The Enduring Legacy
Robert Menzies laid the intellectual and cultural foundations that enabled subsequent governments, both Labor and Liberal, to build one of the world’s most free and prosperous nations. By David Kemp.
Robert Gordon Menzies was the most influential Australian political leader of the twentieth century. His political philosophy is central to understanding his influence. By force of character, courage, political skill and unmatched eloquence he transformed, through his ideas, the culture of his country’s politics and the nation’s future. He held office as Prime Minister in total for more than eighteen years, and was the most widely recognised and respected voice of Australia on the world stage. All the national governments that came after him for four decades built on the foundations he had set in place. Without him, today we would be writing a very different history of Australia.
Menzies’ ideas reveal to us a rather different person to that often portrayed in popular writing, where interpretations and stories tend to be survivals from the political chatter of the day, press comment, or follow the self-interested political ‘lines’ of friends and opponents. Biographies of the man tell of events, repeat anecdotes, put together a story, but often with little reference to the ideas that give meaning to Robert Menzies’ actions and influence over a political life of some forty years [1].
Menzies believed – as have political leaders before and after him - that politics is a contest of ideas. He wrote: “The art of politics is to convey ideas to others, if possible, to persuade a majority to agree, to create or encourage a public opinion so soundly based that it endures, and is not blown aside by chance winds; to persuade people to take long-range views” [2]. His influence on the nation’s politics is largely attributable to his articulation and practise of the ideas that guided his political judgement, and that he sought to embed in the political party – the Liberal Party of Australia – of which he was the principal founder.
Menzies’ ideas not only had the force that came from their inherent logic and appeal to the cultural values of the Australian electorate, but also from the persistence of expression over time that reflected the self-belief and mastery of language that was Menzies’ gift. No previous Australian prime minister had approached Robert Menzies in the depth, coherence and realism of his political philosophy, though George Reid – the tireless advocate of free trade and the liberal economy of the Federation era - perhaps comes closest. In the crisis of momentary self-doubt that followed Menzies’ resignation as prime minister in 1941 he did not flee the field, but instead summoned all his moral courage and intellectual skills to a task that was to make him the great architect of Australia’s post-war politics and policy success.
Along the way, his opponents – and, at times, even some of his friends – criticised him, and identified political misjudgements. Much, but not all, of the criticism was shallow, partisan and unfair, and Menzies himself conceded the validity of some of it in his memoirs. Yet when we reflect on his life, viewed now across the growing distance of the years, it is the depth and scope of his values, his fundamental soundness of judgement, his character, and unwavering commitment to his fellow citizens and his country, that stand out.
It is easier to speak of Menzies’ political philosophy than that of many other leaders because he himself regarded his ideas as comprising a ‘philosophy’ and designated them as such, though he would certainly have disowned the description ‘philosopher’. He sought to impose a logic and coherence on his thinking about politics and life, which he tested in part against analysis, but more generally against his understanding of history and the experience he acquired in the process of implementing his ideas.
The pre-eminent and most comprehensive statement of Menzies’ political ideas is to be found in his book of collected and edited radio talks, delivered in 1942, The Forgotten People. The collection was, he wrote in the foreword to the published collection in 1943, a “summarised political philosophy” [3]. In his first volume of memoirs, Afternoon Light, published in 1967, the year after his retirement from national politics, he regarded the great achievement of his political life as “the revival of Liberalism in Australia” through “the creation of a new party with a modern philosophy” [4]. Twenty-three years prior to this he had told the founding conference of the Liberal Party that it was a matter of “desperate importance to our country” to work for “a true revival of liberal thought” [5]. The name of his new party said just that. He later wrote:
We took the name ‘Liberal’ because we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments; in no sense reactionary, but believing in the individual, his rights and his enterprise …[6]
Liberal thought
For Robert Menzies, ‘liberal thought’ centred on the equal rights, the capacities and the entitlement to respect and dignity, of each individual person. He later spoke of “the supreme importance of the individual”, [7] and argued that “the test of civilisation is freedom, freedom of the spirit and of the mind and of the body”. [8]
The institutions of liberal democracy and the rule of law existed to protect individual rights. The liberal economy based on private enterprise was the expression of those rights in the daily lives of people, demonstrating the dependence of society on the creativity of the individual whose enterprise delivered both jobs and prosperity. Education was the principal road to the empowerment of, and opportunity for, each person. Government had responsibilities to enable this to happen, and to protect the rights of, and to assist, those whom economic or other misfortune had afflicted, and those vulnerable to the prejudice, hatred or the violence of others.
“Classes, races, religions, genders, political causes had no priority in his view over the rights, and the well-being, of each person”
Classes, races, religions, genders, political causes – the collectivities that dominated the political thought of many, and which were often accompanied by hatred of others – had no priority in his view over the rights, and the well-being, of each person. Menzies understood clearly that if all individuals mattered, and if each individual had distinct needs and talents, policy should promote opportunities for each of them. “We must aim at the fullest development of individual capacity”, he had told the Liberal Party’s founding conference [9]. Treating social collectivities such as classes, races or religious denominations as if they had voices and rights inevitably led to injustice to individual people.
Robert Menzies passionately defended the parliamentary and legal institutions Australia had inherited from Britain, and modelled by the founders in part on those of the United States, which he saw as designed to protect individual liberty. The independent judiciary was an essential element of these institutions. “The guarantee of civic freedom is the certainty and impartiality of justice” [10], he said. Throughout his career he saw the necessity of defending parliamentary government against those interests that sought to dictate national policy from outside the democratically elected governments – the ‘faceless men’ as he characterised them during the 1960s. These interests had their strongholds principally in the Labor Party, but he had been equally alert to repel any parallels on his own side of politics.
He thought broadly about political life and its relationship to the workings of society as a whole. While his liberalism was a policy philosophy, pointing the way to sound decisions and legislation, its scope embraced also the conduct, nature and architecture of political life, and a developed understanding about the way society worked and about human nature. Policy, he believed, could not be properly made, nor good government realised, if the processes and institutions of politics did not function well, and policy would not be effective unless it was based upon a valid comprehension of social life and humanity. His liberalism also encompassed a profound Australian patriotism, and the strategies to guarantee the security of his country in a troubled world occupied a significant place in his thinking.
