Australian Liberals

Names What are we to call the political tradition which is the subject of this book? Liberal, conservative, anti-labour, non-labour? This is a fraught question, and there is no easy answer. The question is one that has exercised the party itself as it has re-formed throughout the century. In contrast to the Australian Labor Party (ALP) which has had a continuous organisation since 1901 and a coherent national structure from shortly after, the Liberals have re-formed four times: at Fusion in 1909 when Alfred Deakin's Victorian based Liberals and George Reid's New South Wales based free traders-turned-conservative and anti-socialist came together to form the first united non-labour party; in 1916 when Billy Hughes and other proconscriptionists left the Labor government to join with the Opposition and form the Nationalist government with a Nationalist Party quickly following; in 1931 in the depth of the depression when the Nationalists remade themselves as the United Australia Party with Joe Lyons as leader; and in 1944 when the Liberal Party was formed, finally stabilising non-labour's party organisation. Is it liberalism or conservatism that holds this party tradition together? Or, as the term ‘non-labour’ suggests, is it the opposition to labour which provides the strongest glue? John Howard has argued that the Liberal Party is the trustee of both the classical liberal and conservative traditions; that it combines a liberal economic policy and a conservative social policy.