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Zachary Gorman, "The Menzies Watershed: Liberalism, Anti-Communism, Continuities 1943-1954" (Melbourne UP, 2023)
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Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello. Welcome to the New Books in History channel of the New Books Network podcast. I am your host, Ari Barbelette. Today I'm honored to engage in a dialogue with Zachary Gorman. Zachary Gorman is the research manager and historian at the Robert Menzies Institute at the University of Melbourne. We will discuss his newly published book that he has edited, the Menzies Liberalism, anti Communism Continuities, 1943-1954, published in Melbourne, Australia by Melbourne University Press, 2023. Zachary, it's an honor to be in dialogue with you today.
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A
It's good to be back.
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To begin, please tell us about yourself. Where did you grow up? What formative events in your life inspired the scholar you would later become?
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So, yeah, I'm from rural Australia. My father was a farmer and a small business owner, and he had a sort of inspiring story where he was a maths teacher in Western Sydney, absolutely hated the bureaucracy, decided to pull up stumps and take a punt with starting his own business. So my attraction to the center right of Australian politics and particularly the sort of ideals that go into the centre right of Australian politics very much come from that story.
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What inspired you to prepare this book? What message do you hope to convey to readers?
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Well, this is a really fascinating time period in Australian political history for two reasons. The first is that this is the period in which the Liberal Party of Australia is founded. And this is since been Australia's most successful political party in the 81 years that have followed its founding in 1944. It's been the party of government more often than not. But at the moment it is out of government and there's very much a feeling around it that it's a bit sort of old and stale. Certainly it's memberships and the people who vote for it skew into the older age brackets. So it's really important to look back at the founding and of the party and the sort of energy that was there at the start and the youthfulness that was there at the start. It was a party that was very much informed by the Second World War and returned servicemen and people who had sort of taken on the world and were ready to have that same sort of attitude of taking on the world when it came to their own lives. They wanted freedom, they wanted independence, they wanted to be risk takers and they wanted to succeed. So that very much fed into the party. But it's something that's sort of been lost that perspective now. And this is also just a really important moment in Australian political history because it was quite literally a watershed. The labor government that was in power up until 1949 was quite different from the modern Australian Labor Party. It was an explicitly socialist Labor Party. It tried to nationalize the banking system in Australia in 1947. It also wanted to nationalise healthcare, nationalise airlines. So Australia would have been a fundamentally different, different place had not Menzies and his private enterprise philosophy and political party, not one in 1949.
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B
Can you kindly summarize this book for us?
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A
So the book really looks at this, this watershed moment in Australian political history where so much changes between 1943 and. And 1954. So 1943, the Labor Party wins an absolute electoral landslide. It utterly shatters the center right party of the time, which is called the United Australia Party, which is left with just a handful of seats utterly destroyed, has to rebuild itself from scratch. Yeah, by 1954, the new Liberal Party that's been created out of the ashes of that United Australia Party that Menzies picks, picks the centre right of Australian politics up, imbues it with a far clearer philosophy, wins the 49 election by 1954. The Liberal Party wins its third election and it basically has consolidated its position to be the natural party of government in Australia and will be in power for almost another 20 years from 1954. So the journey of that transition and what that transition involved is very much the premise of the book. And there's also a lot of obviously Cold War themes coming very clearly because this is the early Cold War period, the descent of the Iron Curtain, the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, which is very important to Australia because it brings the Communist threat directly to our region. This is a lot of what's going on. In the background. There's a chapter by the current Australian Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay, examining one of the most controversial aspects of the Menzies government agenda, which is its ill fated attempts to actually ban the Communist Party of Australia, which is overturned by the High Court and then goes to a referendum that narrowly fails. So it is sort of the McCarthy era for Australia as well in some respects.
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B
Can you comment on the relationship between the Liberal Party and the Labour Party in Australia, as alluded to in this book?
