Even before the Coalition implosion of recent weeks, the contemporary crisis in political leadership compelled national attention. That implosion’s immediate beneficiary, Anthony Albanese, had himself provided striking proof of the nation’s leadership deficit in the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre. His appearance then, halting and incoherent, came as the nation did not just call but screamed in desperation for clear and genuine direction.

Yet the national farce that followed made it starkly clear that this deficit was not restricted to one side of politics. The opposition proved itself incapable of settling on a robust response to the Prime Minister’s panicked recall of parliament, and the subsequent Liberal leadership challenge by Angus Taylor further illustrated the vacuum.

This leadership crisis is ecumenical; it straddles the political aisle, effortlessly encompassing both sides.

While the existence of this vacuum is now widely acknowledged, the peculiar demands of national leadership have been ignored for years. Australia wrestles with not only a political crisis but also a moral dilemma, which any putative leader must absorb and respond to.

Now, more than ever, the centenary of Margaret Thatcher’s birth serves as a reminder of the difference conviction can make. Few leaders appreciated the moral underpinnings of political decisions more than Thatcher, and reflecting on the ethical dimensions of her work provides invaluable guidance for our present malaise.

Thatcher is remembered primarily as an economic reformer. The Thatcherite revolution, as it was understood in Australia and elsewhere, was taken to consist of a “neoliberal” credo. But this fundamentally misreads her project. Her economic approach was not a stand­alone theory; it was the direct reflection of a moral outlook.


The misreading is understandable. At first glance, Thatcherism appears a mere consequence of the catastrophic failures preceding her 1979 victory – the Winter of Discontent where mass strikes, uncollected garbage and unburied dead heralded a country near collapse. If ever there was a moment for a conviction politician with no time for the mealy-mouthed politics of consensus, it was then.

However, the revolution had deeper origins. For thinkers such as Keith Joseph and Enoch Powell, the 1970s breakdown resulted from a philosophical wrong turn taken after 1945. The Conservative leadership had accepted the Labour Party’s program of nationalisation and cradle-to-grave welfare as a fait accompli.

This “middle way”, an approach Thatcher viewed as a failure of moral clarity and political will, rebranded surrender as consensus.

Her hold over the party stemmed from a shared commitment to a set of virtues forged in ’30s Grantham: community, voluntary co-operation and energetic self-help. This moral register – rooted in duty, aspiration and personal responsibility – was the engine of her revolution. In this sense, Thatcherism was a return to the original position: a radical Conservatism that broke with a flawed consensus to affirm the virtues of a free society.

This return, moreover, was not simply about balancing the national books or cutting taxes. It was a profound ethical and moral return, a coming full circle. That is the crucial, often overlooked, dimension: Thatcher and her cohorts viewed the ’70s economic crisis not as a standalone event but as a symptom of a deeper crisis.

“The economy had gone wrong because something had gone wrong spiritually and philosophically,” she later said. “The economic crisis was a crisis of the spirit of the nation.”
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But when Thatcherism was diffused internationally, particularly as part of the “Washington Consensus” package adopted by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank – a recipe focused on fiscal discipline, privatisation, trade liberalisation and deregulation – it was solely its economic elements that figured. It was viewed as an economic remedy, as readily adopted by the centre-left as the centre-right, rather than as a social renewal.

That lacuna generated an enormous weakness. The cost of solely emphasising the economy was that the ethical-moral element was ignored, making the policy package a mere response to immediate circumstances rather than a compelling account of what it meant to live in a free society.[pre] Once the economic crises passed and the benefits of low taxes and privatisation flowed, it became much easier for successor politicians to abandon the philosophical basis.

With the spiritual scaffolding ignored, the prevailing zeitgeist, which Thatcher had seen as the core problem, was not merely left intact – it was strengthened, on the centre-right and the centre-left, by the apparent success of the policies and by the broader, left-leaning, change in cultural outlook that renewed prosperity helped engender.

The question now is whether the new Liberal leader can, in the wake of this shock to the nation, and his own party’s catastrophic mismanagement of the most imperative task of opposition – holding the government to account for its failures – renew that moral instinct, applying it not only in one area of politics but across the whole of it.

That cannot be a simple return to the rhetoric of the distant past; rather, it requires developing an idiom that resonates in the present day for truths whose value time has not dimmed.

Thatcher’s enduring legacy, like Menzies’, is not the specific policies for the particular circumstances of their time but a way of thinking about the task of politics. This comes through powerfully in the first recorded speech she gave after becoming party leader, to the West Dorset Conservative Club at the end of February 1975. In it she responded to a newspaper commentator who had criticised a text she had previously spoken to, with typical gusto: “where there is no vision the people will perish”. The commentator had scolded her: “The art of political survival is to deal with the facts as they are and not to dream dreams.”

The crisply withering yet whimsical contempt in her voice comes through clearly in the crackly recording: “I thought he must have been as dry as DUST to write that.” After the laughter, she conceded, of course, that she was a practical politician who comes to any argument armed with all the facts: ‘But never to dream dreams … or to have a vision of the future … What a depressing thought.” That, she said, “is the fate of bureaucrats”. It’s certainly “not the inspiration of a statesman”.

“Did Disraeli never dream dreams?” she asked. “Did Winston Churchill never dream dreams of a future?” And answered feelingly, “Of course they did. And I say again, give us your support and we will try and implement the vision of the future. Of course we’ll deal with the facts as they are, but, perhaps, we’ll make some dreams of a Great Britain come true as well.”

That, then, was the beating heart of her thought: where there is no vision the people will perish. By failing to understand that economic policies must be the consequence of a profound moral vision, the Liberal and Conservative parties today struggle to articulate a compelling purpose beyond mere administration.

Thatcher, who survived an IRA bomb attack at the 1984 Conservative Party conference, persuaded because every ounce of her being was committed to the belief that no policy – economic, cultural, social, or national – could succeed and endure unless anchored in a lucid and humane moral vision. For a nation adrift, the task of its next generation of leaders is to find the voice and the courage to articulate that conviction once again.

Henry Ergas is a columnist for The Australian. Alex McDermott is history fellow at the Robert Menzies Institute.