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FOREWORD

The Hon Michael Kirby AC CMG¹

IN AN AGE of generally short-lived federal governments in Australia, it is difficult for many contemporaries to imagine a federal government lasting an unbroken interval of twenty-three years,before the electors decided that it was time for a change.

Interrupted Ascendency

Even more unusual for today’s generations is the survival of the same politician as the nation’s prime minister for two decades. Yet, this was the experience of Australians, like me, born in and around 1939. Robert Menzies’s first period in that office lasted from 26 April 1939 until his first resignation on 29 August 1941. That interval of his leadership was brief and full of turmoil. It saw his declaration, on 3 September 1939, that Australia was at war with Germany. It was a period full of fear of the warlike ambitions of Japan and how we would survive after the weakening impact of War and the Great Depression.

In June 1940, whilst still prime minister, using wartime powers, Menzies announced a ban on the Communist Party, allegedly for security reasons. His government limped on until he resigned the top position in favour of Arthur Fadden. Fadden became prime minister for a short time in 1941, to be followed by a Labor government, originally led by John Curtin. That government served until December 1949.

On 8 October 1941, Menzies resigned the leadership of the United Australia Party to the veteran Labor ‘turncoat’, William Morris Hughes. Yet if this short interval of twenty-eight months is added to his later unbroken service as prime minister from 1949 to 1963, Menzies’s ultimate leadership of the nation amounted, in aggregate, to eighteen and a half years. This is an astonishing record, unlikely to be even approximated in the future, let alone exceeded.

This volume, one of four in the series, picks up the story of the life of RG Menzies from 1954 (when Menzies’s Coalition government was returned to office in a close electoral outcome) until 9 December 1961 (when Menzies and his Coalition government won office again with a majority of only one seat in the House of Representatives once the Speaker’s chair was filled). At the election on 30 November 1963, Menzies won back ten seats from Labor. He finally retired from political office in the House of Representatives on 20 January 1966. To Australians, like me, living through that time, his departure was truly the end of a long political era.

There had been nothing, in those years, like the Menzies ascendency, in the politics of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand or other parliamentary democracies. Menzies, who started in such a shaky manner before and after the commencement of World War II, survived to display his personality and values on such a long interval of Australian public life, although it was full of new challenges and of the potentiality for substantial change. Did Menzies truly impose his values on Australia? How much of his legacy remains today? How does Menzies look in today’s world? These are some of the questions that each of the four books in this series now seek to answer.

Bookended by two close-run electoral victories, this is the third volume that shows Menzies ‘bestride[ing] the narrow world like a Colossus’.² Yet what was it like living through the extraordinary time of the Menzies years? Against the background of the political, cultural, economic and personal experiences of that time, did Menzies shape the young nation and ‘lucky’ country? Or did he squander the opportunities, content with a stable but do-little administration, whilst deploying his undoubted political gifts to his own successive political advantage?

Reading this book brings memories of the 1940s to the 1960s flooding back. I was then growing up in a country still emerging from the sacrifices and burdens of World War II. For most of the first decade of this interval, the nation’s government had been formed by the Australian Labor Party (ALP). Its prime ministers were John Curtin (7 October 1941 – 5 July 1945) and Ben Chifley (12 July 1945 – 18 December 1949). A dominant political and intellectual leader in that government, especially after Curtin’s death, was Dr HV Evatt (leader of the Opposition in the House of Representatives following Chifley’s death on 13 June 1951) until Evatt resigned to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales (on 15 February 1960).

Throughout all of those years and until his resignation in 1966, Robert Gordon Menzies was prime minister of Australia. It is virtually impossible for a person who lived through those years to overstate the Menzies ‘ascendency’ in the politics of those times. In the period under review in this book Menzies was, politically speaking, effectively ‘impregnable’.³ By presenting the historical record, affording thematic analyses, and examining suggested triumphs, failings and ‘close shaves’,⁴ the several authors bring to life the successes and suggested failings of Menzies, at the height of his powers.

Very few who had lived through the initial period of Menzies’s service as prime minister (1939–41) would (at that time and especially at its end) have predicted that Menzies would return and be elected and re-elected six times, only finally departing the political scene at the beginning of 1966, on his own terms, after successfully wining a new term in office following his seventh and last interval as prime minister. This last term was secured at an election with an increased majority in both Houses of the Federal Parliament, held on 30 November 1963.

Because of its record-breaking duration, it might be thought that this extraordinary accomplishment occurred with the nearly unanimous approbation of his fellow citizens. It is true that, during those years Menzies appeared to be a fixture. However, this was not necessarily so. It was generally accepted in Australia that the Curtin/Chifley governments had been successful in providing strong and vital leadership to the Australian Commonwealth during the perils of the War and the special challenges of post-war reconstruction. Menzies initially had, amongst his own party’s ranks in 1941, strong opposition and discord. Yet he achieved re-election as leader of the Opposition (September 1943) and had re-established the non-Labor Opposition Party under the new name of ‘Liberal’, in December 1944. He lost the ensuing federal election in September 1946. However, 19 December 1949, in coalition with the Australian Country Party, Menzies was restored to the prime minister’s Lodge in Canberra. By 1952, most impartial observers of the Australian political scene would have been fairly confident in predicting the return of an ALP government fairly soon. Most contributors to this book would probably identify as admirers, and even possibly as devotees, of the legacy of RG Menzies. By the end of his parliamentary service, few critics allowed themselves to express much criticism of him. Some of the present contributions to this volume are purely objective chroniclers, well aware of the tribalism of Australian politics and therefore of the distortions that can creep into the story of a leading political life.

‘The evil that men do lives after them.

The good is oft interred with their bones.’⁵

Early Encounters

My early encounters with RG Menzies gave me reason to consider him to be hostile to my family and to people like them. Children and young people (and not only them) often see the world in terms of heroes and enemies. For me, this attitude of mind was helped along by weekend servings of Hopalong Cassidy at the Ritz cinema in Central Concord in Sydney, near my parental home. That was a filmed serial, starring William Boyd, for the Saturday afternoon program, targeted at school children and teens. In those films, and many others, the world was made up of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’. For most Australians of that time, the ‘goodies’ were mostly white, brave, God-fearing and good looking. The ‘baddies’ were black or brown; lacking in civilisation; obviously different, and mostly strange aliens. Some people still adhere to this paradigm; or to one that is the modern version of it.

In such pre-television times, long before the internet, mobile phones, social media and AI, radio was our normal means of direct contact with our politicians. Mr Menzies, by general concession, had a beautiful voice. In his appendix to this volume, Paul Kelly judges that he was a singularly gifted ‘communicator’. Even someone on the other side of politics, like Clyde Cameron, later an ALP Minister in the Whitlam government, admitted that Menzies was, in those far off days, the only person who always ‘looked like a PM; he behaved like a PM, and had the presence of a PM’.⁶ The brilliant Dr Evatt could not offer the electors an equivalent, seductive concoction; neither in public speeches nor in the broadcasts from Parliament House Canberra to which I soon became addicted. However, at about the age of nine or ten, I learned that this politician, with magical tonsils, was a committed enemy of a person who had joined our family, living in the suburbs of Western Sydney.

This person was the new domestic partner of my grandmother, Norma [formerly Alma] Caroline Gray. She had been one of the few members of our family who retained her job and income throughout the Depression and the War years. She was my father’s mother and in April 1943 she married Jack Simpson (born as Maurice Flynn), following divorce from her first husband Victor Kirby. Jack Simpson was an original ANZAC, born in New Zealand. He fought at Gallipoli and later on the Somme, in France. For his army service, he was presented with medals by King George V at Buckingham Palace. He returned to Australia after demobilisation. He moved to Perth; changed his name, inferentially so as not to embarrass his Catholic family in New Zealand; and he became a communist.

Some time after June 1940, when Mr Menzies had placed a ban on the Australian Communist Party (ACP) for ‘security reasons’, Jack Simpson was charged with a sedition offence in Perth, convicted by a magistrate and imprisoned in 1941. The ban on communists was ultimately lifted by the Curtin government in December 1942, although Evatt said that the ban on the ACP would be reinstated if it did not observe the undertakings it had given to the government. This period of grace was to be short-lived. Jack Simpson was eventually to be elected as national treasurer of the ACP. By this time, he had married my grandmother. He lived with her in a modest home in Tempe, New South Wales.

Jack Simpson was a man of great integrity. Ultimately, he was to renounce his core communist beliefs. But within my impressionable childhood years, when I was eight, nine and ten, I would visit my grandmother at Tempe; spend time with Jack and her; read the CPA newspaper Tribune; and glance at the magazines titled Soviet Union, available at their home. I came to like and admire him. Originally, he had joined the communists over disillusionment because of the treatment of war veterans in the 1920s and in a belief that they might offer a fairer form of society. After the Hell of the War, Jack Simpson came to believe in different gods and he was not alone.

My father never joined the CPA. My mother certainly did not; and, intuitively, she despised it. At one stage, she refused point blank to knit woollens for the Red Army troops fighting in their heroic struggle against the Germans in Russia. My mother said that she had plenty of knitting to do for her own four children. My family assumed that my mother usually voted for the ‘nice Mr Menzies’. But my father always favoured the ALP.

My own involvement with politics at this tender age was naturally limited. Once, I helped Jack by carrying a pot of glue around the back blocks of Tempe, affixing signs to the lamp posts, urging a vote for Lance L Sharkey, General Secretary of the ACP. They bore the hammer and sickle symbol. This conduct infuriated my mother. Jack and I were sternly admonished. However, this activity may have attracted the attention of nascent Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), established by Chifley in 1949, based on the British MI5 model. Certainly, a record in my ASIO file (now available in Australia for reasons of accountability) described a visit I made to the Sydney Taronga Park Zoo in the 1950s with Jack Simpson, together with my two brothers. All of us later became lawyers. Two of us became judges. Thin pickings for communists there.

The real challenge for Jack Simpson arrived after the re-election of Mr Menzies as prime minister in December 1949 and the enactment of the Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950. That legislation was a key promise of Mr Menzies in the election. I remember listening with my father to the election returns as they came in resulting in the election of the new Menzies–Fadden government. Menzies promised to ‘put value back in the pound’; to end petrol rationing; to provide wider rights to child endowment; and to enact the Communist Party Dissolution Act. This last initiative was to be one of the top priorities of that time.

On 9 March 1951, the High Court of Australia declared the Act to be constitutionally invalid.⁷ Jack Simpson never believed that the judges, (‘the running lap dogs of the capitalists’) would defy the new government. But ten days after the High Court decision, on 19 March 1951, Mr Menzies secured a double dissolution. At this election, the control of the Senate passed to the Coalition Parties (32:28). The ALP won back five seats in the House of Representatives; but the Menzies–Fadden government retained office. Jack Simpson’s ordeal was not yet over.

A referendum was initiated by Mr Menzies under s128 of the Australian Constitution to reverse the effect of the High Court ruling. Jack Simpson went to Armidale on the week before the counting, inferentially with some of the meagre treasure of the ACP in his possession. Once again, he did not believe that Australia’s institutions would defend our liberal constitutional order from the change that Menzies proposed, to ban the ACP and to permit the imposition of civic penalties on persons ‘named’ as communists. But they did. All that I remember from that time was that a great shadow had been quietly but effectively removed from the life of Jack Simpson.

The events just described fell outside the years of this volume. However, they serve to explain why, in impressionable years of youth, I had learned to admire the voice and bearing of RG Menzies, Liberal leader; but not his illiberal actions targeted at an admired and muchloved family member. Forever afterwards, I was sceptical about the politics and legislative program of Menzies. To me, they appeared not to match the title and claimed objectives of the political party that Menzies led in government. Although most in Australia would not have had a close connection with an individual who would be subject to serious civil restrictions under the Dissolution Act, many who watched the political scene felt an anxiety about Menzies. They saw him as a gifted leader who operated under false colours; and was, basically, a conservative and autocrat, unsuitable to the aspirations of a young, democratic country like Australia.

The debacle over the response to communism was followed by many initiatives of the government that Menzies led that appeared substantially harmonious with the aspirations he had declared, protective of the ‘forgotten’ Australians of the lower and middle class who were still doing it tough in the 1950s and 1960s. These included those with aspirations to purchase their own home. This was something my parents eventually did, in Concord in the federal seat of Lowe held by the Liberal Party and represented by another future prime minister, William McMahon. Concord was a suburb rather similar to Earlwood, a few miles cross country, where John Howard, also a future prime minister, was growing up. Like myself he was attending a ‘selective’ public high school, not far away. As Paul Kelly points out, during the Menzies government in the 1950s and 1960s, home ownership in Australia rose from just over 50 per cent to just over 70 per cent.⁸ My parents took advantage of the opportunity that Menzies helped to make possible.

Similarly, the Menzies government invoked the constitutional power, secured by the ALP in 1946, to provide the protective pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits scheme, which safeguarded the right to essential health care for ordinary Australians. By the mid-1950s, I had my own special reason to be grateful to the Menzies government. Although the Chifley government had promised a scheme for funding university students in many ways similar to their earlier support of war veterans as students, action to improve the affordability of student university places for people like me did not take off until the Menzies government created the Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme. This was reinforced and expanded by the Murray Review of Universities, delivered in December 1956, my first year at the University of Sydney. It was one of the achievements that, rightly, at the end of his long tenure as prime minister, RG Menzies declared that he was most proud of.⁹

Old Men of a Golden Age

It was while I was at university, during the same years as John Howard, that I met RG Menzies as prime minister. The University of Sydney Union offered a dinner to honour the retiring chancellor of the university, Sir Charles Bickerton Blackburn, when he stood down from office. Menzies agreed to propose the toast to the distinguished old man. It was a memorable dinner in many ways.

In December 1964, the student leaders, including me, were lined up to meet the prime ministerial visitor. The windows outside the Union Refectory Hall, where the event was held, glittered in the embers of a student protest in which the prime minster’s image was burnt in effigy. I remember that Menzies took it all in his stride and in good humour. He was specially gifted in humiliating opponents and hecklers at public events. He was proud of his own links with the University of Melbourne where he later himself served as chancellor, immediately after ending his service as prime minister. And he had particular reason, by 1964, to be proud of the revolution in university scholarships and other tertiary education funding that his government had pioneered.

I remember thinking, as I looked on this astonishing, confident, assured leader who had been prime minister for nearly half of my then life, how healthy he looked. I attributed his ruddy, pink complexion to his Scottish genes. How tall and large he appeared; but also remote, aloof. Truly, I knew that I was in the presence of an important Australian historical and political figure. He spoke that night with his magnificent voice exuding his confident presence. It was a grand occasion. He did honour to the old chancellor who was then nearly 90 years of age. I remember that he described the old man as a ‘Peter Pan’ figure; an allusion to JM Barrie’s whimsical creation. I do not remember any of the students, including me, thanking Menzies for making the university experience possible, or at least easier, for most of us. But the old chancellor did so. And all of us with sufficient self-insight, knew that this was fitting.

Of one ‘strategic tactic’ by Menzies I did not approve. This was his initiation of funding to religious and other private schools. This represented the fulfilment of a compact with his traditional religious opponents, with many associations with the Roman Catholic Church. It was ultimately a fulfilment of his promise to the Democratic Labor Party that had undertaken to direct their second preference votes to Menzies and his party. Practically, this was what assured the repeated re-elections of his government. It was, ostensibly, a strange gesture from a ‘simple Presbyterian’, as he sometimes described himself. It secured to Menzies the majorities in federal parliament essential to ensure his re-election and the defeat of the ALP in successive federal elections.

However, this was done at a cost of reinforcing religious denominationalism in Australia. It diminished an important and special feature of Australian governance. We are still paying a price for this gesture. It may have saved the Catholic systemic educational system from its likely extinction, as it became impossible for its schools to rely on religious adherents to deliver the teaching that had previously been advanced as the central justification for offering an educational system outside the secular public schools dating to the mid-nineteenth century. Public education (‘free, secular and compulsory’) was one of the greatest achievements for national democracy and social unity in the Australian community following the 1860s. The inequities of the impact of ‘state aid’ are still felt today in the refusal, or failure, of successive federal governments, of differing affiliations, to provide pro rata primary financial support to public school funding, particularly for capital improvements. Socially and educationally, it was, in my view, a self-inflicted wound. It continues to extract a great price from public education for, on OEDC estimates, Australia has one of the highest levels of publicly funded private and religious school attendances in member states.

Reading this book, then, I am reminded once again of the doubts and criticisms that I felt, alongside a certain grudging appreciation, to the major political figure who was seven times appointed prime minister of Australia. In this book, there are chapters on a number of themes, whose analyses do not necessarily show Menzies in his best light. They include his aspirations and actions in the new atomic age;¹⁰ his resistance to any outright abandonment of ‘White Australia’;¹¹ and his failure to grapple substantively with (or really to understand) the increasingly recognised injustices that settlement and its aftermath had brought to our First Nations Peoples.¹²

It must be conceded that, politically, in Australia, Menzies repeatedly outsmarted and bested the political hero of my youth, Herbert Vere Evatt.¹³ On most fronts, in Australia, Menzies time after time, defeated his rival in the struggle for the highest elected position in the nation. Evatt dreamed of it; but it never came to him. In terms of Australian national politics, Evatt remains one of the foremost instances of what ‘might have been’ in democratic politics. Yet, for all that, Evatt twice defeated Menzies over the latter’s proposal to ban the Australian Communist Party and to deprive Australian communists and others of their basic civil rights. In terms of the damage that this proposal might have inflicted on the Australian Constitution, Evatt emerges as the victor in their titanic struggle of personal ambitions and national aspirations.

Moreover, today, ironically, it is Evatt who probably enjoys the greater fame and appreciation in the global community. In that vital theatre of politics, it is probably fair to say that Evatt is still honoured and influential. Menzies, if he is known, is probably remembered critically for his role in Suez and his resistance to reforms on the matters of race, indigeneity, gender and otherwise. It was Evatt who played a leading role in the establishment of the United Nations Organisation and the adoption of its charter. It was Evatt who defended the small nations and their role in the UN structure. And it was Evatt who helped to secure the participation of the great powers (particularly the United States of America and the Soviet Union) by the inducement of the ‘veto’, without which both of them, with their notions of national ‘exceptionalism’, might not have joined this still flawed but essential global organisation.

To this day, the United Nations remains vital to the survival of humanity and of civilisation on our planet. In retrospect, it is probable that it is Evatt’s name and contributions to international organisations and law that constitute the greatest input that an Australian has made, at a critical phase, to international law. It was Evatt, in 1948, as third president of the General Assembly of the United Nations, who helped pilot the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into acceptance. There were no contrary votes against its adoption at the meeting of the General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948. This was a mighty success whose impact is still continuing.

In the Melbourne General Cemetery, the tomb of Sir Robert and Dame Pattie Menzies is celebrated with a simple inscription, probably of Presbyterian design with no monument. It bears only their names and a mention of their several imperial and Australian civil honours. In the case of Evatt his tombstone is similarly plain and undecorated. It stands in the Canberra Cemetery.¹⁴ Similarly, there is no monument. Like Menzies, Evatt was buried beside his wife Mary Alice Evatt (1898– 1973).¹⁵ None of Evatt’s many national achievements in the Australian parliament, executive government or by his appointment to the High Court of Australia and the Supreme Court of New South Wales are recorded. All that remains to mark his turbulent career is the legend that, in 1948, he served as president of the General Assembly of the United Nations. Both memorials are modest; and accurate in each case. Inevitably, their focus is different.

On the other hand, there were certainly initiatives that Menzies took as prime minister, that are revealed in this book, that were greatly to his credit, on his chosen battlefield. There he contributed to our emerging national consciousness in Australia. They included his perception that excluding Aboriginal Australians from the national census was plain wrong and represented a constitutional provision that should be changed.¹⁶ His recognition of the need for a treaty to cover Antarctica;¹⁷ his skilful handling of the issue of West Papua New Guinea; ¹⁸ his determined steps that led to the creation of an independent Reserve Bank of Australia;¹⁹ and his special dedication to making Canberra a capital city of which Australians could be proud.²⁰

Menzies did not achieve everything that some of us would have liked, at the time or since. This included in constitutional, legislative and policy reform. Yet that may ultimately be a comment on the Australia that he was elected to lead. For a bolder risk-taker, in pursuit of larger dreams, we were obliged to wait for a different time and a different leader, with new and different perceptions and aspirations. In this sense, RG Menzies held up a mirror to ourselves. If we do not now particularly like everything that we see in that reflection, that may only indicate our need for a different constitution; different institutions; different national aspirations; and leaders with different interests and gifts.

Menzies was a man of his time. His values were largely formed from those current at the close of Queen Victoria’s reign and shortly after, in the heyday of the British Empire and the earliest years of the Australian Commonwealth. He was proud to be Australian but also to be British, ‘to his bootstraps’. He did not see those loyalties as inconsistent, let alone incompatible. The same was true of his fellow citizens at that time. They were proud of their Constitution, history, forebears, settlers and institutions. In most countries where a leader had won seven periods as head of government, he might have been tempted, towards the end, to dream of political permanency, if not immortality. This was never the dream of RG Menzies (nor either of HV Evatt). Nor was it the dream of those who elected Menzies to serve in their highest democratic post. He served there; and then he resigned and retired quietly with no large accumulated wealth.

In some respects, Menzies was like Pericles in Ancient Greece, whose orations he surely read in the original Greek of his own classical education. Pericles was a great orator with an elevated mode of speech. He excelled above all his fellow citizens in his oratory. He spoke ‘with a somewhat arrogant manner of address’ but in a ‘calm and tranquil style’. He spoke with a good deal of disdain and contempt for others. But after doing the state exceptional service, he retired to his farm and did not seek rewards or further power. Such were the values of the ancient Athenians.²¹

Menzies, like Pericles, enhanced his reputation by the way he quit public office. He gladly left it to others to identify his failings which, in earlier times, his critics would not have dared to utter to his face. He was unique and although undoubtedly flawed and also limited in his aspirations, the phenomenon of such a life will not be seen again. We do well to look on it and to remember it for the lessons it has for us today. And the mixed memories that it conjures up for those of us who lived through the long Menzies years.

INTRODUCTION

Zachary Gorman

ON 30 NOVEMBER 1954, Robert Menzies became Australia’s longest-serving prime minister.¹ Just six months on from a closely fought election, he eclipsed Billy Hughes’s term of seven years, 105 days in office, taking a record which has been synonymous with Menzies’s name ever since. Every day onwards, for the next eleven years and fifty-seven days, Menzies was setting a new benchmark, eventually reaching an eighteen-year, 163-day total that today appears virtually insurmountable.

It is a truism to say that historical figures are often viewed in hindsight. It is perhaps more revealing to say that we view them as crystallised or set in stone, as if the whole narrative of their life had played out in an instant with a predetermined endpoint, and thus that their character was a constant. When it comes to Robert Menzies, a man most famous for a record-setting length of leadership, this means that we see a dominating, somewhat elderly figure, in complete control of the political landscape. We are not helped by the fact that by this point, those of us who have firsthand memories of Menzies would only have seen, heard or met him in his later years. Even the film and audio recordings of him which do survive tend to have a recency bias.

But if our first two volumes have revealed anything, it is that this is at best an incomplete picture. The Young Menzies was a talented, ambitious, and thoughtful figure, but one that may well have never ended up in politics, and even when he did, showed certain character flaws that indicated that he might not be suited to it. Likewise, the man who founded the Liberal Party and led it to a decisive victory at the 1949 election was not predestined to best Hughes. While ‘The Forgotten People’ broadcasts had expressed a broadly applicable political philosophy, it was perhaps reasonable to assume that once the direct threat of ‘socialism’ had passed, Menzies’s Liberal Party would have a limited shelf life in the manner of its predecessors the Nationalists and the United Australia Party. The Menzies Watershed only became a watershed because it was consolidated.

The period between the narrow election victories of 1954 and 1961 is that crucial period of consolidation. It was a process which involved back-to-back electoral landslides in 1955 and 1958, incremental policy change, extended prosperity, and the carefully cultivated image of a steady hand at the wheel. It started out with tremendous excitement: the glamourous tour of a young queen whom the whole nation wanted to see, breaking news of a Soviet spy ring which saw tales of treason and espionage dominate the headlines, and then in 1956, for the first time, the world turning its eyes towards Australia with Melbourne hosting the Games of the XVI Olympiad.

But despite these and numerous other notable exceptions,² the period has been stereotyped for its alleged dullness and conformity, which would lead Paul Keating to famously attack the 1950s as

the golden age when Australia stagnated … when Australia was injected with a near-lethal dose of fogeyism by the conservative parties opposite, when they put the country into neutral and where we very gently ground to a halt in … nowhere land.³

Even in the domain of foreign affairs, in which the Menzies government could only set so much of the agenda, 1954–61 stands out as a period of relative calm, sandwiched between the Korean War and the height of the Malayan Emergency beforehand, and Konfrontasi and Vietnam afterwards. Beyond our region, it was the period of the ‘Kruschev Thaw’, in which the post-Stalin Soviet Union acknowledged that it could potentially coexist with the capitalist West.⁴ This thaw was not without limitations—particularly the brutal repression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956—and would ultimately come unstuck with the shooting down of an American U-2 spy plane over Soviet territory in May 1960. This ushered in a new period of tension which saw the construction of the Berlin Wall and onset of the Cuban missile crisis.

This volume, made up of papers originally presented at the Robert Menzies Institute’s Third Annual Conference in November 2023, examines why Menzies was able to achieve unprecedented political longevity, and tests the critiques made by Keating and numerous other detractors. In doing so it reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of Menzies’s Burkean conception of progress. This was rooted in making gradual improvements to Australia’s existing institutions, society, and culture, rather than consciously trying to remake them in a revolutionary fashion, which inevitably risked throwing out the good along with the bad. As Menzies put it in his pitch to voters for the 1955 snap election:

We have never sought your votes by offering bribes, nor are we spruikers at old-time country shows offering gold watches for five shillings. We have sought and obtained solid progress. We have been sensible and honest … Given stability of Government and sound administration, equally important with Acts of Parliament, we can all have supreme confidence in the future of our young and vigorous land … I have spoken to you in realistic terms, sustained as I am by an unshakeable belief in the good sense and honesty of our people.⁵

Sustained also by a belief that progress would ultimately be driven by ‘community and individual effort’, and only guided by ‘common sense at the Government and Parliamentary levels’, Menzies trusted in the positive qualities of the Australian public, and in return they repeatedly put their trust in him.⁶

That issue of trust would be brought to the fore at the beginning of our period, with the shock announcement of the defection of Soviet Embassy official Vladimir Petrov on 13 April 1954. The images of the dramatic attempt of Soviet guards to subsequently escort his wife Evdokia back to the Soviet Union, in full view of a crowd composed largely of Eastern European migrants at Mascot Airport, are perhaps the most iconic of the entire Menzies era.

While the once prevalent myth that Menzies orchestrated or timed the ‘Petrov Affair’ to win the election of 29 May has long since been debunked,⁷ the event is still the essential starting point for this volume, as it would usher in the Great Labor Split. This was in fact the fourth Labor split, coming after earlier reformations over the introduction of the caucus pledge in the 1890s, conscription for overseas service in the 1910s, and how to respond to the Great Depression in the 1930s. Remarkably, over the course of six decades, the Labor Party had thus broken apart every twenty years almost like clockwork—in much the same manner as the centre-right parties had repeatedly reconstituted themselves.

The first two chapters in this volume analyse the causes and effects of the Split, which shaped the political scene for the rest of the period. Anne Henderson’s chapter argues that despite sectarian prejudices leading to the frequent scapegoating of Italian Catholic BA Santamaria, it was ultimately Opposition Leader HV Evatt who was responsible for what happened to his party. Despite Evatt’s wellknown advocacy for negotiation and conciliation when it came to issues of international relations or dealing with the Communist Party of Australia, Henderson suggests that he ironically approached party matters with an authoritarian manner which left no room for polite dissent. Moreover, Menzies, who knew Evatt through a long association and rivalry, made his own luck by playing Evatt at his weakest points, thus contributing to the Labor leader’s political and personal breakdown.