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A
Yes. So the important thing to understand about Australia's political divide is that in the 19th century, basically they tried to import a British political struggle of sort of Whigs versus Tories, Liberal versus Conservatives. But in the Australian context, the Liberals won so overwhelmingly that there was no landed aristocracy, there was no legally predominant Church of England, all the things that associated with British Toryism. The Liberals became hegemonic, that everybody in 19th century parliament called themselves Liberals. And then the Labor Party emerges as this sort of socialist party in the 1890s. That's quite a radical threat to the Liberal free market order that's established itself in Australia. And this is largely how the Liberal Party liberalism in Australia ends up on the center right of the Australian political divide. Which is something that's always quite hard to understand for a lot of people outside of the Australian political context because they associate liberalism with more progressive ideals. Whereas in Australia, liberalism actually connotes conservatism because it's conserving a Liberal order that had already established itself. But in the years between sort of Federation in 1901 and this 1940s period where Menzies is reviving Australian liberalism, that actually been a sort of death of Australian liberalism, that both the First World War, which created this nationalist party that was led by Billy Hughes, who had been a former Labour Prime Minister, who left the Labour Party over a battle over conscription for the war, he had turned the center right of Australian politics into no longer an Explicitly Liberal Party, just, just something that was entirely based on an appeal to nationalism. Similarly, in the Great Depression, the United Australia Party had been set up to get through the Depression. It had another ex Labor Prime Minister in Joseph Lyons. So by the time Menzies becomes the leader of the center right, there's very little of that liberal philosophical tradition left. And he very much revives that 19th century liberal philosophical tradition and with it a sort of private enterprise, individual initiative that drove the Australian prosperity in the 19th century and very much drives Australian prosperity in the post war period as well.
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B
Can you say something about the emergence of the Anzus Treaty?
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A
So the Anzus Treaty is one of the most important documents in all of Australia's sort of defence history. So the Anzus Treaty is, is. It's not quite an alliance, it falls short of the definition of an alliance. But it's the security pact between Australia and America that Australia still relies on to this day as its number one sort of security agreement. It'll hit 75 years next year in 2026. And this is something that Australia had always wanted from the United States. Even sort of back as early as 1905, there was a visit of the American fleet into Sydney and more than half the population of Sydney came out to see it. Everyone was really keen about having the Americans present in, present in our part of the Pacific, because we were always quite fearful that we're essentially a sort of British offshoot that's so far from Britain that Britain wouldn't be able to protect us. And so certainly during the Second World War, Britain proved that when it was distracted by a war in Europe, it wouldn't be able to protect us. It was very much the Americans who came in and saved the day. They posted hundreds of thousands of troops onto mainland Australia, particularly northern Australia. And MacArthur, General MacArthur was here for a lot of the war in sort of his thrust, where he then started reconquering much of the Asia Pacific and sort of took back the Philippines where he'd been driven out of. That all started from Australia. But even though they had come to the rescue In World War II, in the immediate post World War II period, they were a bit reluctant to entangle themselves in the Pacific. They were still focused more on Europe and sort of NATO and rebuilding Europe. They didn't really want to waste too many resources down in the Asia Pacific, which very much bothered us. But we managed to negotiate the Anzus Pact, which was a. Which was just this thing that we had always been wanting as Australians, this security agreement with the United States. And we got it for two reasons. The first was that we agreed to send troops to the Korean War to support the Americans. We already had troops in Japan, occupying forces in Japan that we were able to send over to Korea quite quickly. But it was a bit of a controversial decision to send troops into the Korean War just because it was so far north, so far away from Australia. And we were already had some commitments in the Malayan emergency conflicts closer to home. That was also one of these post colonial fights against communism. And then the second reason we were able to Kansas was that we agreed to the American plan of giving Japan a really soft peace treaty that would be nothing like the Treaty of Versailles that had really tried to extract as much money as possible out of the Germans and tried to get revenge on the Germans. The Americans thought that you needed to do the opposite with Japan, particularly in a Cold War context, that you needed to not take vengeance. You needed to allow Japan's economy to rebuild as fast as possible so it wouldn't be in danger of falling to communism. Because obviously communism spreads where there is an economic prosperity, where there's an economic downturn and people are struggling. That's where the communist ideology can really take hold. And it was really controversial in Australia to sign up to this soft peace treaty, but we got the Anzus treaty in exchange. And it was basically the Anzus treaty was the Americans saying, well, you don't have to worry about Japan becoming a military threat again because we will be there to defend you from Japan, should that arise.
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Who is Ben Chifley? Can you tell us about him?
