Gavin Souter, The Sydney Morning Herald, October 19, 1974, p. 9.
By rewriting its platform, the Liberal Party stands to gain a certain amount of support. At the same time, its qualification of such shibboleths as free enterprise and anti-communism may well break a few faithful hearts on the far Right.
This is the sort of climate in which new parties emerge, so it is not surprising to hear the muted sound of platform carpentry. The carpenters have yet to choose a name for themselves, but the most likely choice seems to be the Free Enterprise Party.
The initiative is coming from a hard core of “Rand fans” — disenchanted Liberals and others whose primeval vision of free enterprise and laissez-faire finds its best expression in the works of the Russian-American author Ayn Rand.
Others interested in this embryonic party are Mr John Singleton, managing director of the American-owned advertising agency Doyle Dane and Bernbach, and himself something of a Rand fan; Dr Duncan Yuille, general secretary of the General Practitioners’ Society; and another medico-political figure, Dr John Whiting, who runs the Movement for Limited Government in South Australia.
The Rand fans, most of whom are still in their late twenties, came together five years ago in Sydney as a discussion group. Out of that group was formed an Alliance for Individual Rights. Like similar groups in the United States, the alliance dissected and absorbed the philosophy expounded by Miss Rand in her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and in such polemical works as Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism.
This philosophy, sometimes called objectivism, rests upon individual responsibility and limited government. It’s a case of every man for himself — except that limited government would continue to project individual rights by police action and external defence, and voluntary co-operation would provide a certain amount of charitable relief.
In a Randian society the State would withdraw not only from business and welfare, but eventually also from health, education, transport and communications. Taxes would come down, and because government no longer interfered with the money supply, there would be no inflation.
If you don’t follow that last bit, I can only refer you to the Austrian school of economics — particularly Professor Ludwig von Mises (Human Action: A Treatise On Economics, 890 pages); and Professor Friedrich von Hayek, who was this month awarded half the Nobel Prize for economics. It is from these fountainheads that the Rand fans imbibe their confidence in free market’s immunity from boom and bust.
On a different level, Sydney’s Rand fans also admire the American science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein. Their monthly journal, freeEnterprise, often refers approvingly to TANSTAAFL, an acronym from Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. This stands for “Their Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.”
In other words, somebody has to pay. “We’re for individual responsibility,” says the editor of freeEnterprise, a mechanical engineer named Bob Howard. “You can’t have government doing everything and paying for it off a money tree in the back garden. Somebody has to pay.”
The Rand philosophy may sound harsh, and even naive. But to the fans who meet at Mr Howard’s home in Glebe it is an idealistic alternative to socialism.
Mr Howard’s fellow-fans include Mark Tier, a Vietnam National Service veteran and economics graduate from the Australian National University, who publishes a weekly economic report for subscribers and is at present running a series of commercial lectures on objectivism; Miss Sudha Shenoy, an economics lecturer at Newcastle University and a former student under Professor von Hayek at the University of London, who is a consulting editor for Mr Tier’s weekly report; Patrick Brookes, an architect who contributes to freeEnterprise on the private financing of road construction; and Mrs Maureen Nathan, a pharmacist who until recently was vice-president of a North Shore branch of the Liberal Party.
Mr Howard and another Rand fan, Merilyn Giesekam, had also joined this branch in the hope of “getting the party back to taws[?] from within.” All three are now resigning in protest at what they regard as the Liberal Party’s dropping of free enterprise from its platform.
Actually, the Liberal Party hasn’t quite done that. The new platform qualifies its support of free enterprise by rejecting “the doctrine of laissez-faire which abandons the true responsibilities of government,” and by recognising the right and obligation of the State to intervene for certain purposes. But that was going too far for the Rand fans.
So far they have enlisted sympathy and promises of support from Mr John Singleton, whose advertising agency produced virulently anti-Labor television commercials before the last election, and from Dr Duncan Yuille, of the General Practitioners’ Society. Mr Tier, who writes about economics for the society’s journal, The Australian GP, says that Dr Yuille and his free enterprise GPs are “the most powerful group of applied objectivists outside the United States.”
Another organisation admired by Mr Tier is the Progress Party of Denmark. At the last Danish election, this party came from nowhere to win 28 parliamentary seats on a simply platform of cutting taxes and cutting government.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if something like that happens here,” said Mr Tier. “People are fed up with too much government. Look at England! England is where we’ll be in three years time. Middle Australia today is starting to wonder. That’s why this is such a beautiful time to be starting a new party.”
