Menzies’s philosophy echoed those of early settlers

Robert Menzies talks with then president John F Kennedy during a visit to Washington. Picture: Getty Images

Of the many pictures of Bob Menzies that hang in the Liberal Party headquarters in Canberra, one seldom fails to catch my eye.

Menzies has made himself at home on the Oval Office sofa in September 1962, his third visit to Washington in less than 18 months, his left hand making a sweeping gesture to emphasise his point. President John F Kennedy is sitting upright in a straight-back rocking chair, hanging on his every word.

The image of Menzies as a world statesman runs contrary to everything I once thought I knew about our longest-serving prime minister. When I migrated from Britain in 1989, the man who coined the phrase “forgotten people” had been largely forgotten himself. Donald Horne’s portrayal of Menzies and his generation in The Lucky Country, “antediluvian, nurtured in a backwater, strongly provincial”, had stuck. And yet Richard Nixon was to write that Menzies possessed “extraordinary intelligence and profound understanding” that made an indelible impression on him. Had he been born in Britain, said Nixon, he might have been Winston Churchill.

Like Churchill, Menzies’s legacy stems from the wartime years. While Churchill was planning for victory, Menzies in opposition was planning for peace.

In a series of radio talks in 1942 and 1943 Menzies constructed the intellectual infrastructure for the Liberal Party as it was to become, a party that drew on the same philosophy of classical liberalism that motivated Australia’s first settlers, men such as Arthur Phillip and Lachlan Macquarie.

No one could have been in any doubt for what it stood. It argued that people should have the freedom to be their best selves and to make their best better. It believed people should be protected from the exercise of arbitrary power, notably by the state.

It was a view that was politically incorrect in its day. The international trend in political thought was towards granting greater authority to the state. The newly formed Liberal Party took a different path, rejecting the centrally planned economy as unworkable. The Liberal Party sought to empower an ambitious middle class, “frugal people who strive for and obtain the margin above these materially necessary things”, as the foundation for an active and developing national life. 

On the eve of the party’s 75th anniversary, Menzies’s greatest legacy, the Liberal Party, can justifiably claim to be the natural party of federal government. It has won 19 elections since World War II compared with Labor’s 10.

In the 70 years since Menzies’s historic election in 1949, it has been in opposition for just 22 years. The notion that the Libs only get to govern when Labor is having a bad year or 48 is clearly absurd. 

Allow us to put forward a different theory; that the Liberal philosophy is more closely in tune with human nature than socialism; that the desire of humans to control their own lives is universal, a desire that is today driving street protests in Hong Kong; that people are not crying out for change, one of Labor’s favourite slogans, in one of the happiest, most prosperous, democratic and free countries on Earth.

Australians prefer, to the constant irritation of our intellectuals, to be relaxed and comfortable.

The Menzies party has not built its reputation by balancing the books, even though that is the work it is frequently called upon to perform after a period of Labor profligacy. For Menzies, a Liberal government should aim to increase social justice, a term he used frequently, as well as prosperity.

Menzies was not insensitive to the plight of those who struggle to overcome the friction of everyday life. His childhood was spent in Jeparit, in the farming country of Victoria’s Mallee, where people were frequently down on their luck. Yet he rejected the unrealisable and ultimately undesirable idea that all should be rewarded equally. Instead he affirmed egalitarianism, the principle that every human being is of equal worth and should be granted equal opportunity. That, Menzies argued, was achieved not through the benevolence of the state but by personal and economic freedom.

Today’s policy challenges demand a reappraisal of the Liberal responsibility to protect citizens from tyranny, the imposition of arbitrary power by institutions. In 1949, the threat of arbitrary power came chiefly from a Labor government, encouraged by a false belief that the wisdom of the state was greater than the collective wisdom of its citizens. At this year’s election, the landscape of power was different. The threat of the use of arbitrary power by the state has not diminished. Yet the threat comes from other quarters too.

Arbitrary powers are being exercised by an activist judiciary and quasi-judicial government bodies such as the Human Rights Commission. The freedom of choice is curtailed by monopolistic corporations in the energy and finance markets.

Economic freedom is threatened by the activists who orchestrate Twitter-centred boycotts on commercial companies digging coal or advertising on Alan Jones’s radio program. The threat of arbitrary power is implicit in the rise of so-called political correctness and identity politics. The identity and the motives of the institutions driving this are frequently unclear. Many Australians, however, feel acutely that decisions over social mores and education are being made by other people. It is against this background that Scott Morrison’s election victory must be assessed. The political and cultural agenda is far more diverse than it was in 1949. In part that has been enabled by social media; in part by the changes to the less homogenous nature of our society; and in part to a general neglect of our national traditions and institutions.

In the end, however, the Liberal Party won by standing up for the same people Menzies called upon 70 years earlier; the Forgotten People now renamed as the Quiet Australians, who feel that other people are making the decisions for them.

The Liberal Party has been successful when it stays true to the voters to whom it owes its success, “the great and sober and dynamic middle-class”, as Menzies described. “We shall destroy them,” he warned, “at our peril.”

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre