The eminent legacy of Percy Spender

 

The achievements of Menzies’ top diplomat have influenced global security for decades. By David Furse-Roberts.

After Robert Menzies returned to the prime ministership at the end of 1949, Percy Spender served as his first Minister for External Affairs from 19 December 1949 until 26 April 1951. Although his 17-month tenure in the portfolio was relatively brief, he was arguably one of our most consequential Ministers for Foreign Affairs since the Second World War. His signature achievements included the development of the Colombo Plan, the signing of the ANZUS Treaty and the negotiation of the Japanese Peace Treaty. According to Professor David Lowe, the highly-travelled Spender had ‘a highly developed sense of geopolitics and of change in the Asia-Pacific region’.

Percy Claude Spencer was born in the Inner Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst on 5 October 1897. Educated at Fort Street High School, he eventually matriculated to the University of Sydney where he earned a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Laws with First Class Honours and the University Medal.

In 1923, he was admitted to the NSW Bar, specialising in commercial law, and in 1935 he took silk to become the youngest King’s Council in the British Empire at that time.

Following his successful career at the NSW Bar, Spender set his sights on Federal politics. In a bit of retrospective déjà vu, he contested the Sydney seat of Warringah in 1937 as an Independent and won it handsomely against the sitting UAP Member Archdale Parkhill on ALP preferences. In a family twist of irony, his son, John Spender, who held the Seat of North Sydney as a Liberal MP, would be defeated by an Independent MP, while his granddaughter Allegra Spender, would come full-circle as an Independent MP to once again defeat a sitting centre-right MP in the Eastern Sydney seat of Wentworth.

While Percy Spender was elected to Federal Parliament as an Independent, he joined the UAP in 1938, led by then-Prime Minister Joe Lyons. With Robert Menzies assuming the prime ministership for the first time in 1939, Spender’s potential was recognised when he was appointed acting Treasurer in November 1939 and Treasurer from March to October 1940. In the Treasury portfolio, he favoured a Keynesian, interventionist approach to managing the economy which he believed was justified in wartime circumstances.

After serving as Treasurer, Spender served as Minister for the Army from 1940 to 1941 before the Curtin Labor Government came to power. In opposition, Spender published a book on Australian foreign policy in 1944 and in 1945 he followed Menzies into the new Liberal Party of Australia. Despite supporting interventionist measures in wartime, Spender’s philosophical instincts were essentially Liberal. In his speeches, he stressed the primacy of the human spirit and focused on the individual and freedom of choice, while expressing an antipathy towards socialism and centralised bureaucratic planning. In particularly he deplored Communism as a threat to the survival of freedom, democracy and Christian civilisation.

With the return of Menzies to the prime ministership in December 1949, Menzies appointed Spender as his Minister for External Affairs.

To better appreciate the innovative contributions Spender made to Australian foreign policy in the early post-war years, it would be helpful to traverse some of the background experiences and influences that informed his outlook on foreign affairs.

Unique for a conservative politician of his era, Spender’s primary international exposure had been in the region of Asia at a time when his contemporaries typically made their first overseas trips to Britain. It was this firsthand experience of Asia that equipped Spender with an insight into the region and the need for a post-war Australia to forge closer ties with its Asia-Pacific neighbours. 

During his career at the Bar in the 1920s and 30s, Spender had essentially discovered Asia as a tourist where he visited Hong Kong, the Philippines, Hawaii, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. As Lowe noted, Spender’s cruises as a tourist brought an awareness of geography, and at least some sensitivity to the social and economic conditions in the region. This enabled Spender to tailor the 1950 Colombo Plan in a way which addressed specific areas of need.

The other factor that shaped Spender’s outlook was, of course, the advice he received from the Department of External Affairs. When the Menzies government assumed office from 1949, the Department was led by Secretary Dr John Burton, who had reviewed Australian relations with Asia. One of the key strands of Burton’s thinking was ‘the growing interdependence of Australia and Southeast Asia’. Conscious of both the spectre of Communism and the shift to decolonisation in the region after the War, Burton envisioned that Australia could play an effective role in establishing ‘stable, moderate and friendly governments’ in Southeast Asia which would serve as a security buffer between Australia and mainland Asia. Burton held that the best way for Australia to exert political influence was by fostering economic development in the region through expanded trade and the provision of economic and technical assistance.

Through reviewing departmental briefs, it was evident that Minister Spender adopted Burton’s pattern of thinking and brought this to the 1950 Colombo Conference that birthed the Colombo Plan. Attended by the foreign ministers of eight Commonwealth countries including Spender, the Colombo Conference of January 1950 aimed to address the economic and security needs of South and South East Asia in the face of burgeoning communism in the region. The participating nations included Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Ceylon (later Sri Lanka) and Pakistan.

Contributing to the conception of the Colombo Plan at the conference and leading the drafting process, Spender proposed that the distribution of food and raw materials be part of the Commonwealth’s regional aid programme for South and South East Asia. In addition, Spender called upon the governments represented at Colombo to make credit available for “essential productive purposes” in the region. The beneficiaries of this aid would be Pakistan, India and Ceylon to begin with, followed by non-Commonwealth countries.

While the Conference conceived the Colombo Plan, the initiative itself would assume greater form with the inclusion of more countries and the adoption of new programmes, including student exchanges allowing promising students from the region to study at Australian universities.

