Stephen Chavura review of Zachary Gorman, ed., The Young Menzies: Success, Failure, Resilience 1894–1942; and Zachary Gorman, The Menzies Watershed: Liberalism, Anti-communism, Continuities 1943–1954

(Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2022), 224 pp., HB $49.99, ISBN 9780522879223

(Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2023), 256 pp., HB $50.00, ISBN 9780522880205

Over the past decade, interest in Sir Robert Gordon Menzies, Australia’s longest-serving prime minister, has surged. No doubt much of the renewed interest in Menzies and his legacy is an outcome of the internal politics of the Liberal Party itself following its federal election loss in 2007 and the exit of the major figures of the Howard government. The task of defining itself for a new generation in a rapidly changing world has been difficult. In all this, Menzies functions as a kind of ballast for both conservatives and moderates in the Liberal Party; the former reading Menzies as a conservative liberal, or vice versa, and the latter reading him as a liberal progressive. Both readings have plenty of justificatory data, even if both cannot be true in the ways either faction would like to think of him.

In recent years, Menzies’s justly famous collection of wartime speeches, The Forgotten People, has been republished in facsimile. A good number of full-length studies and essays, as well as volumes of hitherto unpublished speeches and letters, have also been published. Former prime minister John Howard’s The Menzies Era did much to start the trend, followed by major studies by Troy Bramston, David Furse-Roberts, David Kemp and Stephen Chavura and Gregory Melleuish.¹ The Liberal Party think-tank the Menzies Research Centre has done much to promote knowledge of Menzies and his legacy during this period.

A major event in the revival of interest in Menzies was the inauguration in 2021 of the Robert Menzies Institute at Menzies’s alma mater the University of Melbourne. The institute has been instrumental in funding and promoting Menzies scholarship and has to date hosted four major conferences on Menzies. The proceedings are being published in handsome volumes, edited by historian and biographer Zachary Gorman, under the auspices of Melbourne University Press. The tetralogy will constitute a major contribution to our understanding of both Menzies and the history of Australia that his life spanned.

The Young Menzies: Success, Failure, Resilience 1894–1942 opens with an overview of recent writing on Menzies by David Kemp, one of Australia’s foremost historians of liberalism. Kemp is mainly interested in intellectual history and laments that, to a large extent, ‘the content of his [Menzies’s] ideas struggled to achieve any attention at all’ (Young Menzies, p. 5) in the long discussion of his legacy since his retirement from politics. To make matters worse, says Kemp, much of the attention, from Donald Horne in the mid-1960s to Paul Keating in the 1990s, was little more than unfair derision by his cultured despisers, especially those inhabiting the universities. This is ironic for, as historian Greg Melleuish shows, Menzies idealised the university and considered his expansion of the Australian university system his greatest achievement.

Menzies himself, says Kemp, saw ideas as central to his project, and wanted to revitalise an Australian tradition of liberal thinking. Judith Brett more specifically situates Menzies’s thought within the tradition of Deakinite liberalism. Indeed, Brett says, ‘Menzies shared with Deakin a commitment to individual conscience and freedom of judgment’ (Young Menzies, p. 71). One might also add Menzies’s rejection of laissez-faire capitalism. Similarly, David Furse-Roberts traces a deep Protestant, but non-sectarian, Christianity behind much of Menzies’s thought. In this respect, Menzies may be the last great embodiment of British, Protestant Australia, or was that John Howard?

Notwithstanding his first-rate legal mind—or perhaps because of it?—Menzies was never a deep philosophical thinker, but he loved ideas. His World War II (WWII) speech ‘The Forgotten People’, as well as his hundreds of speeches and shorter writings, all contribute to something of a coherent statement of liberalism for mid-twentieth-century Australia. The home is a sacred place in Menzies’s thought, and especially in this speech. Biographer Troy Bramston beautifully points out that, given what we know about Menzies’s own childhood, when Menzies praised ‘homes material, homes human, and homes spiritual’, he was offering tribute to the homelife that formed him. Nick Cater, in his reflection on ‘The Forgotten People’ speech, sees it as Menzies’s ‘manifesto for post-war Australia’ (Young Menzies, p. 150). Given that the same Menzies who wanted a ‘progressive’ political party also called himself ‘an instinctive Conservative’,² perhaps the best thing to do to settle the current sectarian conflict in the Liberal Party is simply to read his most famous speech and ask what Liberal faction would receive it most enthusiastically today. I fear the victory would be Pyrrhic.

Interestingly, according to James Edelman and Angela Kittikhoun, Menzies seems not to have been a legal literalist—a position among many conservatives today—but held more of a dynamic view of the law, attaching ‘significance to the relationship between law and life’ (Menzies’s words) (Young Menzies, p. 34). His philosophy of law was, according to Edelman and Kittikhoun, ‘honed on a foundation of pragmatism’ (Young Menzies, p. 34). Notwithstanding his liberal legacy, Menzies is responsible, to some extent, for the expansion of the Commonwealth’s powers over the states owing to his justly famous appearance in the Engineers’ Case (1920) at only 25 years old.

