The Shadow Attorney-General, Senator George Brandis, has delivered a speech about the Liberal Party and the liberal cause.
Brandis gave the Alfred Deakin Lecture at the University of Melbourne.
Text of the Alfred Deakin Lecture by Senator George Brandis at the University of Melbourne.
We believe: the Liberal party and the liberal cause
2009 is a year dense with significant anniversaries. It is 150 years ago that the most important liberal tract of the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, was published in London. (It is also, by the way, the 150th anniversary of the proclamation of the colony of Queensland although, sadly, the last time liberalism was in the ascendant in my state was about 120 years ago, during the administration of Sir Samuel Griffith.) It is the centenary of the birth of Isaiah Berlin – arguably the most important liberal thinker of the twentieth century and certainly the one whom I find most congenial. And it is, of course, the centenary of the Fusion of the Protectionist and Free Trade Parties in the Commonwealth Parliament, the event which created the political architecture of non-Labor politics, while internalizing within its unified structure the political fault lines which have defined our side of politics ever since.