tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/alfred-deakin-15061/articlesAlfred Deakin – The Conversation2023-01-03T19:16:43Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1963602023-01-03T19:16:43Z2023-01-03T19:16:43ZThe ‘forgettables’: 5 Australian prime ministers you may not know much about<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501818/original/file-20221219-24-fhygs7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.moadoph.gov.au/exhibitions/democracy-dna-the-people-the-prime-ministers-and-the-world/">Museum of Australian Democracy</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The idea of a “forgotten prime minister” may seem laughable. For Australian historians, it is the governed rather than the governors who need rescuing “from the enormous condescension of posterity” as the English historian E. P. Thompson famously put it. </p>
<p>Our First Nations histories especially were for too long silenced and concealed in what the anthropologist Bill Stanner called a “cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale”.</p>
<p>Prime ministers, on the other hand, are stitched into the tapestry of national history thanks to extensive newspaper coverage, the dogged pursuits of political biographers, and the quest of archivists and librarians to collect their personal papers. Deceased leaders’ names adorn buildings and streets, federal electorates, and dedicated research centres, and in Harold Holt’s case, a memorial swimming pool.</p>
<p>But some, of course, are better known than others. So which prime ministers, if any, can be considered “forgotten” by contemporary Australia? And what does that act of forgetting reveal about our political culture? Commemorative rituals and <a href="https://essentialvision.com.au/tag/john-curtin">opinion surveys</a> suggest that some have very much receded from memory.</p>
<p>Here are a few prime ministers who deserve to be a little better known. </p>
<h2>Edmund Barton 1901-03</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501811/original/file-20221219-16-gd6rzd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501811/original/file-20221219-16-gd6rzd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501811/original/file-20221219-16-gd6rzd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501811/original/file-20221219-16-gd6rzd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501811/original/file-20221219-16-gd6rzd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501811/original/file-20221219-16-gd6rzd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501811/original/file-20221219-16-gd6rzd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Edmund Barton, Australia’s first prime minister.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Archives of Australia</span></span>
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<p>Barton was a hugely significant figure in his day. A leading advocate of federation, he was summoned by the <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/hopetoun-seventh-earl-of-6730">Governor-General Lord Hopetoun</a> (after a false start) to form the first Commonwealth government. </p>
<p>Between 1901 and 1903, Barton’s government, with the dynamic Alfred Deakin as its attorney-general, established some of the national institutions we now take for granted, such as the public service and the High Court. Barton and Deakin’s deeply racial vision of a White Australia was also enacted in legislation in these years.</p>
<p>Australia’s first prime minister (known to detractors as Tosspot Toby) helped to establish the machinery of federal government out of nothing. But this earned him no special place in Australian collective memory. Resigning in 1903, he spent the remainder of his life as a reticent statesman and High Court judge.</p>
<h2>George Reid 1904-05</h2>
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<span class="caption">George Reid, a political enemy of Barton’s, held office from 1904-05.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Museum of Australian Democracy</span></span>
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<p>Reid was a political opponent of Barton’s. The defining issue of the early Commonwealth was tariff policy, and all other matters – industrial development, employment, and individual liberty – were refracted through the “tariff question”. Reid, a former New South Wales premier who had earned the moniker “Yes-No Reid” for his prevarications during the earlier federation debates, was a devout advocate for and leader of the Free Trade movement.</p>
<p>Reid was summoned to form a government in August 1904. Hamstrung by his lack of a parliamentary majority, he remarkably passed the <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/education/australias-prime-ministers-george-reid/13856906">Conciliation and Arbitration Bill</a>. This was core business for the early Commonwealth, and two previous ministries had failed to secure it. But Reid’s attempts to settle the tariff question with Deakin’s Protectionists failed, and his ministry was defeated in parliament in July 1905.</p>
<h2>Joseph Cook 1913-14</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501813/original/file-20221219-16-k4lphv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501813/original/file-20221219-16-k4lphv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501813/original/file-20221219-16-k4lphv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501813/original/file-20221219-16-k4lphv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501813/original/file-20221219-16-k4lphv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501813/original/file-20221219-16-k4lphv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501813/original/file-20221219-16-k4lphv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Joseph Cook, together with Reid, was instrumental in establishing the two-party system that continues today.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Archives of Australia</span></span>
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<p>Out of office, Reid and his Free Trade colleague Joseph Cook played a crucial role in making the two-party system that endures today. Whatever their differences with Deakin and the protectionists, Reid and Cook (himself a former Labor MP in New South Wales) saw the rising Australian Labor Party as the real enemy. </p>
<p>Reid travelled the country establishing anti-socialist leagues and building the groundwork for a united anti-Labor Party. When the tariff schedule was finally settled in 1908, and the mutual animosity between Deakin and Reid seemed the only barrier to a Liberal fusion, the latter sacrificed himself and resigned so that the former could join forces with Cook on his own terms.</p>
<p>In 1913, Cook led the new Commonwealth Liberal Party to a federal election, winning by the narrowest of margins. He oversaw the opening weeks of the Great War the following year, committing 20,000 Australian troops and the Australian Navy to Britain, but soon lost power in <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/House_of_Representatives/Powers_practice_and_procedure/Practice7/HTML/Chapter13/Double_dissolutions#:%7E:text=The%201914%20double%20dissolution&text=Elections%20were%20held%20on%205,in%20question%20was%20not%20reintroduced.">Australia’s first double dissolution election</a>.</p>
<h2>Stanley Melbourne Bruce 1923-29</h2>
<p>After the war, the task of national leadership fell to Stanley Bruce, a young businessman and ex-serviceman from Melbourne. In 1923, as leader of the non-Labor forces (now reconstituted as the Nationalist Party), Bruce formed government with Earle Page’s Country Party (forerunner of today’s rural National Party). In doing so, Frank Bongiorno has recently explained, Bruce and Page ‘inaugurated the Coalition tradition on the conservative side of Australian federal politics’.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501814/original/file-20221219-12-fzk3nw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501814/original/file-20221219-12-fzk3nw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501814/original/file-20221219-12-fzk3nw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501814/original/file-20221219-12-fzk3nw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501814/original/file-20221219-12-fzk3nw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501814/original/file-20221219-12-fzk3nw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501814/original/file-20221219-12-fzk3nw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Stanley Melbourne Bruce (pictured with his wife Ethel) had the task of leading the country after the first world war.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Archives of Australia</span></span>
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<p>Bruce’s government was ambitious for Australia in the “roaring ‘20s”. He envisioned a future underscored by British migrants, British money and imperial markets. In power for six years, he presided over the creation of the Loans Council and the federal parliament’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Parliament_House,_Canberra">move from Melbourne</a> to Canberra in 1927. </p>
<p>But like others before him, he came unstuck on the issue of centralised arbitration. His attempt to abolish the federal arbitration court (with a view to restraining wage growth) saw his government defeated and his own seat lost in the 1929 election.</p>
<h2>Arthur Fadden 1941</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501815/original/file-20221219-22-gd6rzd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501815/original/file-20221219-22-gd6rzd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=785&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501815/original/file-20221219-22-gd6rzd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=785&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501815/original/file-20221219-22-gd6rzd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=785&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501815/original/file-20221219-22-gd6rzd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=986&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501815/original/file-20221219-22-gd6rzd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=986&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501815/original/file-20221219-22-gd6rzd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=986&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Arthur Fadden was chosen to lead his party after Robert Menzies resigned.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Archives of Australia</span></span>
