Robert Haupt, “This is the wall the Right built,”
National Times on Sunday, September 7, 1986, p. 12.

“Carpetbaggger” is one of those brilliantly evocative American political words. Like “gerrymander”, “kickback” and “filibuster”, it connotes the actions of political shysters and the kind of colourful skulduggery that is to be admired at the same time as it is deplored.

They have an interesting past, carpetbaggers. They were thus christened during Reconstruction, the sorry period in American history when the North was supposed to pick up the South and help it back on its feet following the Civil War. Many from the North did not so much reconstruct the South as plunder it; those who arrived with no more possessions than could be accommodated in a carpetbag and took advantage of the political vacuum to install themselves in positions of authority and advantage were named, wryly, after their luggage.

This happened more than a hundred years ago, but like gerrymanders and kickbacks, carpetbaggers are still with us. Wherever a battle is being fought and victory won, they arrive with their meagre baggage and set up shop, waiting for advantage. They are conspicuously present today, flying the flags of the “New Right” and singing hosannahs to free markets with all the verve of the newly converted. To make our epithets more Australian, we could say that much of this carpetbaggery is ratbaggery.

This is particularly so of the Liberal Party. True, there has long been a free-market faction in the Liberal Party: for many years, its name was Bert Kelly. Kelly carried the standard against the trade-stifling policies of successive Liberal-Country Party governments, and he generally carried it alone. His party colleagues regarded him with amusement; his political career went nowhere.

Kelly was “the Modest Member” for the Australian Financial Review, in whose pages he was supported by the editorial and denounced by the letters, most of which were written by business people. This was a time when Sir Charles McGrath was Treasurer of the Liberal Party and recipient, via Repco, of some of the most handsome protection against competition ever handed out by the Government. Australia’s tariff wall was not built by the Labor Party for the trade unions, it was built for capitalists, by the coalition.

And the stifling of trade which Liberal-Country Party governments fought for, achieved and defended was not an isolated thing: its effects spread throughout the economy, fattening profits, adding to wage increases and helping to foster the very work practices today’s Liberals so angrily denounce. Nor were its effects unknown at the time. Under its indefatigable chairman, Alf Rattigan, the Tariff Board told the truth constantly and unswervingly; the costs, when they came, would be heavy. Rattigan, like Kelly, was ignored.

It is fairly pointless identifying humbug in politics, since without humbug few politicians would be left with much to say. But as they arrive at the free-market battlefield and unpack all those glittering “New Right” gee-gaws from their carpetbags, you might have hoped that even politicians could make some concession to history and acknowledge their part in creating the evil they now so rail against.