Opinion: Fifty years since Sir Robert Menzies announced retirement

ARTICULATE without verbosity, passionate without being windy, incisive but not cutting. These are not the words most people use to describe Malcolm Turnbull, but can be applied to one of his predecessors.

05/05/2016: Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull holds a press conference after attending the Jane McGrath High Tea at the SCG. Pic by James Croucher

TOMORROW marks exactly 50 years since Australia’s most successful politician announced his retirement from public life.

Robert Gordon Menzies was 71 when he stepped down as Australia’s longest-serving prime minister on January 20, 1966. In winning seven consecutive elections, Menzies shaped Australian politics like no other as he strolled the parliamentary landscape like a giant: tall, slow-gaited, fearsome and unchallenged.

But in the half century since, Menzies’ light has dimmed in Australians’ consciousness. Few leaders on either side of politics today invoke his name — John Howard and Tony Abbott were exceptions — and even fewer voters seem to care. Most Australians under 30 haven’t even heard of him.

Malcolm Turnbull is especially well-placed to heed Menzies’ lessons of electoral longevity. As a PM in search of his own mandate, facing a disgruntled rump inside his own party, and about to sell a tough policy of an increased GST, Turnbull — who’s long on articulation but short on message — must learn to inspire the type of deference Menzies so easily commanded.

That’s why Menzies remains a model of prime ministerial behaviour regardless of political colour. In political science we call it “mode of operational leadership”, but it’s really about how leaders get on with the daily job of leading.

There’s a fair bit to dislike about Menzies, too. His Anglophilia got up distinctive Aussie noses even in the 1960s when we hoped to throw off British cultural shackles. It was said that, to Menzies, Asia was just a stopover on his way to watch cricket at Lord’s.

Then there are matters of race. It was no accident the notorious White Australia policy first cracked — and the 1967 Aboriginal referendum was conducted — after Menzies’ departure. It took a much more “with it” Harold Holt to feel the winds of change. And then there was his cynical wedging of Labor over communism, and ugly attempts to ban a political party that posed no real threat.

Former prime ministers Tony Abbott and John Howard would often reference Robert Menzies. PIC: Kym Smith

Menzies also had a nasty habit of getting rid of Liberal rivals by dispatching them to various overseas posts.

But there’s much to admire about the man, too. Leaving aside the happy 1950s and ’60s boom years of full employment, I argue Menzies brought a dignity to public life that’s sadly missing today.

Politics for Menzies really was about public service. He retired a man of very modest means after 38 years in public life — six in the Victorian parliament and 32 in federal. And when he retired, he refrained from public comment apart from two eloquently written autobiographical volumes. No sniping from the sidelines for him.

Menzies in and out of office also maintained an aloofness rare anywhere in modern celebrity. Menzies didn’t tolerate fools but neither was he cold to those around him. But he did remain distant from many colleagues, journalists and voters. No dancing the Macarena or selfie-shots for this bloke.

It might sound snooty but that detachment provided Menzies with an authority and respect that allowed Australians to feel engaged with politics. After all, this was a time when hundreds of thousands of Australians were political party members.

Sadly, that deference is conspicuously absent from public life today where familiarity has indeed bred base political contempt. Now we sneer at PMs like reality-television show contestants and even the well-liked Turnbull is in danger of attack from common disdain.

A powerful orator ... Sir Robert Menzies.

Representative democracy means voters must, by definition, defer decision-making to agents constitutionally able to make policy on our behalf. And while it is democratic to frequently question — even lampoon — those agents and their decisions, it is not OK to denigrate leadership offices themselves. To hold all politicians in contempt simply because they are elevated and paid by the public — a dumb kind of Australian envy just like the “tall poppy” syndrome — actually disenfranchises non-elites, the very people our egalitarian democracy is designed to help most.

In short, the more respect we lose for elected office, the more our democratic fabric is unwound.

Technology plays a role, too. While television was around for the last nine years of his prime ministership, Menzies wasn’t a television politician. He preferred print and radio — when he tolerated journalists at all — so distance could be maintained. Indeed, Menzies’ “Forgotten People” radio broadcasts in the 1940s, like US president Franklin Roosevelt’s “fireside chats”, connected him with Australians and redefined what it meant to be “middle class”.

Some say Menzies’ enjoyed authority over party and cabinet because he personally established the Liberal Party in 1944. Perhaps so. But he earned voters’ respect more from a steady hand on the public tiller.

Menzies’ was also a model parliamentary orator — something from which Turnbull could take a lesson. Articulate without verbosity, passionate without being windy, incisive but not cutting. Only Alfred Deakin and Gough Whitlam are comparable.

Lastly, Menzies should be remembered for being the last PM to leave office at a time of his own choosing. And going out on your own terms with head held high is the ultimate hallmark of poise.

Paul Williams is a senior humanities lecturer at Griffith University. Twitter: @pdwilliams1