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<p>In the early 1930s, conservatives once again reorganised in the form of the United Australia Party, and dominated politics for the ensuing decade. But by 1941, after two years of wartime leadership, the young leader Robert Menzies appeared to falter. His colleagues disliked his brisk manner and the public lacked confidence in his government’s war efforts. A hung parliament after the 1940 election, in which two Independents held the balance, confirmed this. With his position untenable, <a href="https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection/australias-prime-ministers/robert-menzies/during-office">Menzies resigned in August 1941</a> and the coalition unanimously chose Fadden, the Country Party leader, to replace him.</p>
<p>“Affable Artie” was a widely respected figure and apparently the only one who could hold together a decade-old government too consumed by infighting to meet the demands of the moment. His premiership lasted just 40 days, at which point the Independents offered John Curtin and Labor their support. The sole Country Party leader to become prime minister on a non-caretaker basis, Fadden was one of a small handful of men to lead the nation in a global war.</p>
<h2>Australia and Its Forgettables</h2>
<p>Why is it that these five prime ministers are largely absent from national memory? Four factors seem particularly significant.</p>
<p>First, contemporary Australian political discourse offers only a shallow sense of history. Political reporting rarely reaches for historical depth, and when it does, the second world war tends to be the outer limit. </p>
<p>Moreover, when Australians are asked to <a href="https://essentialvision.com.au/tag/john-curtin">rank their prime ministers</a> and select a “best PM”, they rarely reach beyond living memory.</p>
<p>The federation generation, overshadowed by the first world war, fare especially poorly. In the 1990s, with the centenary of federation fast approaching, <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Senate/Powers_practice_n_procedures/pops/Papers_on_Parliament_67/The_Australian_Prime_Ministership">surveys</a> revealed that Australians knew less about its federal founders than they did about America’s 'founding fathers’. What kind of country, the civics experts implored, could <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6niKTWMx4_c">forget the name of its first prime minister</a>? Tosspot Toby was no match for Simpson and his donkey.</p>
<p>Second, Australians prefer to think of their political history in terms of heroes and villains (often embodied by the same individuals). Those binary roles require gregariousness, dynamism, some controversy, and the occasional serving of larrikinism. “Tall poppy syndrome” notwithstanding, partisan heroes like Menzies and Gough Whitlam, or infamous rats such as Billy Hughes, make for easy storytelling.</p>
<p>The forgettables are more often reserved, restrained or even polite characters. The Primitive Methodist Joseph Cook was “<a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cook-sir-joseph-5763">[s]olemn and humourless</a>”. The patrician Bruce was judged “<a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bruce-stanley-melbourne-5400">too aloof and reserved to be an Australian</a>”. And Frank Forde, in his old age, maintained that all of his colleagues and opponents had been <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2239262?lookfor=Francis%20Forde%20%7bformat:Audio%7d&offset=1&max=1">“outstanding” and “capable men”</a> for whom he had only “friendly feeling”. This is not exactly the stuff of masculine political legend.</p>
<p>Alfred Deakin has tended to absorb the historical limelight and cast long shadows over his contemporaries, not least because he furnished historians and biographers with rich personal papers. (Barton scrupulously destroyed most of his). But as <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/4704220">Sean Scalmer has argued</a>, we ought not to overlook the influence of Deakin’s contemporaries in the making of Australian politics as we know it.</p>
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<span class="caption">Alfred Deakin (front row, second from right) has tended to cast a long shadow over his contemporaries.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://deakinslettersmorningpost.parliamentarylibrary.gov.au/letters/1903?page=1">Australian Parliamentary Library</a></span>
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<p>Third, prime ministers are rendered immemorable if they were judged to be temporary, or presiding over some kind of interregnum. Australians have valorised the longevity and stability of Menzies and Howard, or the sense of epochal change that accompanied Whitlam and Hawke. Men like Reid, Cook and Fadden seem transitory in comparison.</p>
<p>Fourth, public memory has often depended on the sponsorship of major parties and their affiliated scribes and institutes. The corollary is that those who preceded the two-party system are harder to commemorate. Labor has been excellent at proselytising its great leaders and their great reforms, and demonising the rats and renegades. The Liberal Party, on the other hand, has struggled to memorialise its antecedents and influences (Deakin perhaps excepted). Menzies and Howard predominate in the collective Liberal psyche, and Liberal forerunners from Barton to Bruce rarely get a look-in.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/196360/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joshua Black is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.</span></em></p>While some prime ministers loom large in the public imagination, others are largely forgotten. Why were they so unremarkable- and is that fair?Joshua Black, PhD Candidate, School of History, National Centre of Biography, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/989282018-06-28T19:56:30Z2018-06-28T19:56:30ZFrom ‘Toby Tosspot’ to ‘Mr Harbourside Mansion’, personal insults are an Australian tradition<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/225268/original/file-20180628-112604-1xrw75p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The insults have becoming increasingly personal, but they don't always work.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Lukas Coch</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The insults have been flying thick and fast. Malcolm Turnbull is “Mr Harbourside Mansion”, “Top Hat” Malcolm, “the slick merchant banker”, “the top end of town” man. It is a measure of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/mr-harbourside-mansion-credlin-gives-turnbull-a-moniker-with-cut-through-59390">unhappiness in the Coalition</a> that not all of these epithets were invented by Labor.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Bill Shorten is, <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-08/turnbull-and-shorten-trade-barbs-during-question-time/8252540">according to Turnbull</a>, a “sycophant”, a “groveller”, a “man who abandoned workers” while he “tucked his knees under” the table of billionaires like the late businessman Richard Pratt. </p>
<p>The red faces, raised voices and flying spittle that accompany the parliamentary trade in insults are meant to convey passion and spontaneity. But we can be confident the lines have been sorted well in advance. </p>
<p>Turnbull’s insults, for example, made in parliament just recently, largely repeat things he said <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/video/2017/feb/08/malcolm-turnbull-calls-bill-shorten-a-social-climbing-sycophant-video">in February last year</a> when he called Shorten “a social-climbing sycophant” and “would-be tribune of the people”. On the other side, Labor has been seeking to present Turnbull as an out-of-touch Sydney snob from the day he took office.</p>
<p>Do such insults work? We know from the research of Australian political scientists – such as my colleagues here at the Australian National University who produce the <a href="http://australianelectionstudy.org/">Australian Election Study</a> – that elections have become increasingly personalised. Most voters do not comb through policy documents. Rather, they use the party leader as a means of making judgments about the things that matter to them.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/an-evening-with-the-treasurer-how-governments-belt-out-budget-hits-and-hope-someone-is-listening-95929">An evening with the treasurer: how governments belt out budget hits and hope someone is listening</a>
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<p>So, the Labor Party hopes that, if it can make enough mud stick to Turnbull, it can present him as unqualified to make decisions about the welfare of ordinary people. Being so rich, they suggest, he is out of touch with their concerns.</p>
<p>The Coalition hopes that if it can make its mud stick, Shorten will be seen as a self-serving opportunist who built a union and political career by taking advantage of the workers he was supposed to represent.</p>
<p>There is nothing new here; the appeal on each side is a traditional one. </p>
<p>Labor cartoonists of a previous era <a href="http://books.publishing.monash.edu/apps/bookworm/view/Drawing+the+Line/77/xhtml/chapter06.html">would often draw Mr Fat</a> – an obese capitalist – complete with top hat, tails and cigar, the very embodiment of greed and excess. They would sometimes set him beside a brawny, manly worker determined to resist his wiles. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/225273/original/file-20180628-112604-s02htr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/225273/original/file-20180628-112604-s02htr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/225273/original/file-20180628-112604-s02htr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/225273/original/file-20180628-112604-s02htr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/225273/original/file-20180628-112604-s02htr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=736&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/225273/original/file-20180628-112604-s02htr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=736&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/225273/original/file-20180628-112604-s02htr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=736&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Phil May, ‘Poverty and Wealth; It all depends on the position of the bundle’, Bulletin, c. 1887.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://books.publishing.monash.edu/apps/bookworm/view/Drawing+the+Line/77/xhtml/chapter06.html">State Library of New South Wales via Monash University Publishing</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The anti-Labor images of the union boss as a parasite on the working man, and of the Labor politician as self-serving careerist, have existed as long as the Labor Party itself.</p>
