Oh, hapless Liberals, learn from Disraeli

Among the main centre-right parties of the key countries in the Anglosphere, the Liberal Party of Australia stands out as an anomaly – it is the only one that uses "liberal" in its party name. In Canada, the dominant party of the political right is called the Conservative Party and its main competitor, the Liberal Party. The US Republican Party routinely describes itself as "conservative" and derides its opponents as "liberals". In the United Kingdom, the longest-lived and, until recently, most successfully political party is the Conservative Party. In the great parliamentary debates of the 19^th Century the leader of this party, Benjamin Disraeli, battled his opponent, William Gladstone, leader of the Liberal Party.

The name Liberal Party of Australia occasionally leads to confusion abroad. But it also has caused some muddled thinking at home too. Many, including many party members and their leaders, seem to believe that the party formed in 1943 was meant to be a reincarnation of the British Liberal Party. But that party had been destroyed and discredited by the time Menzies came along. He was not trying to emulate it.

The reality is, as academic Dr Judith Brett has correctly argued, Menzies and others instead looked to the Federation Era "liberalism" of Alfred Deakin as the model for their new party. "Deakinite liberalism" could be described more as a form of enlightened nationalism – focused on strong protective tariffs, a very discerning immigration policy, and a muscular government role in nation-building. In many cases it advocated policies which were the exact opposite of what Gladstonian Liberals believed.

Australian "liberalism" was, in practice, a nationalistic political philosophy that had much in common with other New World conservative nationalist parties such as the American Republicans of Abraham Lincoln, the Canadian Conservatives of John A MacDonald, and those led by New Zealand's longest-serving Prime Minister, Richard Seddon.

It is true the term "conservative" was not originally politically popular here (nor in the United States) as it was associated with the established church, aristocracy, and the House of Lords which had grown up organically and were particular to an Old World nation like England. However, Deakin liberalism nevertheless also owed a debt to the broader "one nation" conservative thinking of Benjamin Disraeli. This is rarely recognized on the modern Australian right.

Instead, in recent times, there has been an attempt to monopolize the Liberal Party as solely the property of one political tradition – classical liberalism. "80 years of Liberalism" proudly declared banners unfurled at recent commemorations for Australia's most successful political party a few months before it was electorally smashed at the recent federal election. The explanation for this is probably a product of ignorance rather than any deliberate thinking. Political conservatism is simply not very well understood in Australia. There is no equivalent here to a British Roger Scruton or an American Russell Kirk. All the prominent legacy think tanks of the right in Australia – the Centre for Independent Studies, the Institute for Public Affairs, the Robert Menzies Institute – claim to be "classical liberals". It is hard to think of a centre-right columnist in any Australian broadsheet who has not described him or herself in similar terms.

Gladstone undoubtedly would have recognized these types as his ideological brothers and sisters. Like the modern liberal right in Australia, he stood for free trade, a muscular foreign policy abroad in defence of universal human rights, often strong moralistic rhetoric regarding social ills, and an unceasing zeal for reforming laws in the name of individual liberty.

Many in Australia now even erroneously describe these positions as "conservative". Whenever they do I think of Inigo Montoya's famous line from The Princess Bride: "You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

The greatest 19^th Century British conservative prime minister was certainly profoundly critical of these types of policies and, indeed, their entire philosophical worldview.

Trade

Benjamin Disraeli made his name opposing free trade and was sceptical of it throughout this life. He thought the grandiose claims that it would bring in universal peace and prosperity did not properly take in to account history or the real world of competing nation states. He recognized the harm this policy could cause to working people, the industrial capacity of a nation, and to its social cohesion. While he operated at the high point of British liberalism when "free trade" had become accepted unshakable doctrine in England (although not in the United States and Germany), he never resiled from his long-held beliefs. "I am not one of those who consider that the principle of buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest is the great panacea for human affairs". He cautioned that there are those who "would have you believe that free trade is the cure for all ills, but it is a medicine that may poison as much as it heals."

He did not seek to turn England in to an open-borders free trade zone of which the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal would approve. Neither did he think his country would be better as a "Singapore on the Thames" as modern-day British liberals such as Daniel Hannan sometimes describe as the ideal.