Feminism and the Making of a Child Rights Revolution: 1969–1979

Abstract

raise “abstract questions”. Fawcett, in his 2014 book, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, argues that, along with conservatism and socialism, liberalism was a policy response to industrial capitalism’s incessant change in the 19th century, with increased productivity, unemployment and impoverishment persistent features. Breaking liberalism into economic and social (capitals in the book) to explain change in one location is to miss not only the origins of the idea but its continuity, which also framed political divisions in late-19th-century Queensland (24–27). Burns—along with other Queensland politicians, at what was one frontier of capitalist expansion—grappled with the unity inherent in accumulation, international and local, as a combination of positives and negatives. So too with development, a 19th-century idea that Cowen and Shenton’s Doctrines of Development posits to be at least as international in its invention as liberalism. While Megarrity provides rich detail about Philp’s political activities, he does not go beyond repeating the descriptions economic, liberal and developer. Development, unlike earlier ideas of change, including Adam Smith’s favoured improvement, was framed to deal with what was seen as beneficial in capitalism but also its constant destructiveness—that is, describing Philp as a developer (and as a liberal) avoids asking why he did not see these consequences and try to also frame state policy to counter the negatives. In short, in international terms at least, Philp was wedded neither to liberalism nor to development. Megarrity rules out examining the possibility that conservative and conservatism (compare commentary across pages xv, 57, 66, 122, and 218) played at least as important a part in Philp’s political philosophy as these other two ideas. Conservative seems a better fit with parochial than liberal and developer to this reviewer. That there is no consideration of the consequences of commercial expansion for the Indigenous population of the region in a current biography of a major Queensland political figure only strengthens the assessment.