Menzies’ judgement that the revival of “liberal thought” was a matter of “desperate importance” by the 1940s expressed his dismay at the shallowness and destructive character of the ideas that he saw as then dominating Australian political debate. These ideas had eaten away at the economic and social achievements of colonial Liberalism, had undermined enterprise and encouraged dependence on government, had plunged Australia into one of the worst depressions in the world after 1929, and had weakened the nation as it faced external aggression from Japan. Reason in national policy had too often been replaced by prejudice and selfishness, and individual liberties, and individual motivation, had been threatened by a strengthening authoritarian demand for group solutions to industrial and economic problems. The nation’s vitality was being sacrificed to illiberal thought.
Illiberal thought
The ideas that were Menzies’ intellectual and political targets pervaded many aspects of political and national life. He sought to replace the sectarian, class, racial and nationalist hatreds of Australian political life with respect and rationality, to reason with his foes, and to exemplify civility in the conduct of national affairs. He wanted people to think sensibly and in a reasoned way about problems, and had a special distaste for sanctimony and for the ‘pseudo-intellectual’ whose shallow and incoherent thought often promoted social division, or advocated breaching fundamental principles such as the rule of law in pursuit of their causes and ideological concerns. He patiently worked against the parochial nationalism fostered by the protectionist era of white Australia with his immigration, trade and education policies and through the welcome his government offered to students from Asia coming under the Colombo Plan.
Most of all, however, he set himself to defeat the influence of the utopian ideas about the role of government in society then dominating the Labor Party and union Left, and what he called “the foul doctrine of the class war” [11]. Among these were the beliefs that successful economies and business corporations could be administered like bureaucratic government departments, that markets, prices and entrepreneurs were unimportant, that profits were against the public interest, that raising production destroyed jobs, that the interests of employers and employees under ‘capitalism’ were fundamentally opposed, and inevitably produced a kind of civil or class war. Likewise, he contested beliefs that the greater the number of businesses run by government the better, that politicians, officials and selected others could be entrusted with vast arbitrary discretions over individual lives, that multiplying the uniform rules imposed by government on everyone could produce progress, that a unified governmental authority in Canberra could be effectively controlled by the people, and that personal security could be obtained through an all-powerful state.
These were all ideas that in the decades in Australia before 1949 went under the name of ‘Socialism’, though in his view they might just as readily be called ‘fascism’, as he told the House of Representatives in the debate on bank nationalisation in 1947:
The attitude of the Government is: ‘We are the rulers of the land. We know better than the people what is good for them’. That is the fascist mind [12].
Menzies had summarised his refutation of these ideas for the assembled delegates from the liberal organisations at the conference he had called to establish his new party in 1944:
I see the individual and his encouragement and recognition as the prime motive force for the building of a better world. Socialism means high costs, inefficiency, the constant intrusion of political considerations, the damping down of enterprise, the overlordship of routine. None of these elements can produce progress, and without progress, security will turn out to be a delusion [13].
Through the Liberal Party of Australia Menzies set out to reset the course of Australian history, to expose the fantasies of the Left utopians, and to build a new political culture on a rescued liberal tradition – one not based on class, sectarian or nationalist hatreds, but on mutual respect and faith in the ability of people, making their own choices in life, to create a good society. Government would be recognised as having the responsibility to protect them and to empower them as they pursued their own missions in life.
“It was Menzies’ success in restoring ‘liberal thought’ to Australian government that laid the intellectual and cultural foundations for the efforts to dismantle the bloated state of the post-federation decades under Hawke, Keating, and Howard”
Without Robert Menzies there would have been no Gough Whitlam, carrying the battle against Left extremism into the darkest corners of the Labor Party, nor a Malcolm Fraser inspired by Menzies’ example, pursuing the equal rights of all people regardless of ethnicity, race or religion, supporting those in need, controlling government spending and seeking to re-establish a concept of limited government. It was Menzies’ success in restoring ‘liberal thought’ to Australian government that laid the intellectual and cultural foundations for the efforts to dismantle the bloated state of the post-federation decades under Hawke, Keating, and Howard, and for the tax, education and industrial relations reforms of the Howard era. As Australia became the ‘miracle economy’ of the OECD in 2000, a more open, tolerant and good-humoured nation than it had ever been before, it was the spirit of Menzies that had brought it there.
Menzies and wife Pattie with Winston Churchill in 1952.
Politics as a Public Service
There are at least three aspects of Robert Menzies’ early life to which we can point as providing foundations on which his adult philosophy of politics was constructed.
Throughout his life Menzies saw his involvement in politics as a public service, and politics as an activity whose purpose was to advance the interests of the community as a whole [14]. Politics should never be seen as a selfish activity to better oneself, or to promote some special interest at the community’s expense, but to improve the lives of all.
This had been almost the dominant lesson of his childhood.
His parents, he wrote, “were a remarkable pair of people, with great talents, high moral purpose, and an intense and self-sacrificing desire to see their children make some unselfish but competent contribution to life” [15]. His father, he said, “was a great one for getting things done. In this he was completely unselfish, for all his greatest crusades were for others” [16]. In The Forgotten People he defiantly defended the motivation of public service:
To discourage ambition, to envy success, to hate achieved superiority, to distrust independent thought, to sneer at and impute false motives for public service – these are the maladies of modern democracy, and of Australian democracy in particular. Yet ambition, effort, thinking and readiness to serve are not only the design and objectives of self-government, but are the essential conditions for its success [17].
Menzies would become famous in his own family for his lack of interest in money or personal fortune. As he told a meeting of the Institute of Public Affairs in 1954, when he was Prime Minister for the second time:
What I ask you to realise is that people like myself – I’m not the only one – go into this life because they have beliefs, because they have a faith, because they believe that there is something that matters for their own country [18].