<p>Political name-calling and insults are sometimes like water off a duck’s back. But others can stick. The radical Daniel Deniehy’s lampooning of William Wentworth and his followers in 1854 for wanting to create <a href="http://lrrpublic.cli.det.nsw.edu.au/lrrSecure/Sites/Web/nsw_parliament/lo/legislative_council/applets/bunyip/267/show_tell267_text.htm">“a bunyip aristocracy”</a> of titled men to fill a colonial upper house was recalled for generations. (Personally, I’ve always thought the funniest jibe was Deniehy’s suggestion that James Macarthur’s coat of arms as “Earl of Camden” should include a rum keg, a reference to his father’s role in the commerce and politics of early New South Wales.) </p>
<p><a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/top-paul-keating-quotes">Paul Keating’s question</a> about an Andrew Peacock leadership comeback – “Can a soufflé rise twice?” – was perfect in every way, as was his designation of Liberal leader John Hewson, “the feral abacus”.</p>
<p>But Keating’s quips went down better with the press gallery and the intelligentsia than the ordinary punter, and he had to endure insinuations that an enthusiast for Italian suits and French clocks could not be a true Labor man.</p>
<p>Bob Hawke, more than Shorten, acquired a large coterie of “close personal friends” among the rich and the filthy rich. But this was probably an advantage in his early days as prime minister, when he talked of consensus between workers and bosses in the national interest. As the feeling developed that his friends were doing very nicely while most others were doing it tough, the term “rich Labor mates” became shorthand for the idea that Hawke and Keating had sold out the workers. </p>
<p>Hawke was “the silver bodgie”, a reference to the colour of his still luxuriant hair, somewhat like that of a 1950s <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/hindsight/the-young-ones----bodgies-26-widgies/4109816">“bodgie”</a>, a stylish youth somewhat in the James Dean mould.</p>
<p>But some of our political leaders have had nicknames that were more distinctly pejorative. The Sydney Bulletin called Australia’s first prime minister, <a href="http://primeministers.naa.gov.au/primeministers/barton/">Edmund Barton</a>, “Toby Tosspot”: he had been known as “Toby” much of his life and a “tosspot” was a vulgar term for an enthusiastic drinker. </p>
<p>“Affable Alfred”, for <a href="http://primeministers.naa.gov.au/primeministers/deakin/">Deakin</a>, was affectionate but could be used by opponents sarcastically when he wasn’t being quite so affable. “Jolly John”, for John Gorton, sounds affectionate, until you recall that it was a reference to his <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/03/18/1015909929252.html">erratic personal behaviour</a>.</p>
<p>“Honest John” – for Howard – was mainly used ironically rather than descriptively. But Howard’s own claim that Kim Beazley <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/news/national/pm-gets-personal-beazleys-got-no-ticker/2005/10/13/1128796640367.html">lacked “ticker”</a> is usually seen as having worked on voters looking for strong leadership and doubtful the Labor opposition leader could provide it.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/mis-red-why-bill-shorten-is-not-a-socialist-91752">Mis-red: why Bill Shorten is not a socialist</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<p>Robert Menzies’ critics on the left called him “Pig Iron Bob” after his role, as a member of the Lyons government, in opposing union bans on the shipping of pig iron to Japan. The epithet, which stuck throughout his long career, was intended to remind people of Menzies’ poor judgment and association with the policy of appeasement of the Axis powers. It was a potent rhetorical weapon during the 1940s and even became the subject of <a href="http://unionsong.com/u150.html">radical folksong</a> but, as the years of his prime ministership rolled on after the war, it seemed to do him no obvious harm.</p>
<p>Highly personal assaults can backfire badly. The best example from Australian politics is Country Party leader <a href="http://www.nma.gov.au/primeministers/earle_page">Earle Page</a>’s savage attack on Menzies in 1939 for failing to enlist in the first world war. Menzies had wanted to serve but already had brothers at the front, so remained behind as the result of a family decision.</p>
<p>Page’s career never recovered from the disgust that his attack induced. That didn’t stop the mischievous Labor firebrand, Eddie Ward, from later joking that Menzies’ brilliant military career had been cut short by the war. It’s a tough place, the federal parliament.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98928/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Frank Bongiorno does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Creating epithets for political opponents has a long history in Australia – and when it works, it can be devastating.Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/893092018-02-27T01:13:49Z2018-02-27T01:13:49ZEmpire of delusion: the sun sets on British imperial credibility<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201281/original/file-20180109-83547-1y4sxm1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Today the Commonwealth exists as an organisation in search of a rationale.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This piece is republished with permission from <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/commonwealth-now/">Commonwealth Now</a>, the 59th edition of Griffith Review. Articles are a little longer than most published on The Conversation, presenting an in-depth analysis on the relevance of the Commonwealth of Nations in today’s geopolitical landscape.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Anyone interested in power must visit Persepolis. Its ruins stand defiantly in a parched valley in southern Iran, the ultimate statement of humans’ capacity to dominate vast multitudes of their fellow humans. </p>
<p>Amid the intricately carved stairways, walls and plinths stand the two halls from which the Achaemenid Empire radiated its power, from the Indus to the Danube. The Apadana, begun by Darius in 518 BC and finished by Xerxes, was where the King of Kings received tribute from the variety of peoples he ruled. </p>
<p>With walls 60 metres long, its huge ceiling of Lebanese cedar was supported on 72 columns of carved grey marble, each 19 metres high. Next to the Apadana is the even larger Throne Hall, its massive roof once supported by 100 columns, each of its eight carved stone doorways depicting the King of Kings wrestling with a mythical monster. </p>
<p>The architecture of these two halls, and the stairways leading to them, was designed to inspire awe in the subjects of the Achaemenids. Any tributary hoping to see the King of Kings would be so disoriented by the time he saw the throne as to be utterly prostrate at the heart of the largest empire the world had ever seen.</p>
<p>The British Empire has no Persepolis. Its beginning and end weren’t marked by the construction and destruction of a city. London began as an outpost of another empire, and has continued to flourish long after the fall of its own. </p>
<p>Neither is there a founding date or a battle in which Britain decisively beat its predecessor and was universally hailed as the new world power – just as there is no decisive defeat that marks its end.</p>
<p>The British Empire is a story of ambitious, evangelical, avaricious but ordinary men and women, and a weary, reluctant Whitehall bureaucracy dragged toward formalising what its citizens had created on the frontiers of enterprise in Asia, Africa and the Pacific. </p>
<p>Far from popular notions of an empire driven by surging jingoistic ambition, British society was deeply divided about the benefits and morality of empire at the time of its greatest expansion. </p>
<p>By the mid-19th century, a rising tide of opinion opposed to imperialism on material and moral grounds had begun to contest the pro-imperialist dominance of the Tories under Palmerston and Disraeli. Britain’s economy had started to sputter and lose ground to surging industrial rivals; accumulated war debt and rising taxes were generating popular resentment. </p>
<p>William Ewart Gladstone, at the head of a surging Liberal movement, combined moral attacks on the Tories’ overseas adventurism with a hip-pocket campaign that debt and taxes were the direct consequence of imperial ambition.</p>
<p>And yet, the 70 years that followed 1850 saw the fastest expansion of the empire in history. Hundreds of millions of Asians, Africans, Pacific Islanders and Americans found themselves ruled by Britannia. Apart from in India, the British preferred to govern through local systems of government – and, more often than not, reluctantly. </p>
<p>As the French and the Germans became determined to build themselves global empires, the British were forced to clarify their intentions in vast areas of the world where they had simply asserted a sphere of influence by virtue of the British navy and British commercial dominance. </p>
<p>Repeatedly, where they had been prepared to stand aside in a bid to manage complex relations with their continental rivals, the British found their hand forced by the thrusting subjects in their dominions, who had none of the Empire-weariness of British society. </p>
<p>After the first world war, a bloodied and impoverished Britain found itself forced to take on yet more territory surrendered by vanquished empires in the Middle East and Africa.</p>
