Midway through the twentieth century the Liberal Party published a little booklet called ‘We Believe’. Comprising seventeen short paragraphs it was a creed for Liberal Party believers. Item 3 read ‘We believe in the Individual. We stand positively for the free man, his initiative, individuality, and acceptance of responsibility’. In 1954 the party was less than a decade old, but its catechism of beliefs looked back to the formation of explicitly non-labour parties in the first decade of the century, and beyond to the nineteenth-century British liberalism the settlers brought with them to the new land of opportunity beneath the southern skies. It also looked forward, to the uncertain postwar future, confident that, whatever lay ahead, the party's fundamental beliefs would be sufficient guide.

The Liberal Party of Australia was formed in 1945, and although this marked a new beginning, a re-organisation after the low point of the 1943 federal election, it was also the continuation of a political tradition which has been central to Australian politics since Federation. This book is about that tradition. It begins with Alfred Deakin in the first decades of the century, and it concludes with John Winston Howard at the century's end. It is not a detailed history of the various party organisations, their periodic collapses and reformations; nor is it a history of these parties' fluctuating electoral success; nor of the various governments they have provided, though it will touch on such matters.