Forward from The Menzies Era by John Howard

The idea for this book came from that eminent Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey. At the Melbourne launch of the second edition of my autobiography, Lazarus Rising, he said to me, ‘Why don’t you do a biography of Menzies? You can write it very much from the political perspective.’ I wanted to write again about Australian politics, and decided to focus on that remarkable twenty-three year period from 1949 to 1972, when the Coalition of the Liberal and Country Parties held office without interruption, winning nine elections in a row. During that time, Robert Gordon Menzies became Australia’s longest-serving prime minister.

Included in the book’s coverage are the almost seven years between Menzies’ retirement and the defeat of the Coalition at the 1972 election. This is because those years saw a continuation of debate on issues and policies that had their origins in the time when Menzies was PM. In addition, Holt, Gorton and McMahon – the three Liberal prime ministers who followed Menzies before the Liberal and Country Parties lost office in December 1972 – all served as ministers under Menzies. Holt was Menzies’ Liberal Party deputy for almost ten years. Thus, the logical end point of any study of the history of the Menzies period is the change of government in 1972. This book is not a biography of Menzies, nor does it presume to be a complete history of Australian politics between 1949 and 1972.

Rather, it is a series of detailed reflections on the politics and events of that period, which was dominated by that remarkable Australian statesman.

As the chapters of this book recount, Menzies towered over that era in a way that no other Australian has over any span of time since Federation. He enjoyed a rapid rise to reach the dizzy heights of the nation’s top job, only to have that office wrenched from him due to crumbling support within his own government. His comeback demonstrated the gritty resilience that his many critics claimed was beyond him. Along the way he formed the Liberal Party of Australia, which I would later have the privilege of leading for sixteen years.

There is also the neat conjunction of the twenty-three-year Menzies era with my own deepening attraction to politics. I first became interested in politics in 1949 at age ten, and my fascination intensified as I progressed to adulthood. There is no major event, from 1949 onwards, dealt with in the chapters that follow that I do not recall in some way from my own earlier years, whether it be the Korean War, attempts to ban the Communist Party, the drama of the Petrov Affair or the Australian Labor Party (ALP) Split. It is a long list. I met Menzies briefly on one occasion only, in 1964 at a Liberal Party gathering in Canberra, but in his final years as Prime Minister I became a member of the State Executive of the Liberal Party in New South Wales, and came to know many of his fellow members of parliament (MPs) and ministers.

Robert Menzies not only led the Liberal Party of Australia into government in 1949, but also retained office for sixteen years and then retired in his own time and on his own terms: the only Australian PM since World War I to have done so. He would live to see three Liberal successors, the turbulent Whitlam years, and then the Coalition back in office under Malcolm Fraser, before his death in 1978 at the age of eighty-three.

Forming the Liberal Party out of the wreckage of the United Australia Party and other warring factions on the centre-right of Australian politics, then setting it up for such a sustained period of government, was Menzies’ greatest political achievement. The party has been integral to the Australian political scene since it was founded and, measured by its success in winning elections, has been Australia’s most successful political party.

Occasionally, some members of the Liberal Party engage in debate about whether their party is a liberal or conservative one. I am sure that if our founder could listen in on those debates he would be both puzzled and bemused by what he would hear. Terms such as ‘moderate’, ‘hard right’, ‘wet’ or ‘dry’ would be incomprehensible to him. As for the term ‘small-l liberal’, he once made clear, in a letter to his daughter, Heather, what he thought of such a notion. ‘We have the State Executive of the Liberal Party [in Victoria], which is dominated by what they now call “Liberals with a small l” – that is to say, Liberals who believe in nothing but who will believe in anything if they think it worth a few votes’.

As I frequently argued when PM, the Liberal Party is the trustee of both the conservative and the liberal traditions in Australian political life. It is the party of both Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill. When the party was formed, Menzies said the name Liberal was chosen to indicate that it would in no way be reactionary, but rather progressive, with much emphasis on the individual. Like me, Menzies was conservative when it came to the nation’s institutions. Equally, his ground-breaking initiatives to provide state aid to independent schools and vastly expand opportunities for university study illustrated his liberal instincts. Common sense tells us that on some matters we should conserve what is there and reject change. On others we should embrace change because what is there no longer works as it should. The party should always strive to be a broad church, accepting the reality that all modern political parties are less ideological than their predecessors, and no one group should seek to impose a philosophical straitjacket on the party.

