James Waghorne and Stuart Macintyre, Liberty: A History of Civil Liberties in Australia.

Moore, Andrew

James Waghorne and Stuart Macintyre, Liberty: A History of Civil Liberties in Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2011. pp. 230. $59.95 cloth.

As David Marr has recently suggested, Australians 'have only the patchiest record of becoming passionate about great abstractions--even the greatest of them, liberty'. Australians may fancy themselves as brave Ned Kelly style figures, standing up to authority. A more common form of protest in this country is to grumble into one's beer about the intrusions of government.

Waghorne and Macintyre's Liberty documents the good works of that estimable breed of Australians who were made of sterner stuff, individuals who threw off the apathy from which many of their fellow citizens suffered and dedicated themselves to standing up for civil liberties. The book's chronological parameters range from the origins of the Council for Civil Liberties (CCL) amidst the opposition to war and fascism of the 1930s to modern-day Australia, Dr Haneef and 'the war against terror'. The arguments used by Attorney-General Philip Ruddock for infringing upon civil liberties with new anti-terrorism legislation in 2005 were essentially similar to Prime Minister Menzies' rationale for introducing his draconic National Security Bill in September 1939. Defending democracy by anti-democratic means has long been a cause celebre among conservative politicians in Australia. Nor has the Labor Party been squeaky clean in this regard. Paradoxically the state is often both perpetrator and (through the judiciary) arbiter of civil liberties matters.

In large part this is an administrative history, paying due deference to the legion of individuals who have played a prominent part in the Australian Council of Civil Liberties (ACCL). Scholars in the labour history community would be familiar with the pivotal role of historian Brian Fitzpatrick and other left-wing rabblerousers, such as Rupert Lockwood and Ted Laurie, in the area of civil liberties. Perhaps in keeping with an earlier work by Macintyre, Liberty brings to light the involvement of an army of small 'l' liberals in fighting the good fight. These include the economic historian Herbert ('Joe') Burton, later renowned for his work in academic administration in Canberra, and conservative enough to be on friendly terms with the anti-communist historian and polemicist M.H. Ellis, but before that a major figure in the CCL in Melbourne. The trajectories of some civil libertarians are fascinating. The energetic if erratic John Bennett, the driving force behind the reconstituted Victorian Council of Civil Liberties (VCCL) in the 1960s and 1970s, ultimately came to defend Holocaust denial in terms of arguments about free speech, and his activities split the organisation disastrously

Judicious and measured, Waghorne and Macintyre are content to tell the story of civil liberties in a narrative sequence. This is an important contribution, but it is not without fault. For one thing the book's title is misleading. This is largely a book about civil liberties in Melbourne, Victoria. Ken Buckley and the NSW CCL are hardly mentioned and his memoir (reviewed in LH, no. 96, 2009) does much more than 'recount some of his adventures with the NSW Council for Civil Liberties' (p. 196). It seems remarkable, too, that it is possible to publish a book on civil liberties in Australia that pays no mention of the transgressions of the Bjelke-Petersen government in Queensland. The heroic work of Terry O'Gorman and the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties should have been recognised. If ever it was possible for a civil libertarian in Australia to end up in the concrete pour of a Gold Coast skyscraper it was when the hillbilly dictator and his corrupt police force reigned supreme in Australia's 'Deep North'.

The first four chapters of Liberty are drawn from Waghorne's PhD thesis, a project funded by the Alan Missen foundation, a benefactor of present-day Liberty Victoria. Being a partially in-house history carries both advantages and disadvantages. There are times when the book's approach could be more critical. Some of the wider context of events might well have been incorporated. For instance, with the benefit of hindsight and evidence released in the 1990s, we now know that Fitzpatrick was wrong about the 1954-55 Petrov affair and its Royal Commission. It was not simply part of, as Fitzpatrick believed, a sinister plot by Menzies and his good mate Charles Spry, director general of ASIO, to introduce police state conditions in Australia. In large part the Petrov affair was a means of disseminating information drawn from an earlier top secret crypto analytical operation about communist espionage in Australia without prejudicing the source of that information. Of course Fitzpatrick could not be expected to be privy to secrets known only to the mandarins of security Nonetheless, did Fitzpatrick's wrongheaded approach invalidate, at least in part, his opposition to Menzies' 'show trial' and fear mongering? Possibly. Certainly Fitzpatrick's focus on Petrov more than likely precluded him from campaigning against the scandalous privilege case of 1955 that saw two men sentenced to gaol, without legal representation or redress, on a vote of Commonwealth Parliament. (Liberty's treatment of this matter, too, is decidedly truncated, perhaps because it does not show Brian Fitzpatrick in a favourable light.)

Nonetheless, even if he had some blind spots, in the battle to maintain civil liberties in Australia throughout the Cold War, Fitzpatrick played an honourable part. Waghorne and Macintyre are right to celebrate his role. In the final analysis, too, it remains difficult to demur from the general premise of Liberty's argument. Without groups like the ACCL and Liberty Victoria uncovering and championing cases of injustice, agitating and campaigning, Australian democracy may well have been decidedly impoverished, if not curtailed.

ANDREW MOORE

University of Western Sydney