Liberals must stay true to my father’s vision, Sir Robert Menzies; daughter says

The daughter of Sir Robert Menzies recalls his work to create the Liberal Party, and their crushing first election loss.

Sir Robert Menzies’ daughter Heather Henderson at her home in Canberra on Thursday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Heather Henderson remembers her father, Sir Robert Menzies, working tirelessly to create the Liberal Party in 1944 and being bitterly disappointed by its first election loss in 1946, when he said it was like being “run over by a steamroller”.

In her first comments since the heavy defeat of the Liberal-­National government, and the loss of many blue-ribbon seats, Mrs Henderson, 93, said the party must maintain its liberal viewpoint and not turn to the right for its salvation as her father did not want to create a conservative party.

“I get very tetchy when people refer to it as ‘the conservative party’ because that is one thing that he said it was not: a conservative party,” Mrs Henderson said. “He wanted to create a party that was liberal and forward-looking.”

Mrs Henderson said Liberals must not walk away from their traditional heartland in affluent areas of Sydney, Melbourne, ­Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth where they suffered multiple seat losses to teal independents, Labor and the Greens.

Kooyong, Higgins, Mackellar, Boothby and Curtin had been won by the Liberals at every election since Menzies led the party to victory in 1949. Goldstein had been Liberal since its creation in 1984 and Pearce since its creation in 1990. Bennelong and Ryan had only once previously not returned a Liberal MP since 1949. North Sydney had only twice voted ­independent and Wentworth just once since 1949.

“Surely we must try and get back those seats that have been Liberal, otherwise where do we go from here?” Mrs Henderson said. “There is a lot of work to be done by the Liberal Party.”

The loss of Kooyong, a seat held by Menzies from 1934 to 1966, is a heavy blow for the Liberal Party. Mrs Henderson is deeply disappointed at Josh Frydenberg’s defeat and saw him as a future prime minister.

“I am devastated at the loss of Kooyong, but Josh in particular, because I think he was one of the best performers in parliament,” she said. “He was certainly a ­future leader for Australia and we would have been proud of him. And he also would have got the Liberal Party back to what it should have been, what it used to be.”

The Liberal Party was formed to be a national mass membership organisation that was a broad church with strong community links and appealed to the middle ground. Menzies initiated the formation of the party at two conferences with representatives from 18 centre-right parties and organisations in 1944.

“My father and others went around and spoke to people who ran different organisations that were all more or less on the same side and he got them all together and made it into one party – the Liberal Party – and now I can see it all gradually getting broken up,” she said.

Mrs Henderson said her father got on with people from all walks of life, regardless of their political views, and lamented the decline of cross-party friendships and the often angry tone of debate.

“My father saw people as people and politics as politics, and he was good friends with most of his counterparts in the Labor Party,” she said. “I wish it could go back to that, otherwise the opposition ­becomes nastier and question time is horrible.

“I think we were so lucky to have him in Australia and, of course, I would think that because he was my father.”