Paul Strangio maintains that Menzies was indeed blessed by fortune when it came to the Split, but in a manner that was highly specific to his home state of Victoria. Even though Labor has frequently eschewed the principles of federalism, and sought centralisation both for the Commonwealth and in matters of organisation, Strangio’s chapter reveals that the party has nevertheless been intimately shaped by the historical and cultural division of Australia into six separate colonies turned states. It was Victorian Labor’s unique history, including a stunted growth and lack of inoculation from the three prior splits, which helped make it the epicentre of both Evatt’s wrath and Menzies’s electoral success. Though true to Labor’s centralist tendencies, it was a federal intervention in the 1970s which Strangio believes laid the foundation for Victorian Labor’s subsequent dominance.

While in contrast, a belief in federalism and subsidiarity have been core components of Australian liberalism since Joseph Cook won the Liberals their first outright election victory in 1913,⁸ Menzies has been accused of being at best ambivalent towards the principle. Stephen Wilks charts how Victorian Premier Henry Bolte, strengthened by the weakness of his state’s Labor Party, directly challenged Menzies over the open attack on federalism which was uniform income tax. In doing so, Bolte revealed Menzies to be a pragmatist who supported federalism to the extent of being reluctant to oversee further centralisation, but who would not undertake the near impossible task of unbinding the states from what Alfred Deakin dubbed the financial ‘chariot wheels of the central Government’.⁹

Menzies’s adroit sense of picking his political battles is likewise revealed in Selwyn Cornish’s remarkable account of the founding of the Reserve Bank of Australia. After going to a double dissolution over banking legislation in 1951, Menzies was initially of the view that the issue needed a ‘political holiday’ which would allow the sector to settle, and not create a political opportunity for opponents to undo his achievements in this field should they win the next election. Repeated agitation from the private banks, Fairfax press, and his own party room, however, convinced Menzies that the issue of fully separating central banking functions from the Commonwealth Bank would only grow if he did not act upon it.

In this instance, Menzies had one of his most important reforms thrust upon him, while having to make a careful political calculation over whether the feelings of the Liberal backbench or his Coalition Country Party partners were more important. In the end, even the central opponents of separation ended up agreeing that it proved to be a very positive change, which is arguably a strong endorsement of Menzies’s Burkean instinct of insisting that a major change needed an overwhelming case to be made for it.

This is not to say that Menzies habitually dragged his feet, or that other instances of policy innovation did not have his longstanding support. One that is oft forgotten is the implementation of a system of healthcare coverage based on the ‘contributory principle’. Such were Menzies’s strong views on the issue that he had resigned from the Lyons Cabinet over the shelving of a National Health and Pensions Insurance Scheme in March 1939, and thereby almost jeopardised his ability to succeed Lyons as prime minister.

David Furse-Roberts looks in detail at the multifaceted healthcare reforms of the Menzies government, which were overseen by two eminent doctors turned ministers for health in Earle Page and Donald Cameron. Furse-Roberts’s chapter highlights how these reforms were intimately informed by a liberal philosophy. The government was concerned to ensure that as many people as possible had access to treatment and medicines, while simultaneously avoiding creating a culture of dependence or a monolithic socialised system in which patients would be treated as a number rather than as a person.

While there have been major reforms in healthcare since the 1950s, the Menzies government can be credited with helping to forge the successful and enduring mix of public and private healthcare which continues to be a defining characteristic of the Australian system. Moreover, as Furse-Roberts makes clear, Menzies understood the role of ‘private enterprise’ to include not just profit-making businesses, but also ‘charities, churches and voluntary associations’—as true care enlisted the community rather than merely the state.

More famous than Menzies’s support for healthcare is his long advocacy for university education, which was examined at length by Greg Melleuish in The Young Menzies. With these enunciated beliefs put into practice, the 1950s saw landmark innovations including the introduction of Commonwealth scholarships and the implementation of the Murray Report. In his chapter, Andrew Norton casts a forensic eye over the extent to which Menzies can take credit for the tertiary revolution which accompanied his prime ministership.

While Norton admits that these reforms were expensive and unlikely to attract votes, he points to the bipartisan support they enjoyed, to suggest that we cannot assume that change would not have been forthcoming without Menzies. Menzies was most distinctive in comparison to his Coalition colleagues, who were more reluctant to spend the money and override federalist objections to a Commonwealth intervention in education. However, as Melleuish touches on in his second chapter in this series, the investment in universities was intimately linked to the prosperity of the period, hence any counterfactual must also factor in the extent to which the Menzies government facilitated that prosperity.

Luckily, that issue receives coverage from David Lee. In a direct refutation of Keating’s lament that Menzies left it to the politicians of the 1980s to restart Australia’s economic engine, Lee argues that the period 1954–61 laid the groundwork for the later Hawke reforms. This included reorientating Australian trade towards Asia, not just with the famous 1957 Commerce Agreement with Japan, but also in selling vast quantities of wheat to a Chinese communist government which Menzies had not officially recognised. Both trade relationships involved courting major political controversy, as well as renegotiating our trade agreements with Britain in a manner which defies the Menzian stereotype of being an unreformed Anglophile. On the other hand, a continued commitment to protectionism meant there were certainly contradictions in how the Menzies government was simultaneously trying to foster and restrict trade. But despite the abuse that had been hurled at Menzies following the Dalfram Dispute, ‘pig iron Bob’ overcame protectionist fears in allowing Japanese co-investment in Australian coalmining, thus precipitating a mining boom.

Australia’s abundance of coal is one of the main reasons why we never developed a network of nuclear power stations in the 1950s and 1960s. But, as Michael de Percy records, Menzies nevertheless predicted that ‘there will come a time as the population of this country increases, as new resources are uncovered in remote parts of this country, when nuclear power will become as much the servant of peaceful enterprise as thermal power or hydro-electric power’. While the hope Chifley and Menzies shared of Australia securing its own nuclear weapons was never realised, through the Lucas Heights reactor the Menzies government was able to provide Australia with medical benefits, as well as a core of scientific knowledge and experience. This may yet foster a wider nuclear network and is of crucial importance for the future of the nuclear submarines earmarked under AUKUS—a defence commitment that has been linked to the onset of a new Cold War, which itself has helped us become more appreciative of the fraught circumstances Menzies had to navigate.

As mentioned above, The Menzies Ascendency corresponded with a relative thaw in Soviet–Western tensions—though certainly not in Soviet–Australian tensions, which were at an all-time high in the wake of Petrov. While Australia would not re-establish its official diplomatic ties with Moscow until 1959, Menzies, as Elizabeth Buchanan documents, was nevertheless able to seize on the opportunity engendered by the thaw to secure an enduring international Antarctic Treaty to help protect Australia’s southern border and our claim to 42 per cent of the frozen continent. This was a remarkable diplomatic victory, but one for which Menzies has received little credit—perhaps, Buchanan suggests, because there was little to be gained in boasting of a healthy working relationship with the communists.

Menzies’s record on foreign policy matters over the 1954–61 period was a mixed bag. His failed intervention in the Suez Crisis is undoubtedly the incident which is best remembered, and one on which Menzies felt compelled to spend considerable time justifying his actions in his memoir Afternoon Light. Suez expert Robert Bowker makes it clear that while the episode was riddled with misjudgements and the deliberate sidelining of the Department of External Affairs, the damage it caused Menzies and Australia was somewhat minimal. This was thanks in large part to a significant near miss, when Richard Casey circumvented an uncharacteristic outburst from Menzies reaching President Eisenhower.

The Menzies government showed far more delicacy in its handling of the West New Guinea dispute, which Sean Jacobs depicts as ‘independent, measured, and balanced’. With one of the world’s largest communist parties sitting directly on our doorstep, Australia had to tread carefully, rejecting an eccentric American proposal to try to break up Indonesia, while doing all we could to maintain a vital buffer zone between it and Australian New Guinea. In a brutal outcome, Australia ultimately had to abandon its initial strategic interests and the people of WNG, but not before it charted a course that was clearly independent from both Britain and the United States.

One of Menzies’s main frustrations with the WNG dispute was that the Indonesians were able to use anti-colonial sentiment to seize a territory that would ironically become a colony of Jakarta.¹⁰ Despite these protestations, the Menzies government was not immune to the pressures exerted by the international community. This would come to the fore in how immigration ministers Harold Holt and Alick Downer liberalised Australia’s racially discriminatory immigration policy.

As with tariff protectionism, the White Australia Policy was a pillar of the ‘Australian Settlement’ to which the government remained publicly wedded, yet it simultaneously made choices which served to undermine the policy in the long term. Paul Brown argues that this was a form of ‘incrementalism which is not a conscious process but in which each small liberalisation of the policy ultimately leads to its dissolution’. But as Brown also demonstrates, protecting or consolidating progress is often as important as making the progress in the first place. Not only did the Menzies government abolish the infamous dictation test and make numerous exceptions to the policy allowing specific Asian persons to settle here, it also had to defend the previously bipartisan broadening of post-war migration to include southern Europeans against a populist Labor backlash.

International criticisms were also a factor in the Menzies government making several significant reforms affecting Indigenous Australians, but they were not the only factor. While Damien Freeman and Andrew Bragg suggest that Menzies may have been relatively uninterested in Indigenous people, or at least Indigenous culture, other members of his government took a keen interest in these issues and were given the scope to act upon them in a number of profound ways. Though Minister for Territories Paul Hasluck and Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies founder William Wentworth were not without their flaws, they made great strides in an attempt to ensure Indigenous Australians would be treated on an equal basis to their non-Indigenous counterparts, and that aspects of Indigenous culture which may otherwise have vanished were preserved.

Even where there was sufficient interest in Indigenous policy reform during the Menzies era, this was largely limited to the Commonwealth’s administration of the Northern Territory, as the government did not then have the constitutional power to make laws relating specifically to Indigenous Australians. This was a power that Menzies was reluctant to assume, as his liberal instincts inclined him towards the complete removal of the race power, rather than its use for affirmative action purposes.¹¹

While the Northern Territory was the focal point of significant reforms, it was eclipsed by the attention Menzies showered on the Australian Capital Territory, as Ted Ling examines in his chapter on the National Capital Development Commission. As with the universities, the development of Canberra was not electorally popular, and Menzies had to defy significant consternation within Cabinet to push for expensive projects like the construction of Lake Burley Griffin. That Menzies was able to pursue electorally dubious long-term projects in spite of Australia’s short election cycle is one of the notable benefits of the political ascendency he achieved. Ling’s chapter also offers a brief but telling insight into Menzies’s Burkean belief in the importance of ‘a sense of continuity’, in the speech he gave at the laying of the foundation stone for the National Library in 1966.

While Menzies’s electoral dominance allowed him to look past the electoral ramifications of spending vast quantities of money on Canberra—whose residents at the time were largely excluded from voting for the federal parliament¹²—that does not mean those electoral ramifications were not felt. Menzies did not almost lose the 1961 election just because of the short-term economic consequences of abolishing illiberal import licences as covered by Lee, but also because of an exaggerated swing in the state of Queensland, the causes of which are unpacked by Lyndon Megarrity. He traces the swing to a strong sentiment of ‘Queensland neglect’, expressed not just by the Labor Party but also a Country Party–led state government. These Queenslanders had elaborate dreams concerning the prospect of northern development, and did not take kindly to their favoured projects being passed over for Commonwealth funding.

In the book’s last chapter, Greg Melleuish asks the pivotal question: was Menzies lucky? He emphasises that an electorate that had endured the twin disasters of the Great Depression and World War II craved stability as a major priority. Having lived through years of deprivation, they were tremendously appreciative of prosperity, even if it only provided what we would now consider very modest comfort. Nor were they that concerned about the incremental pace of policy change; they had experienced enough of history. It was only once the first generation of war babies, lacking their parents’ sense of perspective, began to vote from 1961 onwards, that demand for excitement and social change started to rise. The consequences of this will form a notable backdrop for the fourth and final volume.

We finish with a special appendix of the keynote address Paul Kelly delivered to the Third Annual Conference, which elegantly illuminates a core theme of this book—namely that Menzies was a gradualist who paradoxically oversaw tremendous and lasting change. Indeed, the key to his success may well have been his ability to cultivate a sense of reassurance that helped to mask that change, or at least add to it vital ballast, and which was also reinforced by the growth of a vast and stabilising middle class. While Menzies would find himself denigrated when what Kelly dubs the ‘cult of the 1960s’ began to make change an end in itself, we are arguably now in an era which makes us once again pine for stability and social cohesion, and therefore have found a new and powerful sense of respect for the Menzian achievement.

CHAPTER 1

ROBERT MENZIES, BERT EVATT AND THE LABOR PARTY SPLIT

Anne Henderson¹

WHAT A UNIQUE way to start a discussion of the era of true consolidation for the Menzies years of post-war governing—the years between 1954 and 1961. I refer to starting this book with a discussion not so much of Menzies’s Liberal–Country Party Coalition as with a discussion of its Labor Opposition.

For that, of course, we can thank the great Labor Party Split of 1954–55—the split in Labor that, in time, would make Robert Menzies the longest-serving Australian prime minister, with a record not easily beaten. For undoubtedly the great winner to emerge from the Split was Robert Menzies. Moreover, he was by no means an innocent bystander. Menzies—matched with his rival, Labor leader Bert Evatt—was the significant factor in the bitter divide that saw Labor in Opposition federally for a total of twenty-three years.

The role of BA Santamaria and his Catholic Social Studies Movement in the Split has been exaggerated. It stems from decades of Labor historians accepting the line pushed by Evatt at the time and articulated by Canberra journalist Alan Reid, who wrote of Santamaria as ‘Svengali-like’ in the shadows, pulling strings.² In fact, this interpretation of the might of Santamaria, leaning heavily on sectarian suspicions of Catholics within Labor, especially in Victoria, owes much to ignorance of how great Santamaria’s influence actually was at that time.

Whatever his influence among anti-communist (mostly Catholic) trade unionists (known as Groupers) and others, Santamaria was a little-known political force in 1954–55. Moreover, his interest in lobbying Labor MPs had more to do with his views on social and economic policies than any attempt to see Labor split or lose power. Santamaria’s Movement was certainly one player in the Split but by no means the cause of it. In fact, Bill Barry, who led a group of seven Victorian Labor MPs in crossing the floor in the Victorian Parliament to bring down the Cain Labor government in April 1955, was not even a member of Santamaria’s Movement; likewise Tom Hayes, who joined Barry’s group of Labor spoilers. According to Barry himself, and to Frank McManus—then Labor’s Victorian assistant secretary and later Democratic Labor Party senator—Barry had never met Santamaria.³ Nor had Tom Hayes, who told his son Kevin that he was joining the Barry group as he most certainly ‘was not siding with Stout and Evatt’.⁴

It was only later, as anti-communist Labor became the Democratic Labor Party, largely underpinned by the ranks of Santamaria’s Movement (which became the National Civic Council in 1957)—and with anti-communist and DLP preferences from elections in 1955 and 1958 flowing to Robert Menzies’s Coalition—that Santamaria came to public prominence and real political influence. In the formation of breakaway Labor parties after 1955, Santamaria’s NCC became the DLP’s operational network, bringing out the vote, and providing foot soldiers to knock on doors to canvass and enlist supporters, and man the polling booths on election day. Meanwhile, Santamaria’s News Weekly connected thousands of supporters, especially in Victoria, Queensland and to some extent Tasmania. Later, Santamaria’s regular television broadcast, Point of View, which aired each Sunday, made him a household name. In reality, the Labor Split of 1955 made BA Santamaria and his NCC, not the other way round.

Alan Reid’s pointing to BA Santamaria as working in the shadows to pull the strings of Labor anti-communist MPs was an overestimation of the real influence of Santamaria before the Labor Split. On the contrary, the split in Labor ranks was principally the result of serious divisions in Labor’s caucus, divisions that were badly handled by Labor leader Bert (Doc) Evatt, divisions that had been apparent while Ben Chifley led Labor but which Chifley managed with dexterity even during the heated debates over the Communist Party dissolution legislation in 1950–51.

To fully understand the Labor Split of 1954–55, we need to look at the Menzies and Evatt contest which had raged for the best part of a decade by 1954. Their personal rivalry went back to Evatt’s announcement that he was leaving the High Court to stand for Labor at the 1940 federal election. Evatt saw himself as a possible Labor prime minister from the moment he entered parliament via an election at which Menzies’s Coalition government barely held on to office. But Evatt would have his ambitions curtailed by the success of Labor prime ministers John Curtin and Ben Chifley through the decade that followed.

Menzies and Evatt faced each other directly in a number of significant contests from the 1940s. There was the Powers referendum of 1944; the battle for the banks (over bank nationalisation) in 1947–49; the 1951 campaign to ban the Communist Party of Australia; the 1954 federal election, which Evatt was certain he could win; and then the Petrov Royal Commission into subversive activities involving the Soviet Embassy in Canberra and various Australian operatives, three of whom were linked to Evatt’s office.

In these big bouts, Menzies would lose to Evatt in just one. In the referendum to ban the Communist Party of Australia, the ‘Yes’ vote led by Menzies narrowly lost to Evatt’s campaign for ‘No’. From then on, however, Menzies’s conviction that Australia faced a world endangered by the spread of communism in Europe and Asia, and his determination to call it out, were instrumental in playing Evatt at his weakest points. In the end, it was Menzies who destroyed Evatt’s ability to lead and unite Labor. As Menzies told Canberra journalist Frank Chamberlain just before the 1954 election:

Dr Evatt is not a great Australian, he’s a great man for Evatt; he’s not interested in power for Australia, he’s interested in power for Evatt … I would leave politics this 1954 but for Dr Evatt. He’s a menace to Australia and he must be kept out of office by hook or by crook.⁵

The rivalry between Menzies and Evatt was clear to their contemporaries, who noted, over years, their parallel lives and intense competition, even their lack of regard for each other. After Menzies’s resignation as prime minister in 1941, Evatt’s trajectory was in ascendence. He reached new heights as Australia’s attorney-general and minister for external affairs, gaining world attention by helping to set up the United Nations. Then, Evatt’s failure before both the High Court of Australia and the Privy Council in the Chifley government’s bank nationalisation case, followed by Menzies’s Liberal Party win at the federal election of 1949, saw Evatt face his first real defeat in what had been a career of brilliant prizes.

Menzies now became ascendent. As Evatt saw it, Menzies had stolen this brilliant boy’s golden future. But Evatt remained in politics and eventually—as new Labor leader after Ben Chifley’s death in June 1951—Evatt’s second chance at the greatest political prize came.

The move by Menzies to ban the Communist Party of Australia was made in the growing tension of the Cold War era. Menzies’s visit to Britain in 1948 at the height of the Berlin Blockade had sharpened his view that the greatest danger to world peace was the growth of communism. Evatt, meanwhile, showed a more complacent attitude, seeing the United Nations and diplomacy as the way to peace, and seeming to regard the Soviet Union as a reliable negotiator.

In his reply to Evatt in the House of Representatives on 15 February 1949, as Opposition leader, Menzies demonstrated how different the two were in their approach to the issues of defence and foreign policy—even perhaps to politics in general. From the outset in his speech, Menzies was on the attack, belittling Evatt as being legalistic and theoretical in his arguments about the importance of the United Nations, even somewhat boastful about being part of its formation. Then Menzies moved straight to an analysis of the dangers of communism and the failure of the UN to counter it, the UN being an organisation of so many members and with no international authority or powers to control nations with rogue ambitions. As such, the UN could never prevent war, said Menzies, and he then quoted from Evatt’s own writings to this effect.

The bluntness of Menzies’s message contrasted sharply with the high-minded and wish-fulfilment style of Evatt’s extolling of UN virtues. Menzies went for the jugular, accusing the Chifley government of weakness in the face of communist activity, saying, ‘The Australian Government scoffs at the idea of the fifth column in this country … It believes that active revolutionary communists must not be dealt with harshly because they merely have a political philosophy of their own.’ In short, Menzies laid out a theme he would use effectively and often in the coming election year:

Expediency matters in this world, and if we are confronted by a state of affairs in which we find thugs challenging the peace of the world and the security, safety and future of our own people, it is of no use stating airy fairy legalistic ideals. We must face the fact that until the ideal happy state of affairs can be brought into existence, we must first deal with the enemy as we find him and deal with problems which may be solvable only by expediency, as the problem of the Berlin Blockade has been solved.⁶

The clash between Evatt and Menzies in the House of Representatives in February 1949 showed clearly the gap between the two men’s perspectives. Evatt’s constant push for dialogue through the UN to conciliate the Soviet Union was a stance Menzies belittled as useless posturing in the face of danger.

The Split that decimated Labor had its origins in parliamentary politics and the lack of leadership shown by Bert Evatt. Former Labor MP Fred Daly recalled how the legislation to ban the Communist Party opened serious divisions in the Labor caucus from 1950, as Labor debated how to handle the legislation in the Senate. Daly wrote: ‘Evatt, Chifley, Ward, Keon, Mullens, Rosevear, Calwell, Bourke (Vic), Burke (WA) and Pollard participated in emotional and hate-filled debates and sometimes the meetings broke up in disarray.’⁷ For all that, Chifley held the team together as Labor leader.

By 1954, Menzies had Evatt’s measure as Opposition leader, along with a sound reading and intuition of the mood and politics of the time. Communism was a real concern, regardless of the outcome of the Communist Party dissolution referendum. But the overriding concern of voters through 1951–53 was inflation.

As he brought down his ‘horror’—as it was labelled—budget of 1951, Treasurer Artie Fadden said he made no apology for the increase in taxes, as inflation was a ‘whirlwind’ sucking up income and jobs.⁸ It worked and, by the 1953 budget, such was the improvement in the economy that taxes were eased and benefits increased. Menzies was called the ‘Man of the hour’ by one cartoonist.⁹ For all that, Labor had improved in the polls since 1951 and many journalists continued to opine that a Labor victory looked likely at the 1954 election—at least, that is, until the early months of that year.

The relief offered in the 1953 budget was taking effect just as the young Queen Elizabeth and her handsome husband Prince Philip landed in Australia on 3 February 1954 for an eight-week tour. Australia had seen nothing like it—huge crowds waved and cheered at every vantage point, streets were hung with bunting and lights twinkled, while businesses around the country, from magazines to ice-cream vendors, benefited from what seemed like one long glorious party. The mood of the nation changed. Before long, columnists were writing that the election would be close.

The announcement of the defection of Vladimir Petrov, third secretary and consul at the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, on 13 April, just weeks before voting day on 29 May, was not something Menzies could control—the date had been fixed by negotiations with Petrov and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.¹⁰ Petrov’s wife Evdokia, who also worked for the Soviet Embassy, defected in Darwin shortly after the dramatic scenes at Mascot Airport, which added to the excitement.

However, the legislation to set up the Petrov Royal Commission and its terms of reference was approved without a division of parliament, with Evatt as strong in his condemnation of communist espionage as Menzies. Then, within days, he was attacking Menzies for using the royal commission to condemn the Chifley government for being weak on security. In time, he would accuse Menzies of using Petrov to damage Labor in the 1954 election.

There is no evidence that Petrov’s defection influenced the outcome of the 1954 election. Menzies was aware the Petrov documents alleged three of Evatt’s staff had questionable contact with the Soviet Embassy. But Menzies made no reference to the Petrov matter in the campaign. All the debate in the election was over the economy and, eventually, over Labor’s inability to cost its promises. Just one Labor anti-communist MP made a statement in the campaign that could have damaged Evatt. Bill Bourke, a Victorian Labor anti-communist, albeit also a critic of Santamaria’s Movement,¹¹ said that Labor would need to revise its promises on abolishing the means test. Bourke was disciplined at a meeting at Trades Hall shortly after, and he promised not to comment on the means test again.¹² His intervention came and went in a day.

The rivalry on the hustings was tense as election day neared—so much so that The Sydney Morning Herald’s Canberra correspondent commented that while restrained in public, Menzies and Evatt made no secret of their dislike for one another, and the personal attacks by Evatt on Menzies had ‘brought the old-world conventions of election campaigning to an end’.¹³ The campaign had become a contest between just two men. In time, the hurt of Menzies’s election win would let loose Evatt’s well-known tendency to volcanic outbursts and paranoia. This had been common over years with his staff at moments he thought were to his disadvantage. And here was a far bigger moment to his disadvantage.

Evatt had never faced off against Menzies in such a major campaign, one that was meant to hand him the prime ministership—the prize for which he had worked for over a decade. As Menzies had rightly noted, so much of Evatt’s career was all about him. And so it was that what happened to Labor after the 1954 federal election was, fundamentally, about what happened to Evatt.

After the election, the Petrov Royal Commission began its hearings. From 1 July, explosive revelations from the Petrovs and others of espionage activities by the Soviet Embassy in Canberra hit front-page headlines daily. It was here that Evatt made his first serious mistake, by insisting he represent his three staffers named in the Petrov documents—Allan Dalziel, Albert Grundeman and Fergan O’Sullivan—before the commission. Evatt’s performances—as reported in daily newspapers—confirmed that Ben Chifley had been correct in his assessment to Fred Daly shortly before his death that Evatt was not leadership material.¹⁴

Evatt greatly annoyed the commissioners. In addition, he argued with no evidence that the defection of Petrov had been a ploy by Menzies to bring down the Labor Opposition at the federal election. Such was Evatt’s standing in the Labor community that, while conspiratorial in nature, the accusation for decades would absorb Labor supporters—many in academic circles—and create myths that took years to disprove. It also showed that Evatt was preoccupied with absolving himself from blame for the election defeat and passing that blame on to Menzies.

Evatt spent most of August 1954 away from parliament, appearing before the commission. His obsession with the royal commission continued into September. Patience in the caucus wore thin, and reports of disorder there were followed by a 10 September Adelaide News article headed ‘Is Dr Evatt Facing a Nervous Breakdown?’.¹⁵ By 16 September, it was open war between the commissioners and Evatt, with the commissioners refusing to allow Evatt to appear before them. Parliamentary Labor felt leaderless and without a strategy. Menzies stood atop a diminishing opponent. One, he knew, Labor would have difficulty removing, especially as Arthur Calwell, while siding with the Labor anti-communists in the caucus, exhibited no inclination to challenge Evatt. Debates in the House would show a dominant Menzies facing a dysfunctional Evatt.

In the first days of October, something snapped in Evatt. Alan Reid’s article in the Sydney Sun just two weeks before had exposed a suspicion that resonated among fraught Labor activists. For a party struggling with its divisions over communism and still recovering from the dismay of losing what they had thought had been the unlosable election, the accusation that clandestine forces led by a Catholic with the Italian surname of Santamaria were holding back Labor’s chances of success in the polls was all too attractive. It offered a deflection of blame at a time of leadership crisis.

Historian Robert Murray has long since revealed how, in Sydney at a NSW Labor Day weekend dinner, Evatt spoke of loyalty and justice. He was heartened by union support for his speech. Energised by this, over the next two days at his home in Sydney’s Mosman, Evatt drafted a significant press statement which he shared with a small group of confidants that included Alan Reid, asking them for comments. Around 4 p.m. on 5 October, Evatt previewed the statement with a group of supporters attending a party at Morgan’s bookshop in Castlereagh Street. He was encouraged by their surprised but positive reactions. His staffer Allan Dalziel, as described by Murray, went ‘eyes alight with excitement, visited the Press room a few doors from Evatt’s office and told the reporters there that a very important statement would be coming shortly’.¹⁶ Then Evatt’s statement hit the media.

