The Forgotten People

This week marks the 80th anniversary of one of the most salient speeches in Australian political history. David Kemp examines Menzies’ ‘Forgotten People’ address in historical context.

Read a transcript of ‘The Forgotten People’ here

Shortly after he had resigned the prime ministership in August 1941, Menzies, noting the success of President Roosevelt’s fireside chats in the United States, began a series of weekly broadcasts on 2UE in Sydney, relayed to stations in Queensland and Victoria. The broadcasts continued until late November 1942. He published a selection of them the following year under the title The Forgotten People and Other Studies in Democracy. Thirty-seven talks were published, with the order rearranged to suit the presentation of his arguments. He dedicated the book to his son, Ken, who was serving with the Second AIF. 

To Menzies, the all-powerful wartime state seemed to reflect the pathology of the political culture that had flourished between the wars. It was this political culture that had persuaded him into politics in the first place, and the extremes of wartime mobilisation provoked him to make an extensive statement on the condition of Australian democracy and the liberal beliefs and values that he saw as making public life worthwhile. They were values that, in his view, should form the basis of public policy if Australian democracy was to survive and, he asserted, they had been values little in evidence in the previous years. 

Menzies described his talks in the foreword to the book as ‘a summarised political philosophy’ and ‘a serious attempt to clarify my own mind and assist listeners on questions which emerge in the changing currents of war’. As statements of philosophy and direction, they stand alone among the products of Australia’s political leaders of the time. Neither Curtin nor his successor, Chifley, produced anything comparable. They were a major exposition of Menzies’s Liberalism and set out the analysis of Australian society and politics that would motivate the revival of liberal politics he was to lead some two years later.

The Forgotten People is Menzies’s defiant yet patriotic justification for a harmonious liberal democracy and his understanding of what that was. It was written at a time when liberalism was on the defensive after the experience of the Depression and a mobilisation for war under a government influenced by statist ideas of socialism and a union-dominated corporate state as by Australia’s defence requirements and liberal heritage. The ideas he considered in these talks provided the framework for the establishment of a new party ‘to promote liberal thought’ and the policy strategy of that party when it would be elected to national government after 1949.

The radio talks covered a broad field of policy and principle. Menzies addressed the requirements for a successful financial and political mobilisation for war, supported the government in its war loans, and avoided cheap political sniping. Being free, for the first time in many years, from a formal leadership role, he took the opportunity to address issues of fundamental principle and to look ahead hopefully and positively to a post-war world that would be built by the victorious Allies. He was direct about the kind of debate and political criticism he thought was appropriate in wartime and that which was not.

The Forgotten People talks show Menzies at his most distinguished intellectually dealing simply and clearly with weighty matters for the successful conduct of the war and for post-war policies: his vigorous opposition to the rhetoric of class hatred; to the use of racial hatred as an instrument of war; the proper purpose of wartime censorship; the financing of the war; the principles for rationalising industry to provision the war effort; the role of women during and after the war; education during the war and the need for a massive expansion when the war had ended; and the need to give appropriate attention to planning for the post-war world. 

He reiterated his strongly held view that the Labor Party’s decision not to suspend party politics for the duration of the war was ‘a grave misfortune for Australia’, and reminded listeners that it was a decision he had done his very best to avoid - even to the extent of being prepared to serve under a prime ministership drawn from the Labor Party. He avoided any suggestion that Curtin had not been strong enough to achieve the unity in his party that had placed the (now) Opposition in a difficult position. While Labor demanded that the Opposition support the government, its determination to maintain a partisan government during wartime, he said, had as its inevitable consequence an Opposition with a particular responsibility to lead a responsible party critique of the government’s policies. 

Menzies’ treatment of economic life is of particular interest. The public economic debate was then concluded in a different language from that which became the norm later in the century. It almost completely lacked concepts that were to be central later in the decade. ‘Productivity’ was almost never mentioned. ‘Profits’ and ‘capitalism’ needed to be defended, but the role of ‘markets’ and ‘prices’ in aggregating and transmitting individual values to producers were largely absent concepts, notwithstanding that their role was implicit in Menzies’s criticism of Australia’s attempts at collectivist industry structures. The influence of Friedrich Hayek - the leading defender of markets against central authority - had yet to be felt, and despite the Depression and the war, the popular acceptance of the Deakinite settlement meant that ‘protectionism’, and a high degree of labour and product market regulation, were difficult to attack head-on. 

Menzies nevertheless ridiculed the proposition that the economic difficulties of the pre-war years meant that ‘capitalism had failed’ (any more than ‘Christianity’ or ‘education’ could be said to have failed because of difficulties of the times). He was robust in his defence of the economic system based on recognition and protection of private property and business enterprise for profit. Nevertheless, he conceded from the standpoint of the 1940s that ‘we can agree that the products of capitalism have been mixed’. But what other system could produce the benefits of capitalism while abolishing slums, unemployment, poverty, and war? ‘And as there can be no progress without enterprise, the encouragement of enterprise in the most direct human fashion, that is by the prospect of reward, seems to me to be fundamental … A modern and civilised capitalism has much to contribute to the post-war world.

This is an extract from A Liberal State, the fourth book of a five-volume series by David Kemp that explores the history of Australian Liberalism. Click here to buy the book.