John Howard and the New Guard – by Oscar Wobbly

I’ve done a lot of threads on the Catholic strain of fascism in Australia but John Howard’s reentry into public discourse means it’s time for their Protestant counterparts. Let’s talk about his father and the fascist paramilitary he allegedly belonged to, the New Guard.

Now I’m already hearing the right scream “The Loony Left call everything fascist!” They called themselves fascists and attempted to align themselves with their European counterparts. One of their street fighting orgs, the Fascist Legion wore KKK inspired outfits.  

Their leader Eric Campbell described the organisation as the following… “We’re not Italian fascists or German Nazis, but as far the broad philosophy of Fascism goes I am a fascist to my fingertips” He’s the gentleman giving the Nazi cosplay and salute below.

There’s nothing ambiguous here. Like the Spanish and Italian Fascists they were rabidly pro monarchy to the point where one of their slogans was “obey your masters”. They drew from a very long history of the Australian Protestant Right, seeing Australia as an extension of Britain rather than an independent country in its own right.

An excellent case study of this mindset is Australia’s second prime minister Alfred Deakin who wanted Australia to be part of a broader British Imperial Federation and saw Australian independence as a modernisation of the Empire rather than a break from the empire. This mindset was deeply ingrained in the New Guard and their leadership saw the organisation as part of a broader project of British imperial fascism and they formed close ties with the British union of Fascists in the UK.  

They were early pioneers in the use of blending liberty rhetoric with open authoritarianism. If this sounds contradictory you need to understand that they’re not using freedom or liberty in the same way normal people do. When they talk about “liberty” and “freedom” they don’t mean you get a say in how society is run or even the right to feed yourself.

Who was entitled to these rights was limited solely to those who kept within the New Guard’s view of the natural order. “Disloyal” groups like Communists, Catholics, trade unionists, the Irish and other “subversives” were excluded from this definition. If this is sounding very familiar this concept of “liberty” is the same one John Howard subscribed to. It’s visible in his anti-terror laws that stripped suspects of many of their rights for up to a fortnight . Howard deemed suspects “disloyal” and that was enough to strip them of their rights.  

You also see this with the authoritarian doublethink you see in the conspiratorial right in Australia, which was on full display during the pandemic.    

The Australian right isn’t the only group that subscribes to this view of liberty. Neoliberalism’s founding fathers subscribed to this view of liberty. Friedman was notably a fan of undemocratic Hong Kong and Hayek was a fan of dictators Pinochet and Salazar.  

This ideological convergence between Howard’s New Guard influences and Neoliberalism over the concept of liberty and economics blended seamlessly into the Howard government’s policies.

The conservative worldview that informed these events does much to explain the ideology of the New Guard. This worldview was structured around a genuine belief that ‘sane finance’ – balanced budgets, private enterprise, self-reliance, minimalist government, and the sanctity of contract – represented the ‘national interest’ of Australia as opposed to the ‘sectional interests’ of organised labour – Cunningham, Matthew. (2012). Australian Fascism? A Revisionist Analysis of the Ideology of the New Guard. Politics, Religion & Ideology, 13(3), 375–393.

WorkChoices and the Australian Workplace Agreement (AWA) 

During the Howard Government’s infamous WorkChoices era, a statutory individual employment agreement known as an Australian Workplace Agreement (AWA) was introduced. In promoting AWAs, the government stated that “AWAs offer an employer and employees the opportunity to make an agreement that best suits the specific needs of individual employee.”

That opportunity was a mirage. In practise, AWAs were identical documents imposed on thousands of employees, many of which reduced remuneration and other benefits. Telstra successfully imposed many thousands of identical AWAs on its workforce.

The New Guard’s fixation on national cohesion is also very clear in Howard’s immigration policies, most notably in his infamous “One Australia” immigration policy as opposition leader in 1988.

The New Guard’s professions of loyalty reflected a desire to effect the moral rejuvenation of the citizenry. Australia was riven with sectarianism, party squabbling and class hatred at a time when the country needed to come together for the benefit of the nation as a whole. The New Guard lambasted ‘professional politicians’ as ‘quack doctor[s]… [who] in order to remain in power, must secure votes by promising those sections of the community who are most numerous, monetary and other advantages levied from the less numerous wealthier class’.

They were also pioneers in using centrist language to mainstream fascist ideas. The New Guard was eventually turned into a failed political party, the Centre Party. This wasn’t a change in ideology. Their leader wrote to Mosely describing it as an attempt to adapt Fascism to Australian conditions. By December, Campbell had transformed the New Guard into the Centre Party, moving from paramilitary organisation to a political party.