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A
So Ben Chifley is the labor prime minister from 1945 until 1949. He takes over from John Curtin, who's the Prime Minister that's sort of credited with winning the second World War for Australia. Although obviously the Americans do a lot of the actual work with that. He dies from the stresses of office. He dies shortly before the end of the Pacific War. A bit like Roosevelt. The the stresses of the war end up overwhelming him and he's replaced by Chifley, who's this train driver who's a very big union man. There's iconic photos of him with a pipe. He's actually quite a personally popular prime minister. He sets up a lot of Australia's enduring welfare state, a lot of the social services that we still enjoy to this day. He opens up Australia to post war immigration. So the idea is that we need to populate our parish, we need to grow our population in order that we have enough population to defend ourselves and we won't be so reliant on the Americans. But he's also very much a committed socialist and he's the one who decides basically out of the blue. It's not a policy he ever brings directly to the election campaign. Although it had always been in the labor platform this what's called the socialist objective to socialize. They like to use the term socialize rather than nationalize, but socialize the means of production, distribution and exchange. So very much Marxist ideology. And he's the one that decides that he will nationalize the banks. And it turns into this massive overreach. It really galvanizes a lot of middle Australia that utterly opposed the idea that the government is going to be the only source of sort of financial backing. That they won't be able to do anything if the government doesn't sort of support them to as far as what they're going to do. There's this unease about the level of control and also just the sort of long term economic consequences that back nationalization is going to have. And this becomes the wave on which Menzies sweeps to power in 1949 is very much this anti socialism wave that a surprisingly popular wave. It's not something that's just sort of capitalists pushing for it. It's very much sort of middle Australia and Labor also have this thing where they. They almost like the wartime restrictions, they keep up things like petrol rationing that Menzies promises to abolish. They like the planned economy, they like the control that was established during the Second World War. But the mood of the Australian electorate is very much that the war is over now. We want our freedoms back. And that's what they opt for when voting for Robert Menzies.
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B
What was the Colombo Plan? Why was it significant? What were its aims? To what degree was it effective?
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So the Colombo Plan is a, basically a foreign aid strategy that's agreed to at a meeting of Commonwealth external affairs ministers in Colombo in what's then Ceylon, now Sri Lanka in 1950. And it's spearheaded, the idea is spearheaded by Australia's just elected, just appointed under the Menzies government, Minister for External Affairs Percy Spender. And the idea is actually quite similar to what the idea was with Japan. And the idea at the time is something called developmentalism. It's this idea that the best way to combat Communism, particularly in the Asia Pacific in the post colonial context where there is so much sort of widespread poverty is to invest in the economic development of our region, ensure that our neighbors are prosperous and stable. If they're prosperous, they're more likely to be stable and they're less likely to, to become communist. So it's this massive investment of foreign aid. Foreign aid in Australia peaks as a percentage of GDP in the mid-1960s. It's never been anywhere close as high as it was then. I think it was half a percent. It's now down to 0.2 of a percent. And it's not just foreign aid, it's a lot of technical assistance. It's actually giving these Asian and Pacific countries the technical knowledge to be able to undergo industrialization. And probably the most famous aspect of the Colombo Plan is the student exchange program in which all these students from the Asia Pacific region are allowed to come into Australia to study. It becomes so popular that it's initially sort of scholarships that they're coming into Australia to study. But it becomes so popular that a lot of fee paying students come in to study and higher education grows into one of Australia's largest exports. And it, the whole idea is that it will spread goodwill that people who go to Australian universities, they might end up being the Prime Minister of Malaysia, which is something that happens. And then they're going to have these fond memories of Australia and this is going to spread our soft power through throughout the region. But it's also credited domestically allowing all these Asian people in at a time when we still had the white Australia policy, we still had an explicitly racist Asian program. It actually breaks down a lot of the prejudices that underpinned that policy because you're seeing intelligent and articulate Asian students on university campuses, they're interacting with people. And a lot of the fear and misunderstanding that it underpinned the white Australia policy erodes through that.
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B
Who is John Carrick? Why is he noteworthy?
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A
So John Carrick is basically the organizational head of the Liberal Party in New South Wales. And he's important for two reasons. One is that he really embodies the, the amazing optimism of the early Liberal Party. So he is a man who's a soldier in the Second World War, gets captured by the Japanese, has to go to Changi, one of the most infamous prisoner of war camps in all of the Pacific theater. He works on the infamous Tyler Burma Railway. So he has one of the worst wars ever. And instead of being sort of downtrodden, he obviously gets liberated at the end of the war. He is one of the lucky ones who survived those ordeals. But instead of being downtrodden, he's actually incredibly motivated that he wants to Create a better world. He writes a political philosophy book called the Liberal Way of Progress, published in 1949. And he's all about the importance of the individual, the importance of allowing the individual to have self actualization, to live the life that they want to live. But he's also just really important as far as he's a sort of tactician, master tactician that underpins a lot of the electoral success, success of the Menzies government, particularly in New South Wales. And New South Wales is the most important state for Menzies to win, not only because it is Australia's most populous state, so it has the most seats in the House of Representatives. If you're not winning a decent proportion of the New South Wales seats, you're simply not going to lose an election. But also Menzies himself had been very unpopular in New South Wales, particularly in the earlier elections that he had fought. Menzies is thought of as a quintessentially Victorian figure. And Victoria is the second largest state in Australia. And there's this real rivalry between the two states. So there's an argument that without Carrick's tactics that he would never actually be able to win in New South Wales. And certainly later on in stuff that's covered in a later book in the series. Carrick is also very important in bringing Catholic voters over to the Liberal Party because one of the things that used to underpin Australia's political divide was a sectarian divide where Protestants were more likely to vote Liberal and Catholics were more likely to vote Labor. And this caused all sort of bitter feuds and all the rest of it. But Carrick was able to appeal to Catholic voters and get them to vote on the conservative side of politics, which is something that has continued to evolve ever since. And now Catholics, certainly the more committed religious Catholics, are definitely more likely to vote Liberal than they are to vote Labor.