As Alan Reid would describe it, this was Evatt’s ‘hydrogen bomb’.¹⁷ It exploded into front-page headlines the following day. Evatt had accused a small group of Labor members of acting with increasing disloyalty by being ‘largely directed from outside the Labor Movement’. Melbourne’s News Weekly, he added, acted as their organ. Such was his concern at the negative influence of this ‘tiny minority’, Evatt announced he would be bringing the matter to the Federal Executive of the party at its next meeting, since this had been a factor ‘that told heavily against us’ in Victoria in the 1954 federal election. Not mentioning names but referring to Santamaria’s News Weekly magazine, the message was that Santamaria’s Movement had lost Labor the crucial poll. The scapegoating that would ignite a new Labor Party split had started. There was no going back.

At an explosive caucus meeting on 13 October, a motion was proposed for a leadership spill. With such inflamed and heated argument, the motion was held over until the following week. Evatt had time to regroup. At the caucus meeting on 20 October, anger again took control. After Eddie Ward—now strongly supporting Evatt—called for a division, there was uproar. This ended with Evatt standing on a table shouting, ‘Take down their names.’ Fred Daly recalled a manic Evatt, writing: ‘It was Evatt and Ward at their hating best.’ He added that the two seemed to be enjoying it.¹⁸ What Evatt unleashed that day would turn into a dictatorial purge of the party—the sort of authoritarian use of power Evatt had condemned in his campaign against the Communist Party Dissolution Bill. It was an act of selfdestruction not easily understood in today’s politics.

It is clear from recorded events that Evatt’s temperament simply could not handle the succession of losses from the federal election on 29 May on to his failure before the royal commission and the growing rifts in the caucus. A careful charting of his actions both within Labor and at the commission provides significant background to the blow-up moment of issuing the press statement on 5 October and the extraordinary attacks on colleagues during the caucus meetings of 13 and 20 October. To add salt to his wounds, his greatest rival, Robert Menzies, was taking increasing strength from Evatt’s own apparent demise. This showed especially in the parliamentary debate that followed the release of the commission’s interim report.

The Royal Commission on Espionage handed an interim report to parliament in late October 1954. It found the Petrov papers to be legitimate, that the Soviet Embassy in Canberra had been used for espionage between 1943 and 1954, and that the only Australians who knowingly assisted Soviet espionage were communists. It recommended no prosecutions. On 28 October in the House of Representatives, Evatt spoke to his motion for the report to be tabled and printed. Menzies allowed extra time for Evatt to make his case and sat back to hear the leader of the Opposition restate the arguments he had put before the justices of the commission. Evatt was still arguing that the Petrov defection was a stitch-up to bring down Evatt and his party, a conspiracy built around contaminated documents.

After forty minutes of Evatt, it was time for Menzies to respond. On this occasion there were no sparks, just sardonic amusement. Menzies began by saying the House had witnessed a ‘very uncommon privilege’. Its members had ‘heard counsel who has unsuccessfully advanced certain arguments before a tribunal have the opportunity to advance them for the second time before a tribunal which has not heard the witnesses and has not read the detailed evidence’. In a mocking tone he added: ‘That is something I cannot remember in my fairly long experience of public affairs.’¹⁹

Menzies’s manner was superior and deprecating. He added to that by describing the impressive credentials of the three commissioners who had decided against Evatt, their stature weighing heavily against the Opposition leader’s unproven allegations. But he stopped short of taking any of Evatt’s bait, saying, ‘I am not re-arguing this case. This is not a court of appeal. This is a parliament.’ And he went on to make the point that the parliament ‘has no material before it on which it could dare to disagree with those findings’.

It was left to Menzies to luxuriate in a summary of what the commission was set up to do and what its findings were, all of which gave the PM a chance to restate his role in bringing about the investigation into the Petrov Affair and the soundness of the Petrovs’ testimony. The circle of Soviet friends had been spiked; Evatt had once employed one such friend as a press secretary. Menzies was also able to observe that the commissioners had found that both Dalziel and Grundeman, in denying under oath their non-involvement in the infamous Document J,²⁰ could have pleaded their own innocence satisfactorily ‘but for the extraordinary course taken by Dr Evatt’.²¹

Menzies finished by summing up Evatt’s tragic part in the royal commission and its outcome. Evatt had, Menzies said, been told by the commission chairman ‘that if any other counsel appearing in the inquiry had made such statements about the Commission and about witnesses who gave evidence before it, the Commission would have committed that counsel for contempt’. Menzies was on a roll. After years of being derided by Evatt for not measuring up to the legal mind of the ‘Doc’, Menzies was taking revenge. Evatt, he believed, had confused—Menzies used the word ‘muddled’—his legal and political capacity.

Which then left the PM to turn the screws. He described Evatt’s motion as continuing his campaign of attack on the commission and its justices, a campaign supported by the Communist Party press. Menzies finished by moving a motion, with half a minute to go for his allowed speaking time, that debate on the interim report be adjourned to the next sitting. To cries of ‘No!’ from the Opposition, Menzies’s motion was put to the House, overriding Evatt’s, and passed on the numbers. Menzies and Evatt were still a sparring couple, but Evatt was now fetching much longer odds.

In some ways, within Labor, it was a battle of factions and personalities. But the smell of sectarianism also hung over the division. Labor’s banning of any of its members from being members of the Catholic Federation supporting state aid was not so far back in time. But the Groupers—Catholic and non-Catholic—unlike the members of the Catholic Federation, were by the 1940s a strongly supported part of the Labor Party, sponsored by Labor leaders. Certainly, there were Catholics in New South Wales who opposed the influence of Santamaria’s Movement, such as Senator Jim Ormonde, but the strongest pushback against the Catholic Groupers as they surged in success came from members who distrusted a group of activists they saw as being associated with the Church of Rome. The old fear of permeation by an outside organisation took hold.

The history of what happened to Labor in the 1950s has been recorded in numerous books and articles. All interested parties now readily accept that the first shot—made by a press statement—in the internecine war that led to the Great Labor Split was fired by Evatt on 5 October 1954. That press statement can be seen as a result not just of the tensions within Labor, but the pressures Evatt felt at being bettered by Menzies.

As Peter Crockett has written, Evatt was not the best person to judge the effect of his move to denounce and purge the anticommunist elements in Labor: ‘Evatt did not believe that a split would materialise, anticipating that dissent would be contained by eliminating disloyal elements so that the party’s electoral popularity would be restored.’²² A difference of opinion between Evatt and Labor’s Member for Eden-Monaro Allan Fraser made the front page of The Canberra Times on 11 October. Fraser believed the Labor Party was in danger of disintegrating if the current disruption continued, and warned against sectarianism in the party. Evatt responded by assuring the public that Fraser was ‘wide of the mark’, and that just because voters were troubled it was no help ‘to describe the disturbance as a hurricane’. He dismissed Fraser’s anguish at the delight Labor had given its opponents, saying that the government ‘may receive apparent temporary advantage from such a situation in the Labor Party but Labor must put its own house in order first’. When this was done, the stocks of Labor would soar to remarkable heights.²³

Increasingly in denial, Evatt had opened up wounds that could have been healed with the right leader. True, as many have recorded, the battle lines were many and complicated. But that is often the way of political parties; the role of the leader is to manage them. Evatt was unable to separate his personal ambitions and pride from his party’s needs. In his press statement on 5 October and in many that he would make later, the line of division was loyalty to him personally. His disastrous handling of the royal commission was his own doing; his conspiracy beliefs over the 1954 election result, again, were all about how the party had failed him.

Meanwhile, Menzies ended 1954 well pleased. The day before Evatt’s statement to the press that would set off a barrel of dynamite under the Labor Party, The Age ran a ‘This Week in Canberra’ column that complimented the Menzies government on already honouring most of its election promises.²⁴ There were increased pensions coming for invalids and war widows, and another 65 000 new people about to qualify under the regulations. The PM had, the article opined, ‘weathered minor storms inside his own party and the Opposition is weak and disunited’. Evatt, meanwhile, instead of tackling issues that concerned average Australians, in readiness for the next election, and building on the slight majority of two-party preferred votes he achieved at the 1954 election, had gone on a personal crusade against the Petrov defection and was about to begin wrecking the party he had so long served, and which had served him. Why his colleagues allowed him that indulgence is the great puzzle.

Menzies might have celebrated the irony. Evatt, the leader who believed in liberalism and negotiated means to resolve disputes, had switched to an authoritarian stance against those whom he no longer could win over by argument. At his instigation, the Labor Party would go on a purge of dissidents in 1955, in a manner much like what Evatt had argued was a breach of individual liberty during the 1951 referendum campaign. Members and branches would be named and expelled. In the case of paid operatives and eventually MPs, individuals named would lose their jobs and livelihoods.

So it was that after years of personal battles between Menzies and Evatt—which had ended in such a bitter election defeat—and the hysteria of his involvement in the Petrov Royal Commission which affected his grip on the leadership, Evatt made a manic move. As Menzies well knew, Evatt’s temperament was erratic under pressure. In the political contest, this was the darkest of moments for the ‘Doc’—and, eventually, for the Labor Party itself. As a result of the Labor Party Split, Menzies won an increase of seats at the early and conveniently called federal election in December 1955. At the federal election of November 1958, Menzies further increased his majority.

Menzies’s rivalry with Evatt and his defeat of Labor at the 1954 election were fundamental to the Labor Split in 1954–55.

CHAPTER 2

VICTORIAN POLITICAL EXCEPTIONALISM AND LABOR’S 1955 SPLIT

The Bedrock of Menzies’s Impregnability

Paul Strangio¹

‘KILLEN, YOU ARE magnificent!’² For many years it was part of Australian political folklore that this was how an exultant Prime Minister Robert Menzies congratulated the young backbencher James Killen when, after the distribution of preferences, the Queenslander narrowly won his seat of Moreton, thus allowing the Liberal–Country Party coalition to scrape back into office in December 1961. It turned out, however, that the story was apocryphal. Killen admitted in his 1985 memoir that he had concocted the account to help a Courier-Mail journalist hunting for a news break. The truth was far more quotidian—the only contact Killen had with Menzies was a perfunctory phone call in which a subdued prime minister said, ‘Well, laddie, this is good news. I’m glad it is over. It’s been quite a strain.’³

In retrospect, there were always grounds on which to suspect that Killen’s story was a fable. For one, the exuberant wording was all wrong. The Olympian Menzies did not unbend himself in that way with colleagues, and certainly not with a junior member of the government like Killen. The message lacked the gravitas of the great man. There was a bigger reason, though, why Menzies was unlikely to have gushed at Killen in terms that he was the saviour of the government. The prime minister knew well that a seat in Queensland had not been the decisive difference between victory and defeat in the election. Rather, it was due to the state of Victoria that his government had survived. The figures demonstrate this fact. In the 1961 election Labor gained a seat share of only 30.3 per cent in the House of Representatives in Victoria, which was the same level of representation it had been marooned on since the party’s 1955 Split. Compare this with Labor’s seat share of 58.7 per cent in New South Wales, 61.1 per cent in Queensland, 54.6 per cent in South Australia, 60 per cent in Tasmania, and 33.3 per cent in Western Australia.⁴ In other words, if not for events in Victoria, namely the Labor Split and its disastrous aftermath for the party in that state, the Menzies era would have ended in 1961—possibly before.

This chapter addresses the role of Victorian political exceptionalism as it relates to the ascendency Menzies enjoyed, especially between 1955 and 1963. The chapter suggests that the chief feature of that exceptionalism was the chronic weakness of the Labor Party in the state. Further, it argues that Labor’s feebleness was crucial to Victoria being the epicentre of the ALP Split in 1955. The Split was fundamentally a Victorian phenomenon, with the Victorian ALP effectively sacrificed because of its chronic record as the worst performing of the state Labor Party branches. In turn, the chapter highlights the Split’s devastating consequences for the ALP in Victoria, showing that the impact lingered until at least the early 1970s when there was federal intervention in the branch. It was an effect which, as the 1961 election result demonstrated, had all but made the Menzies government impregnable to defeat.

Victorian Political Exceptionalism in the Twentieth Century: Labor’s Electoral Underperformance

We live in an era in which Labor is the party of government in Victoria. Since the early 1980s, the ALP has ruled over Spring Street for three-quarters of the time, while over the same period Labor has won the two-party preferred vote in Victoria in federal elections on no fewer than fourteen out of sixteen occasions. Little wonder that former Liberal Prime Minister John Howard has grumbled that Victoria is the ‘Massachusetts of Australia’.⁵ Yet this recent Labor ascendency is an inversion of the dominant pattern of Victoria’s electoral history for most of the twentieth century. If there was a defining characteristic of Victorian politics throughout that period, a note of exceptionalism, it was Labor’s electoral underperformance. Compared with its counterparts in the other states, Victorian Labor was the last to form government (the burlesque, fortnight-long administration of George Elmslie in 1913) and the last to form majority government (not until 1952).⁶ Labor’s share of government in Victoria during the first half of the twentieth century vividly tells the story of its uncompetitiveness. That share was a mere 12.7 per cent, compared with 67.7 per cent in Queensland, 51.6 per cent in Western Australia, 46.4 per cent in Tasmania, 40.6 per cent in New South Wales, and 26.8 per cent in South Australia.⁷

Why was the Victorian ALP the poor relation of the state Labor branches? In part its weakness was congenital.⁸ The strength of the liberal protectionist tradition in colonial Victoria and the deep attachment of the local labour movement, especially older-style craft unions, to that tradition retarded the movement’s embrace of independent political action. Whereas in the other colonies trade unions were forming Labor parties in the early 1890s, Victoria’s Melbourne Trades Hall prevaricated about pursuing direct working-class political representation. The first incarnation of political Labor in Victoria was the Progressive Political League, which emerged to contest the 1892 election, but it was more a subsidiary of liberalism than an autonomous political force. There were two more evanescent attempts to get Labor off the ground in Victoria over the following decade before it finally gained organisational permanency under the title of the Political Labor Council in 1901. By that time the party had already developed an inferiority complex, comparing itself unfavourably with Labor’s strapping youngsters in New South Wales and Queensland.

Another serious and enduring handicap for Labor, which became evident early in its existence, stemmed from Victoria’s economic geography. Victoria was easily the most metropolitan dominated of the eastern seaboard colonies cum states. It lacked the vast grazing tracts of New South Wales and Queensland, and was also hemmed in by the spread of agricultural smallholdings (especially wheat farms). Victoria’s pastoral industry had reached its productive limits by the end of the nineteenth century. Similarly, goldmining was declining as an employer and, unlike New South Wales, Victoria lacked workable black coal.⁹ The result was a chiefly urban-based constituency for Labor, which was markedly different from the situations in New South Wales and Queensland, where Australia’s pastoral industry was concentrated and where the early Labor parties were strongly rooted in the mobilisation of shearers and small farmers. In Victoria, by way of contrast, Labor’s principal constituency was industrial workers in a ring of inner Melbourne suburbs (Abbotsford, Albert Park, Brunswick, Carlton, Collingwood, Fitzroy, Flemington, Melbourne, North Melbourne, Richmond, and Williamstown), supplemented by limited bases of support in the regional centres of Ballarat, Bendigo, Geelong, and some of the larger towns in Gippsland. In short, Victorian Labor was predominantly an enclave party of industrial Melbourne.¹⁰

This presented a special problem for the party because of the severe malapportionment of the state’s electoral system, a situation that, distant from government, it was helpless to correct. Although the weighting of rural seats was not unique to Victoria, that malapportionment had grown to extreme levels by the early twentieth century. In 1911, fifty-four rural votes were the equivalent of 100 city votes. Thus, despite containing 45 per cent of the state’s population (and growing), Melbourne provided just 30 per cent of the parliamentary representation.¹¹ This bias heavily penalised Labor because so much of its vote was bottled up in Melbourne’s industrial suburbs—in many districts in those suburbs, it amassed more than two-thirds of the vote.¹² To put it another way, the party’s support was sequestered in the wrong place, greatly diminishing its prospects of winning government in the state.

Being locked out of power had detrimental consequences for Victorian Labor—consequences that further hindered its chances of becoming a party of government. Because of the parliamentary party’s remoteness from office, it won little prestige and remained mostly under tight control by Melbourne Trades Hall. The trade unionists were, in turn, equivocal about the value of parliamentary action for the very reason that it delivered so little to them. Another result of Labor’s lack of experience of executive government was that the party had a more oppositional and radical culture than its state counterparts. It developed a consoling but ultimately self-defeating mindset of finding vindication in righteous defeat. During World War I, for example, it was the hub of the anti-conscription movement and was intractable in its determination to punish anyone who strayed from that cause. Out of office at that time, unlike the NSW branch, it avoided a serious split. Though in minority government during the Great Depression, the haemorrhaging was also largely contained at that time with only its leader Ned Hogan and three other renegades expelled, which was in sharp contrast to the carnage in New South Wales.¹³ The dodging of a major schism on these two occasions was to have disastrous effects in the mid-1950s.

Victoria: Epicentre of the 1950s Labor Split

Now let us turn to the ALP Split of the 1950s and why Victoria was its epicentre.¹⁴ The Split was fundamentally a Victorian phenomenon. The party splintered elsewhere, but with a different character, intensity, and scale from the Victorian cataclysm—those schisms were relative sideshows. Split iconography is loaded with Victorianisms. The notorious statement of HV Evatt, federal Labor leader, of October 1954 ‘outing’ the anti-communist Catholic Movement was an assault on the Victorian ALP. The Victorian Labor government of John Cain Snr was destroyed by anti-communist dissidents dramatically crossing the parliamentary floor in April 1955. The so-called ‘sacred seven’ MPs, who defected from the federal parliamentary Labor Party in that same month, were exclusively Victorian.

Why was Victoria the fulcrum of the 1950s Split? The answer is multifaceted, but I want to focus on two major factors. First, there was the distinctive nature of the Catholic anti-communist mobilisation in Victoria.¹⁵ Formed at a small gathering at BA Santamaria’s Melbourne home in August 1941, the Catholic Social Studies Movement (the Movement) was uniquely aggressive and doctrinaire in Victoria. As fountainhead of the Movement’s ideology, Santamaria’s leadership was a chief reason for that zeal. It was Santamaria who harboured the aspiration that the Movement’s mission extend beyond purging Labor Party branches and trade unions of communist influence, predicting confidentially in 1952 that it should

be able to completely transform the leadership of the Labor movement, and to introduce into federal and state spheres large numbers of members who … should be able to implement a Christian social program … This is the first time that such a work has become possible in Australia and, as far as I can see, in the Anglo-Saxon world since the advent of Protestantism.¹⁶

Importantly, whereas Santamaria exercised virtual complete control over the Movement in Victoria, his influence beyond the state’s borders was limited. In New South Wales, with its tradition of Tammany Hallstyle wheeling and dealing politics, Santamaria’s doctrinaire approach fell on barren ground. In the words of one Movement activist, ‘He [Santamaria] didn’t like Sydney and Sydney didn’t like him and kept him out.’¹⁷ Archbishop Daniel Mannix’s leadership of the Catholic Church in Victoria was another critical reason for the distinctiveness of the anti-communist Catholic crusade in the state. The ageing church leader had fostered a tradition of Catholic lay militancy in Victoria that was unmatched elsewhere in Australia, a culture that the local Movement fed off.¹⁸ Mannix indulged Santamaria, treating him like the son he had never had, and granted the Movement an autonomy that its counterpart in New South Wales, which was kept under tight clerical control, did not enjoy.¹⁹

Evidence of the uniquely bellicose and ambitious character of the Movement in Victoria was thick on the ground by the late 1940s. It was in Victoria that the Movement became an incubator for Catholic social policies, which it then attempted to impose on the Victorian Labor Party and, to a lesser extent, graft onto the federal party’s program.²⁰ It was in Victoria that the Movement targeted ‘old guard’ pragmatic Catholic MPs who were regarded as not sufficiently fervent in the anti-communist cause—leading Victorian federal Labor politicians Arthur Calwell and Patrick Kennelly were among those who felt its hot breath. It was in Victoria that the Movement, following the 1949 federal election, commanded a brigade of members and fellow travellers within the federal parliamentary Labor Party, this shock group of Victorians having no equivalent in any other state. Likewise, Victoria was home to the Movement’s mouthpiece and attack dog, Freedom (renamed News Weekly in 1946), which, in its ‘cocksure stridency’ and habitual ferocious attacks on the ideologically ‘suspect’, exemplified the organisation’s intemperance in Melbourne.²¹

A second major factor in why the Split was centred in Victoria was Labor’s infirmity, its arrested development in the state. As I have explained, Victorian Labor was a creature of Melbourne Trades Hall, a party that lacked a governing culture and which had sustained itself through its long, fallow years by ritual incantations about its purity. Ironically, in 1952, at the very point of escalating factional tensions within the party due to the activities of anti-communist Catholic militants, Labor in Victoria achieved a historic breakthrough when, under the leadership of John Cain Snr, for the first time it won majority government in the state—an achievement that was largely due to the chaotic condition of the non-Labor side of politics. The Cain government of 1952–55 was a legislatively productive administration, but it was bedevilled by industrial disputation that was a reflection of intensifying antagonism between the labour movement’s industrial and political wings—another cause of the party’s schism of 1955.²² Put simply, Trades Hall, which, as I have argued, was at best ambivalent about parliamentarism, declared war on the Cain government. What the historian of the Labor Party Split, Robert Murray, has described as ‘industrial wing messianism’²³ was embodied by the ageing secretary of Melbourne Trades Hall, Vic Stout.

Ross Fitzgerald has correctly summed up the ancestry of the madness that drove Stout and his Trades Hall allies on in the mid-1950s:

Stout was far from alone in his views. Much of the industrial wing of the Victorian branch of the ALP was not interested in reformist Labor governments that wanted incremental change. Unlike its counterparts in New South Wales and Queensland, Victorian Labor had never enjoyed an extended period of majority government, and remained in many ways an anti-parliamentary party. Many trade unionists, distrusting the compromises of parliamentary politics, held these views, and Stout faithfully reflected them. As a consequence, Stout seemed to be quite happy for the split to go ahead.²⁴

Labor’s doleful history in Victoria contributed to the Split of the 1950s in other ways.²⁵ Decades of parliamentary impotence and a desultory record of legislative achievement encouraged a tendency for the Victorian branch—and the Cain government—to be treated as expendable. Moreover, the party’s deeply rooted oppositional culture was antithetical to the kind of pragmatic, self-preserving instinct necessary to guide it through the crisis. The contrast with New South Wales in this period was great. There, both the trade union movement and the leaders of the Catholic Church better appreciated the benefits of Labor in power (the party had been in office continuously since the early 1940s), and an attitude of compromise ultimately prevailed.

Victoria was different from New South Wales, too, in that it had previously avoided a catastrophic showdown between its political and industrial wings. This was another legacy of its scant experience of office: relations between a relatively weak parliamentary party and a powerful Trades Hall had generally been harmonious. The party had weathered largely intact the storms of World War I and the Great Depression. But this also meant the Victorian branch had not been inoculated against the perils of a full-blown split. What had been postponed in the past was to be played out with ferocity in the mid-1950s as the industrialists seized the opportunity of the crisis triggered by the activities of the anti-communist zealots to brutally assert their authority over the political wing. Indeed, as Labor’s Cinderella state, Victoria became a sacrificial lamb for all sides of the dispute. Frank McManus, one of the Movement activists, later recalled in his memoirs his realisation in 1955 that their northern allies were prepared to cut them adrift: ‘It became painfully obvious that the Movement and the Groupers in New South Wales had decided that Victoria was expendable, and that their objective should be to save New South Wales and themselves.’²⁶ Dinny Lovegrove, a key powerbroker of Victorian Labor, put it more clinically: ‘The New South Wales men are prepared to fight to the last Victorian.’²⁷ And so it proved.

The Aftermath of the Split in Victoria

The legacies of the Split for Victorian Labor were baneful.²⁸ In simple terms, the Split reinforced, nay worsened, the party’s historic pathologies. Harried by the Split’s bastard child, the breakaway Democratic Labor Party, which was not only electorally far stronger in Victoria than in any other state but uniquely among the DLP branches claimed the affiliation of several trade unions, the post-Split Victorian ALP developed ‘a bunker mentality’.²⁹ Morbidly paranoid, it spent its time jousting at the windmill of Santamariaism. Chief among the party’s defining features were an anti-Catholicism³⁰ and anti-parliamentarism.

The distrust of politicians, as we have seen, had a long pedigree in the Victorian ALP, but it was given tremendous additional impetus by the Split. One of the myths of Victorian Labor in the post-Split years was ‘that the unions had been the “saviour” of the party from infiltration by the Movement’.³¹ This mythology lent legitimacy to the industrial wing’s dictatorial supremacy. Trade unions, specifically left-wing industrial unions, dominated the party’s seat of authority, with the Victorian Central Executive exploiting that stranglehold to wilfully coerce the politicians. Those unions were little interested in parliamentary power, preferring instead a condition of ideological chastity. The branch championed rising left-wing causes, the anti– Vietnam War movement, Indigenous rights, and environmental struggles. Any progressive hue, however, was more than offset by the party’s mostly rigid resistance to policy modernisation. It held fast, for example, to opposing state aid to non-government schools. Such positions had scant appeal to a rapidly middle-classing electorate. It was the post-Split Victorian Labor Party that Gough Whitlam was targeting when he famously declaimed at Labor’s June 1967 annual conference, ‘certainly, the impotent are pure’.³²

In 1965, a reform group, subsequently christened the ‘Participants’, launched a campaign to overhaul the Victorian ALP. Its membership boasted future Labor federal and state MPs, including John Button, Michael Duffy, and John Cain Jnr, while they had kindred spirits in Barry Jones and Race Mathews.³³ In their own words, the Participants’ objective was a refashioned party that was ‘progressive and enlightened … concerned about the welfare of the great majority of people’; ‘conducted as a party capable of government’; and ‘prepared to regard parliamentary members as more than mere ciphers’.³⁴ Branded by the party’s ruling clique as apostates, the Participants looked for allies outside Victoria. Their ‘great white hope’ was Whitlam, elected leader of federal Labor in February 1967. In the same year, as recalled by Button, the Participants relayed ‘a simple message’ to party officials in Whitlam’s home state of New South Wales: ‘Labor could not win a federal election without gaining seats in Victoria, and this would not happen without intervention to remove the incumbent controllers of the Victorian party.’³⁵

Proof of the Participants’ assertion came at the October 1969 federal election. The result replicated what had occurred at Menzies’s close shave election of 1961. Despite a massive swing to the ALP nationally, Labor still emerged with less than a third of the House of Representatives seats in Victoria, cruelling its chances of winning government. This outcome and a VCE-induced debacle at the May 1970 Victorian state election finally provoked the ALP’s Federal Executive to authorise intervention in the branch in August that year.³⁶ The fundamental objective of this move was to break the party’s post-Split order. Intervention brought about a devolved power structure and the empowerment of rank and file members, ushering in a party that was more reflective of, and responsive to, the wider society. As a direct consequence of the changes, there was an influx of new blood into the party’s parliamentary ranks. The incoming MPs tended to be younger, more highly educated, and middle class. Proponents of intervention were in no doubt that it was a vital prerequisite to federal Labor’s election win under Whitlam in December 1972. And, while party reform took longer to bear fruit at the state level, in April 1982, in a moment of exquisite political providence, Labor finally broke through to form government, led by John Cain Jnr. That watershed victory presaged a remarkable transformation in Victorian politics, with the ALP now to become its dominant force.

The Split’s Electoral Gift to Menzies

All of this, of course, was in the future in the Menzies era. The most salient point for this chapter is that the dysfunction of the post-Split Victorian ALP was a gift to Menzies and also to Henry Bolte, the state’s Liberal Party premier from 1955 to 1972. The figures illustrate the catastrophic electoral effects of the Split on Labor in Victoria, as well as showing incontrovertibly that the Liberal Party was the chief beneficiary of those effects.³⁷ Concentrating on the federal elections of 1955, 1958, and 1961, the ALP’s average primary vote in Victoria in those elections was 39.4 per cent. Compare this with 49.9 per cent in New South Wales, 49.4 per cent in South Australia, 48.8 per cent in Tasmania, and 42.6 per cent in both Queensland and Western Australia. This amounted to a mean Labor primary vote in the non-Victorian states of 46.7 per cent, which was more than 7 per cent higher than the Victorian average. The ALP’s average seat share in the House of Representatives in Victoria in those three elections, of 30.3 per cent, was also worse than in any other state excepting Western Australia.

