rag-bag collection of individualists held together by shifting self-interests, Country Party rural knee-jerk politics, and a U.A.P. so divided on ad hoc policies that the determining factors are non-ideological: Lang’s electoral effect on the state Labor Party, personal compatibility between Stevens and the C.P.’s Bruxner and Bruxner’s getting what he wanted.

John Paul’s Albert Dunstan ‘cannot be categorised readily according to the conventional dichotomies: right/left or conservative/progressive... Inasmuch as he can be explained to all it is in the context of Victorian state politics... peculiarly a creature of the exotic political subculture that was Victoria’s in the aftermath of World War I…’

Nor does this sort of stuff define by contrast some conservative interpretation of the non-Labor forces taking him as the introduction had hoped, beyond ‘Hancock’s reflection on the parties or resistance’. In fact the book may even have reinforced the traditional view of them as anti-Labor parties with the ideology a largely a rhetorical screen for the kind of alliance-building Menzies excelled in.

What is clear is that apart from a couple of essays considering the financial backing of non-Labor before and after the collapse of the U.A.P. (no, there is no real hard evidence of improper outside control of the right parties by business interests – 258 ferret-nosed empiricist footnotes nail that down) the bulk of the book is about Menzies. Young Menzies being a student debater home in Melbourne during the First World War and developing the hide to cover private war-time criticisms of Churchill: ‘I am convinced that Winston is a menace. He is a publicity seeker: he stirs up hatreds in a world already seething with them and he is lacking in judgment’, differing from Menzies II of the Thistle in that he is an ‘independent Australian Briton’ like Deakin and Hughes, if only in thought ... G. Edwards concludes this essay: ‘The generation that grew up under the aegis of the Knight of the Thistle and the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports may find it remarkable’. I don’t, for one. Menzies is doubted, by Peter Aimer, to have created the Liberal Party ‘almost single-handed’, a singularly bland piece of re-thinking that changes hardly anything in the common view of the transition from U.A.P. to L.P. except the punctuation and the tone of voice in which you might list the factors. Menzies is shown as the overseer of a reluctant untheorized adoption by the L.C.P. Federal Government of more concern for education.

None of this is very remarkable. None presents Menzies as a superthinker of native conservatism. At most he is seen to be the rhetorician of a shift of Australian free enterprise liberalism into a Keynesian post-war register, meeting the challenge of the ALP’s temporarily superior attunement to the policy needs of a Western capitalism whose war experiences had ushered it into a world demanding various forms of security and insurance against want.

Of the remaining chapters, the two that make some fist of precariously alleging a positive contribution of the Liberal Part to ideological discourse are Peter Loveday’s ‘The Liberals’ Image of their Party’ and Peter Tiver’s ‘Liberals’ Ideas on Social Policy’. Loveday puts his finger on the dilemma facing old-style Liberal fundamentalism. Most of the time when it is not attacking ‘socialism’ the Party is attempting to explain taken-for-granted welfarism. ‘In the absence of an encompassing interventionist theory, the Liberals have not been able to decide, officially or unofficially, where the line should be drawn between public and private enterprise’. Perhaps Tiver gets close to the fact of the matter when he says ‘Liberals hold a Whiggish view of history, stressing the achievement of liberty rather than equality… and they do not fully accept that membership of society alone entitles a citizen to guaranteed security in the socialistic sense but only to a “safety net”’.

In any case, it is hard to see that this has got much to do with the tradition that runs down from Burke to Oakeshott. But perhaps the confusion implicit in this book and its resultant air of untheoretical empiricism is inevitable in a society without benefit of pre­industrial aristocracy, where all classes descended from either agents of an industrialising British state, fortune-hunting migrants, impoverished proletarians of industrialising British towns, landless rural workers, decimated tribes or post-war European masses and who are in any case bound straighter and straighter into international capitalism. Any supposed conservatism would be the same kind of decaying fig leaf from the past that Raymond Williams sees in the conservative social views of T.S. Eliot:

The ‘free economy’ which is the central tenet of contemporary conservatism nor only contradicts the social principles which Eliot advances… but also, and this is the real confusion, is the only available method of ordering society to the maintenance of those interests and institutions on which Eliot believes his values to depend.

We do not entirely leave conservatism behind in Queensland University philosopher Deane Wells’ book The Deep North, for it is one of a series of ideologies from which the author wishes to distinguish the views of ‘Bjelke-Petersen and the small but vocal minority of radical extremists who follow him, and who, with the aid of a shockingly rigged electorate system enable him to govern... a set of assumptions which are anathema to most Queenslanders’.