Reason, Knowledge and Logic
The second aspect of his early life that he said came to matter greatly was his reaction to his father James’ own political style – a highly emotive platform style that he did not like, and left him squirming in his seat at meetings addressed by his father. At times, he observed, his father’s emotionalism could be wounding to others. “We were not a little frightened of him”, Robert recalled [19]. He did not doubt the effectiveness of the emotive style, but in response to it, he developed his own style of highly rational and reasoned argument. In his memoirs, when he had retired from politics, he conceded that both approaches had their merits, and that perhaps his cool rationalism had had its downsides as well:
My father’s emotional character derived from a deep-seated faith and belief. He had not been through the disciplined experiences of the Law, and so, paradoxically, was nearer to the surface in the expression of things that were deepest in his heart. I wish today that there were more like him. It is one thing to be the coldly reasoning product of the schools; the objectivity thus produced is needed badly in a world in which there is so much passion and prejudice, ‘malice, hatred and all uncharitableness’. But there is a great place in life for beliefs so strongly held that they must find utterance and sway the hearts of men. [20].
Without Menzies’ logical and rational analysis of the world, he would never have developed the understanding to which his impact on Australian history can be traced, yet as he looked back, particularly to his alienation from many of his parliamentary colleagues in the early years of the war, when he had resigned the prime ministership and subsequently the party leadership, he could see that Menzian logic could wound as much as Menzian passion.
After the “humiliation”, as he called it, of 1941, he decided to adopt more of what he recalled as his mother’s “sweet reasonableness” [21], learning from bitter experience that leaving a trail of walking wounded was neither admirable nor politically sensible. As the years went by he became more self-deprecatory, more generous to foes, more attracted to the humorous. But beneath the logic there remained a submerged passion that drove him on and his commitment to enlightened understanding and public service continued to motivate him.
Idealism
The third aspect of his early years that contributed to his future course was his family’s political idealism. Both his parental family and the family of his wife, Pattie Leckie, had strong political beliefs. Robert’s father James, and his father-in-law, John Leckie, had been members of parliament, and more than that, they were Liberal, in an era when Liberals in Australia were conscious that their great peaceful and reformist tradition - which had culminated in the establishment of one Australian nation in 1901 - was being overwhelmed first by the horrors of war 1914-1918 and then submerged into a party led by Billy Hughes, then Stanley Melbourne Bruce, that they struggled to recognise as their own.
Robert’s brother, Frank Gladstone, had been named after the leader of the British Liberal Party, W.E. Gladstone, who had died in 1898. No statesman had stood more strongly for moral standards in public affairs. The Menzies family believed deeply in this kind of politics, and Robert was to exemplify it in his career. But it was the agony of Australian Liberalism during and after the Great War that sharpened Menzies’ political views, and set him on what may seem in retrospect an inexorable course to ‘revive liberal thought’.
The Liberals after 1917 faced two challenges. The ‘win-the-war’ Nationalist Party - created out of the merger of the Liberal Party that had been formed by Deakin with Hughes’ National Labor – came increasingly to be seen by many former Liberals as moving away from what they understood by economic and constitutional liberalism. More shockingly, the Left of Australian politics, after the Russian revolution of 1917 - through both the Labor Party and the newly-formed Communist Party - was embracing a utopian anti-capitalist ideology based around class war, inflation of the power of government, and the submergence of the individual. Labor’s leader, Matthew Charlton, in his 1925 election policy speech, had declared that Labor “stands for the unity of the mass against the mass power of Mammon. It subordinates the individual to principle” [22]. The issue of the relationship between politics and economic and social life was now squarely on the nation’s political agenda, and two divergent policy approaches were being promoted.
What troubled the former Liberals was that these two forces were not divergent enough, for the Nationalists showed some signs of moving to a policy convergence. Hughes, despite earlier indications, was plainly not an advocate of liberal thought and made no secret of his distaste for ‘capitalism’[23] or of his belief in government ownership. Bruce, the Nationalist leader from 1923, was a young businessman who viewed Australia more as a corporate entity and was a policy pragmatist with little regard for federalism or theoretical liberal principles. For those who believed in liberalism, the question was: should the Nationalists be confronted by a revived Liberal party, or changed from within?
A small revived Liberal party, the Liberal Union, was successful in disposing of Hughes after the 1922 election, through the agency of John Latham working with the new Country Party, and in 1926 John Leckie helped to establish an Australian Liberal Party in Victoria. The risk of a new Liberal Party, however, was that it would split the Nationalists and let Labor into government. Robert Menzies chose a second strategy and set out to reform the Nationalist Party from within through a new ‘party within a party’, the Young Nationalists. From the time he entered the Victorian State Parliament in 1928 he set out to become a voice for his developing philosophy of liberalism based on responsible individualism rather than state intervention.
The formation of the Young Nationalists in 1929 clearly revealed Menzies, for the first time, as an architect of politics, prepared to transform its structures to further his ideas. Functioning political parties were the key. The Young Nationalists became effectively an organisation promoting Menzies’ version of liberalism.
Political Architect
By the early 1930s Menzies had become one of the most eloquent voices for political liberalism in Australia against those seeking authoritarian solutions through the communism and quasi-fascism that were claiming attention in the English-speaking world. He attacked the danger of political movements identified by the colour of their shirts, and their ‘idea of primitive justice and wild justice’, and felt a genuine sense of mission as the defender and advocate of traditional democratic and parliamentary values in the face of incipient threats, at home and abroad [24]. He constantly stressed the theme that ‘ a strong Parliament was the only protection against dictatorships and Communism’, and parliament could only preserve itself through independence and strength [25]. His frequent addresses to Irving Benson’s Pleasant Sunday Afternoons were regularly reported in the press.
In the darkest days of the Great Depression Menzies played a key role in engineering the restoration of public confidence in the party system and in parliamentary government. Confidence in parliamentary government depended on a party system that could formulate sensible policies and make a persuasive case to the people. When that system broke down, people searched for non-parliamentary, and threatening, solutions.
In the Depression after 1929, unemployment at almost 30 percent shook confidence in government, political parties, and (what remained of) the liberal economy. National debt was over 125 per cent of GDP, and Australia’s capacity to borrow internationally collapsed. Political extremism on the fringes, and not just the fringes, was the result. The NSW Premier, Jack Lang, was threatening the socialisation of NSW industry and the repudiation of international debt obligations. The chairman of the NSW ALP’s socialisation committee told the Easter Conference of that party in 1931 that “Capitalism has failed and socialism must have its trial … Parliaments are stinking in the nostrils of the electors”. The conference was told: “A people’s government must take control” [26]. While the Lang Labor Party debated whether revolutionary action was required, simultaneously a middle class revolt arose against the Nationalist Party through the All For Australia League and other organisations, and Menzies, keeping his head when all about him were losing theirs, moved rapidly to consign the old ‘win-the-war’ Nationalists to the dustbin of history.