The other dimension that Spender brought to the conception of the Colombo Plan was the engagement of the United States as a potential partner, given its geographical position in the Pacific and its close alliance with Britain and the Commonwealth through shared history, values and wartime experiences. The US was initially slow to respond to Spencer’s overtures, but by November 1950, the Americans decided to associate their own aid proposals with the Colombo Plan Committee.

The resolve of Spender to engage the United States brings us to his second signature achievement as External Affairs Minister where he negotiated the terms of the 1951 ANZUS Treaty. With Spender long recognising the receding influence of Britain in the Pacific, he maintained that some kind of security pact with America would be essential for both Australia’s protection and the containment of communism in the Pacific. Addressing the Nation in August 1950, Spender proclaimed that “Australia must seek to revive the close working association with our American friends which existed during the war. This relationship should, in due course, be given formal expression within the framework of a Pacific Pact’.

Given the natural affinity and warmth between Australia and the United States, it would be easy to assume that Spender’s brokering of the ANZUS treaty would have been a foregone conclusion, but this was far from the case. Spender first raised his proposal for a US-Australia-NZ pact with President Harry Truman in September 1950. Truman was sympathetic to the idea in principle and agreed to discuss it with his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, but the Secretary doubted the necessity of such a Pact given his view that Australia was not at risk of a hostile attack. The US Envoy, John Foster Dulles, was even less receptive and suggested that Australia’s security needs could be met simply by America retaining its troops in Japan.

With wartime hostilities still fresh in the public consciousness, this resolution was clearly unacceptable to Spender and eventually a compromise between himself, Dulles and Dean Rusk amounted to an in-principle acceptance of the Australian proposal for a Pacific Pact. The other factor that brought the Americans around to accepting Spender’s proposal was the entry of Maoist China into the Korean War in October 1950. In February 1951, Dulles arrived in Canberra to discuss the pact proposal with Australians and New Zealanders, and after further negotiations, a draft security treaty was finally agreed to which largely resembled the form of the final ANZUS Pact. With the US Senate approving the draft, the ANZUS Treaty was signed in San Francisco on 1 September 1951 by Percy Spender and his New Zealand counterpart, Carl Berendsen.

Considering the tortuous path of its negotiation, the objections of Britain, and even the initial coolness of Menzies himself, the brokering of the ANZUS Treaty was a credit to the tenacity and skilled diplomacy of Spender. According to Andrew Kelly, the ANZUS Treaty “was one of the most impressive achievements by any Australian foreign affairs minister”.

Closely related to Spender’s brokering of the ANZUS Treaty was his negotiation of the US-initiated Japanese Peace Treaty of 1951. Desiring to bring a post-war Japan into the Western alliance against communism, President Truman sought to mend wartime hostilities and negotiate a peace settlement with the Japanese. US Envoy Dulles raised America’s Japanese peace proposal with Spender in the same Canberra meeting of February 1951 that produced the draft ANZUS pact. Reflecting Australian sentiment at the time, Spender had reservations about the peace proposal, particularly its lack of guarantees against Japanese rearmament.  

Given, however, that the negotiations of the ANZUS pact and Japanese Peace Treaty were interlinked, Spender was pragmatic enough to accept that the disadvantages of the peace treaty could be outweighed by the advantages of procuring a security pact with the US in the Pacific. Accordingly, he assured Dulles that Australia would give its assent to the Japanese Peace Treaty and Spender represented Australia at its signing in San Francisco on 8 September 1951.

Unlike the ANZUS Treaty, Australia’s decision to support the Japanese Peace Treaty was contentious and went against domestic public opinion. Spender was not insensitive to Australia’s national interest, and in negotiations with Dulles he suggested that Japan be subject to rearmament controls that could help give Australians peace of mind. The US declined to adopt Australia’s suggestions, yet Spender was a realist who accepted the Peace Treaty as a necessary step to buttressing the peace and security of the post-war world.

Spender’s contribution to the Colombo Plan, ANZUS and the Japanese Peace Treaty reflected the broader view of the Menzies government that Australia’s post-war focus needed to be in the Asia-Pacific. To this end, Spender’s priority was on forging closer ties with both the United States and Australia’s neighbours in South East Asia, but in a way that would not detract from Australia’s historical ties with Britain and the Commonwealth. Foreshadowing the thinking behind AUKUS several decades later, Spender favoured a working alliance between the US and the British Commonwealth of which Australia would be an integral partner with close ties to each.   

Pivoting Australia’s foreign policy towards the Asia Pacific region so strategically in the aftermath of the Second World War, Spender was well ahead of domestic popular sentiment when Eurocentrism and antipathy towards Asia still lingered. Yet in his overtures to the US and the British Commonwealth, he built on a tradition of Australian foreign policy dating back to Alfred Deakin and the first decade of Federation.

While Spender was an innovator and reformer, his approach to foreign policy was in the conservative realist tradition of the Australian centre-right. In contrast to the more multilateralist approach of his Labor predecessor, H. V. Evatt, Spender was somewhat circumspect towards the United Nations and favoured the development of bilateral relationships, believing that such partnerships with the United States and the British Commonwealth could better serve Australia’s national interests and objectives.

This is an edited transcript of David Furse-Roberts’ speech to the Robert Menzies Institute Conference 2022.