<p>Just as the British Empire has no founding moment, neither has it an emphatic final act. There is no burning of Persepolis from which history will forever date the demise of Rule Britannia. After the second world war, the largest empire the world has ever seen declined exactly as it had arisen – through the self-interested acts of thousands of subjects, overseen by an overwhelmed Whitehall bureaucracy, amid an ambivalent British public, romantic and cynical at the same time. </p>
<p>Even today, Britain can’t divest itself of territories that cause it diplomatic difficulties – the Falklands, Gibraltar, Northern Ireland – thanks to the attachment of their populations to membership of a vanished empire. </p>
<p>And while the British Empire’s gracious decline can be seen as a tribute to the prim pragmatism of the same national character that built it, the lack of a final act may carry an ominous thread. Without a clear full stop there can be no certainty that the unravelling has ended even now.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201287/original/file-20180109-83571-oh3ry3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201287/original/file-20180109-83571-oh3ry3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201287/original/file-20180109-83571-oh3ry3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201287/original/file-20180109-83571-oh3ry3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201287/original/file-20180109-83571-oh3ry3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201287/original/file-20180109-83571-oh3ry3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201287/original/file-20180109-83571-oh3ry3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The British Empire has no Persepolis.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Takhtejamshid_1234.jpg">Mardetanha/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The evolution of the Commonwealth</h2>
<p>The key to Britannia’s reluctant rise and dignified eclipse lies in a mystical association: the Commonwealth. </p>
<p>The displacement of “empire” by “Commonwealth” first happened amid the horror of the first world war, at the <a href="http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/themes/first-world-war-effects.htm">Imperial War Conference of 1917</a>. Britain, its self-governing dominions – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Newfoundland – and India had come together to discuss the form and function of the empire after the war. </p>
<p>Britain had come to rely ever more heavily on the Empire for its survival during the cataclysm. In full knowledge of this, the dominions and India had begun to demand a greater say over an imperial foreign policy that could have such momentous consequences for them. </p>
<p>The Imperial War Conference issued Resolution IX, which recognised:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… the dominions as autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth, and … India as an important portion of the same. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The resolution further recognised:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… the right of the dominions and India to an adequate voice in foreign policy and in foreign relations, and should provide effective arrangements for continuous consultation in all important matters of common imperial concern, and for such necessary concerted action, founded on consultation, as the several governments may determine.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Names matter. In naming something or someone, not only do we give them a social handle, we also aim to define the essence of what they are and what we want them to be. Names are meant to shape their hosts and evoke behaviours; that’s why we remain so fascinated by what particular names “mean”. “Commonwealth” was chosen by a succession of statesmen for no less a reason.</p>
<p>Let’s start with the noun it replaced. The British, as they became increasingly devoted to liberal politics and economics, the rule of law and freedom of religion, had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of empire. These were what despots and autocrats built; Britain’s growing dominion was something entirely different. </p>
<p>Like ancient Athens, they told themselves, Britain’s was a liberal empire: built on democracy, free trade and maritime strength, not on huge standing armies and command-and-control repression. </p>
<p>Queen Victoria may have been named “Empress of India”, but Britons could not bear to think they were in charge of a project akin to that which Louis XIV, Frederick the Great or Napoleon had tried to build.</p>
<p>And so they found a gentler, less precise title. But “Commonwealth” was not without controversy, evoking for some the horrors of Cromwell’s own very English revolutionary fervour and despotism. </p>
<p>The rehabilitation of “Commonwealth” was simultaneously occurring in Australia, at a time when the colonists were contemplating their own momentous remaking of their political order. As historian W.K. Hancock pointed out, the name was adopted:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… as a manifesto, a declaration of faith in a way of life, rather than as an accurate descriptor in terms known to political science. The name Commonwealth is a programme in itself.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“Commonwealth” is an anglicisation of the Latin term <em>res publica</em>: “the welfare of the people”. But the modern usage of this term – “republic” – carries with it a precise constitutional framework, as defined by the jurists of the Roman Republic and the constitutional fathers of the US. </p>
<p>“Commonwealth” is less precise, more mystical. It dates from the late 15th century, when England was throwing off the yoke of the Roman church and abolishing feudalism. At a time of great political, social and ecclesiastical upheaval, the English coined a term evoking a comforting vision of an idealised Anglo-Saxon harmony. </p>
<p>For Hancock:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The idea depended on the conception of society as a mystical body, as an organic unity based on a just and harmonious distribution of functions and rewards among the various degrees and estates of men … The idea of the Commonwealth as a mystical body denied that any man or any rank possessed a natural right to power and wealth: it insisted on stewardship.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How perfect for an empire acquired by anti-imperialists. Theirs was not a system of domination and extraction, they told themselves – it was a voluntary association of free societies, held together by sentiment and loyalty for the mutual support and welfare of all. </p>
<p>Surely it is a testament to the power of names that the Commonwealth gained in strength and sentiment even as the empire it tried to deny became ever more repressive, extractive and attached to racial hierarchy. </p>
<p>As the great Commonwealth loyalist Alfred Deakin wrote in London’s Morning Post in 1906, the British Empire:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… though united in the whole, is, nevertheless, divided broadly into two parts, one occupied wholly or mainly by a white ruling race, the other principally occupied by coloured races who are ruled. Australia and New Zealand are determined to keep their place in the first class.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Commonwealth thus became a cypher for the arc of British imperial delusion. Its siren call of volunteerism and the good-of-all convinced a nation caught in industrial eclipse to expand its responsibilities vastly beyond what it could ever hope to maintain. </p>
<p>And, repeatedly, it maintained association among the disparate parts of empire when rational statecraft would have brought an emphatic end to the quixotic enterprise.</p>
<p>By the 1870s, Britain was under serious threat from the rising powers of France and Germany in Europe.</p>
<p>With industrial, military and scientific eclipse beckoning, the empire needed to become a state, refocusing its energies on dominating the near seas and ensuring the balance of power in Europe. Instead, its energies were dissipated at the edges of empire. Where it should have been concentrating its power in Europe, Britain suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of the Afghans in 1878 and the Zulus in 1879.</p>
<p>So it was for the dominions. By the early 20th century, Australia and New Zealand were rightly preoccupied by competition from rising powers in the Pacific.</p>
<p>Never was there a greater need to manage relations and build their own defences and military capabilities. Yet they remained tied to the foreign policy of empire, even as the empire entered an alliance with Japan, the country that most worried them, and then granted it the right to retain the Carolines and Marshall Islands in the Central Pacific after the first world war. </p>
<p>At the <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/naval-conference">Washington Naval Conference of 1921</a>, dedicated to finding a solution to the rising rivalry in the Pacific, the antipodean dominions chose meekly to be represented by the empire.</p>
<p>The Depression provided an opportunity for the Commonwealth to become a genuine society brought together for the common good. But when the dominions and Britain came together at Ottawa in 1932, the result was acrimony and hard, self-interested bargaining.</p>
<p>The real power of the name was revealed in 1949. India, the country that had shed more blood for the empire than any other, and that had just wrenched itself free of the Empire’s grasp, became a republic. And yet it chose to retain the mystical connection, opting to remain within the Commonwealth. </p>
<p>In the decades that followed, the Asian and African colonies – never even thought of as part of the original Commonwealth compact in 1917 – also chose enthusiastically to remain part of the mystical association. </p>
<p>By the 1960s, they were to turn an imperial club into a radically anti-racist force, taking the Commonwealth to the apex of its history in its campaigns against Rhodesia and apartheid. </p>
