Whatever Happened to Free Trade Liberalism?

Abstract

If this essay had been written thirty years ago, perhaps I might have emulated George Dangerfield's reflection on the fate of its rather more distinguished English relative and used a title such as 'The Strange Death of Free Trade Liberalism'. But the transformation of Australian economic and political thought in the period since the 1970s has been taken to indicate that, like Sleeping Beauty, Free Trade liberalism wasn't really dead at all: she was merely sleeping, if not quite for the full century inaugurated by the unfortunate industrial accident in the fairytale. The poisonous prick, in this case, was administered by David Syme, editor of the Melbourne Age and 'Father of Protection', assisted by his impressionable protégé, Alfred Deakin, and by Justice Higgins of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration. The lips of any number of gallants might have revived the somnolent one-no doubt Paul Keating and John Stone would each, if given half a chance, make an eloquent case for having earned the lovely princess's hand, but their claims would possibly be contested by John Hyde, Hugh Morgan and one or two other handsome princes of the Australian New Right.