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B
Comment on Japanese Australian relations under Robert Menzies.
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A
Yeah, so this is one of the most remarkable things about the Menzies government is how rapidly it is able to facilitate a reconciliation with Japan when a lot of the Australian electorate don't want it. It's something that's incredibly unpopular, that most people in Australia still have very bitter feelings about the Japanese. There's all sorts of atrocities that the Japanese commit against Australian soldiers in World War II. But Menzies, even during World War II, is always about that we can't have enduring hatred. So he delivers one of his famous Forgotten People radio broadcasts in 1942. It's on the topic of hatred as an instrument of war policy. And it's actually condemning all the racist propaganda that was being used to try to motivate people in the war against the Japanese. And Menzies is making the argument that, you know, if, if we're fighting for a just cause, then we don't need to hate. If we're fighting for a just cause, we don't need to instill racism in our people. We don't need to instill anything that's going to outlast the war because we don't want these hatreds to outlast the war because that's just going to lead to more wars. And then he practices what he preaches when he becomes Prime Minister. I've mentioned the peace treaty. The peace treaty. The labor opposition completely opposes signing the peace treaty. There's a petition of over a hundred thousand signatures delivered to federal parliament opposing it. The rsl, the Return Serviceman's League, which is a very big body as you can imagine at this point in time because so many people had fought In World War II, it lobbies against it. But Menzies perseveres and then we reap the benefits of that, that perseverance. We set up embassy in Japan in 1952 as soon as the peace treaty has been enacted and we're withdrawing our occupation forces. We later sponsor Japan's entry into the United nations as early as 1958. We're voting for Japan to take a seat on the Security Council, one of the sort of temporary seats on the Security Council. So we've gone from Japan being the biggest threat to world peace to Japan being given the responsibility to help maintain world peace. That's the extent to which we've reconciled. And the benefits of that, apart from, apart from this sort of alliance and goodwill and all the fuzzy warm feelings, is that in 1957 we sign the Japan Australia Commerce Agreement, which ends up being one of the most important trade deals in all of Australian history. Japan by the early 1970s replaces Great Britain as Australia's number one trading partner. Britain's going into the European Economic Community and we would have, our economy would have collapsed if we hadn't found a new trading partner in Japan. So it ends up paying so many long term dividends, not doubling down on retribution and hatred.
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B
How did Australia respond to the Korean War?
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A
So yeah, Australia was reluctant to commit its troops to the Korean War as I've mentioned. And funnily enough, it wasn't even Menzies, even though he was Prime Minister, who committed Australia's troops to The Korean War. The person who really wanted Australia to join the Korean War was Percy Spender, the Foreign Affairs Minister who, who had this plan in motion where he thought he could secure Q at Anzus if he could get, get us to commit to Korea. Menzies was in Britain. He just spoken to the British Prime Minister Atlee, who Atlee at the time had sort of said, oh, Britain's not going to commit troops to Korea. He gets. Menzies then gets in a boat to, to Washington. He's actually going to America. And while he's on the boat, Atlee changes his mind and is about to commit British troops to Korea. And Percy Spender gets wind of this and insists that Australia has to be the one that commits before Britain, that it will be so much more impressive if we're the first to commit. So he and Acting Prime Minister Arthur Fadden make the decision while Menzies is out of contact. Menzies can't. There's. There's a phone that they're trying to talk to him on the radio communications, but is very crackly. Basically, Menzies lands in Washington and as he lands in Washington is told, oh, Australia is fighting in the Korean War, but he owns it and does a speech to Congress and becomes this really praised sort of foreign figure within the United States. So it all works out in the end. But Korea also has quite devastating economic consequences for, for Australia and not for reasons you'd expect. It's actually Korea is too much of a good thing. So what happens with Korea is that the American army needs all these uniforms for all of its soldiers. This drives up the price of wool on the international market. And Australia at the time we live off the sheep's back or our economy is very much based on wool export exports. And the increase in the price of wool actually drives this massive bout of inflation called the Korean War wool boom. That absolutely sort of wrecks our economy and almost wrecks the Menzies government. They introduced in 1951 what's called the horror budget, this massive deflationary budget aiming at bringing inflation down. It's incredibly unpopular, but Menzies is lucky because this happens just after the 1951 election. So he's got the full three year term to recover politically from this. And he just does it in time, narrowly winning the 1954 election. And after that it's smooth sailing for his government until 1961.
