Robert Menzies' forgotten people

SEVENTY years ago today, the former PM broadcast a speech that made history.

120522 Menzies

AS the war in the Pacific was turning decisively in the Allies' favour, an ex-prime minister turned his thoughts to the direction Australia should take when the war was won and what sort of political party should lead it.

No prime minister, before or since, has allowed themselves to think out loud so extensively or so publicly as Robert Menzies did in the year after losing office and leadership of the United Australia Party. The 37 radio talks known collectively as the Forgotten People speeches were, said Menzies, "a serious attempt to clarify my own mind and assist listeners on questions which emerge in the changing currents of the war".

On a Friday evening 70 years ago today, he sat before a radio microphone to broadcast his most famous speech: The Forgotten People. Within a year it had been published along with other radio speeches in the series, and served as a de facto manifesto for the Liberal Party in the post-war years.

Forgotten People is a broadcast essay rich in literary form and meaning, if at times a little rough around the edges, that rewards repeated reading. It is both a historical record of the times and a political speech that contains much that is eternal.

It would be another two years until he founded the modern Liberal Party, and seven years before he would again become prime minister. Forgotten People distils the essence of the Menzies philosophy, explaining not just his prime ministership, but the mood of the country that chose him over Labor's Ben Chifley in 1949.

It was already clear where the post-war cultural divide would lie: between the ideology of socialism and the ideas of the free market; between a centrally planned, command economy and demand-driven capitalism. Lurking in the background was the spectre of totalitarianism. Forgotten People speaks obliquely to that debate and the other burning issues of the time. It was delivered in a different era to a country that in many important respects thought differently about the world, yet its resonance today is unmistakable.

"In a country like Australia the class war must always be a false war. We do not have classes here as in England, and therefore the terms do not mean the same."

Menzies begins by rejecting the Marxist division by capital and labour, a notion that gave foundational meaning to the Australian Labor Party, became the dominant Australian historical narrative in the 20th century.

For Menzies, the issue of inherited privilege would have been settled in 1853, when William Wentworth's proposal for an aristocracy in NSW faced the satire of Daniel Deniehy, the son of Irish convicts. Deniehy mocked "these harlequin aristocrats, these Botany Bay magnificos, these Australian mandarins" led by "the hoary Wentworth" and "the native aristocrat Mr James Macarthur" as pygmies capable of a great deal of mischief. The "bunyip aristrocracy" was thus avoided.

"But if we are to talk of classes, then the time has come to say something of the forgotten class . . . the middle class who, properly regarded, represent the backbone of this country."

Menzies's broad and inclusive bourgeoisie became the political hunting ground for every successful political leader who followed him. He excluded at one end "the rich and powerful" who were able to look after themselves and "the mass of unskilled people, almost invariably well-organised, and with their wages and conditions safeguarded by popular law."

In the middle were "salary-earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers for the most part unorganised and unself-conscious. They are envied by those whose benefits are largely obtained by taxing them."

The Menzies middle class resembles Julia Gillard's working families, "Australians who work hard themselves; who set the alarm clock early." Tony Abbott addresses "small business, decent workers who want to have a go". Menzies' forgotten people, however described, will decide the next election.

"I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the organised masses. It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race."

Appealing beyond the interests of the present generation of voters to those of their children has become a cliche, blatantly and successfully exploited by Alan Corbett, who won a seat in the NSW Upper House in 1995 as leader of the A Better Future For Our Children Party.

Menzies couples personal aspiration with public benefit, since "The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole." John Howard updated Menzies' rhetoric in 1995, arguing that "A stable functioning family provides the best welfare support system yet devised".

"Your advanced socialist may rave against private property even while he acquires it; but one of the best instincts in us is that which induces us to have one little piece of earth with a house and a garden which is ours; to which we can withdraw."

His argument in favour of a home owning democracy comes at the start of a complicated section of the speech, in which the family home becomes a metaphor for self-contained self-sufficiency and the launching pad for self-advancement. "My home is where my wife and children are. The instinct to be with them is the great instinct of civilised man; the instinct to give them a chance in life, to make them not leaners but lifters, is a noble instinct."

Menzies draws from his Scottish heritage to present an inspiring picture of a ploughman who sends his son to the village school, and eventually to Edinburgh and a university degree. His son's future will be assured "not by the inheritance of money but by the acquisition of that knowledge which will give him power". The ploughman asks: "How can I qualify my son to help society?" Not, as we have so frequently thought, "How can I qualify society to help my son?"

"We offer no affront -- on the contrary we have nothing but the warmest human compassion -- toward those whom fate has compelled to live upon the bounty of the state."

Here is the philosophy behind the Menzian welfare state, one that provides support for the destitute but recognises "that the greatest element in a strong people is a fierce independence of spirit and it has as its corollary a brave acceptance of unclouded individual responsibility".