As the Scullin Labor government began to fall apart and Joseph Lyons rebelled against its failure to restore fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets, Menzies once again acted. He formed a group of prominent Melbournians to support Lyons’ transition to the leadership of a new party – a party that would take the name of the ‘United Australia Party’ to beat the Depression. Unlike Lyons, who initially proposed a break from “the crippling fetters of the party system” [27], Menzies knew that a new party was necessary to rebuild confidence in the parliamentary process that had frayed badly, as evidenced by the willingness of the union and Labor Left and groups of returned servicemen to organise paramilitary groups as a protection against violent action. It was Menzies who helped to persuade John Latham to step aside from the leadership of the Nationalists and agree to serve in the new party, and it was a member of Menzies’ group, Ambrose Pratt, who wrote notes for Lyons for his resignation speech from the failing Labor government.
By his role in these events Menzies was already flagging his belief that parliamentary government could not operate without an effective party system, and he was prepared to seize opportunities to reorganise his own side of politics to better work on behalf of his political values.
When he looked back on this testing period from the war year 1942, Menzies concluded:
There has been no doubt that this democracy of ours has been very sick. If and when it can be cured, it has great work to do. But it will never be cured unless we see the past clearly, and recognize frankly that we cannot ignore politics and treat democracy as a mere matter of loaves and fishes and demean the politician, and at the same time sensibly demand that “government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth”. [28]
These years of upheaval also did much to crystallise the substance of Menzies’ policy philosophy, and to lead him to emphasise the importance of a policy framework that embraced the encouragement of enterprise, the equal rights of all under the rule of law, well-directed and controlled public spending, and a comprehensive ‘safety net’ based on national insurance for those suffering distress through no fault of their own. Many of the nation’s problems arose, in his view, from capitulation to excessive and dangerous demands by special interests – business, farming and union especially- for state intervention in the market, and from irresponsible spending, borrowing and regulation by governments. These were policy ideas that had led to excessive dependence on government by both industry and unions, and to national bankruptcy. The key to a return to sound policy-making and economic health was the recognition that freedom and reward, and the value of personal responsibility, were the sources of creativity and achievement for individuals and the economy as a whole, and that government had a responsibility to revive and encourage these motive forces of economic progress and social health.
In articles in the Melbourne Argus in 1929 Menzies had described the idea that judges could regulate the workplace as “grotesque” [29]. He would have noted the Brigden report’s conclusion that Australian tariffs, which would become the second highest in the world (after the United States), were unrestrained from infinite expansion, threatening the nation’s economic health [30]. The conversion of the Deakinite Liberal Frederic Eggleston in his seminal study State Socialism in Victoria, to the view that government enterprises had been run not in the public interest, but by the ‘Interests’ [31] was one that Menzies fully comprehended. He would have noted the conclusion of the historian, Keith Hancock, in Australia, that what Australian public policy required was a “realistic individualism” [32] in which the interests of individual Australians defined the public interest, not the selfish “swarm of petty appetites” that sought to extract benefits and privileges for themselves from the state.
Principle v. Special Interest
During these years Menzies formulated more clearly his critique of policy decisions based on interest group pressures rather than sound principles of the public interest. He had been concerned with selfish pressures from the Progressive Country party in Victoria, and from influential businessmen organized in the National Union, a fundraising committee for the Nationalist Party that attempted to interfere in pre-selections. In September 1931, as President of the Victorian National Federation, he had stated his belief that the solution to such a self-defeating politics lay in principled, rather than pressured, policy:
I believe that a large majority of the public today is perfectly ready to give its adherence to a party which will display political principle and political courage… We have suffered far too much from people who have no political convictions beyond a more or less genteel adherence to our side of politics. That kind of adherence is worthless. We must have people who believe things, and who are prepared to go out and struggle to make their beliefs universal. [33]
He later brought these ideas together in a series of radio talks, published in 1943 as The Forgotten People and other Studies in Democracy, and gave organisational expression to them in his main architectural achievement, the Liberal Party of Australia, in 1944. The Liberal Party was a party with an explicit philosophy of the public interest, committed to the interests of the individual citizen, that would control its own pre-selections and its own fundraising, and where the parliamentary party elected by the people would determine policy. It would not be a business-led or controlled party, but a party whose policies of support for a more liberal economy would benefit business along with all other citizens.
In The Forgotten People Menzies noted that the inter-war years had seen remarkably few pieces of legislation designed to encourage individual effort, enterprise or personal independence. For two decades the nation seemed to have been travelling down a path that was leading to stagnation, and the submergence of the individual. Without freedom, individual people could not flourish, and without freedom there would never be real progress. The constant political rhetoric which emphasised welfare and state oversight from the cradle to the grave and class war demeaned each citizen, had threatened Australia’s democracy during the Great Depression, and would ultimately destroy its vitality as a nation:
There may be some people who think that the only freedom that counts is to have a roof to sleep under, clothes to wear, food to eat. These are very necessary; Governments must be pledged to do all in their power to assist people to secure them; but they are not freedoms at all. Each can be obtained in a state of utter slavery.
The real freedoms are to worship, to think, to speak, to choose, to be ambitious, to be independent, to be industrious, to acquire skill, to seek reward. These are the real freedoms, for these are the essence of the nature of man.[34]
Menzies at the opening of the Australian Kodak factory in 1961.
Free Enterprise
Menzies’ emphasis on the importance of economic freedom was derived from these general principles. His view was that to deprive citizens of this freedom, through unnecessary industry regulation or nationalisation, was nothing short of fascism. Indeed, in the organized marketing arrangements in many industries, and in the demands of extremists in the union movement for compulsory membership of trade unions, he saw, rearing its ugly head, the same corporatist principle that was advocated by fascist movements in Europe.
