Bruce Smith

Bruce Smith was an Australian barrister and a Member of the Parliament of New South Wales when it was still a self-governing colony before it became one of the states in the federal Commonwealth of Australia. He also went on to have a parliamentary career after Federation. His book “Liberty & Liberalism: A Protest Against the Growing Tendency Toward Undue Interference by the State, with Individual Liberty” is described as the only major study and defense of Adam Smith-style liberalism in Australia. This 1887 work is described by the author as “a protest against the growing tendency toward undue interference by the state, with individual liberty, private enterprise and the rights of property.” Now considered one of the great overlooked intellectuals of the Victorian era, Smith advocated government withdrawal from social and economic issues, seeing the solution to the misery of the world not in “the iron hand of an act of parliament” but in humanitarianism.