That Victorian Labor’s dismal electoral position was due to the Split is demonstrated by the fact that the Liberal Party’s primary vote in Victoria was not especially superior to its performance in the other states. At the three elections of 1955, 1958, and 1961, the Liberal Party gained an average vote of 38 per cent in Victoria, which trailed behind 44.1 per cent in Tasmania, 42.9 per cent in Western Australia, and 43.8 per cent in South Australia. That its position was unassailable in Victoria was directly due to the watertight preferences it received from the DLP (and its forerunner, the anti-communist Labor Party). The DLP averaged a primary vote of 15.2 per cent in Victoria in the three federal elections of 1955, 1958, and 1961. This was far above its support in any of the other states, with its mean vote in the non-Victorian states at 7 per cent—less than half its level in Victoria. The flow of preferences from the DLP to Menzies’s Liberal Party enabled the latter to enjoy an average seat share in the House of Representatives in Victoria in the elections of 1955, 1958, and 1961 of 56.6 per cent, which was better than its performance in any other state bar Western Australia.

In sum, that Victoria was ‘the jewel in the Liberal crown’ during this period can be attributed to the exceptionalism of politics in the state—an exceptionalism manifest in the woeful electoral underperformance of the Labor Party. Labor was, to put it mildly, a failed political project in Victoria until its course was changed by federal intervention at the beginning of the 1970s. This weakness was, as this chapter demonstrates, a peculiarity with a long history but which had been further entrenched by the impact of the 1955 ALP Split. Indeed, in the years following the Split, Victoria was effectively a oneparty government state, that party being the Liberal Party.

In The Prince, his famed sixteenth-century meditation on statesmanship, the Florentine diplomat and philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli proposed that fortune governed roughly half of human affairs.³⁸ The annals of political history in Australia—and elsewhere—indeed teach us that a leader requires their fair share of serendipity if they are to prosper.³⁹ It was to Menzies’s great advantage to be in power when the Labor Opposition was crippled by the split due especially to its dire situation in Victoria. It delivered him a charmed electoral run. Nevertheless, it ought not be construed that Menzies was merely one of politics’ lucky generals. The model of a consummate prime minister, preternaturally gifted but also seasoned by his many years of leadership, Menzies expertly capitalised on his good fortune, parlaying it into a supremacy unrivalled in Australian politics before or since.

CHAPTER 3

‘FALLING DULLY’ ON HIS EARS

Menzies, Bolte, and the Travails of Australian Federalism

Stephen Wilks¹

MANY OBSERVERS HAVE portrayed Menzies in his 1949–66 prime as largely unchallenged from within. But consider this from Jack Horsfall, founder of the Australian Financial Review and a keen observer of matters political, about that other eminent Victorian Henry Edward Bolte: ‘Menzies held no fears for him’ to the point that ‘the Labor Premiers of Queensland and New South Wales marvelled at his audacity’.²

Henry Bolte is the leading Liberal of the Menzies era after the eponymous prime minister. Forty-two years after Bolte retired as premier in 1972, John Howard could still write that ‘in my experience the affection and respect for Bolte among Victorians, especially those of a Liberal persuasion, was second only to that for Menzies’.³ Advice to the author from former Bolte MPs Ian Smith, Alan Scanlan, and Jim Taylor notably contradicts the claim made by Bolte’s first biographer, Peter Blazey, that the wily old premier emulated a ‘dictatorial conception of leadership’.⁴ The trio instead attest to the importance that Bolte attached to maintaining dialogue with his parliamentarians, among others.

Blazey added that Menzies became Bolte’s ‘political hero’, and wrongly asserted that in his early days as premier he would not have dared attack Menzies.⁵ Menzies was supposedly even an ‘ultimate political father-figure’ to Bolte,⁶ perhaps reflecting Blazey having been a postgraduate student in the University of Melbourne’s political science department when psychobiography rode high. Bolte and the Victorian division of the Liberal Party in fact sorely tested Menzies’s conception of the Australian federation by challenging his retention of uniform income taxation. This was the practice whereby state governments no longer raised income taxes of their own but instead relied on income tax levied solely by the Commonwealth, some of which was reimbursed to the states.

Uniform taxation was introduced by the Curtin government in 1942, supposedly as a temporary wartime measure. The detail of its evolution can be eye-wateringly complex (anyone keen on this is referred to Mathews and Jay’s 1972 work Federal Finance, a more interesting tome than its title suggests). But in short, although a state could still legally continue to impose its own income tax, Curtin made the reimbursement grants to the states conditional on their ceasing their own income taxes. This basic formula withstood a High Court challenge from the states in 1942. Menzies had himself proposed something less heavy-handed in 1941, and during his post-1949 ascendency largely maintained Curtin’s model.

Uniform taxation now sits alongside the Engineers’ Case of 1920 as a major step in the centralisation of policy and fiscal power. Bolte was determined to reverse this by having income tax powers returned to the states. He was not appeased by special extra Commonwealth grants to his beloved Victoria, nor by tinkering with the calculation of the reimbursements. Remarkably, he did not seem unduly deterred by the political implications of resurrecting state income tax. His complaints constituted a political ally’s most strident contemporary questioning of Menzies as a politician of principle. Yet Menzies biographies, even Allan Martin’s two-volume work, attach next to no significance to dealings with Bolte. Accounts of Bolte himself cast issues of federalism primarily in terms of his later spectacular clashes with John Gorton.

Some accounts struggle to explain Menzies’s seemingly Delphic position on federalism, casting him as being either contradictory or simply passive in dealing with the states. Campbell Sharman in a 1995 edited collection, The Menzies Era, skilfully summarised the fiscal facts and figures involved and noted the prime minister’s pragmatism, but concluded there was ‘no distinctive Menzies era in intergovernmental relations’.⁷ John Roskam in the 2006 proceedings of the Samuel Griffith Society Conference provided an incisive and critical assessment by a committed federalist.⁸ The distinguished economist JJ Pincus, perhaps slightly head-scratchingly, saw Menzies as ‘a pragmatic centralising federalist’.⁹

This chapter focuses on the tensions of federalism under Menzies, and how his handling of uniform taxation illustrates his balancing of party principles with the pressures of national government. A somewhat Boltean perspective is taken. Menzies’s return to office in 1949 had seemed to offer the prospect of the restoration of pre-war arrangements. In actual fact, on few other issues was he so frequently accused of compromising his party’s principles. This he managed by putting the onus for change onto six squabbling states, while seemingly being open to their guidance—Menzies at his most understatedly effective.

A few words about these two very different individuals are in order to set the scene of their relationship as clashing heads of government. Both hailed from small town Victoria, but Bolte remained of the countryside, whereas Menzies became thoroughly urbanised. Although Bolte does not obviously lend himself to analysis of intellectual influences—when a student newspaper editor asked what prominent writers had influenced his thinking, he replied, ‘I’m not sure that any have’¹⁰—both he and Menzies were educated within a broadly similar set of cultural values, the cultural puritanism that Stephen Chavura and Greg Melleuish have written of.¹¹ Bolte was more personally comfortable with business leaders than was Menzies, perhaps limiting his preparedness to question the conveniences of protection and regulation. Bolte famously (even notoriously) reduced ‘quality of life’ to ‘peace of mind based on the home and the garden’,¹² while Menzies valued far wider ideals of the human spirit, notably in relation to education.

Bolte nonetheless admired Menzies for his tactical skills and his role in reviving liberalism in Australia. Both were more cautiously instinctive than intellectual in their approach to government. Like Menzies, Bolte stood for practical government rather than overt ideology. They presided over and managed change in a manner that was more responsive than innovative, and so came to symbolise stability. Both deeply respected the institutions of government. And both, incidentally, are among the very few major post-war political leaders to have resigned at a time of their own choosing.

Menzies considered that he had personal experience of ‘both the theory and practice of federalism which must be quite uncommon’.¹³ This included being a former deputy premier, and a legal counsel in both the Engineers’ Case and Victoria’s 1926 challenge to the Bruce– Page government’s tied grants to the states for rural roads (the latter being one of Menzies’s less successful court appearances).

Interestingly, Bolte believed Menzies favoured his native Victoria. Exhibit A here is that in 1965 Menzies declined to assert exclusive Commonwealth control over Bass Strait oil and gas. Victoria alone would share in the royalties arising, with Menzies obligingly removing this from the agenda for the forthcoming Premiers’ Conference when even Bolte thought it should be discussed.¹⁴ More broadly, political scientist Katherine West believed that Menzies had ‘an intense distaste for New South Wales’, but didn’t elaborate beyond adding that it was both personal and political.¹⁵

Electorally, the two leaders well knew that they benefited from each other. Bolte’s capacity to help deliver Victoria at federal elections was crucially important in 1961, when the Liberals’ retention of all their Victorian seats saved the Menzies government from defeat. ‘I held Victoria while every other state went to water,’ said Bolte.¹⁶ Yet there was still a discernible caginess in what Menzies said publicly about the Victorian premier. His public commentary when Bolte retired in 1972 was underwhelming: ‘a jolly good Premier. Even when I had a few problems with him.’¹⁷

The lingering point of tension in their relationship was uniform taxation and the associated calculation of Commonwealth reimbursements to Victoria. Initially, under Curtin, these were based on the average income tax revenue collected by each state in 1939–40 and 1940–41. This disadvantaged Victoria, as Albert Dunstan’s Country Party government of the time had imposed low taxes and provided correspondingly limited services. Victoria in 1942–43 received just 19.4 per cent of total income tax reimbursement grants, despite the closest census (1947) indicating that it had 27.1 per cent of the national population.¹⁸

In January 1946 the Chifley government, in declaring uniform taxation to be permanent, also decided to put the reimbursement formula on a more properly needs-based basis. Again, the details are complex, but in sum, the aggregate level of grants was increased from the wartime amount, and from 1948–49 would rise in line with the percentage increase in total population of the states since 1947, with the resultant amount further increased by half the percentage increase in average wages over the level in 1946–47. The distribution of grants between the states would slowly transition to an adjusted state population basis by 1957–58 that drew on the number of school-age children and population density, people living in remote areas being more costly to service.¹⁹ Overall, this formula favoured the poorer states, with Victoria’s relatively high population density helping to maintain its sense of being disadvantaged.

Even when the Liberal Party was being formed around the time of these contentious changes, Menzies seemed ambivalent about scrapping uniform taxation. In his ‘Forgotten People’ talks he did not assume a firm stance. This is despite uniform taxation not sitting well with liberalism, by centralising power and muddying accountability through vertical fiscal imbalance. It fell more to the Liberal Party organisation to generate early objections that from 1946 onwards echoed indecisively around its federal and Victorian councils. In May that year, two NSW federal council delegates, AD Bridges and JE Bentley, proposed that an alternative to uniform taxation be referred for fuller consideration by a special committee ‘representative of each state and the federal parliamentary leader’.²⁰ Menzies objected that he ‘would not be able to devote the requisite time’, and the matter was instead sent to a committee of representatives from each state division.

At the Premiers’ Conference of July 1952, Menzies duly described uniform taxation as ‘thoroughly unsatisfactory’, and assured the state leaders that ‘the Commonwealth Government is abundantly and promptly willing to discuss with them the return to the states of their taxing power’.²¹ Victoria seemed the most interested, and in October 1952 the state government, then headed by the Country Party’s John McDonald, followed this up with a High Court challenge (which was not pursued).

Reports on the technical issues involved, prepared by Commonwealth and state treasury officers, were considered at premiers’ conferences in February and August 1953. The onus was effectively placed squarely on the states by the Commonwealth proposing nationally uniform assessment laws, a single tax return, and each state nominating a percentage addition to the income tax collected within its boundaries by the Commonwealth that would meet their own needs.²² Western Australia and Tasmania, with their shallow tax bases, flatly opposed this: they were better off with the existing reimbursement system. Other states wanted the Commonwealth to withdraw from income tax to a degree that far exceeded the amount of the reimbursement grants it had been making.²³ Seven years later, looking back on these exchanges of 1953, Menzies found it ‘most unlikely that uniform tax would end unless there arose a revolutionary change in the opinions of governments’. Indeed, there was ‘no positive evidence that most of the state governments really want a return of taxing powers on terms which would be reasonably acceptable to the Commonwealth’.²⁴

So, when Bolte became premier in June 1955, uniform taxation looked firmly established. Yet he at once launched the last significant challenge to Commonwealth fiscal dominance. His foremost objection was that uniform taxation restricted his government’s ability to respond to growing pressure on services and infrastructure. All states during the 1940s and 1950s faced rising demand for services as total populations grew, a population bulge increased the numbers of school-age children, students studied for longer, and hospital services expanded.²⁵

Worse still, the Commonwealth’s total repayments continued to favour the smaller states. Readers will no doubt appreciate that there are statistics and there are statistics, but most data supports Bolte’s complaint that Victoria in 1955 remained worse off than other states. For example, taking the average per capita Commonwealth payments to all six states as 100 per cent (including special purpose grants), Victoria received just 79.40 per cent in 1955–56, by far the lowest of any state.²⁶ Those taxes which Victoria did control lacked income tax’s propensity to expand as the economy and incomes grew, aided by progressive tax rates. These included entertainment tax (threatened by the imminent arrival of television), stamp and probate duties, and land tax (difficult for the Liberals to increase given its perceived socialist connotations).

In his policy speech for the 1955 state election that brought him to power, Bolte promised to seek the restoration of income taxation powers to Victoria, inconveniently referencing Menzies’s still nominally standing offer to return tax to any state that wanted it. In June 1955 at his first Premiers’ Conference, having been in office for under three weeks, the precocious Bolte publicly described Victoria’s reimbursements as ‘hopelessly inadequate’. It was at this time that Menzies responded in classically disdainful language: dire warnings that the states faced ruin ‘fell dully’ on his ears,²⁷ evidently drawing on John Ruskin’s 1838 poem ‘Remembrance’.

Which didn’t deter Bolte, who on 28 July wrote to Menzies formally accepting his offer to return income taxing powers to the states.²⁸ This was followed on 30 September by a breathtakingly assertive letter berating the prime minister for a system known to ‘destroy and deny the power of the state to raise revenue’. Aggravated by Commonwealth policies such as high immigration, it was ‘the very antitheses of the maintenance of the independence within their respective spheres of the constituent bodies politic which together go to make up the federal Commonwealth’.²⁹ Bolte effectively wrote Menzies off by concluding that he saw no alternative to another High Court challenge.

Bolte drove this challenge almost alone, albeit with the tepid participation of Premier Joe Cahill of New South Wales. In October 1955 Bolte made one of his rare trips to Sydney to seek his fellow premier’s support. Initially, Cahill demurred, reportedly as the ALP state executive had reminded him that party policy supported uniform taxation. His government finally agreed in November to join Victoria, which issued the formal court challenge the following month.

In August 1957 the court essentially upheld its 1942 ruling, the main variation being the invalidation of a provision that taxpayers must pay income tax due to the Commonwealth before paying any state income taxes. Disappointed rather than deterred, Bolte maintained that the fight was not just a matter of defending parochial interest: ‘what would be the use of defeating socialism in the states if all the power still resides at one central point?’³⁰

Nor was help provided by the federal council’s policy research group. Made up of MPs and party officials, this was established in 1956 ‘to review the principles which must continually sustain and inspire us as a Party’,³¹ and was chaired by one W McMahon MP. It affirmed in 1957 the unlikelihood of uniform taxation being abolished, especially as Labor premiers, ‘obedient to the party line, must oppose changes’, while adding that it served the national interest as a means by which the Commonwealth ‘influences the balance and direction of movement of the national economy, preserving it from dangerous fluctuations’.³²

Victorian persistence was succeeding mainly in stoking prime ministerial ire. Menzies was in 1957 sufficiently concerned to agree to a Federal Executive proposal to appoint a liaison minister for each state. (Harold Holt was assigned to Victoria.) In September that year he drew the attention of the party’s federal president, Lyle Moore, to a recent Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial article in which unspecified ‘spokesmen of the Liberal Party’ accused the Commonwealth Government of ‘double talk’ over ending uniform taxation. Such ‘buck passing of the worst description’, wrote Menzies, ‘could hardly have been more misleading or damaging if it had been written by the Labour [sic] Party’.³³ Moore, a reputed centralist, duly passed Menzies’s angry missive on to his Victorian counterpart, Rutherford Guthrie, with a warning that such ‘inaccurate public statements’ threatened ‘the recent steps taken by the Federal Executive and the prime minister to bring about closer contact between our federal and state parliamentarians and the organisation’.³⁴

A confidential (and unsigned) 1958 report to the party’s Victorian State Executive and parliamentary Liberal Party members in Victoria effectively summarised Bolte’s continuing case. Victoria received over 40 per cent of the nation’s immigrants, who imposed more fiscal stress than did natural increase by creating immediate demand for schools and other services. Over 1947–58, the state’s population had grown by 33 per cent, as against 28 per cent in the five other states. The report also compared estimated income tax to be raised in each state in 1958–59 with total reimbursements, concluding that on a per capita basis, Victorians would contribute £23/4s, but receive only £19/18s back, by far the worst deal for any state. (For New South Wales the estimates were £21/14s as against £20/12s; for Queensland it was £15/6s and £22/8s.)³⁵ In June 1958 Bolte tried to convene a special meeting of premiers, only for Menzies to maintain that the Commonwealth would ‘readily fall in with some scheme that is agreeable to the states’, pointedly adding that criticism of the reimbursement formula by New South Wales was ‘not made very violently’³⁶—more elegant Menzian understatement!

Bolte was not greatly assisted by the party’s federal platform. As of 1959 this gently advocated ‘the maintenance unimpaired of the federal system’ and the unspecified ‘re-arrangement of powers between the states and the Commonwealth’, suggestive of its indecision in the face of conflicting internal currents. Bolte at this time even raised what he saw as the Canadian system of the provinces having the choice of imposing income tax, with those which did not receiving grants from the central government.

Support for Bolte continued to come mainly from within the party organisation, particularly the Victorian division. Hence, for example, a resolution of the 1958 Federal Council at Victoria’s behest that uniform taxation ‘would be a strong weapon in the hands of a socialist government’. Elected MPs were less drawn to the issue, possibly as public engagement was increasingly limited to supporting a better reimbursement deal for Victoria. The party’s Federal Policy Committee told Menzies and the six state Liberal leaders late in 1958 that uniform taxation ‘does not arouse much interest as a political issue among the electors’, with opposition to its abolition arising largely from ‘fear [of] greater complexity in their own taxation arrangements and heavier taxation’. It recommended ‘a truce in public campaigning’ as a federal election loomed.³⁷

Yet there were also growing signs that the federal fiscal system needed reform. In October 1958 both Queensland and Victoria applied for special grants: Cahill at the March 1959 Premiers’ Conference thought this outrageous coming from so large a state as Victoria. Publicly, the prime minister in his policy speech for the 1958 election amplified his increasingly evident personal support for uniform taxation by stating that although ‘the sound general principle is that each government should raise its own taxes’, this ‘cannot be strictly applied in Australia. If, for example, Western Australia could spend only what was raised in Western Australia, the development of that state would be impaired. We are all Australians, after all.’ Yet he was still ‘willing to enter into arrangements with the states for the resumption by them of taxing powers on terms just to taxpayers’, and committed his government to ‘a special Premiers’ Conference to discuss this, and indeed the whole tangled problem of Commonwealth–states financial relations’.³⁸

Menzies’s concession that the existing formula was unfair, and the subsequent review at the two premiers’ conferences of 1959, provided the setting for the Bolte government’s last major push on uniform taxation. It sought a full rejigging of the reimbursement formula, or at least the extraction of another special grant from the Commonwealth. At the final of the two conferences, Victoria was represented by Bolte’s trusted deputy, Arthur Rylah (the premier himself being absent on one of his many international trade missions). Rylah accepted the new formula proposed, with reservations, but it was soon apparent that the big states had effectively lost out in this major adjustment of Commonwealth reimbursements. This was as Western Australia, Tasmania, and South Australia had most of their 1958–59 special grants included in the base for calculation of their new formula-based reimbursements that began the following year. Per capita payments to these states increased by far more than they did for the others.³⁹ Victoria’s per capita payments went up in absolute terms from 1958–59 to 1959–60, but its percentage share tumbled from 26.6 per cent to 24.8 per cent.⁴⁰

Menzies’s approach to the law was never rigidly prescriptive. It should not, he felt, be ‘something desiccated and detached, unrelated to the life of human beings’.⁴¹ It was in a similar vein that during the 1950s he pondered the basic settings for the Australian federation. By 1960 his views were sufficiently settled for him to deliver his fullest public statement on federalism. In doing so he effectively dispatched uniform taxation to the museum of great Australian lost causes, alongside new states and bank nationalisation.

For his September 1960 Allen Hope Southey Memorial Lecture, delivered at the new Wilson Hall at the University of Melbourne, Menzies opened with a nod to his party’s principles. Opposing control from Canberra was, properly applied, ‘a good instinct’, but he added that ‘national consciousness’ should have priority.⁴² The unilateral return of taxing powers by the Commonwealth ‘would be pregnant with disaster’.⁴³ Since Federation there had been but an ‘inadequate achievement of this splendid, united sense of nationhood’.⁴⁴ What he wanted—and had largely achieved—was a fine balance of two great goals: ‘that the growing financial power of the Commonwealth is exercised in a way as to permit the states to discharge their own constitutional duties’, but without ‘excessive emphasis upon purely local rights which is proving such an impediment to the creation of a truly national sentiment and pride’.⁴⁵

That the Southey lecture was personally conclusive for Menzies is evidenced by his reiterating its main principles in his 1967 Central Power in the Australian Commonwealth, based on lectures he delivered at the University of Virginia. Menzies proclaimed himself an advocate of federalism on practical grounds ‘particularly for a large continent’, but also in principle as ‘one of the true protections of individual freedom’.⁴⁶ A fully capable central government is essential: ‘as international affairs engage our attention more and more, and affect our lives more and more, it is frequently ludicrous that the National Parliament, the National Government, should be without power to do things which are really needed for the national security and advancement’.⁴⁷ Menzies was avowedly reinforcing the post-war consensus about strong central government capable of managing the national economy. More bluntly, Lee Kuan Yew recalled Menzies telling Harold Macmillan during discussions on Britain’s intention of joining the European Economic Community that ‘I run a federation. I know how federations work’; either they were centripetal as in Australia, or they were centrifugal until they finally broke apart.⁴⁸

Menzies also doubled the number of intergovernmental bodies that gave the Commonwealth a say in an array of different issues, but this was over all of sixteen years. Most such bodies were specific in coverage and, it appears, usually essentially consultative in nature. One finds it difficult to see an unduly heavy hand behind the creation of such entities as the Government Geologists’ Conference, the Biennial Conference of Australian and New Zealand Milk Authorities, the Australian Fisheries Council, the Tourist Ministers’ Council, and the Formal Conference on Weights and Measures.⁴⁹

Bolte had his own set of principles, one of which was not to be appeased by short-term pay-offs from the Commonwealth. In 1964, when the uniform taxation issue was a dead letter for other states, he proposed to introduce unilaterally a marginal individual income tax, regardless of a half-Senate election being due late that year, and condemnation by other premiers and the Commonwealth (which Bolte asked to collect the tax on Victoria’s behalf). He denied that this was a mere negotiating tactic: ‘I cannot be bought off. I am not in the market.’⁵⁰ He also raised the dire alternative of Victoria being forced to bring in poker machines. But his government’s loss of a crucial byelection on 10 October ended both the majority in the upper house it had won at the recent state election, and the proposed state income tax. In 1965, when the 1959 formula expired, Bolte did at least elicit a special payment to Victoria of $1.2 million that was incorporated into its base for calculating grants in later years.

Near the end of his long premiership, Bolte rued his failure to end uniform taxation as ‘my greatest disappointment’, finally conceding that ‘I don’t think the states can convince the Commonwealth to hand taxing-power back’.⁵¹ Menzies, he much later recalled, ‘always said he believed in federalism. But I don’t think he ever quite practised it. However, you would never nail him down to saying he never believed in federalism.’⁵² In fact, Menzies, he thought, had no intention of ending uniform taxation, and wasn’t ‘any more a federalist than Gorton’,⁵³ a dire Boltean insult. With some justification, Bolte attributed this to Menzies having never been truly tested by six states acting in unison. Any real chance of the prime minister giving way had passed even when Bolte first became premier.

Bolte’s usual caution about picking fights makes his audacity all the more remarkable. His confidence probably had much to do with the Liberal Party’s very strong state divisions, unlike the ALP where the federal party could intervene in state branches. These two outstanding Liberal Party leaders nonetheless managed their tensions, with Bolte limiting his public criticism of Menzies to issues of federalism. He never wholly rejected Menzies as he later did Gorton, and was not cast as a party traitor. The uniform taxation debate shows that the still young Liberal Party could cope with significant disagreement within its ranks. In-principle regard for federalism gave state leaders latitude to remonstrate with Commonwealth counterparts.

As frustrating as Bolte found premiers’ conferences, they provided interesting opportunities for him to study the technique of other participants. He considered Menzies to be a master tactician, whose insistence on agreement by all states clearly indicated his real intention on uniform taxation. Both Menzies and Holt, recalled Bolte in his inimitable way, were ‘buggers’ at the conferences, but with Menzies being ‘a lot tougher’ than his successor.⁵⁴ He was contemptuous of the other eminent premier of his time, Thomas Playford of South Australia, particularly given Playford’s extraction of concessions using such means as a veiled threat to challenge the constitutionality of the Snowy Mountains scheme. To Bolte, Playford ultimately was ‘a pirate’ and ‘the greatest bore’, who ‘thought he owned the Loan Council and the Premiers’ Conference’.⁵⁵ Privately, Playford told Bert Kelly, a South Australian member of the House of Representatives, to disregard his public protestations over uniform taxation, for it suited him that ‘the Commonwealth gets the odium for raising the money and I get the credit for spending it’.⁵⁶ Bolte, by contrast, was characteristically open.

Yet, for all this, the prediction by Bolte’s other biographer, Barry Muir, that the uniform taxation cause was ‘one with which his name will be forever synonymous’⁵⁷ was wrong. The Ronald Ryan hanging of February 1967 remains what he is best known for.

Bolte’s assessment that Menzies’s support for federalism was largely nominal is harsh. The retention of uniform taxation qualifies but does not invalidate David Kemp’s view that Menzies had a ‘life-long belief in the federal system’.⁵⁸ This was reflected in his hastening slowly in applying Commonwealth power via section 96 tied grants to address sectarianism through funding non-government schools. Menzies was rightly cautious about the ready use of tied grants that later eroded Australian federalism. Specific purpose grants rose from about 18 per cent of total Commonwealth grants to the states in 1949 to 23 per cent in 1965. This was not only over sixteen years, but was predominantly for debt charges, education, health, and roads, suggestive of being targeted and purposeful. Under Whitlam the figure jumped to some 40 per cent.⁵⁹

It seems improbable that for Menzies, ‘maintaining the constitutional division of powers that characterises a federation was a minor consideration in the framing of national policy and in the development of Australian nationalism’.⁶⁰ He rejected the Curtin–Chifley governments’ efforts to consolidate power with the Commonwealth. His caution and pragmatism were a considered approach that only eventually included the effective consolidation of uniform taxation in Australian governance. That Menzies imposed on the states only when he perceived a major national need reflects greater caution than was employed by his immediate predecessors and many of his successors.