There is some tendency today, as there was in the Italy of the early Mussolini, to organize the community by giving to each trade or industry a separate collectivist control of itself through the employers and employees engaged in it. At first sight this seems reasonable. But second sight will tell us that the most important person is the party of the third part – the member of the general public. He must never surrender his rights. The community is greater than the trade or the business or the craft.[35]
In his talks in 1942 Menzies advocated none of the flagship policies of the Deakinite agenda: industry protection, compulsory arbitration of industrial disputes, nor white Australia. His silence was eloquent. His pre-occupation, in reality, was to deal with the consequences of the failure of these policies, and to return, in many ways, to a more classical liberalism of the kind that had been advocated by the English economist and political philosopher, John Stuart Mill, based on acceptance of minority differences, equal rights, individual liberty and policies that put the consumer ahead of the producer, while acknowledging a positive role for the state and condemning laissez-faire.
At the foundation of the Liberal Party two years later, relying on what he described as an “amazing” study, Looking Forward, by the Institute of Public Affairs, that embodied ideas from the English economist John Maynard Keynes, and the political economist, Friedrich Hayek, Menzies set out to identify “the true economic functions of the State”. These were, he said:
First, to assist in preventing the periodic recurrence of large-scale unemployment;
Second, to secure to all responsible citizens (through social legislation) at least a decent and reasonable minimum of economic security and material well-being;
Third, to impose a framework of law which will give the utmost encouragement to the enterprise, resourcefulness and efficiency of individuals and groups, and which lead to the greatest possible output of the goods and services which the community needs;
Fourth, to conserve in the long range interests of the community, those natural resources fundamental to the life and future prosperity of the nation. [36]
Although Menzies’ training was in the law, and his reforming zeal in government was to be more in areas such as education, health and foreign policy, he never departed from his view that economic and financial policy lay at the very heart of liberal thinking. The great political debates of his time were centred on economics, which he recognised as inextricably entwined with all those aspects of life he held dear: the rule of law and the liberty of people to control their own lives. It became a central proposition of his political philosophy that government could, by unwise interventions, damage and even destroy the productive working of the economy, and foster corrupt and authoritarian concentrations of power. Neglect of this area, in his view, had been one of Churchill’s flaws, and of this neglect he had written:
No political leader known to me ever knew less of the complexities of economics and finance. His grasp of domestic peacetime problems was so imperfect that he had great difficulty, in pre-war years, in holding his parliamentary seat [37].
Robert Menzies would not make this mistake. Chifley’s proposal to nationalise the trading banks in 1947 on the basis that “private banks are conducted primarily for profit, and therefore follow policies that in important respects run counter to the public interest” [38], confirmed Menzies in his view that Australian democracy was in grave danger from Labor’s socialist lack of economic understanding and its corporate state policies. Democracy was based on respect for the capacity and rights of individual people, and personal liberty and economic liberty were indistinguishable. Of Chifley’s Banking Bill to nationalise the trading banks he said:
The Bill will be a tremendous step towards the servile State, because it will set aside normal liberty of choice, and that is what competition means, and will forward the idea of the special supremacy of government. That is the antithesis of democracy. Democracy rests upon the view that the people are the rulers, as well as the ruled; that the government has no authority and no privilege beyond that granted by the people themselves; that while sovereignty attaches to the acts of the parliament, that sovereignty is derived from the people and has no other source. Fascism and Nazism, against which the free peoples of the world have just waged a bloody war in which millions suffered bitterly, both rejected the democratic idea as I have defined it…[39]
In his memoir, The Measure of the Years (1970), he wrote:
[T]he basic philosophy of Australian Liberalism is that the prime duty of government is to encourage enterprise, to provide a climate favourable to its growth, to remember that it is the individual whose energies produce progress, and that all social benefits derive from his efforts. [40]
Between 1949 and 1966 Australia remained protectionist, and direct export and import controls were used on occasion, though phased out. The industrial relations system was reformed to separate judicial and arbitral powers, compulsory arbitration remained, but strikes were few. The white Australia immigration policy persisted, at least formally. Organised marketing of primary products, and in some primary industries, production licensing, continued. The Government retained ownership of the post office and telecommunications, a trading and savings bank, an airline, a shipping line, and a radio and later television network. Menzies had judged that the major policies of the Deakinite post-federation settlement were too entrenched to be confronted directly, and that the politics of overt reversal were impossible. All were strongly supported by the Labor Party Opposition, which sought to block change, supported from the mid-1950s by the Democratic Labor Party. The Country Party, essential to coalition government, was protectionist and defended extensive regulation of many primary industries. His liberalism would undermine these policies, nonetheless.
Menzies’ assessment of what was possible pointed him to a lengthy reform agenda as the policy framework for economic and social liberalisation was put in place. Wartime rationing and price controls were abandoned and Labor’s nationalisation agenda was terminated. The banking system was put on a sounder and less politically vulnerable basis: the uncalled liability of the trading banks was cancelled in 1953, the Reserve Bank established in 1957, and the Commonwealth Trading, Savings and Development Banks separated. The public debt declined from 136 per cent of GDP in 1949 to 52 percent in 1966, and international credit was rebuilt. The regulatory activities of the Commonwealth of private economic activity stabilised, and in some respects (direct controls) were withdrawn. Secret ballots were introduced for union elections in 1951; the Commonwealth Industrial Court was established after 1956 and empowered to order compliance with awards and punish for contempt. The Tariff Board began its slow journey to the economic analysis of protection, foreshadowing its ultimate abandonment. Foreign capital was actively sought, national development took off, jobs were plentiful, and unemployment low. After a short surge in the early 1950s, inflation remained under control at low levels.
Menzies’ philosophy protected Australia from the fashionable economic panacea of indicative economic planning, then popular in Europe, especially France, rejecting this recommendation of the government’s own Committee of Economic Enquiry (the Vernon Committee) in 1965. He refused to hand over policy-making, he said, to the so-called ‘experts’: “In no case is a political policy the product of purely expert opinion on technical matters”, he argued. “We are a private enterprise economy. In such an economy, the demands set up by the people who are the buyers are the normal stimulant for increased industrial investment and activity. What the Committee appears to have in mind is that those demands, where necessary should be redirected”. The Committee, he said, had “predicated a degree of planning and direction of the economy which in our opinion would not be either appropriate or acceptable in Australia …”[41]. What Australia, under Menzies’ leadership, saw clearly, European countries would also later conclude, and that continent would then abandon its dirigiste polices as liberal thought revived throughout the West.