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B
Can you comment on the United Australia Party and its history?
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A
Yeah, so I mentioned them a bit before. The United Australia Party as the name suggests was almost an anti partisan party. It was set up deliberately by having this labor figure in, Joe Lyons, very popular figure, a Catholic, which was just unheard of to have a Catholic lead the center right of Australian politics. When he leaves the Labor Party and goes over to set up this United Australia Party, it was all about let's make the sacrifices that we need to get Australia through the Great Depression. And it was very successful in that, both politically as far as lions winning three election landslides and also economically, they make the sacrifices necessary in Australia's economy does get out of the Great Depression reasonably well, even though we entered it in a worse place than the United States. Our Great Depression sort of started even before the Wall street crash. Our economy was already tanking. So it achieves its purpose, but that actually becomes its downfall. Because it's a party that's set up for a specific moment in time. It has no raison d', etre, no reason to exist once the Great Depression ceases to exist. Lyons is a pacifist. He's a bit of an appeaser when it comes to issues with Nazi Germany and Japan. And the stresses of the war again overwhelm him. He dies on Good Friday 1939, knowing that the war is imminent. And Menzies takes over as leader of the United Australia Party. But he's dealing with this party that's already sort of falling apart. The United Australia Party, by the end, was Joseph Lyons. He's one of our most popular prime ministers on a sort of personal level ever. And once you didn't have Joe Lyons, you basically didn't have a United Australia Party. And Menzies deals with this prime ministership with all this sniping behind the back and this party that doesn't know what it stands for and all the rest of it. So when he ultimately resigns as prime minister in August 1941 and goes into the wilderness for three years and sets up the Liberal Party, the point of the Liberal Party is to be sort of the opposite of the United Australia Party as far as being a party with a philosophy, a party with clear principles that it wants to embody and take forward in its policy program. And these principles are enduring principles. They're not. They're not specific to a moment in time. They'll be able to inform policy in any given situation. And that's certainly how it's proven to be, at least up until recently, over the 80 years that have gone since.
- [34:19]
B
Who was Earl Page? Why is he noteworthy?
- [34:22]
A
So Earl Page is the leader of the country Party and it's worth noting that in Australia, we don't really have a two party system. We have what's known as a sort of two and a half party system. So you've got the Labor Party as the big party of the left. On the right, you have the Liberal Party. But the Liberal Party never wins, at least outside of absolute land slides like 1975. The Liberal Party never really wins enough seats on its own to form government. It's got this essentially permanent coalition with the Country Party, which is this rural based Conservative party. And it's actually been. The coalition arrangement's been really good for the Country Party, now known as the Nationals in Australia, because it's actually had so much influence through this coalition arrangement that it survived. Whereas you find in other comparable Westminster countries that there were rural parties in the early 20th century, but Australia is basically the only place where a rural party is still sort of surviving and thriving. But Page just personally really does not like Robert Menzies. And he is one of the main reasons that that the Menzies government, that first Menzies government of 39 to 41 falls apart when Lyons dies. Paige is actually sworn in as temporary Prime Minister because he's deputy Prime Minister. That being the leader of the Country Party, that's the arrangement that they have. And he delivers this devastating speech trying to stop Menzies becoming Prime Minister and attacks him for not having served in the First World War. And they have this awful falling out. But somehow there is, in this period of the Menzies watershed, there is something of a reconciliation. And Menzies Page is no longer leader of the Country Party, of course, because he couldn't have someone who's that anti Menzies as leader of the Country Party. Arthur Faddance become leader of the Country Party. But Paige is this really decorated rural doctor from the Northern region of New South Wales. And he becomes Menzies Minister for Health and introduces a lot of really important health care reforms, including something called the pharmaceutical benefits scheme, which is still what Australians rely on to this day to access cheap medication. So it sort of epitomizes the journey that Menzies is on from the failure of that first Prime Ministership to the success of that second prime ministership. Even his biggest detractor becomes an ally in the end.
- [37:24]
B
Can you comment on Chinese Australian relations under Menzies?