<p>Now, the Commonwealth’s once most oppressed societies are its most ardent supporters. Surveys show the most positive feelings about the Commonwealth are <a href="https://www.channel4.com/news/jubilee-prompts-questions-about-commonwealths-role">among those societies</a> Deakin placed emphatically in the “ruled” category.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201289/original/file-20180109-83550-16mcnur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201289/original/file-20180109-83550-16mcnur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=283&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201289/original/file-20180109-83550-16mcnur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=283&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201289/original/file-20180109-83550-16mcnur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=283&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201289/original/file-20180109-83550-16mcnur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=356&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201289/original/file-20180109-83550-16mcnur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=356&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201289/original/file-20180109-83550-16mcnur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=356&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Imperial War Conference of 1917 first gave rise to the term ‘Commonwealth’ as opposed to ‘empire’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lafayette Negative Archive</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>An organisation lacking a rationale</h2>
<p>Today the Commonwealth exists as an organisation in search of a rationale. The mythology of the name has done its job: what brings the association together now is an act of forgetting what constructed it in the past. </p>
<p>Its bonds are not hard objectives of modern statecraft but a subterranean sentimentality of connectedness; it endures in its benignity because no-one has the heart to kill it off. </p>
<p>Its secretariat, a recent eminent persons’ group report, and the biennial meetings of its leaders all desperately try to find a rationale for its existence, loading fashionable issue after fashionable cause on its ramshackle shoulders – from green finance to fair trade. </p>
<p>It is hard to find an issue on which the Commonwealth has succeeded in bringing about genuine change since the demise of white rule in southern Africa. </p>
<p>When this coalition of whimsy meets a hard policy issue, its solidarity falls victim to its diversity, while its breadth of membership can’t deliver real weight and gravitas in the present day.</p>
<p>Where then does the Commonwealth sit, in the company of Persepolis and history’s empires? Surely as the last empire – the one that turned that word from a label of pride to one of accusation.</p>
<p>An empire determined to destroy and delegitimise the idea of empire itself. </p>
<p>An empire dedicated to the puncturing of its own pretensions to grandeur and permanence, under the reassuring myth of a mystical Arcadian community of free association. </p>
<p>Surely this is the enduring legacy of the British Empire – which is still so potent. We search in vain for the beginning of the unravelling; nor can we date its end. </p>
<p>Perhaps it continues, as Scotland, Wales and even England begin to assert themselves against the British Union as the original free association in the common interest.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>You can read other essays from Griffith Review’s latest edition <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/commonwealth-now/">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/89309/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Wesley is a member of the board of the Australia-China Council, the AFP Commissioner’s Advisory Board, and the NSW/ACT State Advisory Council for CEDA. </span></em></p>Without a clear full stop there can be no certainty that the unravelling of the British Empire has ended even now.Michael Wesley, Professor and Director of School of International Political and Strategic Studies, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/842142017-09-18T08:18:24Z2017-09-18T08:18:24ZPolitics podcast: Judith Brett on The Enigmatic Mr Deakin<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186356/original/file-20170918-5099-172uvo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C298%2C3024%2C2127&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Eliza Berlage</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It is popular to look at today’s political challenges through the prism of prime ministers past. But when it comes to former liberal leaders it’s usually Robert Menzies, not Alfred Deakin, who comes to mind.</p>
<p>However, Judith Brett, emeritus professor of politics at La Trobe University and author, says we have much to learn from Australia’s second prime minister. Her new biography, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, reveals the intense inner world of one of the most important fathers of Australian federation, who led the fledgling nation for three separate stints. </p>
<p>Brett says Deakin was something of a puzzle – even to himself. As prime minister he had an unusual double life, anonymously penning political columns for The Morning Post in London – a well-kept secret at the time.</p>
<p>He was a gifted orator, but above all he harnessed his optimism to operate a government of compromise at a challenging time. “He saw himself as between the ultras – the ultra tory obstructionists and the part of the Labor Party that was firming up as more ideological in his terms.”</p>
<p>Brett argues that despite Deakin’s undeniable charisma and skills in persuasion, his tendency towards great introspection and solitude means he would find the intensity of contemporary politics and media overwhelming. </p>
<p>For today’s two major parties “brand differentiation has become more important than actually solving problems”, Brett says, while Deakin advocated “policy before the needs of the party”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84214/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Judith Brett's biography, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, reveals the intense inner world of one of the most important fathers of Australian federation.Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/745182017-04-06T19:25:06Z2017-04-06T19:25:06ZAustralian politics explainer: the writing of our Constitution<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163032/original/image-20170329-1637-jttpxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The British parliament passed the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act in 1900.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Museum of Australian Democracy</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The Conversation is running a <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/australian-politics-explainer-37192">series of explainers</a> on key moments in Australian political history, looking at what happened, its impact then, and its relevance to politics today.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Since coming into effect <a href="http://www.foundingdocs.gov.au/item-sdid-82.html">in 1901</a>, Australia’s Constitution has shaped – and been shaped by – our political history.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.legislation.gov.au/Browse/ByTitle/Constitution/InForce#top">The Constitution</a> is the highest law in Australia. It shapes the laws the federal parliament may pass, how it administers those laws, the way our courts work, and how the federal government interacts with the state and territory governments.</p>
<h2>What happened?</h2>
<p>In the late 1800s, there were six British colonies on the Australian continent. These stand-alone colonies had <a href="https://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/members/former/first-parliament">their own parliaments and governments</a>, <a href="http://www.foundingdocs.gov.au/item-sdid-49.html">their</a> <a href="http://www.foundingdocs.gov.au/item-sdid-42.html">own</a> <a href="http://www.foundingdocs.gov.au/item-sdid-34.html">colonial constitutions</a>, and even their <a href="https://www.navyhistory.org.au/origins-of-the-queensland-navy/">own militaries</a>. </p>
<p>When travelling from one colony to another, people had to pass through <a href="http://www.murrayriver.com.au/customs-house/">a customs check</a> before crossing the border. And they had to <a href="http://fbe.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/1889502/2018PeterLloydColonialTariffs.pdf">pay taxes on goods they were carrying</a>.</p>
<p>In the <a href="http://www.foundingdocs.gov.au/timeline-b-1837-t-1899.html">1880s and 1890s</a>, representatives of the colonies began the discussions that would lead to federation. They wanted to join together to create a national government while maintaining political power for each colony’s own government. </p>
<p>These <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Senate/Powers_practice_n_procedures/Records_of_the_Australasian_Federal_Conventions_of_the_1890s">discussions</a>, which culminated in the Constitution we have today, were <a href="http://www.peo.gov.au/learning/closer-look/federation-cl.html">driven by many factors</a>. Among these were the need to make trade easier within Australia, a desire to <a href="http://www.foundingdocs.gov.au/item-sdid-87.html">control immigration</a>, and to improve defence arrangements for the continent. </p>
<p>In part, the Australian Constitution’s drafters were inspired by the United States and its Constitution; the <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/coaca430/">structure</a> of our Constitution looks quite similar to <a href="https://www.usconstitution.net/xconst.html">the Americans’</a>. </p>
<p>But, crucially, Australian Federation <a href="https://parkesfoundation.org.au/resources/sir-henry-parkes-2/in-his-own-words/">did not</a> involve a revolution against Britain. Instead, at Federation, Australia would maintain <a href="http://www.foundingdocs.gov.au/item-sdid-96.html#significance">close</a> links to the parliament in London, <a href="http://www.hcourt.gov.au/assets/publications/speeches/former-justices/gleesoncj/cj_18jun08.pdf">the British courts</a> and the <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/coaca430/s61.html">British monarchy</a>. </p>