According to Deane Wells, Petersen and his followers are not left or right-wing anarchists, conservatives, social utilitarians, social contract theorists, or Aristotelian teleologists, any of which ‘every politician, however stupid’ might wind up being in practice. What they are, in practice, and often in ‘unguarded utterances’, is totalitarian.

Some will cavil at the brevity of the paragraphs in Chapter I, ‘The Purpose of the State’, where these competing theories are put forward, and at their imperfect mutual exclusiveness, but it leads to the setting up of a moral gulf between all of them and a totalistic holding.

            the state rather than the individual as the moral unit.

The totalitarian would emphasise thar the state has rights against the citizens, rather than that the citizens have rights against the state.

That is the first defining criterion of the totalitarian. The second is the conflation of the concepts of state, society and government. Five errors then flow from this confusion, which is referred to as ‘the unitary concept of the social fabric’. These are the abuse of power, e.g., use of state funds for one’s own purposes, proprietary attitude to state institutions, use of the police as if personally m command of them, treatment of civil disobedients as enemies of the government and therefore public enemies, self-perception as threatened by numerous groups working together against one, i.e., paranoia, and finally, acceptance of a Fuhrer principle, with ‘a mystical and general will that requires expression, ideally, through a single voice’.

These seven criteria are then used to test recent actions or recurrently expressed attitudes of Bjelke-Petersen, from his flouting convention by the appointing of Albert Field to the Senate, through the exclusive use of the state plane, to the banning of school projects at the behest of right-wing religious activists, to protecting the police from investigation, to electoral blackmail tactics, to the whole depressing catalogue of all of Petersen’s yesterdays.

So the case builds up, that the Premier of Queensland must be called a totalitarian and not another thing, such as free-enterpriser, or paternalist, or populist or whatever, all such options being ruled out in a series of Objections and Replies, not unlike sections of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. No, we must conclude that he is a totalitarian even if we can admit that ‘of all the world’s totalitarian leaders, Mr. Bjelke Petersen is one of the nicest’.

At this point I was unsure whether Deane Wells wasn’t pulling my leg. But then there followed accounts of Russell Hinze and Rona Joyner, the book-banning lady, both of whom got guernseys as totalitarians and not even nice ones. So I thought we were getting somewhere. One good thing about this book is that, for applied philosophy, it conveys at every pore the emotion of deeply shocked rationality. Nowhere more than in these chapters. ‘As is the habit of the intellectually deficient, he replied to questions about his reasons by restating his conclusions’ ... ‘At this, Hinze, upwards of twenty stone of him, began to blubber and jelly with rage ...’ In Rona Joyner’s chapter we hear of ‘a dirty and obsessional mind’.

The return to democracy in Queensland will come, according to the author, through Edwards, current leader of the Liberal Party. He will become Premier in a redistributed electoral system after putting into effects a six-point plan deduced or interred on pp.121 ff. A bit incredible to those of us who watch all this in Queensland I’m afraid, but perhaps after proving how bad Petersen and Co., Totalitarians to Her Majesty the Queen, are, anyone looks that good. At one point we get this on the 1977 march ban as evidence of Edwards’ growing opposition to Petersen: ‘every cabinet minister expressed his support for it except Edwards. Edwards, when asked, replied with a decisive ‘no comment’.’ Gee whiz!

What is wrong with this book is that if it is not written merely as a fairly abstract task of political botany, coldly classifying species repellent to the layman (‘If Petersen is not a totalitarian, he must be something else’) then its categories ought to be useful to a discussion of what’s wrong and what’s needed to change it. They are not. For they fail to grasp what is crucial about totalitarianism. That is to say they do not tackle the question of system, the question in Queensland being whether the individuals cited have moved as a structured group to re-systematise the regime in which they emerged, making the road back a road over new objective obstacles rather than a mere stiffening of spiritual and moral resistance still capable of inducing social and political change within as yet still basically democratic structures.

What must be put is the question not of the Peterson-and-followers’ theory but of their whole complex consciousness as conditioned by their circumstances in current history, their insertion into the balance of powers of a concrete situation based on mining capital fractions and requiring a mystified rural electoral base, and within this context an accurate account of the way the Petersen government has twisted Westminster-style democracy into a new form, or almost minority-plebiscite oligarchy based on a sort of parallel grouping of forces within and out­side a de facto reorganised bureaucracy. The relations between practice and theory arc not that the former is the application of the latter, but a far more interesting and complex dialectic that situates Petersen’s ‘totalitarianism’ into a power situation that is still bigger than he or his followers and hardly changeable by mere parliamentary revivals of ‘identikit Liberals’.