Moore argues that this shift into electoral politics is ‘explicable only if one takes the Centre Party to be … a Trojan Horse which would participate in the process of liberal democracy only in order to undermine it’,104 a method employed successfully by the Nazi Party in Germany, yet unsuccessfully by the BUF.

This conversion to fascism (and to the Centre Party) was explained by Campbell in a 1934 book, The New Road: “I am a Fascist because I am a democrat. I am a democrat because I believe in government by the general will.

The only possible form of government for a country like Australia, where … there is no traditional ruling class, is the intelligent selection by the people of the most high-minded and capable of their number to undertake the task of government … The party system of government is a negation of everything that [democracy] stands for; it is to the ideals of Fascism that we must look for the retention of democracy as the guiding spirit of the people.”

This was reinforced in a letter that Campbell wrote to Mosley in May 1934 (intercepted by the British and Australian authorities), in which he stated that the ‘principles of the Centre Party are simply an application of the Fascist principles to Australian conditions’ – Evan Smith (2017) The pivot of empire: Australia and the imperial fascism of the British Union of Fascists, History Australia, 14:3, 378-394, DOI: 10.1080/14490854.2017.1359092

I really want to draw attention to the anti-Catholic elements of the New Guard and their counterparts in other states Because they considered Catholics inherently “disloyal” it caused Australian fascism to develop parallel sectarian strains. These constructions emerged from the tensions of the Great War, during which self-proclaimed ‘loyalist’ conservatives lumped their various opponents – anti-conscriptionists, Catholics, Irish Republicans, and most importantly ‘Bolshevists’ – into one catch-all category of ‘disloyalism’.

No distinction was made between communism and organised labour, although regular appeals were made to wean ‘sane labour’ away from the ‘extremists’ and ‘wreckers’. Overarching this worldview were the intertwined concepts of nation and Empire. To be Australian in the 1930s was also to be British, for the Australian national identity was heavily geared towards British institutions and traditions. – Matthew Cunningham (2012) Australian Fascism? A Revisionist Analysis of the Ideology of the New Guard, Politics, Religion & Ideology, 13:3, 375-393, DOI: 10.1080/21567689.2012.701188

It’s also why their Catholic counterparts and Santamaria opposed the White Australia policy while actively trying to build a European Catholic peasantry. They understood their Protestant counterparts considered them fundamentally alien and disloyal because of their Catholicism and the Catholic Church’s opposition to conscription.

By the beginning of the First World War there was a clear Catholic/ALP voting alignment and there were many Catholics in the local branches of the party, but the ALP as a whole did not have an Irish-Catholic image. This was to change by 1917, mainly as a consequence of the conscription referendum. The divisions on the conscription question brought tensions between British and Irish elements in the Australian population to the surface.

Archbishop Mannix of Melbourne became a leading spokesman for the ‘No’ cause. Prime Minister Hughes played on this to appeal to Protestant and British-identifying voters in the referenda – O’Connell and Warhurst. “Church and Class: (Irish-Australian Labour Loyalties and the 1955 Split).” Saothar, vol. 8, 1982, pp. 46–57. JSTOR

By the evening of Friday, 6 March 1931, days of threats and innuendo had brought the town of Donald to the edge of violence. Inside the local convent, Catholics waited with arms, in fear of a Protestant attack . Outside, the White Army patrolled, waiting for the moment when the Catholics and the communists would rise. One of those on the outside was a young soldier settler named Arthur Clifford.

In an interview, he recalled the event : I was out on the farm at the time. I got a call late one Thursday night. Be at Major Sproat’s place, first thing in the morning. When we got there, we were told that we’d have to form an organisation to protect the town. We were all sworn to secrecy. They didn’t know who it was: whether it was the communists or who. But we had to guard the bridges, and the main buildings, and things like that. We didn’t know whether it was the Irish or the communists. Harris was the head man here. But he said that he didn’t know. Some of us thought it was going to be the Catholics. And the Catholics were guarding the convent, because they thought it was us.

I reckon it must have been a put up job to see how far you could have divided the country. Whoever started it should have been shot. We were so close to shooting at each other that I wouldn’t like to say. If one shot had been fired, the the whole town would have been at it. As the storm mounted over the preceding days, Catholic children were terrorised with tales of the fate which awaited them and their parents once the revolution broke. A local minister reported at the time that Catholics were openly threatened and were ‘fearing for their lives and property ‘. But protestants too were afraid .

