In 1907, Justice Henry Bourne Higgins was asked to decide what constituted a fair and reasonable wage for an Australian worker. Rather than leave the question entirely to employers and workers, he examined the cost of supporting a family, including food, housing, clothing, and other necessities.
His decision, known as the Harvester Judgment, helped establish the idea that a fair wage should take account of a worker’s basic needs. The High Court invalidated its legislative basis the following year, but the principle influenced Australian wage-setting for decades.
It is an unusual piece of history for a country whose national character was supposedly built on keeping government out of people’s lives.
In a speech to a libertarian audience, political commentator Damien Costas offered an explanation for Australia’s changing political culture. Australians, he argued, have gradually moved away from resilience and independence towards insecurity and dependence on institutional protection. Government has expanded in response, increasingly shaping how people behave and what they believe.
Costas believes the problem begins with our changing values. His conclusion is that Australian values are fundamentally libertarian. ‘They always have been,’ he declared.
I can understand the appeal of his argument. Australians have a healthy suspicion of authority, and few people would welcome a government that unnecessarily interferes in their lives. Costas is also right to be concerned about institutions accumulating power. Governments can become intrusive, ineffective and resistant to scrutiny.
But I think his account is wrong, both philosophically and historically. He treats a particular understanding of freedom as though it were a universal human instinct, then uses it to explain the supposed decline of Australian society.
Freedom is a rather more complicated business.
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin distinguished between negative liberty, generally understood as freedom from interference by others, and positive liberty, concerned with self-direction and control over one’s life. Berlin recognised the importance of both, while warning that appeals to collective self-mastery could be used to justify coercion.
His distinction raises a problem for Costas. Government involvement may interfere with some people’s choices while expanding the opportunities available to others.
Take disability support. A publicly funded program may allow someone to work, travel, or live independently when they would otherwise be unable to do so. It requires taxation and government administration, both of which involve constraints on other people’s choices. Whether the arrangement produces a net gain in freedom cannot be settled simply by pointing to the government’s involvement.
Or consider employment protections. A law preventing an employer from arbitrarily dismissing a worker restricts the employer’s contractual freedom. It may also give the employee greater independence from the employer’s whims.
A libertarian might reasonably respond that taxation is coercive, or that freedom of contract should take precedence over other considerations. Those arguments deserve to be taken seriously. But they require a defence of particular rights and an explanation of why those rights should prevail when liberties conflict.
Costas’s speech largely avoids that question.
The Australian philosopher Philip Pettit offers another way of approaching it.
His republican theory understands freedom in terms of non-domination: being secure against the arbitrary power of others.
A worker might have an employer who treats them generously. Yet if the employer can arbitrarily threaten their livelihood, the worker may still feel compelled to accommodate demands they would otherwise refuse. The employer need not exercise that power for it to influence the worker’s choices.
The same concern applies to governments. Public authority that is arbitrary, unaccountable or beyond effective challenge threatens freedom. But private authority can create similar problems, including within relationships entered into voluntarily.
This gives us a more demanding way to assess institutions. We need to examine whose power they constrain, whose choices they restrict, and whether people can challenge decisions made about their lives.
That approach also casts doubt on Costas’s account of personal responsibility.
He suggests that Australians have become increasingly receptive to the idea that systems, rather than individuals, are responsible for outcomes. But responsibility is rarely so neatly divided.
People make choices within circumstances they have not chosen. A child’s opportunities are affected by their family’s income. A person’s capacity to work may depend on their health or access to appropriate support. An employee’s bargaining position depends partly on the availability of alternative employment.
None of this makes personal responsibility meaningless. It tells us something about the conditions in which people are expected to exercise it.
John Rawls, for example, argued that fair equality of opportunity requires more than removing formal legal barriers. People’s prospects should not depend so heavily on the social circumstances into which they happen to be born.
We can disagree with Rawls about how far governments should go in addressing these inequalities. But a person who receives assistance to become financially independent has not necessarily become more dependent in any meaningful sense.
Sometimes support is a condition of self-reliance.
