Liberalism was the offering of a succession of political parties that came and went over the forty years examined here. Most of them, sadly, were unable to overcome their addiction to economic controls. Following the economic historian Edward Shann, Kemp regrets that Australia sought to make of itself a ‘hermit’ nation, closed off from the rest of the world by high tariffs. Its system of compulsory industrial arbitration encouraged industrial conflict and was A Bad Thing; except, presumably, when it proved an efficient way to cut wages during the Depression, as Kemp at least concedes.

Fortunately, the Institute of Public Affairs run by Kemp’s father, C.D. Kemp, Robert Menzies – the book’s hero – and the Liberal Party all come to liberalism’s rescue in the 1940s. On the way to this salvation, we are treated to long chunks of Menzies’ ‘The Forgotten People’ broadcast of 1942, which we are enjoined to see as a new departure in Australian liberalism.

In more than five hundred pages, Kemp struggles to find a single policy pursued by the Labor Party worthy of praise

For a man who spent a large part of his career as a practising politician, it is strange that Kemp does so little to distinguish between what politicians say and what they do. Menzies preached self-reliance and enterprise, and bemoaned a bossy state. Yet his government of 1949–66 was so reliant on controls and regulations that it’s rather difficult to see how, under the constraints of the Australian constitution, a Labor government could have been much less ‘liberal’. Australia maintained import licensing through much of the 1950s. Nor were the 1960s a notable era of free trade, with McEwenism in full flight. Reforms to industrial arbitration were insubstantial. Government spending rose as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product. Australia’s fabled home ownership was so propped up by subsidy that each and every white picket fence ought to have carried the names of Menzies, Fadden, and Coombs. Kemp’s claims that Menzies’ liberalism played any significant part in the decline of the White Australia policy are poorly substantiated, implausible, and belied by evidence not cited by Kemp.

Kemp sees his book – and the series to which it belongs – as an effort to emphasise that ideas have played a major role in Australian politics. This is a worthwhile enterprise, and the book does succeed, to some extent, in fulfilling this goal. There are periodic reminders of key overseas developments in political thinking that had Australian echoes and adaptations, as with the Keynesian revolution, which is explored in a stimulating and well-informed way. Kemp provides a sympathetic and intelligent account of the rise of progressive middle-class liberalism in the 1960s. There are also sensitively crafted accounts of Aboriginal affairs.

Politics, as Kemp acknowledges, is also about both passions and interests. Nonetheless, he spends much of the book treating the impact of each as a negation of true liberalism. At the end, I felt I had a fair understanding of what Kemp thought the politics of the era should have been like, yet a cloudier sense of what had actually happened and why. Kemp is particularly weak on the ‘why’ question, partly because he appears unfamiliar with much of the recent work by economic historians. Scholars such as Ian McLean and Simon Ville do not try to explain Australia’s slide down the international economic tables as a simple outcome of the wrong-headed attachment of policymakers to economic controls, or because wharfies and miners kept going on strike. Rather, they recognise the nation’s economic history as a complex story of transformation in a dynamic domestic and global context.

But it is now an axiom of the political class that gained ascendancy in the final decades of the twentieth century, and of which Kemp is a fully paid-up member, that Australia’s policy history before they fixed it was a story of failure, a triumph of the clamour of selfish interests over rational decision-making. This is essentially a right-wing version of ‘black armband history’. If only Australia had left things to the market! Imagine what kind of country this would have been if they’d had Friedmanite professors to guide them! What great things deluded and muddle-headed Deakinite liberals could have achieved had they enjoyed a proper grounding in public choice theory – those influence peddlers would have been run out of town!

For a book as long as this one – and one with three older siblings and a younger one still to come – it’s a somewhat selective account of the era’s political history. There is little on state politics, except for New South Wales premier Jack Lang, because of his national importance and his role in the story as a socialist bogeyman. What does Kemp make of Thomas Playford’s ‘liberalism’ in South Australia? Even as significant a figure as Victoria’s long-serving Henry Bolte gets just one brief reference.

Kemp underestimates some of his liberals’ flirtations with authoritarianism – and even fascism – just as he exaggerates the influence of communism in the Labor Party. He has multiple references to Labor radicals arming themselves during the Depression, as if they posed a serious danger to capitalism. He mentions only in passing the much larger and better-organised right-wing paramilitaries, which were the only forces capable of overthrowing democratic governments in the period. Andrew Moore’s ground-breaking study of these secret armies, The Secret Army and the Premier (1989), does not appear in the bibliography.

It is hard not to admire Kemp’s industry. While this handsome book is based mainly on secondary authorities with a sprinkling of printed primary sources, it nonetheless rests on prodigious labour. But it is also an unrelentingly partisan history, written from within a particular tradition. For Kemp, Liberals have principles, Laborites prejudices. The portrayal of Menzies sometimes approaches North Korean official biography – which is unnecessary, because a man can have flaws and blind spots (Menzies had plenty) and still be both the political giant and civilised man that he was.

The book’s partisanship is evident in this melodrama of goodies and baddies, but also in its implicit vindication of the careers of late twentieth-century neoliberals as saviours of the nation. The text is peppered with references to policies or ideas that, while occasionally stirring in this era, could only flourish in the 1980s and 1990s once rational policymaking supposedly prevailed over the special interests that had previously blighted politics.

This is history as professional vindication. The problem is that the sweeping victory of the very policies that Kemp wishes to celebrate – and which will presumably receive explicit treatment in the final volume of the series – now imperil not only global liberalism but the future of democracy itself. They have also been a great boon to powerful interest groups seeking favours from government. The protectionist clamour of a former era has its echoes in the rampant corporate welfare of this one.