It was a central theme in Noel Pearson's Cape York Institute welfare reform project, From Hand Out to Hand Up, which spoke of "rebuilding norms and restoring indigenous authority by attaching reciprocity to welfare payments."

It was a notion revived by Mark Latham in his attack on "the central failing of left-wing politics" in his 2003 book From The Suburbs: "Rights alone are not enough. They need to be matched with responsibilities."

"The idea entertained by many people that, in a well-constituted world, we shall all live on the state is the quintessence of madness, for what is the state but us? We collectively must provide what we individually receive. The great vice of democracy. For a generation we have been busy getting ourselves on to the list of beneficiaries and removing ourselves from the list of contributors, as if somewhere there was somebody else's wealth and somebody else's effort on which we could thrive."

Here Menzies quarrels directly with socialism, and in doing so identifies the curse of victimhood that was to grow exponentially in the post-war years. Increasing prosperity lowered the threshold for compassion to include the vulnerable, the working poor, the socially excluded, the less fortunate, the victims of disadvantage, deprivation and under-privilege. It is evidence of what political scientist Kenneth Minogue has called "social sentimentalism".

Menzies criticises policies that "penalise thrift, encourage dependence on the state, to bring about a dull equality on a fantastic idea that all men are equal in mind and needs and deserts: to level down by taking the mountains out of the landscape."

"We speak of 'man power' as if it were a mere matter of arithmetic: as if it were made up of a multiplication of men and muscles without spirit."

Menzies, one suspects, would have little time for the post-war concept of "human capital" in which the stock of human competency, creativity and toil are reduced to the level of a machine with an economic value. Menzies draws his thinking from the Scottish Enlightenment, giving primacy to human reason, the most basic renewable resource.

From the human spirit comes "intelligent ambition which is the motive power of human progress" and intelligent ambition, said Menzies, comes mainly from the middle class. It is the middle class, more than any other that provides "the intellectual life which marks us off from the beast; the life which finds room for literature, for the arts, for science, for medicine and the law.

"Are the universities mere technical schools, or have they as one of their functions the preservation of pure learning, bringing in its train not merely riches for the imagination but a comparative sense for the mind?"

Gough Whitlam secured the popular applause for the growth in tertiary studies, but it was Menzies who began the expansion of the university sector, increasing expenditure 10-fold between 1955 and 1966. Enrolment in 1938 was just 12,126; by the time Menzies retired it had reached 95,000.

"That each of us should have his chance is and must be the great objective of political and social policy. But to say that the industrious and intelligent son of self-sacrificing and saving and forward-looking parents has the same social deserts and even material needs as the dull offspring of stupid and improvident parents is absurd."

Menzies plays into the hands of his historical critics by refusing to allow that the state can compensate entirely for the accident of birth. Social democrats have tried to prove him wrong in the intervening years, but with little success.

They have, however, falsely portrayed Menzies as the patron of the privileged elite, promoting the myth that, but for Whitlam, working-class baby boomers would not have got to university.

Yet Menzies was clear in his intention: "Our universities are to be regarded not as the home of privilege for a few, but as something essential to the lives of millions," he told parliament in 1957. By 1961 almost a quarter of students were on commonwealth scholarships and 80 per cent received some form of assistance. Alan Barcan wrote in Meanjin in 1961: "Selection is now less on economic grounds and more on ability, social preference, or vocational ambition."

"Frugal people who strive for and obtain the margin above these materially necessary things are the whole foundation of a really active and developing national life."

Writer David Williamson wrote condescendingly in 2005 of sailing on a cruise ship "stacked to the gunwales with John Howard's beloved 'aspirational Australians'." In Williamson's estimation, there was something unsavoury about their dinner-table conversations about holidays, new cars, kitchen refits and (heavens forbid!) private education.

For Menzies, the case for an aspirational middle class was "the case for a dynamic democracy as against the stagnant one". "Are you looking forward to a breed of men after the war who will have become boneless wonders?" Menzies asked. "Leaners grow flabby; lifters grow muscles. Men without ambition readily become slaves."

"I do not believe that we shall come out into the overlordship of an all-powerful state on whose benevolence we shall live, spineless and effortless -- a state which will dole out bread and ideas with neatly regulated accuracy; where we shall all have our dividend without subscribing our capital; where the government, that almost deity, will nurse us and rear us and maintain us and pension us and bury us; where we shall all be civil servants, and all presumably, since we are equal, heads of departments."

This was the ground on which Menzies chose to fight the post-war political battle, though he makes it clear he is not advocating a return to a laissez-faire economy, the notion Kevin Rudd later described as "let the market rip". There would be more control, not less, after the war, Menzies promised: "The functions of the state will be much more than merely keeping the ring within which the competitors will fight." He concludes with one last rallying call to the Forgotten People: "What really happens to us will depend on how many people we have who are of the great and sober and dynamic middle-class -- the strivers, the planners, the ambitious ones. We shall destroy them at our peril."