The Liberals: The NSW Division 1945-2000, by Ian Hancock

NOT THE LEAST MERIT of Ian Hancock’s timely examination of the Liberal Party in New South Wales is his balanced treatment of the Liberal Wars—the factional battles between the party’s left and right wings—the one faction dubbed Trendies or Moderates or The Group, the other “extreme Right-wingers” or Uglies or The Taliban.

He tracks the Wars from the 1960s to today—despite the book’s subtitle, it brings the story to 2007—and he notes more than once the lost opportunities for compromise. Both factions are legitimate, he says, and there should be some sort of reconciliation, however messy. It will not come from structural reforms or even ideology. It requires a revival of civility and trust. But there is little sign of it in either camp. The party organisation continues to haemorrhage.

I first stumbled onto these bloody crossroads forty years ago during the federal election of 1966 when a bitter skirmish in the northern Sydney seat of Warringah became a dress rehearsal for later confrontations. I was editor of the Bulletin at the time and, according to the now abandoned journalistic convention, not a member of the Liberal or any party. But the Liberal candidate, Edward St John QC, had my editorial support. He combined small-l liberalism, anti-censorship and opposition to South African apartheid with anticommunism and commitment to the war in Vietnam.

But he also aroused the contempt of those Right-wingers who gave a high priority to supporting the South African and Rhodesian regimes as bulwarks of Western civilisation against communism. They did not trust St John’s anticommunism. (“Some anticommunists,” one said, “are anti-anticommunists.”)

The Trendies labelled the Right-wingers racists, homophobes and strident anticommunists. The Right in turn despised the Trendies as soft on drugs, homosexuality, abortion, pornography and national security. (Both factions considered it revealing that the barrister St John had represented the publisher of the satirical magazine Oz in the obscenity trial in 1964. I had supported Oz in the Bulletin.)

I had not met any of the Right-wingers but I knew St John and his family, including his daughter Madeleine, later a brilliant novelist. I did my best to help his election campaign by running sympathetic articles in the Bulletin. Sam Lipski wrote most of them, notably a late summing-up, “The Campaign in Warringah”. St John letter-boxed off-prints throughout the electorate. He won the seat easily (without needing his DLP preferences). I wrote an ingenuous editorial urging his rapid elevation to the ministry. St John took it to heart. (He did not last long in the Liberal Party or the parliament and was defeated in the 1969 election.)

So my first encounter with “the extreme Right” saw me in the same camp as “the Trendies”. I had some reservations. Like the Trendies, I was against censorship (and had written a book in that cause), although I did not share their permissive line on drugs and abortion. I also regarded support for South African apartheid as both wrong and doomed. Again like St John, I agreed with the Right’s hostility to communism but not with all their anticommunist policies. Surely there was room for persuasion, compromise and civility.

My next encounter, a year or two later, strengthened that broad approach. By then I was the Liberal candidate for the marginal state seat of Fuller in Sydney between the Lane Cove and Parramatta rivers. The sitting member was a well-entrenched, popular and decent Labor man. He was going to be hard to beat.

In my pre-selection a couple of members of the committee challenged me over my opposition to apartheid. They were plainly a small minority.

But the general election campaign brought me into closer contact with the Right, particularly David Clarke, now an MLC. Forty years ago he led the Ryde Young Liberals. Under his leadership they campaigned tirelessly, in the dreadful summer heat of 1968, door-knocking, letter-boxing, working the shopping centres, manning the booths. We won on DLP preferences.

I have never been able to recognise David Clarke as the sinister eminence grise demonised in the media. His views on several issues (Rhodesia, South Africa) were not mine but we had no difficulty in collaborating. There was surely a place in a broad-church liberal-conservative party for a man of his drive and commitment. (For a more evangelical Christian perspective on these events, see Doug Buckley’s revealing memoir Fragments from a Forgettory, Temple Press/Sid Harta Publishers, 2007.)

But the barricades were strengthened in the later 1970s. Out-manoeuvred and sometimes out-stacked in many of the established Liberal Party branches, the Right moved into new regions, especially in western Sydney, to set up new small branches (with voting rights at party conferences and in the pre-selection of candidates). Like the new general secretary, Jim Carlton, I was, as Hancock puts it, “not unduly worried about the emergence of a more vociferous and better organised conservative grouping”. With goodwill it should be possible, I believed, for all groupings to pull together.