Observance of broad principle qualified by considered responses to pressing specific needs is the defining feature of the Menzies prime ministership. Where possible, he preferred to let a big issue unravel itself over time, making modest concessions in the interim. On federalism, he acted contrary to his instincts but only as he felt compelled by the national interest, his foremost compromise with the ideals of liberalism. Uniform taxation is thus pragmatic Menzies on full display—slowly assimilating the pros and cons, while cocking an ear to political reactions. He adroitly avoided damaging conflict by keeping most premiers tolerably satisfied by tinkerings with the reimbursement formula and the provision of special grants.

Menzies’s actions did not resolve federalism in Australia: such will never be achieved. It is easy to adopt a naive rationalist approach that depicts the federal system as inefficient and outdated, but far harder to find a more practical alternative for so vast a nation. We also face the force of history—it would take a huge and undoubtedly ultimately wasted effort to try to get rid of the states, or even just uniform taxation.

The persistence of uniform taxation is thus a fundamental part of an admittedly awkward national compromise: such is the nature of government and its ugly sibling, politics. With no realistic option of its abolition, we are left to find other means of making our federation work better, such as by Commonwealth restraint in the use of tied grants. Those of us who are still federalists will surely welcome this—not least because by preserving diversity in government, federalism makes our political world so much more interesting.

CHAPTER 4

RG MENZIES AND THE CREATION OF THE RESERVE BANK

Selwyn Cornish¹

AT A CABINET meeting on 3 April 1957, the Coalition government led by RG Menzies resolved to separate the commercial and central banking functions of the Commonwealth Bank. The decision led to the passing of legislation in April 1959 to create the Reserve Bank of Australia as the nation’s central bank.

Menzies’s personal involvement in the establishment of the Reserve Bank has been understated by historians of central banking in Australia. At first, he opposed the complete separation of the commercial and central banking functions of the Commonwealth Bank. But by 1956 he was beginning to have second thoughts, and by early 1957 he was convinced that a separate central bank had to be created in order to appease the demands of the private trading banks, Liberal Party supporters, and members of the federal parliament. SJ Butlin and CB Schedvin, in their histories of central banking in Australia, scarcely mention Menzies’s involvement in the separation of the commercial and central banking functions of the Commonwealth Bank and the creation of the Reserve Bank.² Allan Martin, Menzies’s most detailed biographer, only refers briefly to the issue in his two volumes.³

The decision to terminate the commercial operations of central banks is commonly regarded as a significant event in the evolution of central banking. Charles Goodhart, a British authority on central banking, declared that ‘it was the metamorphosis from their involvement in commercial banking, as a competitive, profit-maximising bank among many, to a non-competitive non-profit-maximising role that marked the true emergence, and development of proper central banking’.⁴ MH de Kock, former head of the South African Reserve Bank, asserted in his classic study of central banking that a ‘requisite of a real central bank is that it should not, to any great extent, perform such banking transactions as accepting deposits from the general public and accommodating regular commercial customers with discounts or advances’. He argued that ‘if a central bank has a large commercial banking business, such operations might come into direct conflict with its functions as the bankers’ bank, the lender of last resort and the controller of credit’.⁵ De Kock went on to say that it has

come to be recognised over a wide range of countries that the success of a central bank depends largely upon the whole-hearted support and co-operation of the commercial banks, and that such co-operation can be effectively obtained only if it refrains from competing directly with them in their ordinary banking business, except when compelled to do so in the national economic interest.⁶

The Origins of Central Banking in Australia

The legislation passed in April 1959 to establish the Reserve Bank of Australia resolved an issue that had been debated since the depression in eastern Australia in the 1890s. With the collapse of many banks, and the loss of savings deposited in those banks, there was a desire for the creation of a government-owned bank that would guarantee the security of bank deposits. Such a bank might be a government-owned competitor to the private commercial banks, offering a deposit guarantee to its customers. An alternative proposal was to create a central bank similar to those established in some European countries, of which the Bank of England was the exemplar. Such a bank would act as the lender of last resort to the banking system with the object of providing stability to the financial system. Another possibility was a composite government-owned commercial bank and central bank. Such a bank might provide a deposit guarantee to its commercial customers while acting as the lender of last resort to the banking system—in other words, a combined commercial bank and central bank.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia was established in 1911 as a government-owned trading and savings bank, having no central banking functions other than banker to the Commonwealth Government. During the next four decades it acquired an extensive array of central banking functions: it floated loans for the government during and after World War I; it took responsibility from 1920 for the printing and issuing of Australian currency notes; from 1924, trading banks had to settle their interbank balances through accounts held at the Commonwealth Bank; and during and after the Great Depression, the Commonwealth Bank managed the exchange rate and began to exert influence over the determination of interest rates. Additional central banking functions were assigned to the Commonwealth Bank during World War II, when a number of direct controls were introduced for the purpose of conducting monetary policy and providing financial system stability. In other words, the Commonwealth Bank evolved from a government-owned commercial bank into a composite commercial bank and central bank.

Advice from the Bank of England

The development of the Commonwealth Bank as a composite commercial and central bank, however, did not accord with advice it received from the Bank of England regarding the principles of ‘true central banking’.

Lacking experience in operating a central bank, the Commonwealth Bank sought assistance in 1926 from the Bank of England, whose governor, Montagu Norman, was then invited to visit Australia to explain how the Commonwealth Bank could function as a central bank. Norman declined the invitation because of pressing commitments elsewhere. Instead, he suggested that Sir Ernest Harvey, one of the Bank of England’s most senior officers, should go to Australia in his place. In the meantime, Norman provided a list of principles of central banking for the Commonwealth Bank to consider and perhaps adopt. One of them was that a ‘Central Bank should not compete with other banks for general business’. Another of Norman’s principles was that a ‘Central Bank should be the banker of all other banks in its own country’.⁷ The Commonwealth Bank was clearly not conforming to these and several of Norman’s other principles of central banking. For a start, it was heavily involved in the provision of commercial services, in effect competing against the private trading banks for business. Nor was it acting as a ‘bankers’ bank’. This involved, among other things, the private trading banks maintaining their reserves at the Commonwealth Bank, which could be drawn upon by the central bank for the purpose of preserving the viability of commercial banks experiencing runs on their deposits.

Harvey arrived in Australia in 1927 and spent a considerable amount of his time engaged in discussions with the government (including the prime minister and the treasurer), senior staff of the Commonwealth Bank, private bankers, business leaders, and Commonwealth and state officials. In an address to the Victorian branch of the Economic Society of Australia in April 1927, he asserted that

the first object to which a central bank’s efforts should be directed is not the making of profits, but service to the country … it should … refrain from doing any business capable of involving it in liabilities which may restrict its freedom of action in the discharge of its true central bank functions.⁸

He agreed with Norman that a ‘central bank should not ordinarily compete with the trading banks for general banking business’. And he insisted that ‘the trading banks’ reserves should stand to their credit on accounts opened by them with the central bank’.⁹

After Harvey left Australia, the Commonwealth Bank entered into negotiations with the private trading banks. A major topic of conversation centred on the trading banks keeping their reserves with the Commonwealth Bank as the central bank. However, the banks refused, arguing that the Commonwealth Bank, being their major competitor, could not be trusted with their reserves. It was likely, the banks contended, that the Commonwealth Bank would use their reserves to compete against them. In an attempt to induce the banks to change their minds, they were assured that the Commonwealth Bank would not compete aggressively against them. Furthermore, the Commonwealth Savings Bank would be provided with its own statutory authority, thereby allowing a degree of separation to exist between it and the central banking activities of the Commonwealth Bank. Again, the banks refused to entertain the idea, on the grounds that the Commonwealth Bank was not only the central bank but also a commercial bank actively engaged in competition with them for business. To leave their reserves with the Commonwealth Bank, the banks asserted, would give it a competitive advantage.

EG Theodore and the Central Reserve Bank

In 1929 the Labor Party, led by James Scullin, won the federal election. In May 1930, Treasurer EG Theodore introduced a Bill into the parliament aimed at establishing a separate central bank, to be called the Central Reserve Bank of Australia. The commercial functions of the Commonwealth Bank were to remain with the Commonwealth Bank, which would revert to being a government-owned commercial bank. Theodore stressed that the principal object in creating a separate central reserve bank was that the private banks would not agree to maintain their reserves with the Commonwealth Bank because it was a competitor of the private banks. As he informed the parliament:

An attempt was made to enable it [the Commonwealth Bank] to develop into a central reserve bank; but it has not succeeded in fulfilling the function of such an institution, and cannot be regarded as a central reserve bank. The principal obstacle in the way of such a development was the attitude towards the Commonwealth Bank of the private trading banks. They declined to deposit any considerable portion of their reserves with it, because they realized that such reserves might be used to further its active competition with them.¹⁰

In the event, the proposed legislation to create the Central Reserve Bank of Australia as a separate central bank was approved by the lower house of the federal parliament, where the government commanded a majority, but it was rejected by the Senate, which was dominated by the Opposition parties.

The Royal Commission of 1935–37

Following the 1934 federal election, the Coalition government led by Joseph Lyons established a royal commission to report on the ‘monetary and banking systems at present in operation in Australia’. It strongly supported the development of central banking in Australia and the retention of the composite nature of the Commonwealth Bank, arguing that the commercial functions of the Commonwealth Bank assisted its central banking operations.¹¹ Here, the royal commission claimed that conducting monetary policy was difficult in Australia because there existed no short-term money market to speak of. Unlike the situation in Britain, where the Bank of England conducted monetary policy through market operations by raising or lowering its discount rate—the ‘Bank Rate’—the lack of a short-term money market in Australia meant that attempts by the monetary authorities to buy and sell securities on the open market would create considerable volatility in the price of securities, and hence in yields, resulting in financial uncertainty and confusion.

By adjusting interest rates on its commercial deposits and loans, explained the royal commission, the Commonwealth Bank could influence monetary conditions in Australia, and ultimately the level of economic activity and employment. The commission concluded that the ‘present structure of the Commonwealth Bank, consisting as it does of a central bank with trading bank powers and a savings bank, is, in our opinion, essential to the efficient exercise of its functions as a central bank’.¹² While it conceded that ‘it is unusual for a central bank to carry on trading bank activities and to control a savings bank’, it added that

we consider it desirable that the Commonwealth Bank should do both. Through its trading bank activities it possesses powers of competing with the trading banks which can be exercised as and when required … We are of the opinion that the use of its trading bank activities as an adjunct to central banking policy is in keeping with its central bank functions and is to be approved.¹³

Several attempts were made after the release of the royal commission’s report to obtain the banks’ approval to leave their reserves on deposit at the Commonwealth Bank. Once again the banks refused, on the grounds that the Commonwealth Bank was not only the nation’s central bank but their major competitor. When the ALP came to office in November 1941, it didn’t bother to seek the approval of the private banks to maintain their reserves at the Commonwealth Bank. Instead, it invoked the special wartime provisions of the Australian Constitution to compel the banks to lodge up to 100 per cent of the annual increase in their assets in so-called Special Accounts held at the Commonwealth Bank. This mechanism—the Special Accounts procedure—together with other direct controls, including interest rate controls on deposits and loans, and controls limiting bank lending, were continued after World War II through the 1945 Commonwealth Bank Act and the 1945 Banking Act.

The 1953 Amendments to the Commonwealth Bank Act

Following the war, the trading bank activity of the Commonwealth Bank experienced a significant increase in its share of total bank deposits and advances. Of total trading bank deposits, the Commonwealth Bank’s share in 1948 was 7.5 per cent; it rose to 11.6 per cent in 1954, and to 15 per cent in 1960.¹⁴ In other words, within a period of twelve years, the Commonwealth Bank doubled its share of total trading bank deposits. The private banks responded by claiming that this expansion was due largely to the fact that the Commonwealth Bank was not subjected to many of the direct controls imposed on the private banks for monetary policy purposes—the Special Accounts procedure in particular, but also interest rate, lending, and liquidity controls.

As a result of the favourable conditions enjoyed by the Commonwealth Bank, the private banks began to agitate for the separation of its commercial and central banking functions, enlisting the support of the various bank officers’ associations, chambers of commerce, the press, and Liberal Party backbenchers. The Commonwealth Bank, led by its governor, Dr HC Coombs, strongly resisted calls for separation, arguing that the commercial operations of the Commonwealth Bank strengthened its central banking functions, and quoting the 1930s royal commission in support of his case.

As the calls for separation grew louder through the early 1950s, Coombs advised the government that the commercial activities of the Commonwealth Bank could be separated from the central banking functions without enforcing a complete separation of the two. The trading bank function, for example, could be provided with its own body corporate and general manager, with the Commonwealth Bank retaining its single board of directors and common staffing arrangements for both its commercial and central banking operations. Prime Minister Menzies supported Coombs, as did the deputy prime minister and treasurer, Sir Arthur Fadden, the leader of the Country Party.¹⁵

In his autobiography published in 1981, Coombs stressed that there were essentially two reasons why he wanted the commercial activities of the Commonwealth Bank to continue. ‘I had long believed,’ he wrote, ‘that if the economy faced a serious depression, with widespread unemployment and declining investment, the central bank could make effective policies to counter these conditions most readily if it could control directly the activities of a major commercial bank.’¹⁶

The second reason mentioned by Coombs related to staffing, and arose from his visits to central banks around the world. He reported that he had been ‘struck’ by the

tendency of those long established [central banks] to become conservative and routine in their policies and thinking, to become heavily weighted in their top echelons by older men, in other words to show symptoms of institutional old age. It had always seemed to me important that the central bank function should be conducted by men intellectually vigorous, sensitive to social and intellectual change and willing, indeed, anxious to learn and to experiment. For these reasons I believed these functions should be performed by people youthful and innovative in their outlook.¹⁷

For Coombs, the benefit of having an extensive network of commercial bank branches meant that

it was possible to place such men who had run through their period of creativeness in positions which recognised their special performance so far and the continuing capacity it promised. They were equipped by their experience in central banking to see the system as a whole and were therefore much better commercial bankers than those without such experience. This capacity to turn over fairly rapidly most of the small but important central banking staff ensured vitality in the conduct of its functions.¹⁸

In 1953 the Commonwealth Bank Act was amended along the lines that Coombs had recommended: the name of the trading bank function of the Commonwealth Bank was changed from the General Banking Division to the Commonwealth Trading Bank and given a separate statutory authority—a similar arrangement to that provided in 1928 for the savings bank activities of the Commonwealth Bank, which had been renamed the Commonwealth Savings Bank. Steps were also taken to ensure that the CTB was subjected to the same direct controls as the private trading banks, including the Special Accounts procedure. With these developments, it was argued that the private banks could no longer legitimately claim they were being subjected to unfair competition by the Commonwealth Bank.

Menzies Changes His Mind

The compromise adopted in 1953 soon came under renewed attack by the advocates of separation, especially by the private trading banks, aided and abetted by the Fairfax press and an increasing number of Liberal Party backbenchers, especially those holding seats in and around Sydney. Towards the end of 1956, Menzies was beginning to think that the demands for separation had reached a point where serious consideration had to be given by the government to the complete separation of the commercial and central banking functions of the Commonwealth Bank.

At a meeting of Cabinet on 23 October 1956, Menzies announced that he and Fadden would be meeting with senior representatives of the trading banks that afternoon to review the existing bank legislation. The following day, Menzies reported to Cabinet that the concerns raised by the banks would be discussed at party meetings the next day. Following these meetings, Menzies announced at a press conference on 25 October that he and the treasurer would hold further discussions with the trading banks and Treasury officials in early February 1957 to resolve the issues still in dispute.¹⁹

The foreshadowed meeting with representatives of the trading banks took place on 12 February 1957. A press statement drafted by the banks after the meeting drew attention to the two major amendments to the existing legislation requested by the banks: the establishment of ‘a true and proper Central Bank entirely separated from any trading functions or activities’, and the ‘replacement of the special accounts provisions of the Banking Act by a system of statutory reserve deposits’. The statement asserted that the ‘banks are unanimous in their opinion that these amendments are essential in the national interest and in establishing the banking system which will best serve to ensure Australia’s economic stability’. It expressed the banks’ concern ‘with what could happen under the existing legislation in other hands’, claiming that ‘most of the difficulties in the banking system stem from the Chifley Banking Act of 1945’ which, the banks alleged, ‘was designed to squeeze the Trading Banks out of existence by putting impossible controls on them’. The statement also argued that ‘an atmosphere of full trust, confidence and co-operation is difficult to achieve when the Central Bank is an active trading competitor with the Trading Banks and while the staff of the Central Bank and the Commonwealth Trading Bank are freely interchangeable’.²⁰

On 15 February, Menzies drafted a memorandum entitled ‘Banking’,²¹ which highlighted the dilemma he was now facing. While he said that he was able to appreciate the technical issues that might confront the central bank if it no longer had the support of a trading bank, he was worried about the growing support in the Liberal Party and among its supporters for separation. He believed ‘that the largely misconceived agitation now going on will not be stilled unless we have a separate board [for the commercial activities of the Commonwealth Bank]’. On balance, he admitted that he still believed ‘that on the merits the best thing for the banking structure, both public and private, would be to leave it alone’. Yet he agreed that ‘it still remains a matter for judgment as to whether our own people will allow us to leave it alone’.

Menzies was especially critical of the banks’ argument that it was unusual for central banks in other countries to operate commercial enterprises. For Menzies, the ‘analogy with other countries can … be misleading. It does not necessarily follow that what is appropriate in, say, the United Kingdom, should be appropriate in Australia.’ For instance, he said, ‘we have in Australia, no short-term money market, and, therefore, can’t employ the flexible techniques of the discount rate’. Further, parliament ‘has no control over interest rates’, and what was more, ‘we have gross seasonal fluctuations of overseas income from our primary products and, therefore, have marked fluctuations in overseas funds which have such an impact on internal banking liquidity’. He thought it followed from considerations such as these that, ‘in Australia, the Central Bank must have the greatest possible measure of power to meet any monetary conditions or economic emergency’. And if ‘this involved the Central Bank doing some things which central banks don’t do overseas’, he ‘would be quite unaffected. The circumstances of all countries are different. Ours in Australia are, for the reasons I have mentioned, probably unique.’

Menzies went on to stress, however, that ‘this didn’t mean we should not be prepared to consider the case of the trading banks’. On the contrary, he thought ‘we should consider them and … in a sympathetic way’. But he insisted that they should be considered ‘on the merits and not under attack or abuse’. He was ready to agree that ‘changes should be made. But they should be made on the merits and not merely because of some alleged analogy with other countries’. His final point was that ‘if all we decide to do amounts to no more than instalment of banking legislation, leaving the agitation to continue and flourish, we would be better advised to do nothing. For the banking structure needs nothing so much as a political holiday.’ Having decided what changes ‘we are prepared to make and having discussed them with the parties’, it was important, he said, to ‘stand firm. Indeed, we should insist that we expect the support of the parties, the banks, and their staff for such reasonable proposals as we make or adopt.’

When Cabinet met on 19 February the issue of separation was on the agenda.²² The record of the meeting stated briefly that Cabinet decided ‘in principle’ (Decision 632(M)) in favour of the Commonwealth Trading Bank being separated from the Central Bank. The Trading Bank would have its own board of directors and ‘would be subject to the general directives of the Central Bank in the same way as other trading banks’. The Rural Credits Department would remain part of the Central Bank, while the Industrial Finance Department and the Mortgage Bank Department would join the Trading Bank. It was also agreed that ‘the Special Accounts system would be abandoned and replaced by a system of reserve deposits by the trading banks with the Central Bank’. Where the Savings Bank would fit into this new structure had yet to be decided. As a commercial operation it seemed logical to separate it from the Central Bank and place it with the trading bank. But there was concern within the government—and among the trading banks—that a combined Commonwealth Trading and Savings Bank would pose a formidable challenge to the private trading banks.

In the days following the Cabinet meeting, Menzies wrote another note bearing the title ‘Banking’,²³ dated 24 February. In it, he said he still thought ‘the best thing for the banking structure, both public and private, would be to leave it alone’, but it

remains a matter for judgment as to whether our own people will allow us to leave it alone. If through our resolution to do nothing, banking remains a burning issue, it will, I think, materially weaken our position at the next election and may well encourage our opponents not only to re-unify themselves, if that be possible, but also to promote revolutionary banking legislation in a new Parliament in the event of our defeat.²⁴

‘All these considerations,’ he concluded, ‘would lead us to making a modicum of change provided we had the most categorical assurance from both banks and Members of Parliament that the amendments brought the whole argument to an end.’ It was his ‘wish’ that he

knew the right answer to this matter. On balance, my feeling is to make a settlement along the lines indicated. But I am not unaware of the dangers. I think that with the suggested amendments being made we might, before long, have the most terrible uproar from the Trading Banks about the competition from this vastly enriched Commonwealth Trading Bank. My fear [is] that in the case of some of our recalcitrant members the appetite for attacking the Government will tend to grow by what it has fed on.²⁵

On 17 March, Menzies wrote a further note on the subject of ‘Banking’, its contents containing ‘my revised thought in the light’ of recent party meetings and Cabinet discussions.²⁶ He lamented that the government had become ‘impaled upon the horns of a dilemma’. According to ‘political judgment and experience’, it was clear to him that banking ought to be awarded a ‘Parliamentary holiday’. And he feared that ‘the introduction of what will undoubtedly be contentious banking legislation will tend to drive the two wings of the Labour Party together; and will, by making banking a sort of chronic political issue, enable the next Labour Government to pass quite extreme legislation’. But at the same time it seemed probable that ‘the overwhelming majority in the [Liberal] Party will have none of this argument and are hot for banking changes’. Therefore, ‘by leaving banking alone’, Menzies predicted that ‘we will not put the matter at rest; it will be agitated month after month by our supporters until some day we are, under the most humiliating circumstances, practically compelled to bring down proposals’. In weighing up these various considerations, he was inclined to think that ‘there are no votes to be gained by legislation but many votes to be lost’. Providing the Liberal Party clearly understood his ‘own view’—that he would prefer not to embark on further banking legislation—he felt ‘I must prefer unity in the Party to everything else. If, therefore, the Party can be united by banking legislation and continue to be disunited in its absence, banking legislation must be produced.’

That said, he then proceeded to specify what he thought should be done, setting out his thoughts as follows:

1 Changes must interfere as little as possible with the present employment structure of the Commonwealth Bank as a whole. They must not give rise to any belief that—(a) the Central Bank is being weakened; (b) the security of the Commonwealth Savings Bank is being impaired; (c) the competitive position of the Commonwealth Trading Bank is being unduly enhanced or unduly restricted.

2 There is great intrinsic merit in the Central Bank being organically detached from competitive trading banking. (i) The Commonwealth Trading Bank should therefore be given a separate Board to which its manager will be responsible. (ii) The Rural Credits Department, being non-competitive and having no chance of existence except with Central Bank funds, should remain under the Board and Governor of the Central Bank. (iii) The Mortgage Bank is noncompetitive with the Trading Banks since it does business they would not entertain. It deals essentially with long term finance for rural development. The Industrial Finance Department, except for its Hire Purchase activities, relates to industrial development proposals which the trading banks would not entertain. Therefore the Mortgage Bank and the Industrial Finance Department (minus hire purchase) should be grouped together into a development department under the Board and Governor of the Central Bank. (iv) The Hire Purchase activities of the Industrial Finance Department should go over to the Commonwealth Trading Bank. (v) The Commonwealth Savings Bank should remain with the Commonwealth Trading Bank for all purposes of management, employment and premises.²⁷

Menzies’s note of 17 March provoked an extraordinarily emotional response from Fadden, which he addressed to Menzies on 22 March 1957. Remaining opposed to separation, Fadden wrote that:

It has been a source of great worry to me in recent weeks that our views should have diverged on the subject of banking legislation. We have been able for so long now, and on so many great economic and financial issues, to find common ground that I have been deeply troubled at our apparent inability to work completely together and present a united front on this banking matter. It is all the more disturbing because I believe we have always shared, and still share, the view that, politically as well as for the sake of the economy and of the banking system itself, the wisest course would be, if at all possible, to persuade the parties to avoid further legislation.

You have heard me argue this point of view so often that I hesitate to weary you with repetition; but the longer I have thought about the matter the more overwhelming the cause against legislation seems to become. I fail entirely to see what anyone can gain by legislation. It clearly would not give the private banks the protection against future nationalisation which they say they need. It would not ensure them a basis of fairer competition from the Commonwealth Trading Bank. Indeed, with all sincerity, I believe that if the Commonwealth Trading Bank were set apart under an authority of its own, and especially if control of the Savings Bank were also given to such an authority, it could become a far more dangerous instrument of competition and a weapon of the utmost potential destructiveness in the hands of some hostile future government.

Again and again we have agreed, too, on the desirability of giving the banking system a period of freedom from legislation so that it could have a chance to settle down and find a basis for efficient working in the interests of the economy and of co-operation between the Central Bank and the private banks.

In all earnestness, I humbly and respectfully request you to counsel our Cabinet colleagues and our parties against legislation. We should, I think, inform the parties that, after most prolonged and careful consideration of the issue, the Government is not prepared to take further Parliamentary action on banking.

In asking you to take this course I would not wish you to think that I fail in any degree to appreciate the difficulties which will be created. I am only too well aware how strongly a number of your Party supporters feel about the issue and I know that, in refusing action we would invite resentment and continued criticism. At the same time, I do not need to remind you that there are also numerous people in your Party as well as in mine who are just as strongly opposed to legislative action which they feel to be unnecessary and unjustified. Looking at the matter as Party Leaders we cannot, I suggest, ignore this aspect of the position. Were we to go to Parliament with legislation, the Parties behind us would be far from unanimous, at least in point of conviction. Possibly most, if not all of those who are opposed to legislation would nevertheless give formal support to it in Parliament. Would this, however, be a fair thing to ask of these people, knowing as we do that amongst them are many to whom we owe gratitude for unwavering past loyalty.

What I suggest then is that you and I and our Cabinet colleagues should again take the matter up with the joint parties and present to them a firm front against legislative action on banking. My own belief is that although we would no doubt expose ourselves to some attack within the parties and still more from outside supporters of the parties, we would succeed in carrying the parties with us. That, I consider, would be the most desirable and, in the long run, the most fortunate outcome of the whole episode.

If I should prove to be wrong in this, and if we should find in the parties an overwhelmingly strong desire for legislation, then we would of course have to decide the form and content which legislation should take.²⁸

Menzies’s immediate response to Fadden is unknown, though he was aware presumably that a vote at a joint party meeting would result in support for separation. In a note addressed to Fadden on 2 April, Menzies said he believed it was ‘vital that before the Easter adjournment we should tell our own people what Cabinet policy is on banking’, adding: ‘So that you may understand the point of view that I have reached, I will take the matters mentioned in your letter of 22nd March and deal with them quite briefly.’²⁹ He agreed with Fadden that ‘the wisest course in the interests of banking and of the banks would be to keep the whole subject out of politics for as long as possible. So on this matter we are completely at one.’ But it was clear to him that, ‘in my own Party at least, there is a substantial majority opinion demanding legislation; if this is so, then a refusal by us to produce proposals would keep the whole issue open and tend to make it more and more bitter’. It was for this reason that, ‘on balance, my own conclusion is that we should recognise this demand, but should make it clear that the proposals put forward by us are final and that we should demand a united support for them’.

Having reached this conclusion, Menzies stressed again that he ‘would like very much to counsel our Parties against legislation, and to give the powerful reasons which support that view’. But were he to do that—and he was sure that Fadden would agree—‘the whole thing would be in the newspapers the next day, our divisions of opinion would be advertised and our opposition encouraged’. In concluding the note, he said he thought ‘we should formulate legislative proposals, applying to them our own unfettered judgment and without worrying about whether the banks have asked for them or not’. He was convinced that the key components of the legislative changes should include the separation of ‘the Central Bank physically and in point of staff from the Trading Bank’; the ‘Governor of the Central Bank should no longer administer the Trading Bank’; and the ‘Rural Credits Department should remain with the Central Bank’.