The more vigilant had heard that Father Coghlan and Doctor Flanagan had been ferrying in arms to Catholics throughout the district. Doctor Flanagan was also said to have used his car to transport communists in town , while Mr Kelly, the dentist, had been seen driving home with a car-load of crates which were assumed to contain bombs. The agent from the Investigation Branch (IB ), Les Simpson, later established that the doctor’s communists had been two swaggies who had hitched a lift , and that Kelly ‘s bombs were ‘in reality… two cases of tomatoes from St. Arnaud – Cathcart, M. (1985). The white army of 1931: Origins and legitimations: The league of national security in Victoria in 1931, and the means by which it was legitimated (Order No. 28819381). ProQuest One Academic

Tony Abbott’s recruitment

This is the single biggest break Howard had with his father’s ideology and would form the power block that made him the second longest serving prime minister in this country’s history. In their last weeks at school, Catholic boys of particular promise were taken aside and invited to rather mysterious “Peace with Freedom” weekends to prepare them for life at university. Though not invited, young Abbott tagged along: “Some instinct whispered that this was not an opportunity to be missed.” In the heady atmosphere of that secret forum in the summer of early 1976, the course of his political life was set: young Tony was recruited for Bob Santamaria’s Movement.

The men who did the work were Peter Samuel, the Bulletin ’s cranky political correspondent; Warren Hogan, the embattled professor of economics at Sydney University; and Joe de Bruyn, a hard-line Catholic union official about to assume lifetime leadership of the shop assistants’ union.

Howard had done his homework. He knew this was the former student politician, the footballer, the Rhodes Scholar, the ex-seminarian. He found him “Very intelligent, easy to talk to, had a lot of views the same as me; was traditional about a lot of things, but he was also somebody with a great inquiring mind … he saw Australia as something of an outpost of Western civilisation and values in the Asian Pacific region, and having to combine the history and the geography of our country, which he thought we could do … I thought he had real political talent.” 

At this nadir in the fortunes of his party, Howard invited Abbott to lunch. There was a job going as one of the press secretaries of the new leader of the Opposition, John Hewson. Twenty-four hours later, Abbott was in Canberra. He had found the mentor who would mean almost everything to him in his political career. It wasn’t Hewson. Abbott and his boss were very different men – a Catholic idealist, Abbott would later say, serving a Baptist technocrat workaholic – but things began well. Hewson found him bright and hard-working. “Diversity of opinion is an enormous asset,” he says. “Tony was the furthest to the right of my advisers. He was, with that DLP background of his, always about hard-line social policy. He was very good at defending a case in argument.” 

Abbott cites sending this note – which Hewson has no recollection of seeing – as a clarifying moment in his career. He had seen deep conviction frankly expressed make his boss unelectable. More finesse was required, more discretion. Fifteen years later he urged Santamaria loyalists at a dinner for their newspaper, News Weekly , not to abandon principles. “If you don’t have them, what is the point of life in politics?” But principles must be pursued “intelligently and sensitively” so as not to frighten the public: The art of effective democratic statesmanship is of presenting your principles, presenting your convictions, in ways which sufficiently impress the public such that you are seen as a man or woman of principle, but which don’t so worry the public that they think you would be a risk if you found yourself in a position of power – Marr, David. Political Animal : The Making of Tony Abbott, Black Inc., 2013. 18/

Howard attracts Catholics to the Liberal creed

In exchange undermining bodily autonomy Far right Catholic conservatives became acolytes of his economic program. This would create the modern Australian theocratic right and secured Howard’s leadership against his less bigoted counterparts through an influx of members. Much has changed. After John Howard’s first victory in 1996 one of the Liberal Party’s first claims was that the government’s higher vote had reversed a number of its historic electoral weaknesses, including a weakness among Catholics, by then Australia’s largest Christian denomination.

This was a new development. Andrew Robb, then Liberal Party federal director but now an MHR, claimed that ‘a 9 per cent deficit among Catholics was turned into an 11 per cent lead.’[4] By the 2001 election the Australian Election Survey reported that the Coalition still led Labor among Catholics by three points (45 per cent to 42 per cent). In 2004, while the political scientists Dr Clive Bean and Professor Ian McAllister point out that Catholics are still more likely to vote Labor than other denominations like Anglicans and Uniting Church members, the Coalition led Labor among Catholics by nine points (50 per cent to 41 per cent).[5] The old alliance between Catholics and Labor still has some relative strength, but in absolute terms it has gone.

