25 Years of Progress
Nick Cater addressing the audience at the 2017 re-enactment of Menzies famous Forgotten People speech at the Hawthorn Town Hall in Menzies’ old set of Kooyong.
As the MRC celebrates its first quarter-century, it is timely to remember that Menzies-style liberalism is the true driver of modernism and prosperity in Australia, says Nick Cater.
The Menzies Research Centre was born of the despair that the Liberal Party had lost the art of governing. The party had been in Opposition for 11 years, by the longest period since its creation in 1944, and was still recovering from losing the 1993 Fightback election.
Labor, under Paul Keating, had painted Robert Menzies as an ancient and irrelevant figure and berated the party’s current leaders as figures who were strangers to their own century.
It was in these circumstances that some Liberals argued that the party needed a fresh, modern image, that Keating was essentially right, and Menzies, like the people he championed, was best left forgotten. So when the party’s new think tank was christened the Menzies Research Centre in 1994, there were those eager to write it off.
The Liberals were heading “back to the future” accused Fairfax’s Louis Milligan in an article accompanied by a Clement cartoon showing a man with one foot in Menzies’ grave.
Others, like the found of the Centre for Independent Studies Greg Lindsay, were somewhat kinder, but still sceptical as to what a party-based think tank could achieve. “An organisation aligned with the Liberal Party will always be seen as partisan,” he wrote in The Australian. “Whether or not this devalues its finds is for others to decide, though in my guess it will.”
As it was, the Menzies Research Centre was phenomenally successful in its first two years with a staff of just two people fuelled by the enthusiasm of building a policy platform based on Menzies’ clearly articulated principles.
Opposition leader John Howard set them out in the first of what became known as his Headland Speeches, delivered from the MRC podium in July 1995. The MRC would “promote ideas for public policy based on greater individual freedom and dignity, fairer and more competitive enterprise, limited and more accountable government, and a more genuine sense of national community,” in other words, Menzies 101.
The phrase “modern Liberal” as it is now pronounced begs the rhetorical question, “do I repeat myself?”
The clear ancestral chain that ties Menzies' forgotten people to Howard’s battlers, Abbott’s tradies and Morrisson’s quiet Australians demonstrates the endurance of Australian liberalism as a way of ordering our affairs as well now as it did 75 years ago, when Menzies declared it to be a better brand than conservative to be applied to his new party.
Indeed liberalism was the idea that inspired British settlement, as David Kemp describes in his ground-breaking history of modern Australia, The Land of Dreams, the sequel to which, A Free Country, will be launched by the MRC next month.
Modernising is liberalism's very purpose. It is a project of gradual improvement driven by the motive power of individual ambition. When 25 million Australians have the freedom to chase their dreams, the whole country moves forward.
For a quarter of a century, the Menzies Research Centre has unashamedly promoted the legacy of Menzies, the hero founder of the Liberal Party and the architect of Australia’s postwar success.
Five years ago I promised Menzies’ daughter Heather Henderson that we would “make Menzies cool again,” and I believe we have travelled some way to achieve that promise.
As advisers and promotors to the ABC-TV documentary Howard on Menzies, we brought the man and his philosophy to a large prime-time audience.
The re-enactment of Menzies' Forgotten People radio talk 75 years to the minute after it was first delivered before a gala audience in Canberra was broadcast around the country on the Macquarie Radio Network, just like original. The anniversary reproduction of the Forgotten People radio essays as a book was one our most successful publications.
Three original books, Menzies: The Shaping of Modern Australia, edited by J.R Nethercote, Menzies: The Forgotten Speeches, edited by David Furse-Roberts and Forgotten People Revisited edited by Paul Ritchie have helped expand our understanding of liberalism.
Our next project is the establishment of the Robert Menzies Institute at the University of Melbourne, a permanent place to house Menzies’s extensive works either physically or online, a centre for public outreach and a centre of research excellence.
It is far more than a homage to history. At the MRC we see that a fuller understanding of the idea of liberalism is inextricably linked to good policy in a manner incapable of falling out fashion.
We rest in the good fortune of adopting the Menzies name, and offer our sympathy to our friends at the Chifley Research Centre who carry the name of an Australian prime who served his country admirably but who’s old-fashioned socialist approach to policy is well and truly out of date.
And yes, we are still headquartered in Menzies House in Canberra, the nation’s capital championed by Menzies, although we travel far and wide staging events across the country and focusing on state as well as federal policy.
The fortunes of the Liberal Party have recovered somewhat since those difficult years of the 80s and early 90s. The Liberal and National Parties have been in office in Canberra for 17 of those years, and the Labor Party just eight. The economy has been in a state of continuous growth. We have the largest and wealthiest middle class in the world.
Menzies is now celebrated across the board as our greatest ever prime minister, the leader who wrote the script for the postwar expansion of Australia. He built the foundations of our party and the prosperity we enjoy today.
Labor has walked away from the workers it once represented, lured by the siren call of green socialism.
The Liberal Party has succeeded by staying true to its founding principle - to represent the interests of the great Australian middle class, the backbone of the nation.