THIS WAS THE STATE of play when I became Leader of the Opposition in New South Wales in 1977. Despite my optimism, it was disconcerting to find that Liberal staffers of some federal parliamentarians had turned their offices into paramilitary outposts with maps of Sydney on the wall that flagged each Party branch still under “Ugly” control and still to be stacked. Or to have one prominent Right-winger “warn” me that the KGB had infiltrated the higher reaches of the Party secretariat. (He named names.)

Typical of the time was a State Council motion in 1978 to adopt a report deploring the divisive influence of a number of Right-wingers, especially Lyenko Urbanchich, then President of the short-lived Liberal Ethnic Council. The motion was defeated after a passionate speech by John Spender QC: you would not, he called, hang a dog on the evidence provided in the report. But the following year the same Spender moved the expulsion of Urbanchich after scrutinising four articles that had been published in Nazi-occupied Slovenia under Urbanchich’s name. Urbanchich claimed that Nazi censors had edited and rewritten them to add anti-Semitic themes. Spender’s motion was narrowly defeated (by one vote, from memory) following another passionate speech, this time by the small-l liberal and former federal MP, Bob Solomon. He stressed the historic and savage complexities of Balkan politics. A party that would expel Urbanchich, he said, was not “worth belonging to”.

I still believed that with reasonable leadership we could marginalise the cranks of both factions and rub along together. In my folly (vanity?) I even imagined I might be able to give that leadership, or some of it. In the 1978 general election I had a well-known Moderate as campaign director and well-known Right-wingers and Moderates on various campaign committees. According to Hancock, people were divided about me. Critics said I was naive. The patronising said I was too “good” for politics. (No killer instinct.) Others, perhaps more objective, thought I was too “brusque and aloof”. In any case I failed.

The Liberal Wars continued unabated after my defeat in 1978, although I was not directly involved with them during my later years in the federal parliament. Hancock describes some extraordinary confrontations, including allegations of sexual perversions, embezzlement and even murder. The idea that some prominent Moderates are agents of the PLO or some Right-wingers are Nazis are among the less startling. No slur, as Hancock puts it, was too cheap or nasty.

State Directors did not and do not last long amid this bitterness. One said he could not do his job of helping win government when his time was spent on intra-Party procedural disputes masking struggles for control. Is this venue constitutional? Has this meeting been validly called? Is X eligible to vote? Is Y entitled to be a delegate? Or a proxy? Was that quorum really valid? After a few months of this, he resigned. The House That Carrick Built with such dedication in the days of give-and-take had crumbled. (John Carrick was the general secretary for twenty-three years from 1948.)

There were several reports about what should be done. In one, the Federal Director, Lynton Crosby, observed mildly that there were “relatively more abnormal people” in the New South Wales Division than in the other Divisions of the Liberal Party. Yet this Division under Jim Carlton was the driving force behind the revitalisation of the federal secretariat in the 1970s (which Hancock does not discuss). It has also helped win several state and federal elections.

The media regularly give generous space to the damaging plots, branch-stacks and stand-over tactics of the Right. They have generally been silent about the damaging plots, branch-stacks and stand-over tactics of the Left. Hancock judiciously redresses the balance and documents both. In particular he writes in telling detail about the dreadful pre-selections in North Sydney in 1979 and in Cook in southern Sydney almost twenty years later. (Both had stabilising happy endings, with Spender pre-selected in one and Bruce Baird in the other.) There continue to be complaints every year or two about branch-stacking in pre-selections, including another in Cook in 2007 and one in Mitchell in north-western Sydney.

Neither faction is going to disappear or be eliminated (although at the moment, the Right, Hancock observes, can muster more “will, backbone and organisation”). Throughout the world all parties are ideologically and factionally divided. Communism is dead but factions divide over anything from terrorism and Islamicism to stem cells, same-sex marriage, republicanism, free trade and federalism. Structural reforms (for example, of voting methods) will make little long-term difference. Nor will fine restatements of beliefs. (I drafted one splendid Declaration of Principles some twenty or more years ago. The State Council adopted it after an ill-tempered factional debate—and quickly forgot it.)

This is how Hancock ends his enquiry:

“The real harm lies in the factional warfare which underpins the destructive culture of winner-take-all, has led to a decline of civility and promoted mediocrity. The real need of the NSW Division at the end of the twentieth century was not structural reform but an infusion of the spirit of give-and-take, of an understanding that the political “enemy” sits opposite and not behind or alongside, of a recognition that the Liberal Party works better when the pragmatists rather than the ideologues are in charge, and of a willingness to turn the “broad church” into something more than a cliché.”

But is anyone listening?

Peter Coleman served in the New South Wales and Commonwealth parliaments. It was, he says, a long time ago in another life in another country.