Throughout the Howard decade the Coalition has also enjoyed a striking electoral lead among those who attend church regularly. Research into voting in previous decades showed a similar, though not so clear pattern.[6] This phenomenon holds across all denominations. By the 2004 election the Coalition lead Labor among regular churchgoers (at least once a month) by 22 points (55 per cent to 33 per cent), while its lead among those who never attended was just seven points (46 per cent to 39 per cent).[7] This combination of strong support among church-goers and better performance among Catholics has been an important element in Howard’s dominance – Warhurst (2006) Religion in Australian 21st Century Politics, Australian Parliament House

There are similarities between the two cases beyond the use of the conscience vote and the party divisions that inevitably followed. The first involved a successful private members’ bill moved in the House of Representatives by Kevin Andrews to overturn euthanasia legislation introduced by the Northern Territory parliament. The second involved a cross-party private members bill introduced into the Senate by four women, Lyn Allison (Democrats), Claire Moore (Labor), Fiona Nash (Nationals) and Judith Troeth (Liberal) to overturn the ministerial control over RU-486 exercised at the time by Tony Abbott, the Minister for Health. The Prime Minister personally supported the first and opposed the second (while the Opposition Leader on each occasion, Kim Beazley, supported both). The parliamentary debates each had strong religious-secular overtones, though this was only part of the story and many other themes also featured. Notably each generated enormous religious (primarily but not solely Catholic) pressure group activity closely associated with Catholic parliamentarians in both parties, Labor as well as Liberal, and Catholic church leaders. In 1996 it was called the Euthanasia No! campaign and in 2005 it was Australians against RU-486.

It’s important to note that Santamaria himself was openly disgusted by the idea of breaking bread with the Liberals and predicted that the Protestants would turn on their newfound Catholic allies. He also never gave up on integrating the union movement into the power structures.

Not long before he died in 1998, that veteran conservative political warrior B.A. (Bob) Santamaria granted me a series of interviews. After one session, over a cup of tea, his spirits seemed low and he wondered aloud if he had achieved much. The world seemed as troubled a place as ever. In an effort to cheer him up, I suggested that, given he’d been on the receiving end of a great deal of anti-Catholic sentiment over the years, he might be heartened by the fact that religious bigotry was no longer evident in public life. Santamaria looked at me with sad eyes, shook his head and said quietly, “No, bigotry has not gone. It is religious belief that has faded, but once that returns, if it does, back will come the old hatreds.” Howard’s father like many of the rank and file New Guard members would become an enthusiastic supporter of the Liberal Party

Small retailers are an important sub-section of the middle class. Their long hours and narrow profit margins give them an acute sense of their place in society. They feel great pride in their achievements when things are going well but limited empathy for those who aren’t prepared to make sacrifices. John Howard, as the son of a service station owner, shares this background with Robert Menzies and Margaret Thatcher. Lyall Howard was a logical candidate for member-ship of a group such as the New Guard. Police records make no mention of his membership, but Bob Howard recalls his father defending the activities of the New Guard and is of the view that his father probably was a member. His brothers disagree.  

While the Howard family rarely discussed religion outside church, politics was a different matter. Family, business and politics were never separated in the Howard household. Lyall and Mona supported the Liberal Party from its foundation in 1944 and Lyall was a paid-up member, although he never attended meetings. The 1949 election is the first one John Howard clearly recalls. As a 10-year-old, he listened to Opposition leader Robert Menzies on the radio during the campaign and would have heard Menzies promise to end petrol rationing, an extra reason for the Howards to hope for a Labor defeat.

The New Guard fade away but their legacy remains

The Chifley government had extended wartime planning and rationing and was attempting to nationalise the banks. For the Howards, petrol rationing was a potent symbol of the differences between the parties. Howard wasn’t the only person to continue the New Guard’s legacy. Several members of the leadership would go on to join United Australia (No relation to Palmer). Hubert Primrose would go on to become a UAP minister and Herbert Lloyd would briefly become a UAP MP. Primrose’s philanthropic endeavours were tinged with class interest and apprehension. He joined the paramilitary New Guard and rose to senior rank within its council of action as assistant adjutant and quartermaster general.

Through his good offices North Sydney oval was made available as a rallying point for the vast battalions of North Shore New Guardsmen in the event of their mobilisation against the unemployed or the Lang government. On 19 March 1932, after another senior New Guardsman, Francis de Groot, had unofficially ‘opened’ the southern approaches of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, on the northern side, Primrose, as North Sydney’s mayor, ceremoniously slashed another ribbon. Despite some police reservations about his New Guard allegiances, no attempt was made to stop him. So the New Guard opened the bridge at both ends.

