Seventy years ago, Australian troops and planes were defending territory in Korea and Malaya from communist forces, and Cold War tensions between the West and the Soviet Union were mounting.
Prime minister Robert Menzies could see the postwar era would not be one of easy peace and stability. He was genuinely concerned about the imminent threat of World War III, a war that would be fought between the West and the communist world, potentially with nuclear weapons.
In a radio broadcast in 1950, he said: “If we are to be involved in a third world war in the next few years, it will be the result of attack by international communism.”
For a non-nuclear power such as Australia, the geopolitical realities of the time meant alliances with great and powerful friends were deemed essential for our security to see off the threats from communism. September 1951 proved a busy month for the Menzies government in dealing with threats to Australia’s national and international security. On September 1, it signed a landmark security pact with the US and New Zealand – ANZUS – followed by a peace treaty with former aggressor Japan on September 8, formally ending the Pacific War.
Then, on September 22, 1951, Australians voted in the nation’s 24th referendum on whether to give the commonwealth powers to make laws in respect of communists and communism.
The previous year, the Menzies government had tried to ban the Communist Party of Australia through the Communist Party Dissolution Bill, only to have the legislation ruled invalid by the High Court. While Menzies had banned the Communist Party in 1940 during World War II, in 1951 the High Court did not consider Australia in a state of war (as the government had argued the Cold War was), and therefore found it could not invoke the defence power in the Constitution to ban the Communist Party.
The Menzies government’s fix was to call a referendum to empower the federal government to ban the Communist Party. Remarkably, despite the Yes campaign beginning with 80 per cent support, this effort ultimately failed, with only three states voting in favour (Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania) and the Yes case receiving 49.44 per cent of the overall vote.
For Menzies, a committed liberal, the referendum presented the eternal dilemma for democracies. In his words, how does a government repress “subversion or aggression” but not at the same time suppress “freedom of thought”? Menzies’ fear and loathing of the communist threat meant on this occasion he fell too hard on the side of suppression of subversion. Thankfully his countrymen and women saw a better path to preserving freedom.
Menzies’ position on the referendum divided his new Liberal Party of Australia, with several leading Liberals arguing the No case. He was a masterful politician and campaigner who won an incredible seven consecutive elections. But on the referendum, his political judgment was found wanting. As Liberal MP Percy Joske later remarked, Menzies had shown “a failure to understand the Australian people and their appreciation both of freedom and of the rule of law”.
For Menzies the result was a significant political setback. After winning a majority in both houses in the 1951 double-dissolution election, he went on to scrape into government in 1954, losing the two-party-preferred vote but holding a majority of seats.
Menzies was disappointed by the referendum result but framed his defeat in terms of the Australian tendency to distrust central authority rather than a personal setback. He knew that “to get an affirmative vote from the Australian people on a referendum proposal is one of the labours of Hercules”. In private, Menzies also claimed voters were worried about giving Labor opposition leader HV Evatt the dictatorial powers elaborated in the referendum in the event Evatt became prime minister one day.
However, it was the referendum’s longer-term legacy that would deliver Menzies successive electoral victories. Evatt’s leadership of the No campaign and his decision to act on behalf of the communist-controlled Waterside Workers Federation in the High Court case established the idea that he was soft on communism.
Evatt might have won the referendum battle but he lost the electoral war. Evatt’s connection with communism (including in his own office) meant Menzies could argue that communism remained an internal threat to Australia and that Labor could not be trusted with its ties to communists. Internal ructions, particularly after the Petrov royal commission, meant the Labor Party would split, and those opposed to communism and Evatt would form the anti-communist Democratic Labor Party in 1954. DLP preferences would flow to the Liberals, delivering wins to Menzies and rendering Labor uncompetitive for the rest of the 1950s and 60s.
Seventy years on, the world has changed but in many respects hasn’t moved on from the tensions of 1951. September 2021 will be remembered, like September 1951, for the era-defining decisions made by the Australian government to deal with geopolitical tensions arising from the threat of revisionist powers, and in these ideological and strategic battles Australia still stands shoulder to shoulder with the US and the UK.
Georgina Downer is chief executive of the Robert Menzies Institute.