Australian Polity, Volume 9 Number 3 - Digital Version

but the good life for ordinary men and women. The
ordinary man, as I know him, asks for a happy life,
not a complaining one; for a full life, not an idle one.”
Which brings me to the great challenges we face if we
are to be successful in seeking to represent our fellow
Australians.
to be an active part of our great political movement.
But we must also recognise that this involves more than
criticising the Labor Party, especially when in Opposition.
It is often said that Oppositions do not win elections,
governments lose. This is partly true, but the Opposition
must be credible and believable to succeed.
First, we must engage more of them in the political
process. I am told that when Menzies and others formed
the Liberal Party in 1944, there were 200,000 members.
The population of Australia was just seven million people.
Today the membership of the party would be lucky to be
more than 50,000 people, while the national population
is 25 million. In other words, there were some 15 times
more members in the early years of the Party than there
are today. We are not alone, the same trend has afflicted
our major opponent, but we need to engage more of our
fellow Australians.
That means we must understand their challenges and
aspirations. In his ‘Forgotten People’ broadcast - perhaps
the most famous of Menzies’s speeches, he observed:
As Menzies said: “Opposition must be regarded as a great
constructive period in the life of a party, not a period in
the wilderness, but a period of preparation for the high
responsibilities in which you hope will come.”
Let me recount a sobering statistic. Since 1990 in the
States and Territories, Liberal/National parties have
only been in government for an average of 12 years.
While this varies from place to place, State and Territory
Liberal/National coalitions have only sat on the Treasury
benches for a little over one-third on average of the past
30 years. Only in one State, Western Australia, has the
Liberal Party been in government for more than 50%
of the time since 1990. Currently, it is likely to be some
time before the party is returned to government in WA.
I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to
be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty
gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the
officialdom of the organised masses. It is to be
found in the homes of people who are nameless
and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual
religious conviction or dogma, see in their children
their greatest contribution to the immortality of
their race. The home is the foundation of sanity
and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of
continuity; its health determines the health of society
as a whole.
These ‘forgotten people’ were the “salary-earners,
shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and
women, farmers and so on,” said Menzies. They are
the people I represent in my multi-cultural electorate:
the Italian butcher, the Greek greengrocer, the Chinese
pharmacist, the Indian restauranteur, the Aussie
tradesman, the immigrants who struggle to ensure their
children can get a tertiary education, and so on. They
were John Howard’s ‘battlers’. Our challenge is to reach
out to these people, to engage with them, to demonstrate
our vision for them, and where possible, to invite them
Why is this important? Apart from learning how to live
with and manage the Covid pandemic, there are a series
of major challenges facing us. These include paying for
the significant debt we have incurred in response to
Covid; ensuring the rule of law is maintained and peace
and stability preserved in the face of an increasingly
aggressive Chinese Communist Party; and addressing
domestic challenges including the substantial blow-out
in the costs of the NDIS. In addition, inflation is rising
globally, which if it continues, will impact us as well.
As John Howard said, how we in Australia respond
to these challenges will be determined by the ruling
philosophy and values of the parties in government. It is
why we must, in Howard’s words, portray and argue for
our vision of the common good. This is more than how
we respond to each program or proposal that is mooted.
It is about our vision for the way of life for Australians.
If the people understand and trust our values, they are
more likely to trust specific proposals. It is our task to
argue for the type of Australia, we envisage for the future.
This is an edited extract from an address to the ACT Young Liberals,
August 7, 2021.
46 Australian Polity