Captain de Groot declares the Sydney Harbour Bridge open in March 1932

His disillusionment with parliamentary democracy was temporary. On 11 June 1932 Primrose was one of many New Guardsmen elected to the Legislative Assembly for the United Australia Party. His career as member for North Sydney was largely unremarkable. Brought into the Stevens-Bruxner ministry in July 1939, he was acting minister for health until its fall in August, held that portfolio for the next month in the Mair-Bruxner cabinet, then served as assistant minister until May 1941. Again acting minister for health from January to August 1940, in February 1941 he became minister in charge of the National Emergency Services. Here he was in his element but was defeated in the April elections. Lloyd obtained a post with Vacuum Oil Co. Pty Ltd, but severed his connection with that company on winning the Legislative Assembly seat of Parramatta for the Nationalists in 1929.

Next year he became managing director of Australian Soaps Ltd. Defeated in the 1930 general elections, he was deputy-commander of the New Guard before his re-election in 1932 as the United Australia Party member for Mosman, a seat he was to retain until 1941. Following the outbreak of World War II, he held the civil post of director-general of army recruiting in May-July 1940. This has left a lasting authoritarian strain inside the Liberal party and its predecessors. In Victoria in 1948 the Liberal Country Party government introduced a bill to ban the Communist Party, as well as repressive trade union laws.

Trade union protests had delayed their application but allegations made by Cecil Sharpley (a defecting former Communist trade union official who sold his “story” of communist corruption and sabotage to the Melbourne Herald) led to the establishment in 1949 of the Lowe Royal Commission into communism in Victoria, which was intended to produce evidence supporting Sharpley’s claims to ban the Communist Party. Former Communists, J.N. Rawling and T.C. McGillick, witnesses called before the Commission, claimed that the Communist Party was funded by Moscow, acted as a Soviet fifth column and had rigged the ballot in union elections. After 154 days of hearings, the Lowe Commission concluded that while the Communist Party advocated revolution it was not a pawn of the Soviet Union, nor did it commit industrial sabotage.

The Party’s mass work continued through the mechanism of non-Party organisations committed to democratic liberty. The model for this organisation was the Democratic Rights Committee, established in Melbourne in 1949 when Menzies declared his intention of outlawing communism during the Federal election campaign.[24] This form of mass Party work was an expression of the united front against state repression. These organisations, often with slightly different names, were formed in workplaces and local communities primarily in urban industrial areas, where the Party formerly had a public presence and became mass organisations mobilised during the 1951 Referendum to rally the ‘No’ vote against banning communism. In Melbourne a week before the Referendum on 22 September, 417 delegates from these people’s organisations representing 467,000 citizens throughout Australia unanimously condemned the Communist Party Dissolution Bill ‘as a measure which, if effect can be given to it, would convert our country into a vast concentration camp’.[25]

If any of this is remotely surprising to you, ask yourself this question. “Would a country founded on white supremacy be particularly prone to fascist ideology?” Because that’s the country we live in. This ideology can only be broken if we understand it.

References

Cunningham, Matthew. (2012). Australian Fascism? A Revisionist Analysis of the Ideology of the New Guard. Politics, Religion & Ideology, 13(3), 375–393.

The pivot of empire: Australia and the imperial fascism of the British Union of Fascists, History Australia, 14:3, 378-394, DOI: 10.1080/14490854.2017.1359092 Tyulkina and Williams. (2017),

Preventative Detention Orders in Australia, UNSW Law Journal, Warhurst (2006) Religion in Australian 21st Century Politics, Australian Parliament House, Errington and Van Onselen (2007)

The Boy who would be PM, The Age, Cottle, (2015)

How Australia failed to destroy Communism, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Warren Perry,

‘Lloyd, Herbert William (1883–1957)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, Errington and Van Onselen (2007)

John Winston Howard, Melbourne University Publishing Lavelle, Ashley. (2017).

Opposition Vanishing. P43-44 Springer Singapore Pte. Limited. Andrew Moore,

‘Primrose, Hubert Leslie (1880–1942)‘, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. Bornstein, (2018)

Requiem for the Right to Strike, Monash University, PDF Malone, (1988) Multiculturalism row divides party,

Liberals criticises Howard’s view, The Canberra Times. Abjorensen (2017),

Multiculturalism row divides party Liberals criticise Howard’s view – Trove

Marr, David. Political Animal : The Making of Tony Abbott, Black Inc., 2013.

Australia’s great political shift, Inside Story

IMPERIAL  FEDERATION 

An Address delivered by the  Hon. Alfred Deakin, M.P. at the Annual Meeting of the  Imperial Federation League of  Victoria, Town Hall, Melbourne, June 14, 1905.  

A Manifesto of the Objects and Aims of the League (Link)