Menzies’ liberalism was based on a deep faith in the capacities of each human being, in the desirability of “a fierce independence of spirit” and “a brave acceptance of unclouded individual responsibility” [42]. These values would build a better society. Government had an important role, but it was limited in what it could achieve because its services and laws inevitably imposed conformity where progress required diversity. Where socialism meant uniform provision for all, and was justified in some limited cases, Menzies insisted upon the right of each person to exercise judgement and choice in all those aspects of life where people’s preferences differ, and where a variety of goods and services can be provided. He wrote: “any activity in which choice and personal confidence are essential is not an activity for which the socialist solution is appropriate” [43].
Such areas included banking, medicine and health care, housing, aged care, media and education services, as well as the normal commercial activities of a liberal economy. As Prime Minister, Menzies pursued policies in each of these areas designed to foster through private provision the variety citizens were seeking. In strengthening and cementing in human services the mixed character of provision – private and public – he put in place a characteristic pattern of service provision for which Australia still stands out internationally.
The liberalisation of social policy proceeded apace, as significant steps were taken towards strengthening private provision in Australia’s mixed public/private systems in health and schooling and empowering patients and parents with choice. An effective voluntary system of health insurance was established through the historic National Health Act 1953. Support for white Australia was eroded by massive immigration, and thousands of students from Asia, and would be effectively ended by Harold Holt in 1966 in the face of opposition from the Labor Party. The Commonwealth took over the major role in the funding and expansion of higher education. Menzies set out to encourage private home ownership and his success was proudly recorded in his memoirs. He wrote that “of all the dwellings in Australia, over forty percent were built” during his term of office after 1949 [44]. The foundations for one of the world’s (proportionately) largest middle classes were set in place.
The exercise of choice and the freeing of individual creativity would have a profound effect on the structure and leadership of society, Menzies argued. His policy ideas, as he saw it, led to opportunity for individuals in a way that the uniformity of government provision and regulation never could. Opportunity in turn would naturally lead to the strengthening of the middle class, and in Australia the values of the middle class were those that would lead to a progressive, enlightened, humane and prosperous society.
Education, Opportunity and the Middle Class
The key to opportunity and to strengthening the middle class was education, for education was empowerment. Out of his Scottish heritage Menzies saw the realisation of liberal principles and education as linked, because education was the essential basis of a politics based on knowledge and reason, and reason had a central place in liberal thought, coming out of the Scottish enlightenment. The Scottish farmer, he said, sees the future of his child secured not by money but by “the acquisition of the knowledge which will give him power” [45].
Apart from the winning of the war, the greatest because the most fundamental task in front of us is to educate a new generation, not for mere money-making or to comply with the law, but for an enlightened citizenship based upon honest thinking and human understanding. [46]
…in the new world we must seek to develop all the intelligence and strength and character in every child. Each one of them must have his chance … When the war is won, for every hundred boys and girls who now pass into higher schools and universities there must be a thousand. Lack of money must be no impediment to bright minds … To develop every human being to his fullest capacity for thought, for action, for sacrifice and endurance is our major task; and no prejudice, stupidity, selfishness or vested interest must stand in the way. [47]
Menzies’ Liberal Party after 1949 placed education – both school and university – at the centre of its program. His government overturned the nineteenth century sectarian policy that refused to recognize the public benefit of government support for all schools (and indeed, hospitals), provided scholarships for university entry and, following the Murray enquiry that he established, introduced revolutionary change into university funding, vastly expanding entry to high education through new universities. Menzies pursued this policy with a passion. As he introduced into the Parliament the measures that would lead to the unprecedented development of the university sector, “my emotions”, he said, “were deep, and for me, unforgettable”. [48]
Menzies’ view was that better education would lift the whole society, and the quality of every institution in it. It would improve leadership, it would improve public debate, and it would produce greater equality. The position of women was foremost in his mind. “Higher education for women must come to be regarded as normal”, he said, and not as a matter of eccentricity [49]. Working with Elizabeth Couchman, in a striking contrast to Labor, Menzies ensured that the new Liberal Party gave women and men equal positions of leadership in its councils, including in pre-selection conventions.
Though his belief in empowering people through education and the encouragement of a sense of responsibility permeated his thinking, Menzies also supported income redistribution through the government to those whom the vicissitudes of life had injured, and in government established legal frameworks for the provision of services that were necessary on humanitarian grounds that would not be privately provided. This, too, was part of empowerment. He objected vehemently to “false humanitarianism which does not strengthen but corrupts”, that asserts that one person should be another’s keeper. His programs would be aimed to encourage individual responsibility.
Under his Government social security spending continued to rise. He was proud of the Commonwealth entry into improving care for the aged through the Aged Persons Homes Act 1954; the provision of free life-saving drugs, and free medical and pharmaceutical services for old age and invalid pensioners. His Government expanded child endowment to first child and full-time students, and during his prime ministership the Commonwealth entered into capital provision for mental health patients.
Menzies holds a press conference in London in 1956.
Freedom of Expression
The freedom to which Menzies gave priority, and without which – he believed – all other freedoms collapsed, was freedom of expression. Freedom of association and freedom of religion were essential elements of his liberalism, but it was freedom of expression to which he gave the greatest importance, because without it all other freedoms were threatened. During the 1930s he had been one of the most liberal voices against censorship on grounds of morality. He wrote in 1942: “The worst crime of fascism and its twin brother, German national socialism, is their suppression of free thought and free speech”. [50] Without free speech, error might never be discovered and truth would be suppressed:
Hence, if truth is to emerge and in the long run be triumphant, the process of free debate – the untrammelled clash of opinion – must go on. [51]
He associated himself with the principle stated by John Stuart Mill that the only restraint on the exercise of freedom must be to prevent harm to others. The threats to liberty become greater as society becomes more complex, and as this occurs, “we must be increasingly vigilant for the freedom of our minds and spirits”. [52] Menzies was a lifelong advocate of freedom of the press, and he carefully weighed the principles behind wartime censorship in the Forgotten People talks. The policy expression of this commitment was perhaps clearest in media policy for radio and television. Chifley’s premature attempt to establish a government monopoly in television was overturned by Menzies as consumers were provided with the choice of commercial networks alongside the ABC.
