In June 2026, the Robert Menzies Institute’s historian Dr Zachary Gorman & Fellow Professor Greg Melleuish had a chapter exploring ‘Liberals before the Liberal Party’ published as part of the Routledge history and political science book The Australian Liberal Party Volume 1: Ideas, History and Organisation, edited by Zareh Ghazarian, Marija Taflaga, and Matteo Bonotti from Monash University. The book also features chapters from Robert Menzies Institute collaborators Frank Bongiorno, Scott Prasser, Judith Brett and Paul Strangio.

Gorman and Melleuish’s chapter aimed at deciphering one of the paradoxes of Australian politics: that the Liberal Party of Australia is more than 50 years younger than the Australian Labor Party, even though liberalism is Australia’s oldest political tradition. Their work places Menzies’s 1944 creation of the modern Liberal Party in the context of his self-proclaimed aim of ushering in ‘A Liberal Revival’, which consciously drew on that rich pre-history of colonial liberalism. It also offers insights relevant for the present political malaise, in which liberalism appears likely to face a similar eclipse to that which it experienced in the interwar period. The chapter concludes:

‘The fact that a Liberal vs. Labor party system had emerged as early as 1909 suggests that, barring external shocks and recent fragmentations, this is the ‘natural’ dividing line of Australian politics. This is particularly evident once the instinct to ‘conserve’ liberalism, including the liberal constitution, is seen as an integral element in the tradition. But while the modern Liberal Party has endured for 80 years, it is still impacted by its pre-party origins. There is a recurring impulse to take ‘freedom of conscience’ to its logical conclusion and do away with the party system, as it reared its head in 1931, 1943 and now in the twenty-first century. As society becomes more fractured, this tendency may become exacerbated; however, a political reformation on the scale of those caused by war and depression appears unlikely for the moment. Stubbornly independent, liberals often need a strong leader and a headline cause to ensure that they are all moving in the same direction. However, once in power, their tendency to embody the status quo and ability to appeal to a patriotic narrative of Australian superiority mean that they are often capable of holding onto it for an extended period.’