<p>Aside from some <a href="http://www.foundingdocs.gov.au/amendment-amid-21.html">discriminatory</a> <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/coaca430/s25.html">provisions</a>, the Constitution would not include acknowledgement or recognition of Indigenous Australians. Our system of government became a <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00323268008401755?journalCode=cajp19">mixture</a> of British-inspired elements, American-inspired elements and uniquely Australian elements. </p>
<p>Voters were asked to approve the draft Constitution at <a href="http://www.peo.gov.au/learning/closer-look/federation-cl/referendums.html">referendums</a> held in all the colonies. All the colonies <a href="http://www.peo.gov.au/learning/closer-look/federation-cl/western-australia-joins-the-federation.html">eventually</a> voted in favour – though some only narrowly, and with most women and Indigenous Australians <a href="http://www.federationpress.com.au/bookstore/book.asp?isbn=9781862871960">excluded</a> from voting. </p>
<p>After being passed into law by parliament in London, the Constitution came into effect on January 1, 1901.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162618/original/image-20170327-3298-10xbnvs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162618/original/image-20170327-3298-10xbnvs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162618/original/image-20170327-3298-10xbnvs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162618/original/image-20170327-3298-10xbnvs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162618/original/image-20170327-3298-10xbnvs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162618/original/image-20170327-3298-10xbnvs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162618/original/image-20170327-3298-10xbnvs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin are considered founding fathers of Australia’s federation.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-136598758/view?searchTerm=edmund+barton#search/edmund%20barton">National Library of Australia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What was its impact?</h2>
<p>All this history has shaped our Constitution, and continues to shape our political history. Our Constitution establishes:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>a <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/federalism/">federal</a> system of government – <a href="https://www.govt.nz/browse/engaging-with-government/government-in-new-zealand/">not every national government</a> is a federal government;</p></li>
<li><p>a system of <a href="https://jade.io/article/67991?url.hash=_ftnref30">representative government</a>: we vote for those who govern us, and hold them accountable;</p></li>
<li><p>a system of <a href="https://jade.io/article/267004?at.hl=williams+v+commonwealth&url.hash=_ftnref120">responsible government</a>: our prime minister and ministers <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/coaca430/s64.html">are members of parliament</a>, chosen by the parliament and accountable to the parliament; and</p></li>
<li><p>a constitutional monarchy: Queen Elizabeth II is the <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/coaca430/s61.html">constitutional head of our executive government</a>, and our <a href="http://www.australia.gov.au/about-government/how-government-works">head of state</a>.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>But it’s also important to remember that much goes unmentioned in our Constitution. Many key elements of our system of government <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-unwritten-rules-shape-ministerial-accountability-50515">don’t appear in the text of the Constitution</a>. The prime minister, for instance, doesn’t rate a mention. </p>
<p>To help make up for the omissions, our political and legal history has been guided by rules known as <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-unwritten-rules-shape-ministerial-accountability-50515">constitutional conventions</a>. These conventions are shaped by British history and by Australian history, and have occasionally proven <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-might-the-dismissals-legacy-mean-for-an-australian-republic-push-50299">very controversial</a>.</p>
<p>Unlike <a href="https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights">many</a> <a href="http://www.gov.za/documents/constitution/chapter-2-bill-rights">constitutional</a> <a href="http://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/eng/Historical_Information/The_Constitution/February_2015_-_Constitution_of_Ireland_.pdf">systems</a>, Australia lacks any form of comprehensive bill of rights protections. Instead, Australia’s constitutional system was <a href="http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/publications/papers-and-podcasts/australian-constitution/keane.aspx">built on the principle</a> that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… the rights of individuals are sufficiently secured by ensuring, as far as possible, to each a share, and an equal share, in political power.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nonetheless, the text of our Constitution shapes what our governments can do, and the way in which they can do it. The Constitution affects how governments <a href="https://jade.io/article/267004">spend money</a>, the position of <a href="http://www.aspg.org.au/conferences/darwin2012/Session%201%20-%20Williams.pdf">Indigenous Australians</a>, and policy in areas ranging from <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HCA/2006/52.html">industrial relations</a> and <a href="http://eresources.hcourt.gov.au/downloadPdf/2013/HCA/55">marriage</a> to the <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/high_ct/158clr1.html">environment</a> and <a href="https://jade.io/article/67728">asylum seekers</a>. </p>
<p>Significantly, the Constitution also protects our role as citizens in <a href="https://jade.io/article/15319">choosing our representatives</a> and in <a href="https://jade.io/article/67991">holding them accountable</a>.</p>
<h2>What are its contemporary implications?</h2>
<p>The Constitution is <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/coaca430/s128.html">hard to change</a>. The federal parliament first must approve any proposed amendment. The amendment must then pass a referendum by a “<a href="http://education.aec.gov.au/teacher-resources/files/referendum-2-double-majority.pdf">double majority</a>”: approved by a majority of voters as well as a majority of voters in a majority of states.</p>
<p>In 116 years, <a href="http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22handbook%2Fnewhandbook%2F2014-10-31%2F0049%22">44 attempts</a> have been made to change the Constitution. Only eight have succeeded. </p>
<p>The failed <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp0203/03rp11">attempts</a> have included efforts to switch parliamentary terms from three years to four years, multiple efforts to protect basic civil rights, and the unsuccessful republic referendum to replace the monarch with an Australian. The last time the Constitution was successfully amended was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_referendum,_1977">in 1977</a>.</p>
<p>Some may see this inflexibility as a strength: the Constitution is stable and enduring. But it also makes the Constitution very hard to update in response to changing times and changing values. </p>
<p>As a result, the Constitution is a document that reflects the priorities of the late 19th century <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/comment/our-nations-rulebook-is-showing-its-age-we-desperately-need-a-review-of-the-constitution-20161229-gtjf7l.html">more than the early 21st century</a>.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, after 116 years of federation, there are many contemporary debates about the Constitution. Some are about how we should interpret the Constitution we have. Others are about finding ways to update our system of government <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/FedJSchol/2003/3.html">without</a> having to amend the Constitution. </p>
<p>But there are also debates about changing the Constitution, such as whether Indigenous Australians should be recognised in <a href="https://referendumcouncil.org.au">symbolic or substantive ways</a>, whether the role of <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-why-are-we-having-a-referendum-on-local-government-14112">local government</a> should be enshrined, or whether to <a href="http://www.republic.org.au">replace the monarchy</a> with an Australian head of state. </p>
<p>Or should we undertake a <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/comment/our-nations-rulebook-is-showing-its-age-we-desperately-need-a-review-of-the-constitution-20161229-gtjf7l.html">much more serious overhaul</a>? </p>
<p>These questions reflect our history, and the answers to them will shape our future. But they also raise broader questions for all Australians: what do we expect from our politics? And what do we expect from our Constitution?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74518/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ryan Goss does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Australia’s Constitution is a product of foreign and domestic political influences. It has become one of the enduring aspects of Australian politics and law, for better and worse.Ryan Goss, Senior Lecturer in Law, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/537412016-02-01T23:57:54Z2016-02-01T23:57:54ZLacking a script, individuals drove the evolution of prime ministerial power<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109561/original/image-20160128-27180-11ia9d8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">John Curtin and Ben Chifley were successful in expanding the power of the Commonwealth – and thus that of the prime minister.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Alan Porritt</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Australian Federation was established to address issues that seemed best resolved collectively rather than by each of the colonies acting alone (such as in defence), to co-ordinate activities that would benefit from uniformity (such as immigration and postal services), and to break down barriers to national economic development (like border tariffs between colonies). </p>