Menzies’ greatest legacy as a statesman was to lay the foundations of modern Australia. The economic prosperity of the 1950s ensured a good life for larger numbers of Australians than ever before. The Australia, New Zealand, United States Security (ANZUS) Treaty arrived as the bedrock of our security, and the 1957 Commerce Agreement opened up the huge potential of the Japanese market, just as the British market was diminishing. Menzies maintained and broadened the immigration programme commenced by the post World War II Labor Government.

The first three chapters of this book set the scene, with Chapter 1 recalling, partly from my own personal recollections as a ten-year- old boy, some of the ordinary character of the nation that Menzies was elected to govern in 1949. Chapters 2 and 3 trace Menzies’ life from birth until 1949, describing along the way his political struggles and the manner in which our nation responded to the impact of two world wars and the Great Depression. In that rapid journey we meet some of the other political leaders who influenced those times, such as Billy Hughes, Joseph Lyons and Labor’s John Curtin and Ben Chifley.

From Chapter 4 onwards the book deals with what I regard as the issues, challenges and identities that gave such colour and drama to the years of the Menzies era – 1949 to 1972. Inevitably there will be issues, events and personalities familiar or important to some readers that have not been included.

The penultimate chapter, entitled ‘The Great Assumption’, requires special mention here. The Menzies era saw robust economic growth and, by the standards of today, astonishingly low unemployment. So consistently good was the performance of the economy during this time that both sides of politics came to assume it would always be that way.

The Coalition and the ALP were deeply antagonistic towards each other on foreign policy and defence issues – what we now collectively call ‘national security’. On economic issues the ALP maintained its traditional faith in government ownership and intervention. The High Court might have put paid to Chifley’s bank nationalisation plans, but as Chapter 5 will detail, Labor continued in Opposition to frustrate as best it could the banking policy of the Coalition. Labor was always willing to outspend the Liberals.

Yet when it came to what is now called micro-economic policy, in areas such as tariff protection, wage determination and regulation of the financial system, there was almost an unspoken bipartisanship. There was plenty of debate on the surface, but neither side sought to challenge fundamental assumptions about the correctness of policy approaches in these areas. Not only had they been with us since soon after Federation, but in the stable prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s they also seemed to work. This factor was crucial to the Liberals. Pragmatically, they continued to abide a more interventionist role for government than might have been their natural bent, because of the economic and political dividends it seemed to deliver.

In addition, the world, including Australia, was still basking in the afterglow of Keynesian economic theory, which many believed had lifted the dark pall of the Great Depression. Governments were meant to intervene, and not just to eliminate the imperfections of the market. When, at Canterbury Boys’ High School, I studied economics for the Leaving Certificate in 1956, I was left in no doubt by either teachers or textbooks that what was then called a ‘mixed economy’ was the right one. The alternatives were the planned economies of the Soviet Bloc, or the ‘unplanned economies’ which were a form of unbridled laissez-faire capitalism.

In ‘The Great Assumption’ I canvass this broad issue in some detail. I have placed the chapter immediately before that dealing with Gough Whitlam’s victory in 1972, because the Labor Leader based his hugely expansive spending programme for the election on the great assumption that economic growth would continue. Yet within eighteen months of his election the foundations of that great assumption began to shake, portending a mighty change in economic circumstances that would require both sides of politics to rethink their economic attitudes. And although it is outside the scope of this book, Australian politics of the subsequent forty years has largely been dominated by debate about the appropriate responses to those changed economic circumstances.

The Australia bequeathed to the incoming Labor Government in 1972, after twenty-three years of Coalition government, was utterly transformed from what it had been in 1949. The imprint of those years has stayed with us. They were more than an era. They were the Age of Menzies.