Liberals ignore, despise and knife their leaders – and drive their party over a cliff

John Faulkner, Labor’s respected former Senate leader and keeper of the Whitlam flame, once said to me that one of the biggest differences between Labor and the Liberal Party was their different attitudes to their own history – in particular, to past leaders. Liberals celebrate only their most successful leaders, said Faulkner, whereas Labor celebrates all its leaders – even the second-rate ones. The exception, of course, is the rats (although even Labor leaders who ratted still have their photographs hung in the caucus room).

One of the paradoxes of Australian politics is that the conservative side has so little sense of its own history, while the party of the left celebrates – indeed, shamelessly mythologises – its own. For instance, a prime minister as pedestrian as Ben Chifley has been enlarged into a beloved national icon – a pipe-smoking, cardigan-wearing old sweetheart who preferred the modesty of the Kurrajong Hotel to the stateliness of The Lodge. The catastrophes of his government – its disastrous attempt to nationalise the banks; the worst industrial conflict in our history, which put troops in coalmines – have been airbrushed away.

Chifley’s successor as Labor leader, H V Evatt – one of the most unfit national leaders in our history, whose political incompetence failed to avert the split that kept Labor out of office for two decades – is remembered by invariably sympathetic biographers as a passionate, if flawed, idealist. (Always beware that weasel word “flawed” in political hagiography – it’s usually a euphemism for a multitude of character defects.)

Labor honours its leaders in death, even if it stabbed them in life. At Simon Crean’s funeral two years ago, Melbourne’s St Paul’s cathedral was packed to overflowing. Crean may never have been given the chance to fight an election, but his farewell was a vast gathering of the tribes. How many of the Liberal tribes do you imagine would turn out for the two Liberal leaders who never got to fight an election – Brendan Nelson and Alexander Downer?

For every Labor prime minister whose government ended in failure, there’s always a villain to blame. In the case of James Scullin, it was the wicked Bank of England and its devilish agent Sir Otto Neimeyer; in Whitlam’s case, the scheming Sir John Kerr (in league, for loopier conspiracy theorists, with the Palace and/or the CIA); for the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government, Rupert Murdoch and his evil myrmidons. It’s always someone else’s fault when things end badly. The fallen hero/evil villain narrative gives Labor history a vaguely operatic flavour that the boring old Liberal Party quite lacks.

Perhaps that is why Liberals are so uninterested in their own history – and woefully neglectful of their former leaders. Or perhaps it is because of the dominance in their imagination of Robert Menzies. For most of its existence, the Liberal Party was a one-hero party. John Howard has since joined Menzies in the Liberal empyrean. The rest – including seven prime ministers – are ignored, forgotten or even despised.

Last month, the 50th anniversary of the Dismissal prompted endless commemorations by Labor, and by its surrogates like the ABC. Predictably, they became Gough Whitlam tribute acts. Expect no Liberal Party commemorations for the anniversary next weekend of the denouement of the events of November 11 – Malcolm Fraser’s historic landslide on December 13.

Yet Fraser led the Liberal Party for eight years (all but eight months of them as prime minister), and was our fourth longest-serving prime minister. The Fraser government shaped modern Australia fundamentally and for the better, in particular by transitioning us to a multicultural society, the architecture of which was created by Fraser in collaboration with his adviser Petro Georgiou. It was distinguished by its welcoming of refugees (in particular, the Vietnamese refugees whom Whitlam, to his eternal shame, abandoned), and its human rights-focused foreign policy, reflected in Australia’s global leadership in ending apartheid in South Africa.