The past, of course, can be a burden; it can be used to resist change, and seek to mire the present and the future in a morass of custom and tradition that might no longer be relevant. But it can also be a source of strength, drawing on the sometimes painful lessons learned in another era that still have relevance and touch on enduring principles.

The current imbroglio involving the Liberal Party, brought to a head this week by the dramatic resignation of the respected Philip Higginson as honorary treasurer of the federal party, suggests Prime Minister Tony Abbott has learnt little about the party he now leads.

There has always been a degree of unease in Liberal circles about the fact that Abbott's powerful and influential chief of staff, Peta Credlin, is married to the most senior official in the party's national office, federal director Brian Loughnane.

To describe Mr Higginson's resignation email as explosive is to understate the case. The mysteriously leaked email read in part: "How this party ever let a husband and wife team into those two key roles where collegiate competitive tension is mandatory and private consultations between colleagues to see that each side is served well is a complete mystery…The federal director has a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the organisation at all times, repeat, at all times. How can this possibly happen when the COS [chief of staff] to the PM is his wife?"

The issues raised here go to the very heart of the key principles of the new Liberal Party when it was founded 70 years ago – principles as relevant today as they were then and for the same reasons.

The prime mover in bringing the new party into existence, and its leader for the next 20 years, Robert Menzies, had looked on with growing dismay as the Liberal Party's conservative predecessor, the United Australia Party, tore itself part, lost government (incidentally destroying Menzies' first prime ministership in 1941) and was savagely punished by the electorate in the crucial wartime election in 1943, returning a bare cricket team of members to the House of Representatives. Labor under John Curtin, by contrast, secured 49 seats in a house of 75.

The UAP was more of a cabal than a political party; its finances were controlled by a secretive group of Melbourne businessmen who also dictated policy and selected candidates. UAP branches were largely inactive between elections, and its politicians were increasingly seen as compromised by their reliance on large donations from business and financial organisations from whom they took their orders.

Menzies, of course, had been a beneficiary of such patronage himself, but as a weary nation emerged from the depths of the Great Depression with a wariness about business that had not been there before, he came to see that any viable non-labor party had to be able to demonstrate its independence from vested interests if it was to win public confidence.

In 1939, Menzies had dramatically resigned from the Cabinet of Joe Lyons over the decision by Lyons not to proceed with a national insurance scheme that had already passed the parliament. It was, of course, a challenge to the ailing Lyons who died soon after, but it is often forgotten that Menzies had taken exception to the way in which Lyons took his instructions from the so-called Temple Court Group, a group of Melbourne financiers and insurance interests who saw their own interests threatened by the scheme.

When Menzies and his colleagues pulled together a number of pro-business and anti-ALP organisations to form the Liberal Party in 1944 to try to salvage something enduring from the wreckage of the UAP, he insisted as a non-negotiable principle that the parliamentary and organisational wings of the new party were to be functionally separate. His idea was that the organisation would raise funds and administer a secretariat and branch structure while the parliamentary would alone be responsible for policy.

Menzies regarded it as important for politicians not to know where donations came from so that decisions could be made free of undue influence. He was intent on ensuring that the experience of the UAP was not repeated, with its attendant loss of public trust.

The Credlin-Loughnane axis cuts across this principle, and it is surprising that Tony Abbott cannot see the potential for damage that the Higginson email has so clearly signalled.

It was always there in the history if he had cared to look.

Dr Norman Abjorensen of the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy is the author of three books on the Liberal Party and its leaders. His book on prime ministerial exits will be published in September.