<p>The constitution’s purpose was to define specific powers, to be exercised at federal level, with all residual powers to remain with the states. In deference to established ideas of states’ sovereignty, federal power was intentionally circumscribed. In effect the prime minister’s power was constrained.</p>
<p>The issue for each prime minister described in our new book, <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/items/163675">Settling the Office: The Australian Prime Ministership from Federation to Reconstruction</a>, was how to work effectively within those bounds. Almost all at some stage decided that the limitation of the prime minister’s remit was unequal to the challenge and tried to amend the Constitution. </p>
<p>Only four out of the 24 referenda they initiated were passed:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>one (second Deakin ministry, 1906) to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_referendum,_1906">enable concurrent elections</a> for both houses of parliament;</p></li>
<li><p>one (third Deakin ministry, 1910) allowing the Commonwealth to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_referendum,_1910_(State_Debts)">take over state debt</a>; </p></li>
<li><p>one (under Stanley Bruce, 1928) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_referendum,_1928">establishing the Loan Council</a>; and </p></li>
<li><p>one (under Ben Chifley, 1946) allowing the Commonwealth to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_referendum,_1946_(Social_Services)">legislate</a> for the provision of social services. </p></li>
</ul>
<p>Despite these frustrations, prime ministers embraced <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajph.12084/abstract">the view</a> that their office was “the blue ribbon of the highest possible ambition”. Each would share something of Edmund Barton’s goal to create <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/antipodes.28.1.0141">“a nation for a continent”</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109735/original/image-20160131-3894-gkt3h5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109735/original/image-20160131-3894-gkt3h5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109735/original/image-20160131-3894-gkt3h5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109735/original/image-20160131-3894-gkt3h5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109735/original/image-20160131-3894-gkt3h5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109735/original/image-20160131-3894-gkt3h5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109735/original/image-20160131-3894-gkt3h5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109735/original/image-20160131-3894-gkt3h5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Miegunyah Press</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The leadership task was to harness those twin drives, of personal ambition and national creation, to the resolution of concrete questions. How was a prime minister to identify “national” issues and to become the national voice for collective action? And how could he gain the authority to speak and act in the national interest?</p>
<h2>The prime ministership’s changing nature</h2>
<p>Alfred Deakin and his contemporaries invented the Australian prime ministership. But it was not settled as a platform for national leadership until John Curtin and Chifley managed to turn it into the pivot of government to which we have since become accustomed.</p>
<p>Its evolution from the early Federation years to the postwar nation-building years was not a matter of linear progression. There was no grand design to guide it, no “Canberra consensus” to drive it forward. The office was made up as its holders went along. They shaped what it meant to be prime minister through their personal leadership styles and their responses to the circumstances they encountered.</p>
<p>Precedent, procedure and public service support structures could not be leveraged to provide the prime minister with an institutional authority that could be wielded when other political powerhouses – state premiers, partyrooms and factions – flexed their muscles. They simply did not yet exist. </p>
<p>Neither were foreign examples, even obvious ones such as Britain or Canada, turned to in search for a script for the office.</p>
<p>The absence of such a script allowed for the great stylistic contrasts between Deakin, Andrew Fisher, Billy Hughes and Bruce in particular. Who leads a government matters – it always does – but in the early decades of the Australian Commonwealth it perhaps mattered most.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109562/original/image-20160129-27136-7bdwho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109562/original/image-20160129-27136-7bdwho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109562/original/image-20160129-27136-7bdwho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109562/original/image-20160129-27136-7bdwho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109562/original/image-20160129-27136-7bdwho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109562/original/image-20160129-27136-7bdwho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109562/original/image-20160129-27136-7bdwho.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">As prime minister, Billy Hughes personalised every battle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Alan Porritt</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For the early prime ministers there was little else to fall back on but their personal skills, zest and wits. Much would depend on individual preferences: to capitalise on charisma (Deakin), to personalise every battle (Hughes), to insist on process (Bruce), to prioritise the cause (Fisher). There was little administrative support. Cabinet processes were informal and fluid.</p>
<p>Parliamentary majorities, delivered by a disciplined party system, were not yet assured. Some prime ministers, such as Fisher and Bruce, took an interest in building up institutional arrangements for the office. Others, particularly Hughes but also James Scullin and Joseph Lyons, ignored or abolished some of the fledgling support mechanisms their predecessors had put in place. </p>
<p>All had to learn the exercise of party management, cabinet discipline, proper administration and public communication as the preconditions for authority.</p>
<p>What the early prime ministers had in common, however, was that they lacked institutional clout. The initial federal settlement had delivered scant powers to the Commonwealth. All prime ministers from Barton to Chifley struggled to appropriate more, in protracted, sometimes intense and often frustrating clashes with the states, industry and the unions. </p>
<p>Bruce saw most clearly the need to develop the office as a public institution with the processes and resources to ensure control. But facing an extraneous challenge – economic decline – he would over-reach. His institution-building was subsequently eroded. The cleanest route for changing the balance of powers in favour of the Commonwealth government – by referendum – rarely delivered the desired outcomes.</p>
<p>Instead, prime ministers often depended upon critical moments created by unusual external events to provide them with a rationale to wage such battles. The two world wars in particular provided opportunities for increasing the power of the Commonwealth – and thus for the prime minister. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109564/original/image-20160129-27156-13ysw0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109564/original/image-20160129-27156-13ysw0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109564/original/image-20160129-27156-13ysw0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109564/original/image-20160129-27156-13ysw0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109564/original/image-20160129-27156-13ysw0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=995&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109564/original/image-20160129-27156-13ysw0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=995&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109564/original/image-20160129-27156-13ysw0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=995&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Robert Menzies didn’t have the political momentum to use the war to increase federal power.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1914, Fisher no longer had the stamina to try; Hughes seized the moment energetically but erratically. Twenty years later, Menzies lacked political momentum to exploit the advent of war to increase federal power.</p>
<p>Curtin and Chifley did so more methodically and much more successfully. They took hold of the purse strings, laid the foundations of a national welfare state, and built a professional federal public service. They succeeded where their mentor Scullin had failed when he was confronted with that other great international crisis – the Depression.</p>
<p>Instead of being able to leverage it to strengthen the office, Menzies had been overwhelmed by the divisions that the challenge had created in his party and across the country. And he could not call on the emergency powers conferred by war.</p>
<p>But even a deft institution-builder like Chifley would experience the limits of prime-ministerial power when he tried to nationalise banking, even though, by 1949, the office had acquired institutional clout. His failure of judgement is a salutary reminder that while we need to understand the possibilities of the institution – and the historical contingencies in which it is enmeshed – we must never lose sight of the character of our leaders.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>This is an edited extract from <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/items/163675">Settling the Office: The Australian Prime Ministership from Federation to Reconstruction</a> by Paul Strangio, Paul ‘t Hart and James Walter (The Miegunyah Press).</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/53741/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Strangio's research for this study was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant.