On each of these issues Menzies believed that he and Fadden were in general agreement. Where their ideas diverged was on the issue of a separate board for the Trading Bank. Here, Menzies believed that it was ‘logical to give the Commonwealth Trading Bank a separate Board and that unless we do nobody will seriously believe that we have effectively detached the Central Bank from Trading Bank activities’. He was aware that Fadden felt ‘quite strongly (in line with some of the evidence before the Royal Commission) that it is a good thing that the Central Bank should have a Trading Bank’. If this was also his view, he would, like Fadden, ‘not want to have a separate Board’. But he was sure that, ‘if we were starting all this business from scratch, we would not think of giving the Central Bank a Trading Bank to operate’.

The Government’s Decision

Cabinet finally, at its meeting on 3 April, took the decision (Decision No. 699 (M)) to amend the banking legislation.³⁰ The brief minutes of the meeting, drafted by the acting secretary to Cabinet, EJ Bunting, filling in for Sir Allen Brown, stated that ‘the Prime Minister informed me today that the government had decided to introduce amending banking legislation’. It has been agreed, Bunting wrote, that ‘the Central Bank will be separated physically and in point of staff from the Trading Bank’; that ‘the present Special Accounts procedure will be replaced by a system of Reserve Deposits’; and ‘the Rural Credits Department will remain with the Central Bank’. Bunting added that there had been no firm conclusion on whether the Commonwealth Savings Bank would be attached to the Central Bank or to the Trading Bank, and if it were to be attached to the latter whether it would be subject to directions by the Central Bank regarding the use of its funds. The delay in making a decision on this matter was due, Bunting explained, to various technical issues about which advice was still pending. He added that there was a desire by the government for the drafting of the new legislation to proceed without delay, the aim being to have it passed in the current session of parliament.

Fadden wrote to Menzies on 10 April immediately following a meeting of Country Party MPs, and before a joint meeting of the Coalition parties was due to take place later that day, to warn him that members of the Country Party (with ministers ‘refraining’) had ‘unanimously reaffirmed their previous unanimous decision against [the] proposed banking legislation’.³¹ He remarked that the publicity surrounding the proposed amendments

has caused my members grave and individual concern … They believe that the convictions expressed, and the sincere stand taken by their leader [Fadden], have been ‘leaked’ to the press from Cabinet and Joint Party meetings to the calculated hurt and detriment of our party members—who are and have always been 100% supporters of the Liberal Leader of the Composite Government [Menzies]—consequently, such press and other campaigns have determined my members against voicing views or declaring attitudes in this [today’s] Joint Party meeting.³²

Fadden concluded that

you [will] appreciate and agree, in all the circumstances and experiences, with this declaration … because you yourself, in your letter of 2nd instant to me, advised that, on account of publicity dangers, you cannot adequately and properly counsel our parties against legislation without running the risk of the whole thing being in the newspapers, etc. etc.³³

Fadden went further, saying that

you [Menzies] will agree that as far as myself and my party are concerned, this is closing the door after the horse has gone, if only for the undoubted reason that while I, being Treasurer and Leader of the Country Party, have declared and exposed my sincere convictions and unequivocal attitude to the Joint Parties, and, as a consequence, to the bankers, their supporters and the World, you have been able to refrain from so doing.³⁴

As for himself, Fadden said that ‘I am as happy and as popular as a half-caste in Bombay—the whites despise him, the Hindus won’t have a bar of him’. He hoped that ‘in any assessment of the real feeling and decisions of the meeting, due regard must be given to my members’ attitude and their reasons for it’. In particular, he wanted Menzies to know that members of the Country Party supported ‘(a) Opposition to [the] proposed legislation’; and ‘(b) Desire future full consideration and decision of the form and scope of whatever legislation in principle is now decided upon’. He insisted, furthermore, that it

must not be interpreted or accepted as ‘taken for granted’ that silence by my Party members, for the reasons herein conveyed, is consent, or that they are in any way committed to support the nature of bank reform recommended to, and accepted by, this meeting in the absence of the fullest details of the implications and the complexities of its form and scope.³⁵

How—or if—Menzies responded to Fadden’s blast is unclear. But it would appear that the joint party meeting went ahead on 10 April and that it endorsed the Cabinet resolutions passed on 3 April. After the meeting, Menzies held a press conference where he announced that the separation of the central banking and commercial operations of the Commonwealth Bank would proceed, with the preparation of legislation beginning as soon as possible.³⁶ The Treasury, in consultation with the Commonwealth Bank, was assigned responsibility for drafting the legislation.

Parliamentary Approval

The legislation to create the Reserve Bank was introduced into parliament in late 1957 by the treasurer, Sir Arthur Fadden. It passed through the House of Representatives without great drama, though the ALP opposed all fourteen separation Bills, largely on the grounds that separation would weaken the central bank. But the Coalition parties lacked majority support in the Senate. This became clear when the two Democratic Labor Party senators and the single Queensland Labor Party senator announced they would be voting with the ALP to oppose separation. This meant the government parties and the combined opposition in the Senate (the ALP, the DLP, and the QLP) now commanded an equal number of votes; an even vote resulted in a negative outcome and the legislation failed to pass the Senate in late 1957, and again when it was reintroduced in early 1958. The government could have sought a double dissolution of both houses of parliament. But with a general election for all 122 House of Representatives seats and thirty-two of the sixty Senate seats due before the end of 1958, it decided to wait for the scheduled election. The election was held on 22 November and resulted in majorities for the government in both houses of parliament.

Fadden chose not to contest the 1958 election and was replaced as treasurer by Harold Holt, who reintroduced the banking Bills that had been presented to parliament in 1957 and again in 1958. The Bills were approved by both houses of parliament in April 1959. But because of the large amount of administrative work that still had to be undertaken, including the division of staff and physical assets between the Reserve Bank and the Commonwealth Banking Corporation, it was not until the beginning of 1960 that the separate institutions began operations. The Reserve Bank—the new name for Australia’s central bank—opened for business on 14 January 1960. The commercial functions of the former Commonwealth Bank were assigned to the new Commonwealth Banking Corporation, which included three separate statutory authorities: the Commonwealth Trading Bank, the Commonwealth Savings Bank, and the Commonwealth Development Bank (which comprised the former Mortgage Department and Industrial Finance Department of the Commonwealth Bank). The Commonwealth Banking Corporation was provided with its own board of directors and managing director, while the three statutory bodies each had general managers.

Assessments of Separation

Assessments of the outcome of separating the commercial and central banking functions of the Commonwealth Bank were largely positive. SJ Butlin later wrote that, as the dust settled in the early 1960s, ‘it could be said that for the first time this century the principle of a sustained degree of control and restraint over the trading banks, of the existence of an effective instrument for the exercise of monetary policy, in short of central banking, had been taken out of politics’. In the following decades, Butlin continued, ‘the [Reserve] Bank modified and improved its techniques and its use of them, free of recurrent embroilment in fights over its existence, structure and role’.³⁷ CB Schedvin concluded that the ‘beneficial effects of separation exceeded expectations. Almost immediately, banking disappeared from the political agenda. Even the Labor Party soon came to accept that separation had not diminished the central bank’s power and that no benefit would be derived from re-integration.’³⁸

As for Coombs—who was appointed governor of the Reserve Bank—he admitted that

the change brought me relief from the problems of reconciling different, if not conflicting purposes. It meant that a source of irritation between me and my colleagues on the one hand and our banking clientele on the other was removed. And, to be truthful, its removal was followed by a significant improvement in our working relationships with the private banks. I was able to devote my whole energies to central banking issues.³⁹

For the private banks, while they were more inclined after separation to accept the leadership of the Reserve Bank and its role as the nation’s central bank, separation did little to arrest their declining position within the Australian financial system. The Commonwealth Trading Bank continued to increase its share of total trading bank deposits, from 14.5 per cent in 1959 to 20.8 per cent in 1970. Furthermore, the private banks lost business to the rapidly expanding non-bank financial institutions, including finance companies, building societies, merchant banks, and credit unions.

While the private banks failed to win back business as a result of separation, the two clear winners were Prime Minister Menzies and the Reserve Bank. For Menzies, achieving separation meant that he was able to preserve the stability of his government; indeed, at the federal election in November 1958, the Coalition increased its majority in the House of Representatives and gained an absolute majority in the Senate. For the Reserve Bank, separation meant that it could concentrate its attention on central banking issues, including the development of new operating procedures, and the pursuit of its mandate of price stability and full employment. In short, the central bank no longer had to divert its attention to commercial banking issues.

Conclusion

Several forces were responsible for the separation of the commercial and central banking functions of the Commonwealth Bank. The private trading banks were relentless in their determination to see this occur, arguing that they were experiencing unfair competition because their major competitor, the Commonwealth Trading Bank, was part of the same institution as the nation’s central bank. The leading newspapers, especially The Sydney Morning Herald, supported the trading banks and their case for separation. An increasing number of backbench members of the Liberal Party were also influential advocates of separation.

Menzies’s role in the government’s decision to support separation was crucial. No doubt he was conscious of the growing support for separation from traditional supporters of the Liberal Party, including the private banks and the metropolitan press. There was also the strong—and increasing—support from backbench members of the Liberal Party, and Menzies was not prepared to allow them to destabilise the government. Above all, it was Menzies’s political acumen that led him in the end to support separation and the creation of the Reserve Bank as a standalone central bank.

In a broader sense, it seems that Menzies believed that history was determined principally by the ideas and actions of individual men and women. He dismissed, for example, Marx’s economic (or materialistic) interpretation of history. Writing to the Oxford historian AL Rowse in August 1958, Menzies revealed that he had ‘long since come to the conclusion that Diogenes was right and that at all stages and under all circumstances we must look for a man’.⁴⁰ Cameron Hazlehurst in his biographical study of Menzies declared that ‘as long ago as 1934, Sir Robert himself wrote approvingly of what he called a “new historical method”, which would “bring the great men and women of earlier days so near to us that, while their heroic proportions may be occasionally diminished, their actual existence becomes credible and significant”’.⁴¹ In the case of the separation of the commercial and central banking functions of the Commonwealth Bank—and hence the responsibility for creating the Reserve Bank—‘the man’, it would appear, was Menzies himself.

CHAPTER 5

STANDING FOR THE ‘MOST AMPLE PROVISION IN RESPECT OF OLD AGE AND SICKNESS’

The Menzies Government and Health Reform

David Furse-Roberts¹

CAMPAIGNING IN THE Fremantle by-election of 1945 for the seat vacated by the recently deceased Prime Minister John Curtin, Menzies declared his new Liberal Party as ‘standing unhesitatingly for the most ample provision in respect of old age and sickness’.² This chapter will discuss the seminal health and aged care reforms of Menzies’s second term as prime minister. It will cover his government’s main legislative initiatives on public health, including the National Health Act (1953), the Aged Persons Homes Act (1954), the mental healthcare assistance package of 1955, and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, implemented in 1960.

When Menzies returned to the prime ministership in December 1949, he sought to chart a new direction in health policy from the preceding Chifley Labor government. The hallmarks of this new approach included a publicly funded yet non-socialised health system based on the ‘contributory principle’, the preservation of the doctor– patient relationship, and the engagement of faith-based organisations and charities in the provision of aged care. At his keynote election speech on 10 November 1949, the Liberal leader outlined his vision for national health policy. This entailed not only the introduction of a new national health scheme but efforts to improve supplies of milk, fruit, and vegetables to enhance daily nutrition.³ Resolved to expand health services across the country, he called for the building of new hospitals, and the extension of bush nursing and flying doctors to bring medical care to people in remote areas. Appreciating the necessity of life-saving medicines and vaccines, he appealed for ‘a nation-wide drive for immunisation against disease’, and believed that with a targeted campaign, it would be possible to eliminate diseases such as tuberculosis from Australia within ten years.⁴

Liberalism and Public Health

To better appreciate the landmark health reforms of Menzies and his government, it is valuable to explore the liberal philosophy from which they sprung. With popular thinking tending to see health policy initiatives as more typical of Labor governments, it would be easy to assume they had a democratic socialist or social democratic impetus. Yet the inspiration behind Menzies’s initiatives in healthcare was profoundly liberal. The mid-twentieth-century Australian liberalism of Menzies stressed not only individual self-reliance, but also the care of the poor and the sick. In his William Queale Lecture in 1954, Menzies affirmed that:

The protection of the poor and the weak, and the elimination of the causes of poverty and weakness are undoubtedly the supreme business of politics. One can recognise that without in any way ceasing to insist that the first duty of every man is to do his utmost to stand on his own feet, to form his own judgments, and to accept his own responsibilities.⁵

Menzies’s approach to healthcare, that of maximising individual initiative and free enterprise on the one hand, with the provision of ameliorative social welfare measures on the other, accorded with the thinking of key twentieth-century liberal theorists such as Friedrich Hayek. In The Road to Serfdom (1944), Hayek maintained that ‘there is no incompatibility in principle between the state providing greater [social] security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom’.⁶ Balancing these two principles, the Menzies government delivered healthcare policies calculated to ameliorate the suffering of the sick and the frail aged without compromising the interests of private enterprise and individual initiative. Channelling liberal instincts, such an approach would seek more of the ‘private enterprise answer’ to the treatment and care of the sick—‘private enterprise’ meant not only commercial businesses but also charities, churches, and voluntary associations.

Menzies’s Health Ministry

In the delivery of his health policy up until 1961, Menzies was assisted by two ministers for health, Earle Page and Donald Cameron.

Born in Grafton, New South Wales in 1880, Earle Page trained as a doctor at the University of Sydney, opened a private hospital, and worked briefly as a medical surgeon during World War I. Elected to federal parliament as the member for Cowper in 1919, he became one of the leading lights of the new Country Party, leading it into coalition with the then Nationalist Party from 1923, and with its successor, the United Australia Party, until 1939. Following the death of Joe Lyons in April 1939, Page served briefly as Australia’s eleventh prime minister until the UAP elected Menzies as its new leader and prime minister three weeks later. As is widely known, the relationship between Menzies and Page was difficult, yet Menzies in 1949 was magnanimous enough to appoint Page his first minister for health. In his six years in the portfolio, Page was responsible primarily for the passage of the 1953 National Health Act. After two failed attempts to introduce a national health insurance scheme, in 1928 and 1938, the 1953 Act represented Page’s crowning achievement. He was able to claim that he had erected ‘a bulwark against the socialisation of medicine’ while also meeting the necessary health requirements of all the population.⁷

In January 1956, Donald Cameron succeeded Page as Menzies’s second minister for health, serving until December 1961. Born in Ipswich, Queensland in 1900, Cameron also trained as a doctor in Sydney and served as a medical officer at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital during the late 1920s and early 1930s. With the outbreak of World War II, Cameron served in the Medical Corps of the Australian Army and was awarded an OBE in 1946. Joining Menzies’s fledgling Liberal Party, Cameron was elected to the new Queensland seat of Oxley at the 1949 election. Once appointed minister for health, he was responsible for proposing an increase to the rate of the Commonwealth additional hospital benefit in 1957, and introducing the 1959 National Health Act that rebirthed the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.⁸

National Health Act 1953

Starting with Earle Page as health minister, the first major health reform of the Menzies government was the introduction of the National Health Act 1953.

Just prior to his election as prime minister in 1949, Menzies had expressed his opposition to the nationalised system of healthcare favoured by the incumbent Labor government. Seeking to avoid a government monopoly in the provision of healthcare, Menzies called for a ‘common sense’ approach entailing ‘the co-operation of the States, of the municipalities, of hospital managements, of friendly societies, and of the medical, dental, pharmaceutical and allied professions’.⁹ Such an approach would not only seek more of the ‘private enterprise answer’ to the treatment and care of the sick, it would also serve to protect the sanctity of the voluntary ‘doctor–patient relationship’. Menzies declared that his government would stand ‘utterly opposed to the socialist idea that medical service should become a salaried government service, with all its implications, penalising skill and experience and destroying the vital personal relationship between doctor and patient’.¹⁰

Differentiating the Menzies government’s new approach to healthcare from that of the preceding Chifley Labor government, it introduced new legislation to deal comprehensively with certain medical services and medical benefits. Under the National Health Act, these would be based upon contributions made by individuals to a Medical Benefits Fund conducted by a registered medical benefits organisation, supplemented by a ‘Commonwealth Benefit’, being a benefit payable by the Commonwealth in respect of a professional service rendered to a contributor.¹¹ According to Menzies, the underlying principle of these provisions was that ‘the individual doctor–patient relationship should be preserved, and the disadvantages of a fully nationalised and Government-conducted scheme averted’.¹²

Introducing the National Health Bill into parliament in March 1953, Page told the House of Representatives that the Menzies government had ‘endeavoured to bring into being a national health scheme that will remove from the people worry and anxiety caused by the cost of sickness’.¹³ According to Page, the scheme was ‘aimed at reducing costs to the patient, lessening sickness and creating confidence in the community’.¹⁴ Commending the Bill to the House as ‘the final and complete answer to the socialisation of medicine’, the health minister outlined some of its key features. Giving form to Menzies’s 1949 vision for a cooperative approach to health policy, the scheme would establish ‘a partnership with State governments, the professions and insurance organisations on a long-term basis’, to give ‘to all parties that sense of security needed to develop and provide a satisfactory and comprehensive cover against sickness for the whole of the community’.¹⁵ Page also pointed out that for a large federation such as Australia, the new health scheme was ‘unique in being made universal all over the continent of Australia’, attracting the cooperation of all state governments, doctors, and chemists. As to the tangible benefits the National Health Bill would deliver for the people, Page told parliament that ‘every stage of life is touched’. Free milk and immunisation would be provided for children in creches, preschools, and primary schools. Young people prone to tuberculosis would be protected. Everyone would be provided with free life-saving drugs, as well as hospital and medical benefits, while in regards to senior Australians, pensioners would receive free doctors and medicines.¹⁶

Appreciating that the cost of ‘free’ healthcare provisions was ultimately borne by taxpayers, the health minister reminded his parliamentary colleagues that ‘the great danger in any government-aided health scheme is the tendency to develop a psychology of dependence and diminished personal and community responsibility’. Whether it was health or welfare, Page held that ‘the fundamental aim of any social security scheme should be to raise the individual to a level at which he can help himself. Any such scheme should contain elements that encourage self-reliance and a sense of personal responsibility’. In the case of the Menzies government’s health scheme, this would entail individuals making a contribution towards the functioning and cost of the scheme. For Page, the contributory principle would not only avoid an entitlement mentality but protect the scheme from potential abuses. First, it would make the patient appreciate the rendering of a health service much more than if they had simply received it for ‘apparently nothing’. Second, the obligation for patients to make a contribution to the scheme themselves would invite a check that might not otherwise exist on unscrupulous suppliers of health services.

Speaking in support of the legislation, Page’s parliamentary colleague Percy Joske told the House of Representatives that ‘under the medical benefits scheme of this Government, medicine is not socialised, the patient is entitled to choose his own doctor, and the doctor is neither a servant of the State, nor bound to prescribe in accordance with a formula’.¹⁷ Both Menzies and Page were studious in preventing Australia from going down the post-war British path of a nationalised health service, in the form of the National Health Service, that had witnessed a palpable deterioration in the doctor–patient relationship and the general diminution of private medical practice.¹⁸ Referring to recent reports on the British health service, Page observed that doctors in the NHS worked under a panel system where they had thousands of patients, which frequently left them with minimal time to perform proper examinations.¹⁹ Thus, Menzies’s National Health Act would seek to conserve the doctor–patient relationship, with the proper involvement of private enterprise in the ministering of healthcare and treatment.

For both Page and Menzies, this preservation of the doctor–patient relationship was nothing short of sacrosanct, and a critical feature of the National Health Act. As an experienced medical practitioner himself, Page appreciated its indispensable nature, telling parliament that:

It is the personal, continuous contact of the doctor, with an interest in the patient and his family, that must be maintained. These results can be best obtained by maintaining the position, prestige and fullest usefulness of the general medical practitioner. His intimate contact and knowledge of the history, constitution, life and environment of the patient make the preservation of his opportunity to use to the full all modern improvements in knowledge and technique one of the most important factors in a national health scheme.²⁰

Invoking the Liberal emphasis on the welfare of the individual, Page went on to say that the ‘retention of the intimate doctor–patient relationship must also be supported by social and psychological factors that build up the morale, independence, benevolence and community spirit of the individual’.²¹ The esteem in which Page held the doctor– patient relationship was shared by Menzies, who remarked that: ‘Our family doctor knows us, our history and our oddities, sees us as individuals, and evokes a high degree of frankness which is based upon mutual confidence. There is no substitute for the diagnosis and therapy so produced.’²² Together with the care of the sick, the contributory principle, and freedom of choice for the patient, the doctor–patient relationship was one of the four great pillars of the new health scheme.

Aged Persons Homes Act 1954

The reform to general healthcare achieved under the National Health Act was followed by substantial reforms to Australian aged care under the Aged Persons Homes Act 1954, which gave churches and charities a greater hand in the provision of aged care facilities and services. In this vein, the Act was wholly consistent with Menzies’s approach of engaging private enterprise in the delivery of health and aged care. According to Menzies’s own account, the inspiration for this reform came from his wife, Pattie, who suggested that ‘the greatest social need for old people is that they should have a place of their own to live in’.²³ She then challenged her husband to ‘think up some scheme under which the Government could subsidise the building of proper accommodation’.²⁴ Giving this serious consideration, Menzies conferred with some of his Cabinet colleagues to propose an aged persons housing scheme to canvass at the 1954 election. In his election speech, the prime minister remarked that ‘there is no greater human problem affecting lonely old people than that of care and housing’. Appreciating the longstanding contribution of churches and charities in this field, he pledged that his government, if re-elected, would ‘provide on a pound for pound basis, money towards the capital cost incurred by churches and recognised charitable bodies and institutions for building homes for the aged, up to a total commonwealth contribution of £1 500 000 a year’.²⁵

Shortly after its re-election, the Menzies government executed its policy for aged persons with the introduction of the Aged Persons Homes Act. Under the legislation, the Commonwealth paid subsidies for the building of aged persons’ homes to non-profit organisations of which the principal objects or purpose were charitable or benevolent.²⁶ At one level, the policy was adopted because it was the most effective way of rapidly expanding the provision of aged care accommodation.²⁷ Most significantly, however, the initiative was deeply rooted in the concept of community philanthropy that Menzies regarded as so integral to social welfare.²⁸ With churches, ex-services organisations, and other charities receiving government grants under the legislation, they were able to provide personalised accommodation and services according to the needs of the individual.

Introducing the legislation to parliament, Menzies’s minister for social services, William McMahon, told the House of Representatives that the Commonwealth was anxious to provide leadership, ‘to find a solution to what is a delicate human problem—the care and companionship of aged people’.²⁹ On the economic side, the legislation would contribute to the capital cost of approved homes for aged people, while on the social side it would ‘enable older persons to live in surroundings as close as possible to those of normal domestic life, with all the associations we think of when we think of our home’.³⁰ In particular, ‘the companionship of husband and wife [would] be preserved’. McMahon’s colleague Senator William Spooner, the minister for national development, lauded the legislation as ‘breaking new ground’ in establishing a ‘new social service’.³¹

A few years after the passage of the Aged Persons Homes Act, Menzies addressed a Wesley Mission audience in Sydney, expressing his pride in what the Act had achieved:

Why is it … that I am so proud of this great matter of homes for aged people? It isn’t because they’re institutions … it’s because they are homes, it’s because they set out to reproduce for the individual … not the sense of the institution like the old asylums that one used to walk by as a boy but a home with friendliness in it, administered with loving kindness, the maintenance of friendships, the sense of personal identity and of personal dignity.³²

For Menzies, it was this characteristic that gave aged persons’ homes ‘an individuality and quality which really preserve the human dignity of the people who go into them’. Recalling his boyhood years in Ballarat from the early 1900s, Menzies had found himself ‘depressed’ by the pitiable plight of the elderly people who dwelt in the local ‘benevolent institution’. To him, even as a child, there was nothing about its cold, institutionalised atmosphere that appeared ‘to be consistent with human dignity’.³³ With this early experience etched in his memory, Menzies was resolved to help humanise the living conditions of elderly Australians through the Aged Persons Homes Act.

Buoyed by the Act’s initial success, the Menzies government increased the government grant ratio for charitable aged care providers from ‘pound for pound’ to ‘two pounds to one’. This added funding injection gave rise to more individual homes built for aged persons, that in effect resembled a ‘little flat’ with bathroom and kitchen amenities. Balancing personal privacy with community, the elderly people in this accommodation could live as if in their own homes, yet could mix with other occupants in common dining and sitting rooms.³⁴ Reflecting with pride on the development of these new, privately run aged care facilities, such as the one he opened in Ballarat on 21 September 1959, Menzies remarked:

What we have learned in these modern times, with these wonderful places, is the importance of individual human dignity—nobody looking down, but everybody looking across, meeting people in a perfectly normal, social sense … living in bedrooms and using diningrooms, and using sitting rooms and sun balconies and so on.³⁵

For Menzies, this was not simply an innovation in aged care policy but ‘one of the great revolutions of our time’, where such palpable improvements to the living conditions and dignity of senior Australians signified the progress of human civilisation. It gave concrete form to Menzies’s liberal philosophy that elderly people should be dealt with ‘not en masse but as individuals’.³⁶ Appreciating the popularity of the Aged Persons Homes Act reform, Menzies remarked: ‘I don’t think any of our schemes was ever more widely welcomed by the public or gave us a deeper satisfaction.’

Mental Healthcare Initiatives (1954–55)

In what was hitherto the domain of the states, the Menzies government made noteworthy innovations in mental healthcare. Since 1948, the Commonwealth had agreed to pay the states a benefit to cover the cost of mental healthcare patients, but in Menzies’s own words, this agreement ‘had produced very trifling results’.³⁷ Thus, when the agreement expired in 1954, the Menzies government was resolved to find a new way to address mental health. The prime minister accordingly commissioned a respected Melbourne-based psychiatrist, Dr Alan Stoller of the Victorian Mental Hygiene Authority, to undertake a survey of mental health facilities and needs in Australia. Released in 1955, the Stoller Report painted a grim picture of mental healthcare, with unacceptable overcrowding, an almost complete lack of curative or palliative measures, and a chronic shortage of professional staff and equipment in Australian mental hospitals.³⁸ To rectify this, the Menzies government offered £10 million to the states as part of a capital expenditure package of £30 million to increase and improve mental patient accommodation. Menzies noted that all the states accepted the Commonwealth’s offer and he subsequently converted it into an annual assistance package, until a new federal Act for mental health expenditure was introduced in 1964.

Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (1960)

Turning to the provision of affordable medicines, the Menzies government introduced the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme in 1960 to make life-saving medicines affordable for ordinary Australians.