Costas’s wider explanation is also difficult to assess because he offers little evidence in the speech for the causal relationships on which it depends.
He describes protective parenting producing risk-averse children, increasing anxiety encouraging demands for protection, and expanding institutions reinforcing dependency. Over time, he suggests, these changes have altered the psychology of the nation.
Some of these relationships may exist. Yet each requires investigation, and the explanation must be tested against alternatives.
If Australians are more concerned about financial insecurity, for example, is that evidence of declining resilience? Or might their attitudes reflect changes in housing costs, economic conditions or the risks they personally face?
Even if protective parenting is associated with childhood anxiety, it would take considerably more evidence to establish that it has produced a national political shift towards greater government control.
Demanding protection can be a sign of vulnerability. It can also be a perfectly rational response to a genuine risk. The distinction matters if we intend to make claims about the character of an entire country.
And Australian history gives us good reason to be cautious about claims of a lost national character.
From the beginning of Federation, Australians were willing to use public authority to pursue collective goals. The Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration was established in 1904. The Harvester Judgment followed in 1907.
Compulsory voting arrived at the federal level in 1924.
Australia developed a political tradition in which personal independence coexisted with industrial regulation, public services and collective obligations. These arrangements have always been contested, but their presence was hardly an accidental departure from an otherwise consistent libertarian inheritance.
Nor should we romanticise the freedoms enjoyed by earlier generations.
The White Australia policy restricted immigration on racial grounds. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples endured dispossession and discriminatory controls, including restrictions on political participation. Women faced legal and economic barriers that limited their independence.
These examples do not suggest that Costas endorses those injustices. Indeed, he explicitly rejects attempts to define Australian identity by Anglo-Celtic ancestry, a position with which I agree.
But they do undermine the suggestion that Australians once shared a straightforward understanding of freedom and responsibility that has subsequently been diluted.
Freedom has always been contested in Australia, including over who was entitled to enjoy it.
There is another difficulty with Costas’s argument. He warns that institutions have grown so powerful that politics now shapes culture, reversing what he regards as the healthier relationship in which culture shapes politics.
Government certainly influences social values. Education policy, public spending and regulation affect people’s expectations and behaviour. Such power can be misused, particularly when institutions discourage dissent or insulate themselves from democratic scrutiny.
Yet Australians have also used political action to challenge entrenched cultural attitudes. Campaigns for voting rights, labour protections and the removal of discriminatory laws changed public institutions and helped reshape social expectations.
Our values influence our political institutions, which in turn influence our values. This reciprocal relationship is part of democratic life. Whether a particular exercise of political power is legitimate depends on its justification and the constraints placed upon it.
Democratic consent alone is insufficient, of course. A majority can support an unjust law, and individual rights must limit what governments can legitimately do.
Equally, the fact that an institution exercises public power cannot be sufficient reason to conclude that it diminishes freedom.
Costas wants Australians to articulate their values more clearly. I agree. His rejection of an ethnically defined Australian identity also provides a worthwhile starting point.
But values such as freedom, fairness, and responsibility have no single, uncontested political meaning. People can share those commitments while reasonably disagreeing about the institutions needed to uphold them.
A libertarian may place particular weight on property rights and freedom from coercive interference. Others will emphasise fair opportunities, democratic accountability, or protection against domination. Each position must explain how it handles competing rights and the consequences of its preferred arrangements.
Invoking human nature does not resolve those disagreements.
Nor can Australia establish its political future by appealing to an idealised version of its past. Our history offers examples of both government overreach and collective institutions that have expanded people’s rights and opportunities.
A worthwhile argument about freedom must engage with both.
I’d be interested to know how Costas would assess a public institution that restricts some people’s choices but gives others greater independence from arbitrary power. What principles would determine whether that intervention increases or reduces freedom, and how would he apply them consistently?
Until those questions are answered, the claim that Australian values have always been libertarian tells us more about the political philosophy Costas prefers than it does about Australia’s history.
The fair go has always involved an argument about what we owe one another. There is no reason to think that argument is finished.
The post Australia’s fair go was never exclusively libertarian appeared first on The Spectator Australia.