</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Walter receives ARC funding.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul 't Hart receives ARC funding.</span></em></p>Alfred Deakin and his contemporaries invented the Australian prime ministership. But it was not settled as a platform for national leadership until John Curtin and Ben Chifley’s time.Paul Strangio, Associate Professor of Politics, Monash UniversityJames Walter, Professor of Political Science, Monash UniversityPaul 't Hart, Professor of Public Administration, Utrecht School of Governance, Utrecht UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/379002015-02-25T19:31:14Z2015-02-25T19:31:14ZAlfred Deakin provides a contrast to an Abbott lost for words<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72831/original/image-20150223-32217-n3gikt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=50%2C90%2C635%2C473&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Unlike early 20th-century prime minister Alfred Deakin, Tony Abbott has no language for reaching out to the Australian people.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Library of Congress</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>How do you rally a people to accept the responsibilities of national security, the burden of their own defence? Here’s how then-prime minister Alfred Deakin did it in 1907:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We are a free people, with political equality and sole authority in a country where all have the opportunities to possess homes of their own. Our position as free men in a free country casts on all the responsibility of undertaking our defence.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Deakin’s words are a snapshot of current Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s problem. Unlike Deakin, an architect of Federation, Abbott has no language for reaching out to the Australian people. </p>
<p>Deakin’s 1907 defence statement was delivered in parliament, a symbolism that stressed his accountability and exposure to his critics – within parliament and without. Abbott’s <a href="https://www.scribd.com/doc/256590320/National-Security-Statement-Canberra">national security statement</a> earlier this week was delivered in a small room at Australian Federal Police headquarters, filled with a carefully selected audience of political allies and the heads of the security agencies. </p>
<p>Journalists were not allowed to direct questions to Abbott. He warned that “we cannot allow bad people to use our good nature against us”, apparently not least those within Australia. This included “Muslim leaders”, whom Abbott implied may not be sincere when they describe Islam as a religion of peace. Abbott’s default instinct is division, and his words reflect it.</p>
<p>But from one speech to the next, Deakin spoke an inclusive language, drawing the Australian people into the task of their own government. He respected that “the hands of people” were creating a Commonwealth “for themselves”, as he declared following Federation in 1901. Deakin knew what he believed in; it helped him to believe in himself and to survive three terms as prime minister between 1903 and 1910.</p>
<p>By contrast, the Abbott government’s first budget was dominated by harsh measures delivered without warning. Abbott could not offer a compelling narrative to justify cuts to pensions or university funding. Abbott lamented that the government needed to clean up <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/abbott-fixing-labors-mess-is-not-enough/story-e6frg75f-1226903787490">“Labor’s mess”</a>, hardly a compelling or inclusive appeal.</p>
<p>Sifting the bullet-point clichés and slogans of Abbott’s statements, the only vivid appeal to inclusion was triggered by fear. Faced with a <a href="https://theconversation.com/liberal-leadership-tensions-give-neglected-backbenchers-a-voice-37328">backbench revolt</a> and a <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/liberal-leadership-crisis">leadership spill</a>, Abbott desperately – and inaccurately – asserted that it was <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-01/abbott-determined-to-stay-on-as-pm/6060490">for the people</a> to make or unmake his prime ministership, not his despairing Liberal colleagues in the party room. Lost for words, Abbott resorted to bullying the backbench by slogan.</p>
<p>Abbott’s post-spill promises were equally unconvincing. He repeated sound bites of contrite script. He claimed to be chastened and changed; he would be “different” and “do better” – but do what differently? What, precisely, will be better?</p>
<p>Deakin’s rhetoric dealt in specifics. He moved from one substantive reform to the next, arguing each case in detail as the Commonwealth accrued what he described as its “great institutions”. These included the establishment of the High Court of Australia, inaugurating a system of arbitration of industrial disputes between employers and employees, and fighting through the enervating political trench warfare of implementing the tariff system.</p>
<p>Deakin invested the dense web of bureaucratic tariff schedules with the aspirations of a nation. He promised to ease the stress of a people worn by the political divisions and economic suffering of the 1890s. By protecting jobs and industries from foreign competition, he declared in 1903 that the “Australian tariff” would inaugurate an era of “fiscal peace”.</p>
<p>A modern audience would be shocked at the depth of Deakin’s speeches. Opening his 1903 election campaign in Ballarat, Deakin was on his feet for two-and-a-half hours. <a href="http://electionspeeches.moadoph.gov.au/speeches/1903-alfred-deakin">Deakin said</a> it was his duty:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… to call your attention to the number and magnitude of the interests over which you have control. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72839/original/image-20150223-32217-l91qx8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72839/original/image-20150223-32217-l91qx8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/72839/original/image-20150223-32217-l91qx8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72839/original/image-20150223-32217-l91qx8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72839/original/image-20150223-32217-l91qx8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72839/original/image-20150223-32217-l91qx8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72839/original/image-20150223-32217-l91qx8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/72839/original/image-20150223-32217-l91qx8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tony Abbott has struggled to articulate a coherent policy agenda.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Mick Tsikas</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He was the instrument of their self-government and, in outlining the responsibilities they shared, Deakin said he would rather “tire your patience … than mislead your sense”.</p>
<p>Deakin respected the intelligence of his audience. His speech was received with “intense enthusiasm”. Even his dedicated political enemies at the Melbourne Argus newspaper conceded the speech reflected his skills as “a supreme word-spinner”.</p>
<p>Presented with an opportunity to set out his policy ambitions at the National Press Club earlier this month, Abbott <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/tony-abbott-press-club-speech-key-points-and-full-transcript/story-e6frg6n6-1227205021408">struggled</a> to describe an invigorated policy framework. A week later, ABC 7.30 host Leigh Sales posed Abbott a <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2015/s4176867.htm">blunt question</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Who are you? </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sales offered Abbott a chance to describe his ideals, to tell the people what he stood for. Abbott merely promised to undo his inept “captain’s calls”, including the future awarding of knighthoods. Abbott reminded viewers of his errors of judgement.</p>
<p>Democratic government is an endless negotiation of the governed and their representatives. Trust is shaped in words; deception is unmasked in the slipshod abuse of language. A lack of substance is exposed in the fumbling refuge of cliché and repeated slogan.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/37900/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Hearn receives funding from the Australian Prime Minister's Centre, Museum of Democracy, Old Parliament House Canberra. He is a member of the Australian Labor Party.</span></em></p>Alfred Deakin knew what he believed in; it helped him to believe in himself, and to survive three terms as prime minister.Mark Hearn, Lecturer, Department of Modern History and Politics, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.