The idea of the PBS was first proposed in 1944 by the wartime Curtin Labor government. It had even introduced legislation to bring it into effect, relying upon section 81 of the Constitution, which provided for the Commonwealth expenditure of public moneys. But while a PBS appeared attractive to many Australians with its provision of affordable medicines, the Australian Branch of the British Medical Association and other medical stakeholders were less than enthusiastic. This was not so much based on an objection to the PBS per se, but rather a suspicion that it could be tainted by the ‘socialism’ they saw as characterising the Labor government’s health program as a whole. The peak medical body feared that Labor’s PBS would amount to unwelcome government interference in their conditions of work and their pricing power.³⁹ Accordingly, vigorous opposition to the PBS from the BMA and other medical stakeholders resulted in a successful High Court challenge to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Act 1944 which rendered it unconstitutional.⁴⁰ In the Pharmaceutical Benefits Case,⁴¹ a majority of the High Court found that the power under section 81 was limited by section 51(xxiii) to ‘invalid and old-age pensions’, and thus did not extend to pharmaceutical benefits. In short, the provision of pharmaceutical benefits was not authorised by the Constitution, and thus fell beyond the powers of the Commonwealth Parliament.⁴²

The succeeding Chifley Labor government reintroduced the PBS after the successful carriage of a 1946 referendum gave it new powers to legislate it under the Constitution. The success of the 1946 referendum was made possible by the proposed addition of section 51(xxiiia) to the Constitution that the Chifley government had negotiated with Menzies. As leader of the Opposition, Menzies had supported the extension of the Commonwealth Government’s powers to legislate for the provision of maternity allowances, widows’ pensions, child endowment, unemployment, pharmaceutical, sickness, and hospital benefits, but stopped short of extending such powers to medical and dental services.⁴³ This was because it could raise the possibility of Australia adopting a nationalised health system, as had been the case in Britain and New Zealand. For this reason, Menzies proposed a compromise provision that extended the powers of the Commonwealth to the provision of ‘medical and dental services (but not so as to authorise any form of civil conscription)’. According to Menzies, the purpose of this qualifying clause was to afford members of the medical and dental profession protection from conscription, just as industrial workers were entitled to the same protection.⁴⁴ Menzies’s proposition was accepted by the attorneygeneral, HV Evatt, and when put to the people in the September 1946 referendum, it was carried nationally and in all states.

While the insertion of section 51(xxiiia) into the Constitution was believed to provide a pathway for the Chifley government to reintroduce the PBS, the implementation of the scheme through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Act 1947 was again frustrated. As well as encountering stiff resistance from the Australian BMA and many doctors, who feared that it signified the first stepping stone in the Labor government’s objective to socialise medicine and healthcare, the Act was subject to yet another constitutional challenge in 1949 from the BMA. In what became known as the BMA Case,⁴⁵ the majority of the High Court affirmed the constitutional validity of the Act, but found that section 7A, requiring doctors to use a special prescription form and imposing a penalty if it was not used, constituted civil conscription and was therefore unconstitutional.⁴⁶ In response, the Chifley government amended the Act and the PBS went ahead, but as Martyn Goddard pointed out, the scheme was effectively a ‘dead letter’, with only 157 out of 7000 practising doctors prescribing under the scheme, owing to its unpopularity within the medical profession.⁴⁷

After Labor’s defeat in 1949, the suspicions of the medical profession abated, with reassurances from the incoming government that ‘socialised medicine’ would not be part of its agenda. This created a more congenial climate for Menzies and his government to eventually revisit the PBS in 1959. The other factors in Menzies’s favour were medical and scientific advances in medicine, leading to an increase in popular demand for pharmaceuticals and life-altering medication. As Minister for Health Donald Cameron had noted:

When the pharmaceutical benefits scheme was first introduced, it was decided to supply certain very important drugs to the public without a direct charge. No one could have foreseen that drugs of this type, which then represented a small area of total prescribing, and were almost entirely in use, would, within a few years, have their numbers, uses and purposes enormously expanded by fresh discoveries which have, in effect, produced what can only be described as a therapeutic revolution in the treatment of disease.⁴⁸

With this trend making the case for a national PBS all the more compelling, the Menzies government passed the National Health Act 1959 to resurrect the scheme, which came into effect from 1 March 1960.

Speaking about the rationale behind the new PBS, the health minister told parliament in 1959 that such initiatives needed to be ‘capable of modification and improvement from time to time as circumstances permit’, yet done in a way that is ‘financially responsible’ and not unduly burdensome to taxpayers.⁴⁹ Accordingly, the new PBS included a patient contribution (or co-payment) of 5 shillings (or 50 cents) for each medicine to ensure that the scheme would be financially sustainable over the longer term. Given that the Commonwealth’s expenditure on prescription pharmaceutical benefits had risen in dollar terms from $14 million in 1952 to $38 million by 1959, the government believed that the time had come for patients to contribute directly to the cost of the PBS.⁵⁰ The existing pharmaceutical benefits for pensioners, however, would remain the same, with pensioners and their dependents continuing to be eligible for a full range of drugs and medicines free of any charge.⁵¹ Accordingly, this created two streams of pharmaceutical benefits: the ‘general scheme’ that attracted a fee of 5 shillings for each prescription, and the ‘pensioner scheme’ where they were free.

Reflecting the growth of the pharmaceutical industry, the rebirthed PBS included a much more expansive list of medicines than that previously proposed by Page as health minister. In addition to the small number of ‘expensive and life-saving drugs’ such as penicillin, the sulfa drugs, vaccines, serums, diphtheria antitoxin, and insulin, the PBS covered a broad range of medications available to the general public at the subsidised rate. By capping all medicines at 5 shillings, it gave assurances to all patients of the cost they would incur for their prescriptions. If the medicine was worth less than 5 shillings, it would be charged at a rate to be determined by the chemist or pharmacy. As well as benefiting patients, the health minister saw advantages for doctors and dispensaries in the new PBS. From a wider range of drugs and medicines, the doctor had a choice of what to prescribe for their patient, and would not be hampered in their medical discretion by any consideration of the cost of the prescription to the patient, knowing the set price of 5 shillings for non-pensioners. For dispensaries, meanwhile, the uniform charge of 5 shillings for all (non-pensioner) prescriptions would apply equally to private chemists, pharmacies, and friendly society dispensaries, thereby ensuring a level playing field.

A Balancing Act

The health and aged care reforms of the Menzies government balanced social welfare with personal initiative and responsibility. In so doing, they acknowledged a strategic role for government, yet also a critical part to be played by private enterprises, including churches, charities, and ex-services organisations, in the provision of health and aged care. A reform such as the Aged Persons Homes Act 1954 succeeded in making the engagement of community and voluntary organisations in the provision of welfare an enduring strand of liberal philosophy. In accordance with first of all seeking the ‘private enterprise answer’, successive Liberal governments in Australia since Menzies have esteemed families, communities, charities, voluntary associations, churches, and faith bodies as the great reservoirs of social capital that can be mobilised to help the sick, aged, and vulnerable, whilst reserving a coordinating role for the state to provide the necessary funding and policy direction. This approach came to the fore with the Howard government in the late 1990s, with its broad ‘social coalition’ of faithbased bodies equipped to provide welfare assistance and employment services for Australians in need.

Vesting individuals with a greater sense of personal responsibility was the thinking behind the contributory principle integral to both the National Health Act 1953 and the 1960 Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. Again, this principle has become an integral and enduring part of Australian liberalism, informing the ‘mutual obligation’ ethic of modern social welfare policy where recipients of welfare benefits are expected to contribute something back to the community that supports them through their taxes. As the practical outworking of Australian liberal philosophy, the Australian health and aged care policies of the Menzies government would make ample provision for the sick and the aged, but with policy mechanisms in place to ensure that such obligations did not fall to government alone but to the goodwill, initiative, and resources of individual citizens and private enterprises.

CHAPTER 6

MENZIES AND HIGHER EDUCATION, 1954–61

Andrew Norton¹

IN JANUARY 1966 Robert Menzies resigned as prime minister, ending sixteen years in office. At his departure press conference, Menzies was asked what he saw as his ‘lasting achievements’. Along with the creation of the Liberal Party, the healthy maintenance of the Country Party alliance, and the ANZUS treaty, Menzies nominated university policy.²

As Menzies anticipated on leaving office, 1949 to 1966 was a key period in Australian higher education policy history. General Commonwealth funding of universities and university students commenced in 1951, beginning higher education’s transition from state to federal financial reliance. In the 1954–61 period covered by this book, the 1957 Murray Report led to significantly increased Commonwealth expenditure on new as well as existing universities. And from the mid-1960s, following a report Menzies commissioned in 1961, Commonwealth support was extended to non-university higher education colleges and institutes.

These developments under Menzies were important, but potentially other prime ministers of the time would not have ignored the serious deficiencies of Australia’s universities in the 1950s. The chapter’s concluding section examines where Menzies most plausibly made a distinctive difference to the course of events. It does this by using university policy counterfactuals: if Menzies had not supported the 1946 referendum that created the constitutional power to fund scholarships, Labor had won the 1949 election or returned to power in the 1950s, and somebody other than Menzies was Liberal prime minister.

Menzies’s Philosophy of Education

Robert Menzies’s own educational experiences informed his approach to university policy. He did well at school, winning scholarships to continue his studies. In 1913 Menzies enrolled in a University of Melbourne law degree. As was common until the twentieth century’s later decades, he combined education for a profession with subjects in the humanities.³

In 1913 the University of Melbourne was one of six Australian universities, all established by colonial or state governments. Universities were principally funded by state government grants, student fees, and donations.⁴ The University of Melbourne enrolled 1256 students out of a national university total of just 4172.⁵

Menzies was a prominent figure in the small University of Melbourne world of the mid-1910s. In their book The Forgotten Menzies, Greg Melleuish and Stephen Chavura argue that Menzies was part of the university’s idealist intellectual milieu. A key idea was that the progress which the university would foster should not just be economic and technological but also moral and spiritual.⁶ These themes recur through Menzies’s numerous statements on education in general and universities in particular.⁷ This conception of progress was why Menzies believed in university study of the humanities alongside training for a profession. In emphasising education’s broader purposes, Menzies challenged a narrow utilitarian view of education as just a means of acquiring useful skills.

Education and the Constitution

Menzies’s first direct involvement in university policy was as a Victorian state minister in the early 1930s, having entered the Victorian Parliament in 1928. Against Labor opposition, Menzies pushed through parliament a proposal to appoint the University of Melbourne’s first full-time vice-chancellor.⁸ But Menzies could not protect the university from depression-era funding cuts. Its government grant fell by 23 per cent between 1929 and 1934, though notably universities in other states suffered larger reductions.⁹ Reduced state government grants in the 1930s contributed to the poor condition of Australia’s universities in subsequent decades and consequent calls for Commonwealth help.

Entering federal parliament in 1934 initially reduced Menzies’s opportunities to influence university policy. As originally understood, the Commonwealth’s powers were limited to matters specified in the Australian Constitution. Any other subject remained a state government power. The Constitution did not mention education, so the Commonwealth could not directly legislate for universities, schools or other educational institutions, other than in its own territories. As a prominent constitutional lawyer prior to entering politics, Menzies understood this constraint well. But he also knew that the High Court’s interpretation of the Constitution—including judgments in cases in which he was a barrister—was undermining its federal nature.

Labor’s period in office during and after World War II was a turning point for Commonwealth and state policy responsibilities. Prior to the war the states and the Commonwealth both imposed income taxes. In 1942 the Commonwealth legislated to take over income taxation, compensating the states with grants under section 96 of the Constitution, which allows the Commonwealth to make grants to the states ‘on such terms and conditions as the Parliament thinks fit’. A High Court challenge to the income tax takeover was lost. Subsequent attempts to restore state income tax powers were similarly unsuccessful. The states’ capacity to finance their constitutional responsibilities—including education—was permanently diminished.

In the short term, the Commonwealth did not use its expanded control of the nation’s finances to influence education policy. But in 1943, using the Constitution’s defence power, John Curtin’s Labor government introduced regulations aimed at ensuring there were enough graduates to aid the war effort. The regulations included a scholarship scheme that paid student fees, and a means-tested living allowance. A new Universities Commission administered the scholarships and provided advice on universities, with a Sydney academic, RC Mills, as its chairman.¹⁰ The minister for war organisation of industry, John Dedman, stated that while the policy was enacted for ‘good solid utilitarian reasons, directly concerned with the war effort’, he hoped that ‘this necessary wartime measure [was the] first instalment of a better order’.¹¹

The defence power was also the legal basis for the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme, which provided free education for people with defence-related service during World War II. Under the scheme, the government could also fund educational facilities.¹² While most CRTS students chose technical education, 38 000 of them enrolled in universities. Despite CRTS’s status as a ‘training’ scheme, its university funding covered all bachelor-degree courses—arts was the most popular.¹³

In the mid-1940s both major political parties, Labor and the newly established Liberals, were open to continued Commonwealth support for education. This was mostly easily done, constitutionally speaking, in the Australian Capital Territory, as a Commonwealth territory. The proposed Australian National University in Canberra, intended as a research-focused university, enjoyed bipartisan support.¹⁴ In July 1945 Menzies as Opposition leader called for a review of education at all levels, to be carried out in cooperation with the states. His speech addressed the constitutional issues, suggesting that section 96 would inevitably be used to fund education.¹⁵ Section 96, however, would not support a peacetime scholarship equivalent to the CRTS, which directly funded students. It could only finance grants to the states.

In 1946 the Labor government, now led by Ben Chifley, proposed a constitutional amendment that, among other social services powers, would authorise the parliament to make laws with respect to ‘benefits to students’. In parliamentary debate, Menzies supported this amendment while criticising it as a ‘piecemeal treatment of a large problem’.¹⁶

Along with two other proposed constitutional amendments, on primary products marketing and industrial employment, the social services referendum was held on federal election day 1946. The Liberal Party took no official stance on the referendum questions, while painting Labor as the party of central control from Canberra. Menzies, however, indicated that he personally would vote ‘yes’ to the social services question while strongly opposing the other two.¹⁷ Labor won the election, but only the social services referendum was passed, with a national 54 per cent ‘yes’ vote and majorities in all states.

Menzies to Power

With the Liberal Party’s first federal election win, in December 1949, Menzies became prime minister for the second time. His major campaign speech, as it had for the 1946 election, promised Commonwealth financial support for education through grants to the states. Menzies reiterated his belief in the ‘spiritual’ aspect of education. He also stressed limits to the Commonwealth’s involvement. ‘We shall be careful,’ he said, ‘not to attach to such grants conditions which will limit the reasonable discretion of the states or lead to Commonwealth interference with the proper freedom of teaching and research.’¹⁸

The defeated Labor Party had also committed itself to further action on universities. In his election speech, Chifley made more specific promises than Menzies, repeating a previous commitment to a Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme—made possible for students without military service by the 1946 referendum—and a review of the finances and development plans of Australian universities.¹⁹

As the incoming prime minister, Menzies allocated ministerial responsibilities. With education still a minor Commonwealth Government activity, there was no education portfolio. In the outgoing Chifley government, John Dedman, as minister for post-war reconstruction, handled education matters. Menzies took education himself, a responsibility he did not relinquish until late 1963.²⁰

Grants to the States

Early Menzies policies on universities were significant steps, as they initiated Commonwealth peacetime support for university students. However, they were largely a continuation of existing Labor initiatives rather than taking policy in a new direction. Menzies proceeded with the review of university finances promised by Chifley, announcing terms of reference in March 1950.²¹ The review was led by the Universities Commission chair, RC Mills, and reported in August 1950. The government announced its funding response to the Mills review in January 1951.²² The necessary legislation was not introduced until November 1951, although in his second reading speech Menzies said that the funding had nevertheless flowed for the 1951 year. Money was also allocated for 1952 and 1953.²³

The Commonwealth’s university funding mechanism was a section 96 specific-purpose grant to the states, which set out how the money was to be spent. From the 1972–75 Whitlam government onwards, section 96 grants tied to specific purposes were major instruments for widening the Commonwealth’s effective constitutional power, including in 1974 taking full responsibility for recurrent higher education funding from the states.²⁴ In the early 1950s, however, specific purpose grants were less common; most section 96 grants provided general revenue for the states.²⁵ In line with his 1949 election promise, Menzies took care with state sensibilities. Negotiations with the states on university grants and their conditions contributed to the long delay between the additional financial support being announced and legislated.

The Commonwealth’s funding legislation, the States Grants (Universities) Act 1951, required each university to receive a threshold amount from fees and state grants. On any revenue above this, the Commonwealth would pay on the basis of £1 for every £3 of state and fee revenue, up to a maximum amount. This formula encouraged states to maintain or increase their own grants. To secure their maximum Commonwealth grant, universities had an incentive to charge their students higher fees. While fees in the 1950s remained low by 2020s standards, they increased significantly after the Commonwealth’s policy took effect.²⁶

Except on student fees, the funding conditions reflected Menzies’s views of the proper relationship between universities and government. ‘It is not the desire of the Government to interfere in the internal management of the universities,’ he said, ‘nor to attach conditions to the use of these moneys which would interfere with the traditional liberty of the universities to determine the courses of instructions that they wish to pursue or the character of the research that they wish to undertake.’²⁷ Most of the Commonwealth’s grant was for the ‘general teaching and research purposes of a university in connexion with university courses’, a system known as block grant funding.²⁸

HV Evatt, as Opposition leader, supported the Bill, questioning only whether the amount was sufficient, especially for research.²⁹ Arthur Calwell, who was to replace Evatt as Labor leader in 1960, also supported the Bill and Evatt’s comments.³⁰

Commonwealth Scholarships

The Constitution’s benefits to students power authorised the Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme from 1951. These scholarships were merit-based, paying both fees and—subject to a personal and parental means test—a living allowance. As with the Mills review, Menzies’s Commonwealth scholarships policy implemented a decision already made by the Chifley government.³¹

Like the block grants, the Commonwealth scholarships were flexible on courses. Regulations listed eligible fields of education but included all bachelor-degree courses and a wide range of diplomalevel courses.³²

Things Move Slowly (1951–56)

By the end of 1951, peacetime Commonwealth financial involvement in higher education was established in law. While this was an important constitutional shift, the specific measures implemented in the early to mid-1950s were not transformative for Australian higher education. With 3000 new Commonwealth scholarships available each year, the total number of students holding one reached 9635 in 1956.³³ But this was fewer students than the CRTS supported at its late 1940s peak.³⁴ Total university enrolments fell in the early Menzies years.³⁵

The new Commonwealth block grants paid via the states did not solve university financial problems. An inflationary surge—24 per cent in the year to December 1951, and another 10.5 per cent in 1952—quickly eroded the real value of grants based on the 1950 Mills review’s recommendations and legislated without indexation.³⁶

Desperate vice-chancellors lobbied hard for a review of university development.³⁷ In 1952 they published a report pointing to overcrowded buildings, obsolete equipment, and declining real wages for academics.³⁸ Further Commonwealth grants legislation followed in 1953 and 1955, increasing how much the Commonwealth would pay contingent on state grant and student fee revenue. Despite this, total university revenue and expenditure remained finely balanced in the early to mid-1950s.³⁹ After a dinner with vice-chancellors at the University of Melbourne’s University House in March 1956, Menzies finally agreed to a review of universities.⁴⁰

The Murray Review

Formal invitations to the university review committee were sent in December 1956. Sir Keith Murray, head of the British University Grants Committee, was appointed as its chairman. The four other members included CSIRO Chairman Ian Clunies Ross, believed to be the subsequent report’s main author.⁴¹ The Murray committee worked quickly and delivered its report in September 1957. It is an impressive document—in this author’s view, the best report ever published on Australian universities. Other reports also offer diligent analysis and sensible advice, but none match the Murray Report’s elegant prose or frank conclusions.

The Murray Report’s criticisms included many perennial problems of Australian universities: inadequate student academic preparation (high student fail rates were deemed a ‘national extravagance which can ill be afforded’⁴²), poor-quality teaching, industry not doing its own research, the situation of overseas students, dissatisfied academic staff, and shortages of graduates. The report’s comments on university infrastructure were especially scathing. Students and academics were ‘overcrowded’ in ‘grossly deficient’ buildings. The University of Tasmania housed several faculties in ‘shocking conditions’.⁴³ Additional student demand driven by population growth would add pressure to this already strained infrastructure. The number of people in the 15–19-years age group was expected to increase by 36 per cent between 1957 and 1962.⁴⁴

Without quick action, the Murray Report warned, the current ‘critical’ situation ‘may well become catastrophic’.⁴⁵ But these serious problems could not be solved cheaply. The Murray Report recommended significantly increased funding to improve conditions for students and staff, and support increased enrolments.

On governance issues, the Murray committee’s views aligned with those of Menzies. They assumed that university autonomy was essential, that universities could not achieve their functions without it.⁴⁶ At the same time, ‘the days when universities could live in a world apart, if ever they truly existed, are long since over’.⁴⁷ Universities needed governance systems that could balance autonomy and national interests.

To reconcile these goals the Murray committee suggested an intermediary body, which, following the British example, they called a University Grants Committee. It would use a decentralised process for setting priorities and directions.⁴⁸ Committee visits to universities would inform each university of national needs while hearing about the university’s own plans.⁴⁹ Based on these discussions, the committee would make recommendations to the government. The Murray committee saw a limited role for ‘earmarking’ of grants for specific projects supported by the government, where a university had agreed to it. But they thought that most grants should be for general university purposes.⁵⁰

The Internal Government Politics of the Murray Report

In his book The Measure of the Years, Menzies describes how he won Cabinet support for the Murray Report’s funding recommendations. His story begins prior to a trip to England in 1956 where he first met Keith Murray. He told Treasurer Artie Fadden that he was initiating an enterprise that could not fail to be ‘vastly expensive’. After noting that this was ‘almost an obsession’ for Menzies, Fadden gave the all clear, ‘without which subsequent events may not have happened’.⁵¹

Menzies says in The Measure of the Years that Treasury had full opportunity to examine the Murray proposals he put to Cabinet. What he does not say, but his biographer Allan Martin does, is what Treasury thought of them. Predictably, Treasury did not like them, due to the high proposed expenditure and the potential precedent of state bodies directly accessing a Commonwealth entity constituted to deal with their financial requirements.⁵²

Treasury’s concerns were ignored. Menzies told a Cabinet meeting, which he called with two or three days’ notice, that he would like it to ‘sit morning, afternoon and evening and reach its conclusions that night’. The Cabinet, ‘knowing that this was an outstanding event in my life, humoured me, and I am still grateful to them’.⁵³

The New Policy Framework

Menzies announced the government’s response to the Murray Report in November 1957.⁵⁴ It came in stages, starting in 1958. The first stage was increased grants distributed through the existing framework. This included ‘emergency’ grants for recurrent expenditure, additional funding conditional on pay increases for academics, and for the first time money for capital works. Unlike the general recurrent grants, capital funding was for specific projects.

Capital grants changed the institutional fabric of the higher education system. The 1958 university states grants legislation included an initial £75 000 contribution to purchasing a site for Monash University and preparing its building plans. In the 1960 states grants legislation, construction of Monash’s buildings was the largest capital grants budget item, with £3.9 million to be matched by the Victorian Government. Including Monash, initial capital funding was provided for six of today’s public universities between 1958 and 1965.⁵⁵

Figure 6.1 shows trends in grants to states, in both nominal and real terms, from the start of the section 96 system in 1951 to the last financial year of Menzies’s prime ministership, 1965–66. While funding began increasing significantly in 1956–57, it surged in 1958–59, with a 125 per cent boost in real terms from the previous financial year.

Figure 6.1 Trends in Commonwealth grants to state universities, 1951–52 to 1965–66 (original and inflation-adjusted)

Note: The figures for 1965–66 are as estimated for that year. In later budgets, all sums are reported in dollars rather than pounds. On the £1 = $2 conversion formula, the subsequent 1965–66 actuals are 2.9 per cent higher than estimated. Due to uncertainty about how Treasury converted its time series after the currency change, 1965–66 funding is left as originally estimated. Indexed to all groups’ CPI, using the June index figure of the first year of the financial year shown. All figures adjusted to June 1965 values.

Source: Harold Holt, Commonwealth Payments to or for the States, 1965–66, Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia

The next stage of the government’s Murray Report response was developing a more sophisticated funding process. What the report called a University Grants Committee was legislated in 1959 as the Australian Universities Commission. The AUC would advise the government on the need for, distribution of, and conditions to be attached to money that would be paid via grants to the states and directly for the ANU. The AUC was to perform its functions with a view to the ‘balanced development of universities so that their resources can be used to the greatest possible advantage of Australia’.⁵⁶ The AUC is a policy turning point. From this time onwards, Australia’s public universities are part of a national system, rather than a collection of state-based institutions. In his second reading speech on the AUC legislation, Evatt declared Labor’s ‘enthusiastic support’.⁵⁷

To help students financially, the Murray Report recommended a greater number of scholarships, including for postgraduate study. Postgraduate research scholarships were added, with 100 new places each year between 1959 and 1961.⁵⁸ Overall, however, the generous increase in funding for universities was not extended to scholarships. The annual 3000 new undergraduate scholarships on offer, in place since 1951, was not increased until 1961, and then only to 4000. With scholarship application numbers growing each year, the pool of Commonwealth scholarships could accommodate 34 per cent of applications in 1956 but only 21 per cent in 1960, before a small recovery to 24 per cent in 1961 with the extra 1000 scholarships.⁵⁹

Commonwealth-funded scholarships were not the only source of university student financial support. They made up about half of all scholarships held in 1961. But the proportion of students with scholarship assistance changed little between 1957 and 1961, fluctuating in the range of 53–56 per cent.⁶⁰

Problems Unsolved

The government’s response to the Murray Report lifted universities from their impoverished state of the early to mid-1950s. But university policy was pursuing a moving target. The first AUC report, delivered in October 1960, observed that student numbers were increasing quickly and would continue doing so, pushing universities beyond their optimal size. It suggested that a new type of tertiary institution was required, and that higher institutes of technology might be needed. The report suggested getting advice on how to proceed from an expert committee.⁶¹

Menzies’s comments on the AUC’s October 1960 report struck a different tone from his Murray review response in 1957. He reiterated his strong support for expanding university education, but no longer ignored Treasury objections:

The Government has taken the view, which it believes the commission holds also, that unless there is an early and substantial modification of the university pattern, away from the traditional nineteenthcentury model on which it is now based, it may not—and I say it with reluctance—be practicable for Australian governments to meet all the needs for university education in Australia and at the same time to achieve the best use of resources in the national interest. We think, therefore, that the development of alternative kinds of tertiary education is likely to be of the greatest importance.⁶²

In August 1961 Menzies appointed the advisory committee the AUC had recommended. Leslie Martin, the AUC chair, was to lead it.⁶³ The subsequent Martin Report, which is outside the time period of this volume, led to what was later called the ‘binary division’ in tertiary education, with universities on one side and cheaper teachingfocused colleges of advanced education and institutes of technology on the other.

How Different Would University Policy Have Been without Menzies?

Menzies’s interest in universities was deep and longstanding—as a student at the University of Melbourne in the 1910s, as a Victorian Government minister in the 1930s, as Opposition leader in the 1940s, as prime minister in the 1950s and 1960s, and then as chancellor of the University of Melbourne until 1972. As prime minister, he took responsibility for education policy when his predecessors and successors all delegated it. His biographer, Allan Martin, thought that Menzies sometimes exaggerated his higher education policy achievements, but did not doubt that Menzies’s belief in the importance of universities influenced his policies. Martin remarked that Menzies was ‘hardly likely to have imagined that in the Australian electorate there were many votes in a pro-university policy’.⁶⁴

As this chapter documents, however, Menzies was not the only politician of his era interested in higher education. Both his Labor predecessors, Curtin and Chifley, increased Commonwealth involvement in higher education. Their CRTS-driven enrolment peak of 1948 was not surpassed until 1957. First-term Menzies higher education initiatives, Commonwealth grants to universities, and the Commonwealth scholarships, had already been announced by Labor prior to losing office in 1949. Labor’s two post-Chifley leaders in the Menzies era, Evatt and Calwell, also favoured increased Commonwealth involvement in education.

Menzies’s support for Commonwealth involvement in higher education meant that he did not oppose Labor’s higher education initiatives in the 1940s. But with Labor majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate from 1943 to 1949, this was not politically decisive. Labor did not need Liberal or Country Party parliamentary support to legislate its policies.

Labor’s 1946 constitutional referendum on the social services and benefits power, which included ‘benefits to students’, was more politically vulnerable. The amendment needed support from a majority of voters in a majority of states to pass. With the ‘yes’ vote at 51.7 per cent or less in three of the six states, the amendment had a narrow victory. Menzies’s support for it may have swayed some Liberal voters, who otherwise rejected increased Commonwealth powers, to vote ‘yes’.⁶⁵

In evaluating Menzies as prime minister, as against a counterfactual Labor government, the period from 1952 to 1956 is of greatest interest. Commonwealth funding via the states was flat (Figure 6.1), with the annual number of new Commonwealth scholarship awards stuck at 3000. Would Labor have responded more sympathetically to university pleas for additional funding in the first half of the 1950s?