Could an underlying pragmatism be partly responsible for Menzies’s immense political success? Or was it just luck? Scott Prasser explores this question and goes on to offer an illuminating discussion of politics in general as he walks through Menzies’s ability to learn from his own and others’ mistakes. Speaking of pragmatism, Frank Bongiorno sets out a subtle reading of the contributions of both Menzies and John Curtin to both the war and postwar Australian order. The two prime ministers’ relationship was cordial, if not close. They could work together, and even if a fair degree of the immediate post-WWII prosperity experienced by Australia under Menzies rode off the back of policies put in place by Labor beforehand, the wartime Curtain government had benefited from policy put in place by the preceding government under Menzies. A good case study of how Menzies built on earlier Labor policies is Lyndon Megarrity’s chapter on the Colombo Plan, in many ways ‘a continuation of the sponsored student schemes developed during the 1940s’ (Young Menzies, p. 183). On the Menzies–Labor relationship, Anne Henderson convincingly shows that Labor, not Menzies, was most hesitant to enter WWII, with the Australian Labor Party (ALP) not throwing its support behind Australia’s entry until well into 1940. World War I cast a shadow over Menzies’ entire life, and much as Billy Hughes spent his time trying to stave off communist influence within the Labor movement in between the wars, Menzies spent his time discouraging conservative Australians away from the temptations of fascism—evidently with much more success than Hughes.

The Menzies Watershed: Liberalism, Anti-communism, Continuities 1943–1954 analyses Menzies in power as the leader of the Liberal Party. It begins with Nicolle Flint weighing into the longstanding argument about the extent to which Menzies the man can be credited with the founding of the Liberal Party and its success. Flint makes a compelling case, based on 11 briefly developed arguments, for Menzies being the major force in the party’s formation and subsequent success. As Flint points out, ‘over the four decades that followed 1901, all attempts to form a properly national and united party failed’ (Menzies Watershed, p. 4)—that is, until Menzies, with his extensive national network, practical experience and undisputed leadership qualities, among other assets, came along. One is reminded of John Hirst’s defence of the unpopular (among historians) view that Henry Parkes really was the ‘Father of Federation’.³

Ann Henderson’s account of the ALP’s attempt to nationalise the banks under Chifley underscores the success of the fledgling Liberal Party. Nationalisation was the Labor policy that, more than anything else, handed Menzies the 1949 election. Even though the High Court of Australia, and then the Privy Council, found Chifley’s bank nationalisation legislation unconstitutional, Menzies convinced Australians, if they needed any convincing, that the ALP had socialist plans for Australia, and even if the banking venture failed, others may not. After being in existence for only four years, the Liberal Party was swept to power. And yet, notwithstanding Menzies’s anti-socialist rhetoric, as Tom Switzer points out, Menzies ‘left unchanged many of the achievements of Ben Chifley’s interventionist government’ (Menzies Watershed, p. 45). Menzies never set out to destroy high tariffs, centralised wage fixing and financial regulation. Menzies also kept the public servants who helped Chifley construct it all. How to make sense of this? Like Brett in the previous volume, Switzer identifies Menzies as a ‘creature of his culture’—being Deakinite liberalism, which made John Maynard Keynes more appealing than Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman. The local effects of Menzies in government are explored in a helpful regional micro-study by Christopher Beer focusing on the Central Coast region of New South Wales, just north of Sydney. Beer sees a microcosm of wider Australia in this region as it evolves throughout the Menzies years, with its own Liberal, anti-communist federal representative.

What about Menzies the party leader? Troy Bramston shows how Menzies was highly consultative and habitually aimed for consensus through debate in Cabinet meetings. Menzies always kept a close eye on how his ministers were managing their portfolios. There was no doubt Menzies was in control, but not tyrannically. This is perhaps best shown in David Lee’s chapter on Menzies’s economic policy. Despite coming to power on a platform promising a ‘new era of free enterprise’—in fact, Menzies was never a laissez-faire enthusiast—Lee points out that Menzies only finally ended the WWII economic controls in 1960 with the abolition of import licensing. Menzies pursued a pragmatic, Keynesian economic policy, largely driven by highly competent economists and public servants. His trust in his economic technocrats, who were roughly in line with his own distrust of laissez-faire economics, contributed greatly to the prosperity and stability of the 1950s and 1960s. For those today who bemoan the rise of the technocratic, managerial state, Menzies’s legacy must appear ambiguous.⁴ Andrew Blyth shows how, as economic and technological questions became more complicated, Menzies began a trend of government relying less on the public service and turning more to specialised experts for advice, including think tanks.