- [37:30]
A
So the thing about Australia and China is that a lot of people think that we have a really bad relationship with China over the Menzies period because we don't officially recognize the Chinese Communist government until the 1970s. Menzies never actually recognizes the Chinese Communist government as the official government of China. And he's not alone in this. America's doing the same thing. There's lots of important strategic reasons for not recognizing the CCP regime, the most important of which is actually the UN Security Council itself, where at this moment in time, Taiwan actually gets to take up China's seats on the UN Security Council because it's still recognized, at least by the west, as the legitimate government of China. And a lot of the history gets lost because of that. So Menzies actually appoints our first minister, slash ambassador to China in 1941. We have diplomatic relations with China as one of the first embassies we ever set up outside of the British Empire. But we back the Nationalist side in the civil War. We always see the Nationalist government, what becomes the Taiwanese government as the legitimate government of China. And there's a lot of sort of long term fallout from that. But even though we never recognize the CCP government under Menzies, we're not hawks either. The Menzies government is not war hawks. There's two incidents called the Taiwan Strait crises of the 1950s, which are very similar today as far as the potential for America and China to go to war with each other over the defence of Taiwan. And in both scenarios, Australia actually counsels the American government to not escalate the conflict, that we say that we're not willing to go to war over Taiwan, at least in the 1950s, we'll see if we are in the 2000s. And also Australia, despite not recognizing the government, does become an important trade relationship even before that official diplomatic recognition kicks in. And from the 1960s onwards, we're selling vast quantities of wheat to China. It becomes a really major export boom, particularly at a time when the Chinese themselves are quite low on foodstuffs. And the Cultural Revolution, there'd been a lot of starvation and these sorts of things. So there's a lot more nuance to the relationship than the stereotype of, oh, we just ignored China until the 1970s would have you believe.
- [40:30]
B
Who is Eric Harrison? Why is he noteworthy?
- [40:34]
A
So Eric Harrison is a really forgotten figure in Australian political history. And he's the deputy of the Liberal Party for from its foundation until the mid-50s. And he's sort of forgotten because unlike his successor in Harold Holt, he never gets to succeed Robert Menzies. Menzies holds on for so long, he's Prime Minister for, all told, 18 years, that Harrison just becomes too old himself. And ultimately decides that he wants to retire. But Harrison is really vital strategically for Robert Menzies because he again speaking of how Menzies most important sort of internal political problems are with New South Wales and how he's not popular in New South Wales. Harrison's basically the only New South Wales MP that firmly backs Menzies. He, he's feels really betrayed when Menzies is forced to resign in 1941. And he really helps to rebuild the New South Wales Liberal Party and in rebuilding the New South Wales Liberal Party, he makes the Federal Liberal Party as a whole are more electable.
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B
Can you elaborate on the economic policies implemented by Menzies?
- [42:06]
A
So Menzies is an interesting one because a lot of, there's a lot of debate over sort of how much of an economic liberal Menzies was because a lot of his rhetoric is very free market. But he's still working within a sort of Keynesian post war framework. He's not a sort of 1980s neoliberal privatization champion, although he does privatize some things. He, he privatizes a Commonwealth shipping line, he privatizes Commonwealth oil refineries, all these things that labor had succeeded in set up, setting up a semi, semi socialist system as far as how many industries the Commonwealth was actually overseeing parts of. So he does do some privatization, but he is more of a Keynesian than he is a modern liberal neoliberal. The important thing to stress about his Keynesianism, unlike a lot of followers of Keynes today, is that he's willing to do the electorally unpopular side of Keynes, which a lot of Keynes, certainly around the global financial crisis, the focus has been on when there's a economic downturn, you need to spend lots of money to get the economy to go back up, which is a very easy thing to do. It's a very electorally palatable thing to do to inject a lot of money into the system, lower interest rates, all those sorts of things. They're very popular policies. But the other side of Keynesianism and the reason that it actually succeeded to the extent that it did in the 1950s in creating long term prosperity, was that in times of boom, in good times, you're actually meant to run budget surpluses, deflate the economy, ensure inflation doesn't get out of hand. Basically the whole point of Keynesianism is making little adjustments to keep the economy on an even keel. So growth never fails, but growth also never gets so hot that it then sort of burns itself up and you get an economic recession that way. And this is what Menzies does with that horror budget that I referred to before in 1951. This is a radically deflationary budget. You would never have a current Australian political party put forward a budget that was quite as harsh as that one. But even though in the short term that was electorally very unpopular, in the long term it paid dividends. And the Menzies era is still remembered as being the era of really high growth in real wages, high growth in rates of home ownership, even with the being this massively high immigration. That's none of the tensions surrounding immigration that you see today because the economy is so prosperous that there's not going to be the same level of tensions surrounding immigration that you see today. So it's, it's really hard to sort of detract from Menzies economic management. The, the only thing that detractors sometimes say is that, well, there was prosperity across the west at this time, that the post war boom was something that was experienced in lots of countries. But he still needs some credit for ensuring that that boom lasted as long as it did. And two things he did. One was the commerce agreement with Japan. So being able to reorientate the entire Australian export economy away from Europe and towards Asia and also opening up our iron ore export market. So we stopped being reliant solely on agricultural exports like wool and wheat, and we started to have the real boom in iron ore and coal and all the exports to that drive Australia's prosperity to this day.
