True history of the Black Hand, the Liberals who have kept Menzies’ flame alive

Last month, the Liberal Party gathered in Sydney to celebrate its 80th birthday – the anniversary of its founding in 1944 by Sir Robert Menzies. The occasion was the annual meeting of its peak national body, Federal Council.

Liberal Federal Councils are different from Labor National Conferences. Labor’s conference is an important decision-making body. Its power to bind parliamentarians does not exist in the Liberal Party, for which the autonomy of the parliamentary wing has always been an article of faith. Liberal conferences are thus tamer affairs, with little political drama.

The light from the hill of liberalism, Liberal Party founder Robert Menzies. Credit: Michael Fitzjames

Another important difference between the parties is their attitude to factions. The Liberal Party does not really have factions. Certainly, there are distinct strands of opinion, and identifiable networks of like-minded members – but these are nothing like Labor’s disciplined, quasi-official structures (memorably described as being like mafia families by Andrew Leigh, the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury). This is a cultural difference as much as a structural one.

Apart from Peter Dutton’s speech on nuclear energy, the only notice the Federal Council attracted was a social event on the sidelines: the storied Black Hand Dinner. The Black Hand is the jokey sobriquet of a loose network within the party called Liberal Forum. As we celebrated the Liberal Party’s 80th birthday, Liberal Forum marked its 40th.

In the winter of 1984, Tom Harley, scion of a distinguished Melbourne family which traces its impeccable political lineage to Alfred Deakin, convened a meeting in South Yarra, in the very street where Deakin once lived. Its purpose was to defend the Liberal Party’s traditional liberal values, then under attack from a resurgent right-wing amid the choppy internal politics following its 1983 election defeat.

I was the youngest person invited, which included some of the party’s then high-profile moderates such as Peter Baume, Ian Macphee and (wettest of the lot) Alan Missen, together with faces of the future such as Robert Hill and Chris Puplick. The leader, Andrew Peacock, joined us for drinks.

No sooner was Liberal Forum established than it had an identity crisis. What was its role to be? Some, like Baume, essentially saw it as a debating society, publishing worthy papers about Liberal Party policy and liberalism. Others, like me, wanted a network which got active in the party’s branches to support the preselection of candidates who were committed to classical liberalism: Menzies Liberals.

Liberal Forum’s only tangible achievement in its early days was publishing a collection of significant speeches defining the Australian liberal tradition, Australian Liberalism: The Continuing Vision. (If you ever spot this slender volume on someone’s bookshelf, you will know you are in the presence of a truly hard-core political nerd.)

In the decades that followed, Liberal Forum took root in just two states: South Australia and NSW. This was due to the work (and ambition) of two people not present at the initial meeting, Christopher Pyne and Michael Photios. Through strenuous effort over long years, each built a political network which became dominant and, in NSW, still is.

It is many years since the Liberal Party abandoned Deakinite economic policies and embraced the free market. The intellectual argument was led by John Howard. Ironically, the most important speech in which he made his case was the Deakin Lecture of 1986. Howard was on the right side of history. Those of us who in the 1980s opposed him were completely wrong. There are few members of Liberal Forum today who are not economic dries.

Nor is there any difference between moderates and conservatives on defence or national security. Many leading moderates are cultural conservatives. While most are republicans, some, such as Photios, Steven Marshall and Don Harwin, are constitutional monarchists.

While conservatives won the economic argument, moderates generally prevailed on social policy. One unifying issue was same-sex marriage. The gay community is dominated by the left, but it was the Liberal members of that community – well represented in the party’s Sydney branches – who delivered marriage equality. The Liberal Party’s commitment to multiculturalism has also been fiercely defended.

So the Black Hand turned out to be much more important, in the long run, than any of us ever imagined that wintry Melbourne day 40 years ago. Not a faction, but a loose network of like-minded friends, ultimately inspired by Menzies’ liberal vision of a society that cherishes and defends the freedom of every individual. Of course, Menzies would never in a month of Sundays have supported multiculturalism, any more than he would have favoured slashing tariffs or floating the dollar. Gay marriage would have been inconceivable to him.

It is anachronistic to judge today’s policies by yesterday’s standards. The way a political philosophy translates into policy evolves with every generation. Liberal Forum has kept the liberal flame alive by championing policies that have made Australia the ever-freer country Menzies envisioned.

And the name? It originated from banter between Tom and me. I was worried that creating such a network was foreign to the Liberal Party’s non-factional culture. We had settled on “Liberal Forum”, but even an innocuous name might sound sinister. “Like ‘the Black Hand’!” Tom rejoined laughingly. It was a private joke between us until it escaped into the party’s bloodstream like a virus from a Chinese laboratory.

Last month, Senate Leader Simon Birmingham hosted the now eminently respectable Black Hand at its well-attended dinner. Deputy Leader Sussan Ley, numerous shadow ministers and backbenchers, current and former state leaders, and the party’s state president were there. So was the spirit of Menzies.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor at ANU.

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