Join us online or in person for a seminar with Dr Geoff Robinson.

Liberal politics and liberal history: David Kemp’s histories of Australian liberalism

David Kemp was an academic political scientist, Liberal Party activist, politician and Howard government minister. After leaving parliament in 2004 he turned his attention to history, completing a multivolume study of Australian liberalism that centred the contribution of Robert Menzies. Kemp’s experience revealed the difficulties of intellectuals on the political right. They feel isolated within an increasingly left-leaning intellectual community but also contend with the populist and anti-intellectual strands of conservatism. Together these trends reinforce each other. The study of history in Australia became a theatre of political combat, as from eighties historians have emphasised legacies of Indigenous dispossession and racial exclusion. Kemp challenged this perspective, but he also rejected popular conservative historiography that inverted the pessimism of the left to present Australia as a simple tale of material gain and national pride, an approach popular with Liberal politicians. Like Manning Clark, Kemp believed that Australian history was the story of ideas, and for Kemp the great idea was liberalism. For Kemp history offered a way to distinguish his liberalism, both from progressivism but also the libertarian right. In Nietzschean terms Kemp sought a monumental history that inspired action in the present rather than a simple dismissal or uncritical veneration of the past. This present action was in the end, perhaps despite Kemp’s intentions, the legitimation of John Howard’s conservatism.

9th July 2025, 11am AEDT

Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC1.108
Zoom: Click here

Geoff Robinson began his academic career as a labour historian and is now Senior Lecturer in Politics. He is particularly interested in relation between political ideas and practice and the balance between political agency and social structures in determining what governments can do, this concern makes the rise and fall of socialism is a particular fascination but he is also interested in liberal and conservative ideas and policy. Geoff’s works blend intellectual and policy history.