Forty-three years ago W. K. Hancock published what many think to be still the best history of Australia. In it he characterized the Labor party as the party of initiative and the anti-Labor parties, under whatever name, as the parties of resistance. Since then some clever people have made modest reputations for themselves by showing that Hancock’s massive generalization was wrong in this or that particular. Occasionally, for instance, it happens that liberal-minded people like Don Chipp get into the Liberal Party hierarchy or that a Liberal government passes a genuinely liberal law, as happened when Garfield Barwick was Attorney-General; but our history in the twentieth century generally underlines the validity of Hancock’s insight. No-one, so far as I know, has ever attempted to show that, within our polit­ical spectrum, the anti-Labor parties are not more conservative than the ALP.

By definition it is the business of conservative parties to conserve: and what a welter the Liberal-Country Party coalition, flogged on by the DLP, has made of conservation for the past twenty-three years! Conservation of the most fossilized and discreditable aspects of Australian society of course, not conservation of wild-life un­der threat from the most sacred of all sacred cows, ‘private enterprise’, or of other things worth conserving. Indeed the period opened with Menzies’ unsuccessful at­tempt to ‘put the clock back’, in the sense that the phrase is used of Fascist regimes: the attempt embodied in the Communist Party Dissolution Bill to outlaw people for their beliefs or for what a host of paid spies alleged them to believe.