- [46:27]
B
Who is Dame Patty? Why is she significant?
- [46:34]
A
So Dame Patty is Menzies, Robert Menzies wife. She's a woman that he meets when she's a. A girl. They're both young people attending Presbyterian services at, in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. One day at a party, Robert strides over to her and says, you're Patty Lecky. I've seen you making eyes at me at church. And they fall in love and all the rest of it. But she's a really important figure as far as a supportive figure for Menzies because she's actually the daughter of a politician herself. Both Patty and Robert have fathers who are rural Conservative MPs. So they're growing up in very similar households. And Patty's mother actually dies quite young. So she's entirely sort of dependent on her father and travels around with him on his political campaigns. So she's lived the political life. She's. She's almost been a First lady as a daughter. So she becomes the quintessential first lady as the wife of the Prime Minister. And it is Dame Patty, who's actually credited with forcing Menzies to take the plunge as far as making the shift to federal politics. Because Menzies is in the 1930s, he's a very successful barrister in Melbourne, he's a member of the State Parliament in Victoria, he's Deputy Premier. So he's, he's very happy. He's, he's living a very happy life. And he basically doesn't want to enter federal politics even though he knows he'll do quite well at it because that will mean having to move to the bush capital of Canberra. And Menzies really hates Canberra at this moment in time. He later becomes a convert and invests a lot in developing the capital. But initially he hates going to Canberra. And it's Pai who is the driver of his ambition, who really insists that you need to go where you can do the most work for the country.
- [48:49]
B
What would and did the most fierce critics of Menzies say about him?
- [48:57]
A
Well, the main thing that's thrown at him is the Communist Party ban, that this is utter McCarthyism, that this is fascism trying to ban a political party. It's something that certainly you wouldn't have in a non Cold War context, that you wouldn't. You couldn't imagine today an Australian politician trying to outright ban a political party. But there's a couple of pieces of context that need to be understood with the Communist Party ban. Firstly is that the Communist Party had actually been banned already in Australia during the Second World War, and this was a bipartisan ban. So both the United Australia Party and the Labor Party agreed to the ban of the Communist Party. When labor took over from the center right of politics and took over the prime ministership in 1941, they kept that ban in place until 1942. Because in the initial period, people often forget in the initial period of World War II, the Soviets had signed the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact, had jointly invaded Poland with the Nazis, had invaded Finland themselves. They were acting as a pseudo Axis power. And the Communist Party within Australia was deliberately trying to disrupt the war effort, leading all sorts of strikes. And there was intelligence information that suggested that they were trying to infrastructure, infiltrate Australian, Australia's military. So, so this precedent held. So it was not an unheard of thing to do to ban the Communist Party. In the early 1950s, Menzies was actually one of the more reluctant people on the conservative side of politics to do it. At the 1946 election, the country Party committed to banning the Communist Party. But Menzies, Liberal Party did not. It was only the circumstances of those late 1940s where the cold War got really hot. As far as, you know, the, the Soviets detonating a nuclear weapon, the CCP winning the Chinese civil war, the coup in Czechoslovakia that showed how expansionist the Soviet Union was going to be. And then even reinforced by the Korean War, which happened sort of simultaneous with attempts to introduce the ban on the Communist Party. And Menzies argument was not that you needed to ban the Communist Party because it was ever going to take over in Australia. The argument was that we were headed for World War Three. All the strategic planners felt that World War three was imminent, that the Cold War would go hot and it escalate into a global conflict. And basically his justification for banning the Communist Party was that all he was doing was preempting what had already happened in World War II. That in, in wartime you would ban your enemy's political party from operating in Australia. You banned fascist organizations in World War II as well. But ultimately the High Court finds that the Cold War does not constitute a war. So that's the, that is the finding that rules the Communist Party ban unconstitutional because the defence power in the Australian constitution is one of the broadest powers in the entire constitution. In, in wartime, the government can almost do what it wants. But the High Court finds that we weren't actually at war as of the early 1950s, even with the Korean War going on. It just wasn't the state of total war that we had endured in the Second World War.