A feel for these tricky matters marks Michael Sexton, former private secretary to ex-Attorney General Kip Enderby, enabling him to write Illusions of Power, the best book so far on the fall of the Whitlam Government in 1975. At one bound he leaves the plane of ‘the bastard’s sacked us’ and ‘Kerr’s cur’, skilfully weaving a political thriller out of a sort of meta-narrative of the miring of an insufficiently planned Cabinet strategy in a host or meditated obstacles. the same ground as that traversed by previous writers, but dealing with a level of infrastructure provided by analysis. The story is no less dramatic but the dramatis personae are less personal. Thus, after recounting Whitlam ‘s response to David Smith’s reading of Kerr’s Proclamation of Dismissal, the story proceeds:

The important decision was the Opposition’s decision to block the Budget ... Whatever Kerr had once been, he was by this rime a representative of those non-Labor forces ...

The agencies described are the social forces of Australian history and contemporary capitalism, and the story is of how the Labor Government found its power was only that of one-and eventually a minor - player in a league of ‘other power-holders - bureaucrats, manufacturers, trade unions, banks, mining companies, media groups and the rest’. It is about the fierceness of their resistance and the methods they used to keep their present power. So it is a book full of facts, facts found and correlated in a new and illuminating way because of the level of analysis that defines what is being looked for.

The story is very detailed and much of the detail is new (e.g., the legal opinions that flowed into Kerr from the Sydney bar included one, quoted very fully, that he may well have followed step by step in his actions) but the point is the recurrent and incremental summarisation of themes that yield this basic view: forces within the government (powerful sections of the whole bureaucracy, especially Treasury, which have their own long-term interests, policies and procedures in favour of the status quo) and outside (the Senate, L.C.P. state governments, ‘private’ enterprise and elite groups) were coalescing ever more strongly to secure a Labor Government in paralysis, less and less capable of anything beyond mere survival, then not even of that.

The upshot of this is a semi-pessimistic (and ominously numbered) chapter 13, suggesting that any reform government improbably elected and going the full term in the near future should identify the real centres of power in Australia and plan how to carry out its program despite them.

A coherent strategy of a unified Cabinet with something like Harold Wilson’s policy unit could master the bureaucracy and, along with outside advisers, turn it into a tool rather than a swamp of hinderances.

Then the government should set up government corporations in key sectors (not lame duck or declining ones) of the economy to carry on business either alone or in association with private corporations, with the aim of having an impact on over-all economic direction. ‘It will only be possible to change the existing pattern of the distribution of resources in Australia if changes are made to the system of production of those resources’.

So far so good. Both the sad story and the happy sequel can only be told because of the analysis. But the analysis stops half-way down. A deeper investigation would yield more disconcerting levels of fact and caution even more compellingly against false opti­ism in the sequel.

In 1965 Perry Anderson, contributing to the book Towards Socialism, shared the same intuitions about the limits of parliamentary power:

the reality is of course that power in advanced capitalist societies is nor an object sited exclusively - or even primarily - in Parliament, to be passed to and fro as majorities change. It is nor an object at all: it is the totality of differential relationships that constitute society. These relationships are, of course, mediated and objectified in a range of crucial institutions. These institutions are infinitely more numerous and various than Parliament ... the dynamic configuration of these different ensembles is the real constellation of power in the society ... the structure of power amounts to the hegemony of one social bloc over another. This is a trans-electoral phenomenon.

So would be its solution. The crisis is one of social democracy and its whole range of strategies. For the plurality of Sexton’s ‘power-holders’ are unified at another level in a concurrence of interests, aspirations, mental and emotional categories that are epochal moulds for the expression of the everyday ‘differences’ forming thus a set of reciprocal relations running through all levels of the society from unarticulated and unconscious assumptions to decisions of international capital. This unifying force benefits one group far more than others.

An analysis which halts at the level of non-parliamentary ‘forces’ to be opposed by a tight Cabinet with a tight plan will not even discern the appalling facts of capital’s hegemony over the spirits and life-projects of Labor’s enemies and friends alike. So even next time the hydra of ‘power-holders’ will grow more heads, some even more surprising than John Kerr’s. Perhaps more like that of General Augusto Pinochet.