John Faulkner, Labor’s respected former Senate leader and keeper of the Whitlam flame, once said to me that one of the biggest differences between Labor and the Liberal Party was their different attitudes to their own history – in particular, to past leaders. Liberals celebrate only their most successful leaders, said Faulkner, whereas Labor celebrates all its leaders – even the second-rate ones. The exception, of course, is the rats (although even Labor leaders who ratted still have their photographs hung in the caucus room).

Forgotten and ignored and, worse, reviled by their own tribe: Liberal leaders Malcolm Turnbull and Malcolm Fraser.Credit: Michael Howard

One of the paradoxes of Australian politics is that the conservative side has so little sense of its own history, while the party of the left celebrates – indeed, shamelessly mythologises – its own. For instance, a prime minister as pedestrian as Ben Chifley has been enlarged into a beloved national icon – a pipe-smoking, cardigan-wearing old sweetheart who preferred the modesty of the Kurrajong Hotel to the stateliness of The Lodge. The catastrophes of his government – its disastrous attempt to nationalise the banks; the worst industrial conflict in our history, which put troops in coalmines – have been airbrushed away.

Chifley’s successor as Labor leader, H V Evatt – one of the most unfit national leaders in our history, whose political incompetence failed to avert the split that kept Labor out of office for two decades – is remembered by invariably sympathetic biographers as a passionate, if flawed,........

© The Sydney Morning Herald