When this weekend’s 75th anniversary of the founding of the Liberal Party was planned, the Liberal hierarchy probably anticipated more of an autopsy than a celebration. Yet, after Scott Morrison’s miracle May victory, the Liberals are proudly boasting of their status as the natural party of government. Since its formation in 1946 by Robert Menzies, the Liberal Party has been in federal government for almost two-thirds of its existence. This is a political achievement rightly worth celebrating. But the challenge now facing the Liberals is to avoid the hubris and complacency that electoral success can breed. Does the Liberal Party view its hold on the government benches as an end in itself? Or will the privilege of government be seized as a means of giving the nation the economic leadership it urgently needs? That is a critical question now that it has unexpectedly won itself a third term in office. How it answers will define the character and legacy of the Morrison government.

The Liberal Party that Menzies created promised to represent the ‘forgotten people’ - the vast middle classes of the nation whose interests were neglected by the organised political forces of capital and labour. Menzies’ party rejected operating as an instrument of big business; but its major and historic achievement during Menzies’ long residence in the Lodge between 1949 and 1966 was to successfully defend the liberal principles of individualism and free enterprise by resisting global trends towards greater state control and expansion of the role and size of government.

Scott Morrison on election night. What does the party do with its win. The Sydney Morning Herald

The people who Mr Morrison says are forgotten today are the “Quiet Australians” - or the ‘aspirationals’ toiling in the suburbs - in whose name the Prime Minister promises to govern. But is the Morrison Government a liberal government in the Menzian sense? The modern Liberal Party confronts a more complex political world than in Menzies’ era, when the epoch defining ideological struggle pitted liberalism against the forces of socialism and communism. Today, centre-right parties globally are being pulled in illiberal directions by the forces of populism, nationalism, and neo-conservatism that favour government intervention over markets, to achieve naked political objectives in policy areas such as trade and immigration.

Australia’s near three-decades of unbroken economic growth is the dividend of the economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s that have insulated Australia from the worst of the illiberal trends evident in the US, UK, and much of Europe. For this we can also thank Menzies, who allowed Bert Kelly, the original Modest Member and celebrated columnist with The Australian Financial Review, to start agitating from the back bench against tariff protectionism and government regulation generally. So was born the economic ‘dry’ faction in the Liberal Party that provided the intellectual and policy drive for the reforms of the Hawke and Howard governments. Mr Howard, now often seen as more a “conservative”, preceded the economic liberalism of the Hawke-Keating Labor governments when he commissioned the Campbell committee that provided the blueprint for the financial market deregulation of the 1980s. Back then, he was positioned against the Liberal “wets” - more socially progressive but also more economically interventionist - and the old Tory instincts of rural-Liberal Malcolm Fraser.

But despite this proud liberal heritage, the modern Liberal Party is not immune to rising ill-liberalism, as is evident in the tone and direction of the Morrison government so far. Bashing business might play well politically by pitting ‘elites’ against ‘ordinary’ voters. But when banks are threatened with greater regulation because some customers won’t shop around for a cheaper mortgage, the policy direction is illiberal by definition. Menzies swept to office in 1949 defending private banks from nationalisation by Labor. The May election proved the Quiet Australians still want to be left alone by governments. But sparking the economy for the benefit of all requires some hard-but-liberal reforms in electorally sensitive areas like workplace relations that might disquiet some Quiet Australians. Genuine political leadership, combined with policy substance, is needed.

An un-liberal Liberal Party might well stay in power. But what the country needs in the view of the Financial Review is a genuinely liberal government. To be truly worthy of mantle of Menzies, the Morrison Government must move beyond right-wing populism and get on with the hard work of helping Australians create a more prosperous and secure nation.