Menzies’ attempt to ban the Communist Party in 1950 did not conflict with his profound belief in freedom of speech, and did not involve any attempt to ban the expression of communist beliefs by individuals. Subversive associations had been banned on grounds of national security in both world wars, though it was arguable with limited effect. After 1945 he had resisted, on grounds of freedom of speech, Country Party proposals to ban the party again (as at the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact). His changed view after 1949, as the Cold War was heating up and wider war threatened, was based on his assessment that, in light of new intelligence information, the Communist party had become an active agent on behalf of the Soviet Union in a subversive attack on Australia. Its members had penetrated the highest levels of politics and government and had passed secrets to the Soviets. Chifley had acted against this penetration and set up the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), and the Petrov Royal Commission in 1954 established its extent in detail, including into H.V. Evatt’s office. Banning the party would enable the Government to force Communist Party members out of the public service and out of leadership positions in unions in industries vital to the security of the country. The prospect of a fifth column operating inside Australian government and in vital industries in time of war was not to be contemplated. It could prevent the Government acting effectively and, if this happened, Australia might not survive.
The Labor Party, fearful of a threatened double dissolution, supported Menzies’ initial Bill, and during the Petrov affair his Cabinet acted deliberately and effectively to ensure that witch-hunts of the kind that had occurred in the United States under Senator Joseph McCarthy were not replicated in Australia. But the pressure of Menzies’ proposal on a Labor Party, divided as it was between anti-communists and the secular, utopian and sectarian Left, would lead in 1954 to an irrevocable split in that party, and to the long-term realignment of Australian politics.
In the event, armed conflict between the major powers did not eventuate and the potential fifth column Menzies had identified never had its opportunity. Communist Party members at senior levels in the public service fled, recanted or ceased their activities, and the party’s ideological rigidity and popular uprisings against communist governments in eastern Europe (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968) drained support from communism in Australia.
By his steadfastness on principle, Menzies had not only reconstructed his own side of politics, but had helped to force a realignment of his foes, securing to his party an unprecedented twenty-three years in office.
Menzies with US Secretary of State Robert McNamara in the Pentagon.
National security
Menzies’ political realism led him to give a very high priority to the security of Australia. Adam Smith, the Scottish moral philosopher and founder of economics, had in 1776 described the first duty of government as “protecting the society from violence and invasion of other independent societies”. As Prime Minister, 1939-1941, Menzies clearly recognised that Australia’s security might come to depend on America. He valued the Empire at a policy level because it gave Australia military support, vital intelligence links, and a seat at the Cabinet table during wartime of one of the greatest powers in the world. It was a seat Menzies used forthrightly to speak truth to power.
It was nevertheless evident from his first period as Prime Minister that his respect for Britain and love of British traditions did not stand in the way of his determination to defend Australian interests against Churchill’s strategy, nor to underestimate the potential importance of the United States to Australia’s survival if the onslaught should come. He established in the United States Australia’s first diplomatic appointment to a foreign country (R.G. Casey), bought the Australian Residence in Washington as a permanent seat for the mission, visited America to gain assurances that it would support Australia’s security and followed up with diplomatic appointments to Japan (J.G. Latham) and China (F.W. Eggleston).
In government after 1949 Robert Menzies used his diplomatic skills, and those of his colleagues such as Percy Spender and Paul Hasluck, to build a network of alliances that would stabilise the Pacific and East Asian region, and pursued trade and aid policies to promote economic progress and political leadership throughout the same area. Alliances would secure Australia where the United Nations could not. The Colombo Plan was negotiated in 1950; the ANZUS Treaty in 1951; the South East Asia Collective Defence Treaty in 1954; the comprehensive trade treaty with Japan in 1957, and the free trade agreement with New Zealand in 1965.
Menzies believed that Australia could make a significant contribution to regional security through its alliances. He overturned the suspect moral principle that Australian conscripted forces could only serve in a limited geographical zone – a principle that had humiliated Australia in World War II as American conscripts died to defend Australia in areas where Australia would not require its own citizens to fight. His Government established the principle that Australian forces could be garrisoned outside Australia, and major re-equipment of the air force undertaken with Hercules and Mirage aircraft.
Menzies’ diplomatic skills were recognised throughout his prime ministerial years. Lee Kwan Yew attributed the successful launch of the State of Singapore in 1965 to Menzies’ good relations with Malaysia. “The outcome, without Bob Menzies, might have been disastrous for us”, he said.[53] In 1982 former American President Richard Nixon, whose own reputation rested heavily on his skill in foreign affairs, wrote: “If I were to rate one postwar leader . . . it would not be one of the legendary European or American figures. It would be Robert Menzies."[54] He wrote of Menzies’ “extraordinary intelligence and profound understanding of issues, not only in the Pacific but throughout the world”.[55]
Equal Dignity for All
Menzies believed that he knew from his own family culture and experience that the morality that supported ethical and respectful relations between citizens was principally a product of the home, not the State, and that insofar as the state could contribute to a moral social order, it was by providing the rule of law and a model of leadership characterised by honesty, integrity, good humour and mutual respect.
The great moral problems that Menzies had set himself to address were those that arose from prejudice and ideology - sectarianism, racialism, and national and class hatred - the answer to each of which was respect for all. His education and health policies, and the openness of his Liberal Party to people of all faiths, dissipated decades of religious hostility in Australia between Catholics and Protestants. His Liberal Party would seek to hammer the nails into the coffin of Protestant/Catholic sectarian political hatreds.
The abhorrence of racialism that had underpinned his immigration and education policies found expression in his attitudes to the conduct of foreign relations on a number of occasions. When, during the infamous Kristallnacht in early November 1938, Jewish properties were attacked and burnt throughout Germany at the instigation of the Nazis, the Lyons Government decided that Australia must respond to the demand to admit refugees, and in the year leading up to the war some 5000 Jewish refugees were admitted, along with other victims of persecution[56]. Menzies was repelled by anti-Semitism and racialism in all its guises and remained a firm friend of Jewish communities.