- [52:49]
B
What is the spectrum of opinion among Australians regarding whether Robert Menzies was indeed Australia's quote unquote, greatest prime minister? Which prime ministers are the strongest challengers to Menzies for this honor?
- [53:06]
A
Well, as you can imagine, there's a lot of partisanship in who the greatest prime minister is considered to be. There would actually be very few people on the centre right of Australian politics that wouldn't credit Robert Menzies with being Australia's greatest Prime minister. He was, after all, prime minister for 18 years. He signed ANZUS. He, he raised homeownership rates above 70%. He oversaw all this long term prosperity. He set up Australia's universities system. All these sorts of achievements that you can point to. As far as his labor sort of critics, who people on the labor side of politics would look to. There's probably two that you would put as the major contenders. One is John Curtin, who is the wartime Prime Minister who takes over when Menzies resigns, the country party leader Arthur Fadden is Prime Minister for 40 days and 40 nights and basically his government topples and Curtin becomes Prime Minister. And Curtin is credited with, for, with, for a lot of Australians with winning the war. He's a, he's a pacifist who'd sort of been anti the First World War, certainly anti conscription, who really doesn't want to be plunged into this wartime situation. But he nevertheless accepts it and bears that burden and is ultimately his life is taken by that burden when it, when he dies from the stresses of the war. So he's got that martyrdom attached to him. So he's one that has respect from both sides of politics that even people on the center right would at least respect John Curtin a lot, even if they don't necessarily think he was a greater Prime Minister than Menzies. The more partisan figure is Gough Whitlam who is the Prime Minister who finally breaks the Liberal stranglehold on the prime ministership. So from 1949 when Menzies wins the election, the Liberals and the coalition are in power for 23 years, all the way up until 1972. And Gough Whitlam is only in for three years. But he, he has a crash or crash through mentality and really transforms the Labor Party from its working class industrial relations, quite often socially conservative roots into the modern progressive Labour Party that you would think of as everything you associate with modern progressive politics as far as sort of women's rights, indigenous land rights, introducing anti discrimination legislation, shifting the white Australia policy had already essentially been abolished by the whole government. But he shifts the whole mantra from when migrants come here, they're expected to become part of one Australian community to this idea of multiculturalism and keeping your culture and all the rest of it. So he's the big, he's the big progressive hero. He makes university free. Menzies had introduced merit based Commonwealth scholarships so lots of people could go to university for free. But when golf gets in, everyone can go in for free. But basically he bankrupts the country and gets involved in this scandal called the loans affair where he's going to sort of shady Middle Eastern businessmen to borrow millions of dollars because Australia is that bankrupt at the time. So his career ends rather ignobly, but he's still a hero to the left and he ends in a sort of martyrdom in the sense that the Governor General actually becomes involved in bringing him down.
- [57:11]
B
As we end our dialogue today, can you tell us about where your time and attention have gone since completing this book?
- [57:17]
A
So we're just about to release it's due out in February, the fourth volume of the series, the Menzies Legacy. So this chronological examination of the Menzies period is coming to an end. But the new thing that the Robert Menzies Institute is undertaking is a new trilogy of books looking at the greatest sort of cultural and historical influences on Australia. So there's a book on Menzies in the British Commonwealth of Nations. There'll be one on Menzies and the United States of America and one on Menzies in Asia, and they're all linked to historical anniversaries. So, for example, next year, year we're holding the conference where the papers presented at that conference will produce the Menzies in America book. And that is not only the 75th anniversary of Anzus, but obviously the 250th anniversary of American independence in 1776.
- [58:20]
B
Sounds amazing. I wish you the very best in that work.
- [58:24]
A
Thanks.
- [58:25]
B
As we enter dialogue today, I'd like to thank you for your erudition and eloquence throughout the course of today's dialogue. I can hardly be more thankful. As we enter dialogue today, I'm signing off as Ari Barbolen, your host on the New Books and History Channel of the New Books Network podcast. Today I've been grateful to engage in a dialogue with Zachary Gorman. We have discussed his newly published book, which he has edited, the Menzies Watershed Liberalism anti Communism Continuities, 1943-1954, published in Melbourne by Melbourne University Press, 2023. Zachary Gorman is the research manager and historian at the Robert Menzies Institute at the University of Melbourne. Thank you Wholehearted.