Eyes on the prize: Robert Menzies v Doc Evatt
This is a lively account of how one public life flourished and another collapsed into ignominy, with much to instruct anyone interested in the ingredients of political success.
Anne Henderson has given us a lively account of political triumph and disaster; of how one public life flourished and another collapsed into ignominy, with much to instruct anyone interested in the ingredients of political success. Both Robert Gordon Menzies and Herbert Vere (Bert) Evatt were brilliant students marked early for big futures, both were highly successful lawyers, both served in state and then in federal parliaments, and both led their respective parties. There the similarities end. Menzies grew and matured into becoming our longest-serving prime minister while Evatt’s self-regard and lack of judgment caused Labor to split with disastrous consequences that are felt to this day.
In a telling sign of zero self-awareness, the workers’ party leader was always the “doc”; using an academic handle that even John Hewson in different times and circumstances never insisted upon.
Apart from the election campaigns where they faced off, Menzies and Evatt fought three mighty battles: over bank nationalisation, banning the Communist Party, and the Petrov defection. The two versus one scorecard to Menzies, though, understates the magnitude of his triumph. Menzies learnt the right lessons from his defeat and Evatt manifestly didn’t. For Evatt, in the end, it was all about him and nothing is more fatal to a democratic politician than narcissism. Even if propitious circumstances lead to some success, the final outcome is not just failure but a dishonourable one and the pity or contempt of fair-minded observers.
In 1947, Menzies was an ex-PM on probation from the new party he’d founded, due to the widespread sentiment that “you can’t win with Menzies”. But in a big error of political judgment, the depression-scarred then-Prime Minister Ben Chifley announced bank nationalisation. It gave Menzies the issue he needed to rally his own side, barnstorm the country, and secure a thumping win in the 1949 election. In the first of many ego-driven decisions, under the delusion that he could simultaneously be both an effective party politician and a forensic courtroom advocate, Evatt appeared personally before the High Court to argue the constitutionality of the government’s plans – and not for the first time or the last, bored and annoyed the judges by not knowing when to stop.
In 1951, it was Menzies turn to overreach. Having previously argued that communism should be defeated by argument not law, he sought to ban the party using the defence power. It was Evatt who successfully argued before the court that the Cold War’s internal subversion couldn’t justify it and then out-campaigned Menzies to defeat the subsequent attempt to amend the constitution. But added to Evatt’s obvious infatuation with the UN – whose initial General Assembly president he’d been – his insistence that even possible traitors deserved procedural justice enabled his internal and external opponents to paint him as soft on communism.
Then came the succession of paranoid mistakes that demonstrated how unfit he was to lead a party, let alone a country. First, he was convinced, without any hard evidence, that Menzies had somehow orchestrated the Petrov defection to sabotage his chances of winning the 1954 election; second, he made a fool of himself appearing before the subsequent royal commission to defend his own staff, at least one of whom was a Soviet fellow-traveller; and finally, and fatally, debating the commission’s report in parliament, he thought to refute its findings by trumpeting a denial from the Soviet foreign minister.
To any but the most prejudiced reader, Henderson shows that Evatt had no evidentiary basis for his paranoid suspicions and persisted in these delusions long after any sensible person would have conceded error. Menzies might have revelled in humiliating “the learned doctor” in the parliament but he’d quite properly handled the defection and its aftermath. Menzies was then a bemused spectator to Evatt’s vengeful expulsion from Labor of the anti-communist industrial “groupers” in another massive demonstration of his blindness to any fault in himself. This was the catalyst for the migration of Catholics from the politics of helping the underdog to the politics of upholding freedom and respecting tradition.
The wonder is that, mesmerised by his supposed intellectual brilliance, the federal Labor caucus persisted with the Doc as leader for two elections post-Petrov. And that to move him on, NSW Labor appointed him as Supreme Court Chief Justice, despite his obvious mental decline.
Two key truths shine through this masterly account of a transformative time: the human factor in history and the role of chance. But for bank nationalisation, Menzies might have missed his chance at political redemption; if Chifley had lived, Menzies might have lost the 1954 election; if Arthur Calwell, Evatt’s deputy, had been of different mettle, and challenged for the leadership, Labor might not have split. Six decades on, it seems we’re as fascinated with the brilliant and unstable failure as with the no less brilliant and much more steady success. Is this the genius of the political left to make martyrs out of losers; or some instinct that it’s defeat that’s more instructive?
Tony Abbott is a former Australian prime minister. Menzies versus Evatt: The Great Rivalry of Australian Politics by Anne Henderson (Connor Court, Australian Politics, 236pp, $35).