Lucas McLennan offers an interesting account of the intellectual similarities between what he calls the ‘two pillars of Australian anti-communism’: the Menzies government and B. A. Santamaria’s Catholic Social Studies Movement, aka ‘The Movement’. Although Menzies and Santamaria were coming from quite different religious and philosophical backgrounds, broad Protestant British liberalism and Catholic social teaching, respectively, both found common cause in two threats: ‘the centralising state at home and international communism abroad’ (Menzies Watershed, p. 24). Other ideals regarding healthcare, referenda and reconstruction coincided as well. McLennan’s chapter is a valuable piece of Australian political intellectual history showing how ideas have real world political consequences, including the long-term success of the Liberal Party and the Labor split of 1954–55. Another interesting intellectual comparison is Charles Richardson’s analysis of Menzies and H. V. Evatt’s approach to constitutional government, which Richardson calls ‘“imperial” versus “progressive”’ (Menzies Watershed, p. 103), respectively. Richardson sees a tradition of Australian constitutionalism evolving since Federation in which the Australian parliamentary system increasingly shows it can operate effectively in full autonomy from the Crown. Menzies, at the very least, did little to hinder this, and his actions towards successive governors-general showed that he believed the elected parliament to be the main sphere of constitutional authority.

Responding to accusations that Menzies was entirely Machiavellian in his attempts to ban the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), Lorraine Finlay takes the reader through the history of Menzies’s changing views on the CPA from 1940 to 1950. Finlay argues that Menzies’s principles never changed, but he applied them differently as circumstances changed. Thus, when the Soviet Union became more aggressive and expansionist after WWII, Menzies considered the CPA’s existence to be intolerable. Given the accusations of Menzies’s Machiavellianism, it is well to bear in mind that, as William A. Stoltz points out, by 1948 Australia’s departments of external affairs and defence had been ‘thoroughly infiltrated by Soviet agents’ (Menzies Watershed, p. 152). Stoltz tracks the origins of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), seeing it as Menzies’s brainchild, which he created (1952)—and rescued—in the face of considerable opposition from existing military and intelligence departments. The Britain-centric vision Menzies had for ASIS, says Stoltz, ‘adds complexity to our typical view of post-war Australian foreign policy as being derivative of America’ (Menzies Watershed, p. 164). A case study of foreign policy is offered by David Furse-Roberts, focusing on the major achievements of Percy Spender as minister for external affairs. Spender helped achieve the ANZUS Treaty, the Colombo Plan and the Japanese Peace Treaty. ANZUS took some moral courage, as it excluded Britain, for which Britain protested at the time.

These two volumes offer a readable reconsideration of Menzies’s life and legacy. Liberal Party enthusiasts will be surprised, maybe disappointed, to learn that he built considerably on what went beforehand under Labor, and those with a more sceptical view of the worth of Menzies’s legacy will likely be impressed with the extent to which Menzies contributed to postwar reconstruction. And yet, other than Australia’s continued commitment to the American alliance, what of Menzies’s vision abides today? He surely would be unhappy with the housing crisis, the state of the Australian family, the universities and, it must be said, the rise of non-Anglo-European multiculturalism. The current Liberal Party does not agree on what the great man would think of it today. The extent to which Menzies adapted Labor policy into something more constructive and therefore successful will continue to be central to the debate over his legacy. These volumes will inform that question without finally settling it. No doubt these are all questions that will draw some attention in the remaining volumes.

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1. 1 Heather Henderson, ed., Letters to My Daughter: Robert Menzies 1955–1975 (Sydney: Murdoch Books, 2011); John Howard, The Menzies Era: The Years that Shaped Modern Australia (Sydney: Harper Collins, 2014); John Nethercote, ed., Menzies: The Shaping of Modern Australia (Redland Bay: Connor Court, 2017); Troy Bramston, Robert Menzies: The Art of Politics (Brunswick: Scribe Publications, 2019); David Kemp, A Liberal State: How Australians Chose Liberalism over Socialism 1926–1966 (Carlton: Miegunyah Press, 2021), doi.org/10.2307/jj.1176881; Stephen Chavura and Gregory Melleuish, The Forgotten Menzies: The World Picture of Australia’s Longest Serving Prime Minister (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2021), doi.org/10.2307/jj.1176869; David Furse-Roberts, God and Menzies: The Faith that Shaped a Prime Minister (Redland Bay: Connor Court, 2021); David Furse-Roberts, ed., Menzies: The Forgotten Speeches (Redland Bay: Connor Court, 2017); Martyn Lyons, Dear Prime Minister: Letters to Robert Menzies 1949–1966 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2021).

2. 2 Robert Gordon Menzies, Afternoon Light: Some Memories of Men and Events (London: Cassell, 1967), 6.

3. 3 See John Hirst, The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000).

4. 4 See, for example, Salvatore Babones, The New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism, and the Tyranny of Experts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018).