In The Forgotten People talks Menzies had attacked the deliberate fostering of race hatred against the Japanese in wartime propaganda as “fantastically foolish and dangerous”:
If this war with all its tragedy breeds into us a deep seated and enduring spirit of hatred, then the peace when it comes will merely be the prelude to disaster, and not the end of it.[57]
Menzies’ appointment of Paul Hasluck as Minister for Territories in 1951 committed Australia to the long journey of achieving equal rights and opportunities for Aboriginal people. Social services were extended to aborigines; in 1962 voting rights were established; and in 1965 Menzies met with aboriginal leaders and introduced legislation for a referendum to abolish section 127 of the Constitution, so that aborigines could be included in the census. It was a provision, Menzies, said, “completely out of harmony with our national attitudes”.
In relation to apartheid he would warn the South African Prime Minister, Verwoerd, that its failure was inevitable:
The more the policy succeeds in the short run, the more certain it is that it will fail in the long run’. For the more successful the education and health services provided for the Bantu (and they are better than those provided in other African nations), the more surely the day will come when the Bantu will no longer be content to be treated as second class citizens. There may well be a horrible explosion, and with the backing or encouragement of some intransigent northern African nations, much blood may be shed.[58]
Conclusion
As Robert Menzies had intended, the freedoms and incentives of the liberal economy, civil liberties, limited government and widening education led to the vast expansion of the middle class, and, with his policies, the educational level of the population rose dramatically. His policies strengthened the foundations for individual independence and individual freedom. His immigration programs produced a marked and relatively harmonious shift in the character of the country’s population. Australia turned towards the Asia-Pacific in both security and commercial terms. The banking question was settled for several generations. He laid educational foundations for an economy that could embrace the shift from manual labour to service, science and new technologies, and he steered Australia away from public ownership, strengthening its private enterprise character. As a consequence of such changes public debate on policy was transformed.
His egalitarian and respectful attitudes restored the political culture. Religious, class and racial hatreds died away and the growing legions of Robert Menzies’ forgotten people began to influence the Labor Party itself as it sought their support. In the new knowledge-based society Menzies had foreseen and worked to bring about, the very issues of politics evolved. The policies of the old Liberalism were replaced by the policies developed out of the new Liberalism that Menzies had espoused.
Robert Gordon Menzies was not just at the turning point in the ideas governing public policy in Australia in the twentieth century, he was the turning point. He was the most remarkable Australian political leader of his generation, indeed of the century[59].
[1] This is beginning to be recognised. See Elena Pasquini Douglas, “Robert Menzies’ Stolen Legacy”, Australian Financial Review, 24/1/2014
[2] R.G. Menzies, The Measure of the Years, Melbourne, Cassell, 1970, 8
[3] Robert Menzies, The Forgotten People and Other Studies in Democracy, Melbourne, (1943),2011, Liberal Party of Australia (Victorian Division),29.
[4] Sir Robert Menzies, Afternoon Light: Some Memories of Men and Events, Melbourne, Cassell, 1967, Ch.12
[5] Forming the Liberal Party of Australia, Record of the Conference of Representatives of Non-Labour Organisations, convened by the Leader of the Federal Oppositiion, Rt. Hon. R.G. Menzies, K.C., M.P., and held in Canberra, A.C.T., on 13th,14th and 16th October 1944, Melbourne, 1944, 2
[6] Menzies (1967), 286
[7] R.G. Menzies, Speech is of Time, London, Cassell,1958, 219
[8] ib., 211
[9] Forming the Liberal Party of Australia, 10
[10] ib., 222
[11] R.G. Menzies, Policy Speech 1946
[12] Rod Kemp, Marion Stanton (Eds.), Speaking for Australia: Parliamentary Speeches that shaped our nation, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2004,143
[13] Forming the Liberal Party of Australia, 11
[14] A.W. Martin, “Menzies the Man”, in Scott Prasser, J.R. Nethercote, John Warhurst, The Menzies Era: A Reappraisal of Government, Politics and Policy, Sydney, Hale & Iremonger, 1995, 22
[15] Menzies (1967), 5
[16] ib,,11
[17] Menzies (2011), 36
[18] Institute of Public Affairs, The I.P.A. Review, Vol.8,No.2, 1954, 50
[19] Menzies (1967),9
[20] Menzies (1967), 12
[21] ib.,op.cit.
[22] The Argus 10/10/25
[23] L.F. Fitzhardinge, William Morris Hughes: A Political Biography, Vol II, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 507
[24] A.W. Martin, Robert Menzies: A Life, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1993, Vol. I, 109
[25] Martin, op.cit.,108
[26] Sydney Morning Herald 6/4/1931, 7
[27] David Bird, “The Annus Mirabilis of a Subdued Radical”, Quadrant, Vol. 53, No.11, Nov., 2009, 49-50
[28] Menzies (2011), 178-179
[29] The Argus, July 1929
[30] Alf Rattigan, Industry Assistance: The Inside Story, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1986, 11
[31] F.W. Eggleston, State Socialism in Victoria, P.S. King & Son, London 1932
[32] W.K. Hancock, Australia, Sydney, Jacaranda Press (1930), 1961, 120-121
[33] Martin (1993), 99
[34] Menzies, Policy Speech 1949
[35] Menzies (2011), 188
[36] Forming the Liberal Party of Australia, 12
[37] ib.,6
[38] Kemp & Stanton,135-136
[39] Kemp, Stanton, 141
[40] R.G. Menzies, The Measure of the Years, Melbourne, Cassell, 1970, 55
[41] Kemp & Stanton, 180
[42] Menzies (2011),35
[43] Menzies (1970), 121-122
[44] ib.129
[45] Menzies (2011), 35
[46] Menzies (2011), 157
[47] ib.,186-187
[48] Menzies (1970), 86
[49] Menzies (2011), 159
[50] ib, 41
[51] ib, 42. See also Menzies (1958), 218
[52] ib.,43
[53] Sydney Morning Herald, 14/9/98, 9
[54] Douglas, AFR, 24/1/14
[55] Richard Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, Sydney, Macmillan, 1978, 120-121
[56] Michael Blakeney, Australia and the Jewish Refugees, 1933-1948, Sydney, Croom
Helm, 1985, 141-147
[57] Menzies (2011), 79-80
[58] Menzies (1970), 282
[59] I have repeated at several points in this essay some of the phrasing (with slight modifications) used in my introduction to The Forgotten People (2011). These concluding words are from that essay.