No, the Liberal Party does not have a history of upholding the right to protest in Australia - just look back to the Vietnam War

More than a year after the eruption of conflict between Hamas and Israel, the escalating war in the Middle East is roiling Australian society and politics.

Demonstrations about the conflict are a routine event, with mobilisations by pro-Palestinian activists especially commonplace on the streets of the major cities. In this impassioned climate, an unfocussed debate has emerged about political protest. Questions have been raised – though far from cogently answered – about what ought to be the acceptable limits of political expression and dissent in this country.

In this context, writers have contended that it is the Liberal Party that has traditionally upheld the right to freedom of political speech and the expression of dissenting views in Australia. Working from that premise, some of these writers have further suggested that Peter Dutton’s intimidatory remarks about pro-Palestinian demonstrators constitutes a significant departure from the party’s conventional habit of mind. Dutton has urged, for example, that flag waving activists be “subject to the full force of the law”, demanded amendments to Commonwealth law to empower the Australian Federal Police to arrest transgressors and made threatening noises about deporting them.

At a certain level this misconception is understandable. After all, it seems reasonable to assume that the Liberal Party, being a liberal party, stands on the side of the sanctity of individual rights, of which freedom of political expression is a fundamental subset. Yet, as those familiar with the story of modern Australian politics know, it illustrates that the Liberal Party has in practice a history of intolerance towards political dissent and protest.

In a Nine newspaper column, the former Liberal attorney-general, George Brandis, who one would expect to put forward a more nuanced argument, exalted the party’s founder, Robert Menzies, as the fountainhead of its forbearance of the expression of dissenting political viewpoints, no matter how repugnant to them. Menzies is indisputably among Australia’s greatest prime ministers, and he was emphatically more of a liberal than many of his current successors in the Liberal Party. Yet part of his governing record was a determined effort to outlaw the Communist Party of Australia. Those attempts were first by legislation in 1950, which was struck down as unconstitutional by the High Court, and then through a 1951 referendum that the Australian people wisely rejected. To say the least, these actions strain at the idea of a Liberal Party steadfastly committed to the defence of a free market of political ideas even those contrary to their own.

It is the Vietnam War era, however, that most unambiguously explodes the myth of the Liberal Party holding sacrosanct the right to expression of political dissent. The historical reality is that in that period it was the giant of the Labor left, Jim Cairns, who, both through the articulation of a powerful underpinning intellectual case and brave and strategic activism, supported by a legion of anti-war and anti-conscription foot soldiers, legitimised political protest in this nation. It is now mostly forgotten that the opponents of the war in those years had to run the gauntlet of an array of Commonwealth, state and city council laws and regulations that significantly circumscribed political expression. Only through defiance, by acts of civil disobedience, were those impediments to protest pushed back.

Important to this story, the agitations of Cairns provoked vitriolic attacks and calumnies from Liberal members of the Coalition governments (and many elements of the press), who regularly defaulted to equating protest with anarchy and mob rule. That debate – if it can be called that – culminated in the days preceding the first of the moratorium demonstrations in May 1970. In his characteristically stoic and understated style, Cairns defended the protest action as an enlargement of the democratic space in a speech that became a manifesto for political dissent in the peace movement:

Some […] think that democracy is just Parliament alone […] But times are changing. A whole generation is not prepared to accept this complacent, conservative theory. Parliament is not democracy. It is one manifestation of democracy … Democracy is government by the people, and government by the people demands action by the people. It demands effective ways of showing what the interests and needs of the people really are. It demands action in public places all around the land.

Meanwhile, Cairns’ Liberal opponents went into hyperdrive in their efforts to warn and bully the public to stay away from the moratorium. Future Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, shrilly likened the notion of a right to occupy the streets to French revolutionary extremism. Fellow Coalition minister, and another future Liberal leader, Billy Snedden, notoriously condemned would-be demonstrators as “political bikies pack-raping democracy”. The conservative press, too, was apoplectic at the spectre of mass protest action. The Sydney Daily Telegraph fulminated:

Best advice for the citizen […] is to avoid like a plague spot any Moratorium demonstration […] As one of the crowd, you add fractionally to the impressiveness of the mob. Fractionally, you buy a share in the mob’s blind recklessness.

So much for a tradition of tolerance of political dissent.

The May 8 1970 Moratorium drew 100,000 to Melbourne’s CBD (another instance of that city being the epicentre of progressive activism in this country), while smaller events were held across the land. All of the demonstrations were peacefully conducted, defying conservative forecasts of blood teeming in the streets.

The stunning success of that day struck a mighty blow for the right to protest in Australia. Indeed, it routinely goes unacknowledged that whenever and wherever today’s demonstrators take to the streets, and no matter their cause, they stand on the shoulders of the anti-Vietnam War activists.

Equally, it has all but disappeared from collective memory that Cairns, whose star fell so dramatically in the final year of the Whitlam Labor government, played a seminal role in that era. Cairns is the unrecognised father of peaceful political protest and civil disobedience in this country. The accent is on peaceful because he tirelessly worked to disarm intemperate elements in the anti-war movement who were prepared to break heads for that cause - earning their enmity as a consequence.

Cairns’ achievement of effectively straddling leadership roles in the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary spheres remains extraordinary and unique. Notwithstanding his later follies, he was a distinctive jewel in Australia’s political landscape.

Let us not then gullibly swallow the conceit that the Liberal Party has been a stalwart of the right to political dissent in Australia. To the contrary, the historical record shows that it is a party that has harboured a significant streak of conservative authoritarianism.

Its current leader, Dutton, embodies that tendency, albeit a particularly aggressive version of it consistent with the party’s rightwards pivot under his direction. I do not recall, for example, Liberal politicians in the Vietnam period going quite as far as calling for the rounding up of student radicals who waved Vietcong flags or chanted “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh” at anti-war rallies. Nevertheless, in his cavalier repressive attitude to pro-Palestinian protests, nor is he acting contrary to his party’s traditions.