Robert Menzies’ mantra perfectly timed

It is natural that in marking the 75th anniversary of the Liberal Party’s foundation, and the 70th anniversary of its first national election win on December 10, 1949, attention should focus on its remarkable record in elections.

Since World War II, few ­parties can boast victories in two out of every three elections they contest.

But to see the Liberal record in elections as its main claim to fame sells it short. Indeed, its predecessor parties — the Commonwealth Liberal Party (1909-17), the Nationalist Party (1917-31) and the United Australia Party (1931-45) — had a comparable record, nine wins against four losses.

The essential strength of the Liberal Party in contrast to these predecessors lies particularly in its philosophical foundations, and the timeliness and boldness of their advocacy.

These qualities have been sustained by institutional strength, the structures, federal and state, adopted at its foundation. Arrangements for the party to raise and manage its own finances, a vital difference from its forerunners, were of special importance.

Another crucial feature was establishment of branches throughout each state, with important but not an exclusive role in selection of candidates, and in campaigning, particularly on polling day. This key development gave the party roots in the electorate, critical in a lively parliamentary democracy. In all these aspects, the Liberal Party at the time of its creation was in advance of all other centre-right parties in Western democracies, and a good many others as well.

As World War II was drawing to a close, the Liberal Party needed to tackle the zeitgeist. Collectivist ideas that had taken root during the Depression and flourished during the war were ascendant. Parties of the centre-left rejoiced and prospered.

And they were supported with considerable enthusiasm by bureaucratic elites. The exemplar was Jean Monnet, leading light of the grands corps in France, architect of French planning in the 1950s and a major force in the development of the Common Market, now the EU.

Even into the 1970s Monnet’s views on planning public policy, especially in the economic realm, were the envy of many administrators in the Western world. Even some parties of the centre-right supported these trends in public policy and governance, among them the Conservative Party in Britain, with its own long traditions of Tory paternalism.

The electoral mood was very favourable to the collectivist gospel: government ownership of key industries, extensive regulation of business and expanding provision of services directly by government.

Thus when Robert Menzies, after losing office in 1941, set about reorienting politics in Australia, of which the Liberal Party would be the principal instrument, he was not by any means running with the tide. And when the Liberal Party faced the electors for the first time in 1946, it was in an international context of Labour’s stunning win in Britain’s 1945 election, an ­entrenched centre-left government in Canada, the New Deal by no means in retreat in the US, and Labour firmly in office in New Zealand. In Australia, Labor was in command in most states.

It required great conviction when Menzies took to the air waves declaring his belief “in the individual, his rights, and his enterprise, and rejecting the socialist panacea”.

To Menzies, the individual was the “prime motive force for building a better world”. The “greatest element in a strong people is a fierce independence of spirit. This is the only real freedom, and it has as its corollary a brave acceptance of unclouded individual responsibility”.

“The moment a man seeks moral and intellectual refuge in the emotions of a crowd, he ceases to be a human being and becomes a cipher.”

He continued: “The great vice of democracy … is that for a generation we have been busy getting ourselves on to the list of beneficiaries and removing ourselves from the list of contributors.”

A few months later he declared capitalism “an extraordinary success”. Under it, there had been “enormous developments in the recognition of human rights, in living standards, in material comfort, in public health”.

But its “products” had been “mixed”. It was also the system under which “we have had slums, unemployment, poverty, war”.

So for capitalism to survive, “most stringent obligations” must be imposed on it “to discharge its social and industrial duty”.

While Menzies had given the new party a philosophy for the times, it was only when the Chifley Labor government announced its intention to nationalise the private banks that, as Menzies put it: “The issue of socialism was no longer academic. It came alive, and the critics subsided.” Public reaction was immediate, widespread and hostile.

In appealing to the electors in December 1949, he asked the question: “Are we for the socialist state, with its subordination of the individual to the universal officialdom of government, or are we for the ancient British faith that governments are the servants of the people?”

This epitomised the philosophy on which the Liberal Party was founded. The victory that followed was no ordinary swing of the pendulum. It was the victory with which the collectivist tide started to ebb.

John Nethercote is adjunct professor, Canberra campus, Australian Catholic University.