Norman became a member of the breakaway Democratic Labor Party which gave its preferences to the Coalition ahead of Labor. This certainly saved Robert Menzies and John Gorton from defeat in the 1961 and 1969 elections respectively, and effectively kept the ALP out of office between 1955 and the end of 1972.
Despite the fact that Norman was a DLP voter, for the past two decades of his life he remained a fan of John Curtin (who was prime minister of Australia from October 1941 until his death in office in July 1945) and Ben Chifley (prime minister from July 1945 until December 1949, who died in 1951).
So, I can well understand why Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said what he said about Australia’s wartime prime minister when delivering the John Curtin Oration last Saturday in Sydney. Put simply, Curtin is a hero to most Labor supporters and a (secular) saint to some. Yet, like all of us, he was not without fault – including during wartime.
Albanese told the John Curtin Research Centre that no Australian achieved more in war and in peace than Curtin. He added: “Throughout 124 years of our Federation and 31 prime ministers of Australia, John Curtin stands apart.”
Yet, Curtin’s contribution to Australia’s security deserves examination. He was a strong opponent of conscription for overseas service during World War I. Indeed, he was jailed briefly in Melbourne for defying wartime regulations.
There were many who opposed conscription, which was voted down in the plebiscites of 1916 and 1917 – an issue that led Labor to split in 1916. But that was another matter. What initially was called the Great War was not an occasion of Australia fighting other people’s wars, as the left-wing interpretation of Australian history states. After all, Imperial Germany had possessions in the Pacific, and a victory by Kaiser Wilhelm II would have adversely affected Australia in a dramatic way.
My maternal uncle, Alan Dargavel, who came from a Labor voting family, died in November 1917 in Belgium during the Third Battle of Ypres. Like all his comrades, Alan was a volunteer. His life in the trenches was harsher than Curtin’s uncomfortable incarceration in the 19th century-built Melbourne prison at around the same time.
Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating is wont to declare that the likes of Joe Lyons and Robert Menzies – United Australia Party prime ministers between January 1932 and August 1941 (Lyons died in office in 1939) – were appeasers of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany from 1933 until the outbreak of World War II in September 1939.
And, so they were. And so was Curtin. The talented historian John Edwards is something of a Curtin fan-boy. Yet a reading of volume one of his John Curtin’s War reveals that, in the 1930s, Curtin opposed every proposal by Lyons or Menzies to increase Australia’s defence expenditure.
Moreover, on May 9, 1939, Curtin delivered a speech in the House of Representatives in which he declared that to Germans (but not Australians) “democratic systems do not necessarily mean work and food and decent living standards”. He added Germans believed “the form of political system that they have accepted yields to them a more satisfactory internal social standing than does the democratic system”. This was Hitler’s Germany.
In the event, Menzies declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. Albanese put it this way: “Where Menzies had said that because Britain was at war with Germany, as a result Australia was at war – under Labor Curtin said Australia was at war”. The reference was to Australia entering the Pacific War after Japan’s attack on the United States at Pearl Harbour in December 1941.
But Menzies was correct. In 1939, Australia had not adopted the Statute of Westminster and was dependent on Britain with respect to foreign policy. Australia’s position vis a vis Japan in December 1941 was different.
The essential point is that Menzies committed the Second Australian Imperial Force to the northern hemisphere in September 1939. The Curtin-led Labor opposition opposed the commitment. The Second AIF left Australia in March 1940. It ended up engaged in battle with Germany and Italy in north Africa. With considerable success – as is documented in Tom Gilling’s recently released Start Digging You Bastards! on the Battle of El Alamein. Curtin had wanted Australian forces to remain in Australia.
As documented in Anne Henderson’s Menzies At War, the senior defence public servant Frederick Shedden wrote that without the contribution of Lyons and Menzies to Australia’s defence between 1931 and 1941 “the legacy of the Curtin government in 1941 would have been very poor indeed”.
Sure, Curtin was a fine domestic political leader in the early 1940s as is evident by Labor’s landslide victory at the 1943 election. And he made the correct decision in insisting that the Second AIF forces return from the northern theatre to Australia in early 1942.
In this, Curtin overrode British prime minister Winston Churchill’s insistence that the AIF be sent to Burma. However, Curtin effectively handed over responsibility for Australia’s commitment in the Pacific War to General Douglas McArthur, the Commander of US Army Forces in the Far East. This was not the best wartime leadership.
Without question, as Albanese declared, Curtin did much to foster Australia’s relationship with the US. Yet he was not alone. Lyons developed a strong relationship with Roosevelt and appeared on the cover of Time magazine on July 8, 1935. Menzies continued in this vein and Curtin added to the Australia-US relationship.
But, contrary to Albanese’s claim, Curtin was not “the founder of Australia’s alliance with the United States”. That was born in September 1951 when Percy Spender was the Liberal Party external affairs minister and Menzies prime minister.
Curtin was by no means a false god. But nor was he the one-true God when it came to politics. This I came to learn, despite my father’s teachings.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.
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My father, Norman, was a long-time member of the Australian Labor Party – until he was expelled by/resigned from the ALP at the time of the Labor split in Victoria in 1955. There was a not-unrelated Labor split in Queensland two years later.