By 1953, during the parliamentary debate on new States Grants (Universities) legislation, Labor was more critical of the government’s performance than in 1951. Calwell compared Australia’s support for universities unfavourably with that of other countries, complained about increases in student fees, pointed out that the funding formula meant universities did not necessarily receive all the money available to them, and wanted more spending on medical research. He promised that Labor would increase university funding if it won the 1954 election.⁶⁶ Labor narrowly lost that election but continued to express similar views. In parliamentary debate on the 1955 States Grants (Universities) Bill, Calwell called for the establishment of new universities, and encouraged the government to provide ‘as much more money as it possibly can’ to universities.⁶⁷

In the two elections in this period—in 1954 and 1955—the major Labor campaign speeches, however, do not mention university finances.⁶⁸ This may reflect Martin’s perception that there were few votes in universities, although the 1949 Chifley and Menzies campaign speeches both included university-related promises. That Labor, had it won a mid-1950s election, would have acted more quickly to increase university funding than the Menzies government is probable but not provable.

Another counterfactual is a 1950s Liberal government with someone other than Menzies as leader. Labor agenda setting and university lobbying would have created some political pressure for action. But a delayed Liberal start to Commonwealth peacetime funding of universities, on financial and political priority grounds, is plausible without Menzies’s personal interest. Limited Cabinet and party room support for significant additional funding may explain early to mid-1950s university policy stasis.⁶⁹

The more than doubling of university funding in the late 1950s almost certainly would not have happened without Menzies. Menzies had accepted that the universities had serious problems, and decided to act on them, before he received the Murray Report. He commissioned the report to build the case for and advise on the details of a new university policy. The good appointments Menzies made to the Murray committee led to a high-quality and persuasive report. It probably built public and political support for reform; at a minimum, it raised the profile of university issues. The release of the Murray Report was, for example, a page one story in The Sydney Morning Herald, with further reports on three other pages.⁷⁰

Inside the government, four consecutive election victories had enhanced Menzies’s political authority. Menzies’s own account of events suggests his Cabinet colleagues would not have endorsed the Murray Report recommendations without his influence. This matches Allan Martin’s description of the Murray process from the perspective of officials and other ministers.⁷¹ A mix of strategy, in the Murray Report, and stature, given by electoral success, let Menzies change the university funding system.

Another counterfactual question is whether Labor or a different Liberal leader would, like Menzies, have supported light-touch controls over what courses universities offered or students took.

Menzies’s Australian Universities Commission introduced national coordination but not prescriptive rules about university use of recurrent teaching funding. In the post-war years, Labor generally favoured greater economic planning.⁷² But in 1950s parliamentary debates on universities, Labor’s leadership did not call for more prescriptive control over universities.

Since Menzies, Liberal and Labor governments have often earmarked some university teaching funding for specific courses. Often this was to meet a workforce need. They were not purists on the ‘traditional liberty’ of universities to choose which courses to offer. But no government of either party has ever sought detailed control over all university teaching funding. The not-Menzies scenarios on this point are not radically different from what happened during his prime ministership.

For students, Menzies-era Commonwealth scholarships were flexible between courses. This student choice contrasted with bonded state government scholarships, which locked students into a course and early career job. When Dedman announced Labor’s Commonwealth scholarships in 1949, he suggested tying them to specific courses if enrolments were ‘not sufficient to meet the needs of the country’.⁷³ But Menzies-era lists of eligible courses also created scope for control. On this issue, each party’s default position involved flexibility with the means to intervene if necessary.

Liberals and Menzies

The most persuasive case for the distinctive importance of Menzies to Australian higher education comes from another Liberal prime minister counterfactual. Assuming Liberal governments in the 1950s and 1960s, the start of Commonwealth support for universities may have been delayed without Menzies’s personal interest. The internal government politics of the Murray Report suggest that, without the prime minister’s influence, universities would have received less Commonwealth funding in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Menzies created a funding system that could maintain momentum without him. While the government made final funding decisions, public AUC reports set the benchmark for what was needed. Between 1960 and the Liberals losing office in 1972, the AUC produced four reports, each one supporting its recommendations with detailed analysis. Along with the impetus given by the Martin review, these reports help explain why section 96 grants for universities and colleges of advanced education more than doubled in real terms in the post-Menzies Liberal years.⁷⁴

Eventually, Australia would, like every other advanced economy, have had a mass higher education system. Menzies saw that Commonwealth funding was necessary to deliver higher education on a larger scale and at a better standard. The ‘benefits to students’ referendum and section 96 specific-purpose grants were routes around the constitutional allocation of universities to the states. Menzies supported them both. With these constitutional tools in place, Menzies was able to manoeuvre the necessary higher education policies through his party. The Menzies era set the foundations for a higher education system that would, in subsequent decades, educate four in ten Australians. That is the university policy ‘lasting achievement’ of Robert Menzies.

CHAPTER 7

THE MENZIES GOVERNMENT AND THE ORIGINS OF THE OPEN ECONOMY, 1955–61

David Lee¹

THE DECISIONS OF the Hawke government (1983–91) to float the Australian dollar, reduce tariffs, and redesign industry policy are generally regarded as the crucial episode in Australia’s move towards greater economic openness in the second half of the twentieth century.² Less attention has been paid to the historical origins of Australia’s transition towards openness during the Menzies era.³ This chapter examines the policy decisions of the Menzies government that laid the foundations for this transition. From a sheltered economy, substantially oriented towards trade with the British Commonwealth and fortified by economic controls, Australia began the move to becoming a more open, Asia-Pacific-centred nation in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The first crucial measure was Menzies’s decision in 1955 to merge the Department of Trade and Customs (DTC) and the Department of Commerce and Agriculture (DCA) into a unified Department of Trade.⁴ Under John McEwen as minister, the Department of Trade renegotiated Australia’s trade agreement with Britain, negotiated the ground-breaking Commerce Agreement with Japan, and opened the wheat trade with the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Also vital was the Menzies government’s decision to abolish import restrictions in 1960. This proved to be a watershed between the controlled economy of World War II, the late 1940s and the 1950s, and the more open economy of the 1960s and afterwards. An immediate consequence of the decision, however, was a balance of payment crisis of 1960–61. This prompted onerous ‘credit squeeze’ measures that almost saw the Menzies government defeated in 1961. But the later search for ways to encourage exports brought with it other consequential decisions in 1960 and 1961. These included relaxing the 1938 embargo on exports of iron ore in 1960, and encouraging the development of trade in black coal in 1961. Together, they sparked a mining boom that transformed the Australian economy by helping it to operate without the full panoply of economic controls that had been a necessary part of the toolkit of all governments in Australia since the Great Depression.⁵

The Department of Trade

The Australian economy was controlled in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Exchange rates were fixed under the Bretton Woods regime; dollars were in short supply and rationed; some exports were controlled, and others tied up in long-term contracts with Britain; and tariffs and import restrictions protected industry. In 1952 a balance of payments crisis forced the Menzies government to extend import restrictions across the board. In August 1955, the DTC, which administered import restrictions, underestimated the likely balance of payments position in 1955–56. The reasons for this failure may have been an overestimation of the ‘wastage’ of licences. But whatever the reason, the manifest shortcomings of the DTC and the drain on Australia’s reserves was clearly exercising Menzies’s mind in 1955. This was evident when he announced in the election campaign

that my Government is determined to arrest this running down of reserves by the end of the financial year, that is to say by June 30 next. This is so vitally important that we will hold ourselves ready to take any other measures which are needed.⁶

One of those measures was a decision in 1955 by Menzies and the Public Service Board to merge the DTC and the DCA and create a single, unified Department of Trade. The new department was built around a nucleus in the DCA and had John McEwen as its minister and John Crawford as the departmental secretary.⁷

Before 1956, the DTC had responsibility for imports and a ‘defensive and inward-looking approach to external economic relations’, while Crawford’s DCA had a ‘positive approach to engage with the world economy in support of Australia’s primary exports’.⁸ As Boris Schedvin has observed:

The new Department of Trade combined elements of both these philosophies. It retained high protection as a cardinal philosophy and incorporated an aggressive approach to export promotion. These two strands, contradictory in a number of respects, sat side-by-side for almost twenty years.⁹

Establishment of the new trade department removed bureaucratic impediments in the way of renegotiating Australia’s agreement with Britain and negotiating a trade agreement with Japan. The new and more powerful department was also able to persuade the government to open a trade in wheat with the PRC and negotiate a commerce agreement with its erstwhile enemy, Japan.¹⁰

Japan, Britain and China

By the mid-1950s, it was becoming urgent for Australia to reach a modus vivendi with its second-best customer, Japan. Reconciliation with Japan was a crucial objective of the Menzies government that had begun with its signing of the Treaty of San Francisco in 1951. Fully achieving the objective, however, required a sound foundation in trading relations. Indeed, the very premise of the highly controversial ‘soft’ peace treaty—on which Menzies spent significant political capital—was that rather than punish the defeated foe, Japan must be allowed to rebuild so that it could become an essential Cold War ally.

The Anglo-Japanese trade relationship which subsequently emerged was overwhelmingly in Australia’s favour as Australia continued to discriminate against Japan in the tariff and import licensing. This left open the possibility of Japanese retaliation against Australia’s wool trade. But to provide ‘elbow room’ for a trade agreement with Japan, the Menzies government had first to revise its trade arrangements with Britain.¹¹ A review of the Ottawa Agreement was necessary because it constrained Australia’s scope to promote better opportunities for Australia’s exports in Japan and in other markets.¹² In the more than twenty years since the signing of the agreement in 1932, Britain received preferences on 86 per cent of its exports compared with 43 per cent of Australia’s exports to Britain.¹³

McEwen and Crawford duly renegotiated the United Kingdom– Australia Trade Agreement. The new agreement preserved duty-free entry into Britain of some Australian exports; increased the range of Australian goods on which Britain would guarantee existing margins of tariff preference in the British market; and reduced the margin of preference on a wide range of British goods entering the Australian market.¹⁴ One of the most important aspects was its provisions on wheat. The British Government indicated its expectation and ‘positive policy objective’ that annual sales of Australian wheat and flour into the British market should amount to no less than 28 million bushels, the equivalent of 750 000 tons. In the years before 1956, sales of Australian wheat and flour had been far below this level—in 1954 they had even dropped to 13 million bushels. Consequently, a major objective of the revised trade agreement was to get more Australian wheat into the British market.¹⁵

Britain never lived up to its ‘best endeavours’ undertaking on lifting wheat exports after 1956. But, fortuitously, a new market for wheat was opened in Asia in the PRC. The first efforts to establish a trading relationship between Australia and the PRC began in 1956 when Harry Menzies, a cousin of Robert and trade commissioner in Hong Kong, was invited to visit China.¹⁶ Harry Menzies spent three weeks there in April 1956, visiting Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Hankou, taking in ten factories and four exhibitions. His visit laid the basis for flourishing wheat trade between Australia and China.

This came about when a representative of the China Resources Company visited George Patterson, Harry Menzies’s successor as Australian trade commissioner in Hong Kong, in December 1960.¹⁷ Food shortages had appeared in China in 1959. But in the West, appreciation of this remained unclear until refugees began to flood into Hong Kong in 1961.¹⁸ In December 1960, Chinese trade officials asked Patterson to arrange a meeting with Chris Perrett, general manager of the Australian Wheat Board, to discuss an urgent shipment of Australian wheat to China. Patterson was able to arrange the meeting with the result that, in February 1961, the AWB announced that it had agreed to export to China 1 050 000 tons of wheat and 50 000 tons of flour for cash, with an irrevocable letter of credit arranged through a bank in Melbourne.¹⁹

At first, Patterson and the Department of Trade wondered whether this deal would be repeated.²⁰ In April 1961, however, the CRC indicated that it wanted to arrange the shipment of a further one million tons between July and October as well as additional sales from 1962. This bonanza came with a problem for the AWB because the Chinese wanted to purchase the wheat on terms of credit. The AWB, assisted by the departments of trade and primary industry, was able to negotiate terms for continuation of the trade. Australia proceeded to become the largest foreign supplier of wheat to China in the first half of the 1960s, eclipsing even Canada. In the early 1960s, moreover, the PRC was the main purchaser of Australian wheat, so much so that it was regarded as having saved the wheat industry. In several of those years, the PRC took 6 per cent of Australian exports, making it as valuable a market for Australia as New Zealand.²¹ For its part, Australia supplied about 45 per cent of China’s imported foreign wheat between 1960 and 1965.²²

More important than opening the wheat trade with China was consolidating the trading relationship with Japan. From August to October 1956, trade official G Paul Phillips led an Australian delegation of officials in negotiations with officials from the Japanese Embassy in Canberra. After the informal talks finished, Japan sent out its formal delegation. It was chaired by Nobuhiko Oshiba from the Japanese Foreign Office and included representatives from the Japanese customs, finance, and trade and industry ministries. On 1 November 1956 a counterpart Australian delegation, chaired by Trade Deputy Secretary Alan Westerman, started negotiations with the Japanese.²³

By 14 June 1957, negotiations had been concluded. The Commerce Agreement that McEwen eventually signed on 6 July 1957 comprised seven articles. Under the first four, each government undertook to extend most-favoured-nation treatment in tariff and import licensing, but the tariff preferences for British imports were retained. Both parties undertook to conduct state trading on non-discriminatory and commercial principles, and to base their commercial relations as far as possible on General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade principles. Articles VI and VII of the Commerce Agreement provided for regular consultations, and for a term of at least three years for the agreement. The most contentious provision was Article V, which provided safeguards in the case of serious injury caused by the exports of either to the industries of the other, first by consultation and then by an attempt to renegotiate the agreement.²⁴

In 1962, when looking back at the negotiation of the agreement with Japan, Crawford recalled the apprehension felt in 1956 and 1957, mainly by manufacturers and by consumers, who feared an inrush of cheap, low-quality Japanese imports. This fear was not realised. Australia had gained a stronger market for wool, foodstuffs, and, increasingly, minerals; and Japan obtained the end of discrimination in tariffs and import licensing.²⁵ In the years from 1957 to 1962, Japan and Australia both made rapid progress under the treaty, Japan proportionately more than Australia and Australia more in absolute terms. Japan would take Britain’s place as Australia’s largest export market in 1967 and become its largest trading partner in the 1970s.

1960: The End of Import Licensing

Transferring to McEwen and Crawford responsibility for import licensing had been one of the main reasons why Menzies had decided to establish a unified Department of Trade. Import controls, which had been introduced as a wartime measure in World War II and then reintroduced comprehensively in 1952, had always been regarded as a necessary evil that Liberals wanted to remove as soon as the Australian Government was able to stabilise its balance of payments. The problem for Australia was that it was developing at a rapid rate and welcoming many immigrants from Europe at the same time. This inevitably placed a strain on the balance of payments under the fixed exchange rates in the Bretton Woods regime. Import licensing was the main policy instrument used to address this problem between 1952 and 1960.

Licensing, however, became increasingly unpopular. Retail and business leaders persistently complained of corruption and trafficking in import licences. In 1956, 150 licences were cancelled in New South Wales because of breaches of the regulations, prompting the leader of the Opposition, HV Evatt, to call for a parliamentary inquiry into the whole issue.²⁶ Journalist Don Whitington reported in March 1957 that ‘one of the biggest explosions in politics for years appears to be imminent in the Commonwealth Department of Trade which has the unenviable task of administering export licences’.²⁷ HVC Thorby of the NSW branch of the Country Party described the government’s system of import licensing as ‘vicious, dishonest and the most corrupt in the world’.²⁸

The Department of Trade continued, however, to hew to a gradual and cautious ‘slideout’ strategy for import licensing in the late 1950s. It was not prepared to give up the controls until it was assured of stability in the balance of payments. But by 1958, Treasury was favouring a faster pace towards eliminating import controls. This was, in part, a response to pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the GATT. The Commonwealth Bank and the Tariff Board joined Treasury in the campaign against import restrictions, the former because of their detrimental effect on resource allocation and the latter to promote an unhindered flow of imports except by tariffs.²⁹

By late 1959, Harold Holt, the treasurer, was recommending the abolition of import controls as an anti-inflationary measure. The rationale was that a greater volume of imports would soak up the swelling demand for goods and services and hence lead to lower prices. In this, Holt was supported by the newly established Reserve Bank, led by HC Coombs. McEwen, despite expressing reservations about the timeframe and the political consequences of the decision, accepted in principle that import licensing should go and that a new regime involving only special exemptions begin as early as March 1960.³⁰

Partly because of the ending of import controls, a new boom developed in 1960 with an adverse effect on the balance of payments.³¹ Australia’s still overwhelmingly rural exports were not able to support the rapid and now unfettered increase in imports. Severe remedial action became necessary, and, on 15 November 1960, Holt announced a package of drastic deflationary measures including sharply increased sales taxes on motor vehicles and harsh restrictions on credit.³² Before those measures were announced, McEwen appeared to backtrack on his decision in February 1960 to wave through the abolition of import licensing. On 30 June 1960, he wrote to Menzies implying that the abolition of import restrictions had been a sudden change of policy by the government, calling for complex administrative changes without sufficient time for planning.³³ McEwen’s own experience ‘in the Trade Department was the sudden, virtual termination of import licensing, decided by Cabinet late in February and operative on announcement by you a few days later’.³⁴ McEwen’s critical comments on the handling of the end of import licensing probably reflected the fact that the government’s faltering management of the Australian economy had placed the Menzies government in severe political peril.

One of the main targets of McEwen’s wrath was the governor of the Commonwealth (later Reserve) Bank, Coombs. Journalist Alan Reid recalled that in 1961, McEwen commented loudly to Westerman in the lobby of his Parliament House office: ‘Whatever happens in the future, doc, always remind me to disregard Coombs’s advice.’³⁵ McEwen’s anger had something to do with his sense of the political jeopardy in which economic policy was placing the Coalition Government. He confided in Crawford on 24 June 1960 that, to ward off political danger, the federal and state Country parties had been ‘hammering out our ideas and girding our loins for the election next year. It seems altogether too close’.³⁶

For his part, Crawford was scathing about the government’s management of economic policy in the period he was abroad in 1960. Writing on 12 March 1961, he conceded that an inflationary position was developing which the government had to address. He acknowledged that Australia’s overseas balances, supplemented by a strengthened position in the IMF, were strong in February 1960. While these conditions justified relaxing import restrictions as an anti-inflationary measure, however, he ‘did not then, and still do not think it was wise to dismantle the machinery of import controls’.³⁷ In Crawford’s view, the government ended import controls prematurely and kept credit squeeze measures for too long.

Reflecting on the bitter struggles between the Department of Trade and Treasury in the late 1950s and 1960s, one senior Treasury official offered a Treasury perspective to historian Greg Whitwell, taking the long view. He wrote:

The ironic result was that the Treasury operated as the Department for trade (e.g. in persuading the Government to abolish import licensing in 1960) and Trade as the Department against trade (e.g. in conceiving and winning support for local content plans). I would argue that, if Treasury had been less influential, Australia might have clung to import licensing and ‘a quiet life of profitable incompetence’ for its manufacturers, as New Zealand did, and that if Trade had been less influential, Australia might have participated more fully in the great expansion of trade between the industrialised countries which occurred in the 1950–70 period—thereby experiencing a more rapid growth in living standards and faster progress toward a more adaptable and resilient economy.³⁸

Against this articulation of the ‘Treasury line’ in Australian policymaking, it could be argued that the Department of Trade was as much involved as the Treasury in Australia’s move to greater economic openness that began in the late 1950s and reached its apogee in the 1980s. This was through successful renegotiation of the Ottawa Agreement, negotiation of the trade agreement with Japan, and the opening of the wheat trade with China. They all gave an impetus to reorientating Australian trade towards the countries of the Asia-Pacific.³⁹

Policy Changes and the Beginning of the Mining Boom

By-products of the balance of payments crisis of 1960–61 were policy changes that sparked the 1960s mining boom. In the interwar period, until the 1960s, mining was in the doldrums. In the 1940s and 1950s, for example, no iron ore was exported abroad, and very little coal. This was the result of a decision of the Lyons government in 1938 to reserve Australian iron ore for domestic industry by embargoing exports overseas, and the almost moribund status of the NSW black coal industry. The decision to embargo iron ore exports was taken for strategic reasons to prevent Japan gaining a foothold on iron ore deposits in Yampi Sound off north-west Western Australia.⁴⁰

Afterwards, Australian governments maintained the iron ore embargo because of the widespread belief that Australia had insufficient reserves of easily obtainable high-grade iron ore. Earle Page and the Department of Commerce had responsibility for the trade embargo in 1938, but by the 1950s responsibility for iron ore had devolved to the Department of National Development. In the late 1950s, that department’s Bureau of Mineral Resources did not consider the fact that Australia had much more accessible high-grade iron ore than it had in 1938.

The Western Australian Government and the Japanese mounted a concerted campaign against the embargo from the mid-1950s. Their efforts bore fruit in November 1960 when, casting about for ways to promote exports, Menzies’s Cabinet reserved known deposits of high-grade iron ore for domestic use, but permitted sales from smaller deposits or deposits that might be discovered in the future. The Department of National Development was made responsible for considering and approving licences to export. Part of the reason for continuing to license iron ore exports was to make sure that Japanese mining companies did not gain an undue influence in the mining of deposits. After the end of the embargo, vast new deposits of iron ore were announced from discoveries made by entrepreneurs and prospectors in the 1950s.⁴¹

In the mid-1940s the Chifley government had cooperated with the Labor government in New South Wales to establish a Joint Coal Board. The JCB was endowed with federal and state powers to regulate the stagnant black coal industry in New South Wales. As well as encouraging mechanisation in the industry, the board saw prospects of Australia making coal sales to Japan in the 1950s. The first such exports were made from companies mining the high-quality coking coal (coal used to make steel) from the south coast of New South Wales.⁴²

Assisting in the development of the coal trade with Japan were the commercial counsellors in Australia’s Embassy in Japan: Nevil Stuart (1956–60) and AJ (‘Jack’) Day (1960–62).⁴³ To foster growth of an export trade in coal, the Department of Trade cooperated with the Department of National Development to encourage the Commonwealth Government to invest in improving coal-loading facilities in the major coal ports in New South Wales and Queensland.⁴⁴

Japanese Government and steel industry missions which visited Australia in 1961 confirmed the prospect of a long-term Japanese market for Australian coal.⁴⁵ Following the visits of the Japanese survey missions, and visits to Tokyo by Federal Minister for National Development William (Bill) Spooner and NSW Minister for Mines James (Jim) Simpson, the Menzies government provided financial assistance to upgrade the NSW coal ports at Newcastle, Balmain, and Port Kembla, and the Queensland port of Gladstone.⁴⁶ After the upgrade, all of these ports facilitated significantly larger coal exports to Japan. This was the beginning of the boom in black coal that led to coal becoming Australia’s main commodity export in the late 1970s and 1980s, and Newcastle the largest coal port in the world.⁴⁷

Stuart also monitored the first coking coal exporting operation in Queensland, developed by Thiess Brothers in the Kianga/Moura area. To get the coal to the port of Gladstone, they proposed to construct a 160-kilometre railway line. Thiess Brothers had no trouble in obtaining finance for the railway line, but anyone investing would need to have some certainty of continuity in Japanese purchasing of Queensland coal. A mere contract, even for ten years, would not provide such certainty. Consequently, Stuart advised that ‘Australian interests therefore can only be protected against undue risks if the Japanese steel companies themselves invest a substantial (but not a predominant) amount in the project’.⁴⁸ Thiess Brothers duly entered a partnership with the US company Peabody and the Japanese company Mitsui to form Thiess/Peabody/Mitsui to mine the coal deposits in the Kianga/Moura area. Stuart’s suggested model for Thiess would be replicated by the US-based Utah Construction and Mining Company when it formed a partnership with Mitsubishi to establish the Central Queensland Coal Associates, which became the dominant company mining coal in Queensland’s Bowen Basin in the 1960s and 1970s.⁴⁹

An increasing demand for Australia’s minerals augmented Japan’s already significant importation of primary products, such as wool and wheat. In 1963, negotiations between Australia and Japan led to a new agreement. This removed Australia’s right to discriminate against Japanese imports and completely normalised trading relations, albeit imports of British manufactured goods still received preferential entry under the Australian tariff.⁵⁰ Four years later, Japan was Australia’s largest export market. Comparison of the relative position of Britain and Japan is instructive. In 1950–51, Britain’s share of Australia’s exports was 33 per cent and Japan’s 6 per cent. But by 1973–74, less than a decade after Menzies’s retirement, the positions had reversed, with Japan taking 31 per cent and Britain 7 per cent.⁵¹

Conclusion: Menzies and Hawke

The years between 1955 and 1961 can be regarded as the period during which the foundations for Australia’s open economy were laid. The Menzies government established a unified Department of Trade and renegotiated the Ottawa Agreement in 1956, negotiated the landmark trade treaty with Japan a year later, and opened the wheat trade with China in 1960–61. Abolishing import restrictions in 1960 marked the end of the controlled economy that had begun in World War II.

The decision was a risky one, as became clear during the ‘credit squeeze’ episode, but coming out of this crisis were other decisions that sparked the mining boom of the 1960s. The mining boom had complex causes, including Japanese demand, the discoveries of prospectors, and investment decisions of Australian and foreign mining companies. But policy decisions of the Menzies government—such as ending import restrictions and the iron ore embargo—played an important role, too. Admittedly, later decisions of Coalition governments, such as high rates of tariffs, worked against greater openness.⁵² But the policy decisions of Menzies and colleagues discussed in this chapter were essential prerequisites for the liberalising initiatives of the Hawke government after 1983.

CHAPTER 8

AUSTRALIA IN THE ATOMIC AGE

Menzies’s Legacy and Nuclear’s Potential

Michael de Percy¹

ROBERT MENZIES EMBRACED the atomic age rather more enthusiastically than many other Australians. He envisaged Australia’s substantial uranium reserves providing a source of clean, reliable, and affordable energy that would ultimately replace fossil fuels. But he also knew that the threat of nuclear war tainted the development of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. Acknowledging that ‘what is best advertised tends to be more popularly understood’ about the dangers of nuclear proliferation, he nonetheless embraced the atomic age and set about securing its opportunities for Australia.²

The establishment of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission in 1952 and the subsequent passing of the 1953 Atomic Energy Act were the practical aspects of Menzies’s nuclear legacy. This ultimately led to the establishment of the High Flux Australian Reactor at Lucas Heights, albeit not the nuclear weapons-capable reactor that Gorton tried to establish at Jervis Bay years later. But symbolically, Menzies opened Australia’s atomic age by pushing the button at an official ceremony to start the first uranium processing plant at Rum Jungle in 1954.³ He also pushed the button to start Australia’s first nuclear reactor, designed to ‘test materials for their suitability in use in future power reactors’, at Lucas Heights in 1958.⁴

The HIFAR, as it was known, was Menzies’s consolation prize for extending the Chifley government’s ‘joint project’ with Britain to develop nuclear weapons.⁵ British tests were conducted in Australia between 1952 and 1963 during Menzies’s tenure as prime minister. These had destructive and enduring consequences for local Indigenous peoples, and though their extent is difficult to quantify, they have been thoroughly explored by recent historiography.⁶

While this chapter by no means seeks to downplay the suffering of those affected, it takes the view that history can only be judged based on the context in which decisions were originally made. Contemporary narratives that put Menzies at the centre of ‘nuclear colonialism’⁷ in Australia ignore the bipartisan desire to secure nuclear weapons as an ‘ideal deterrent’.⁸ With the threat of nuclear war more likely given the Soviet Union’s successful testing of atomic weapons in the same year that Menzies became prime minister, powder-coating Menzies’s legacy with historical revisionist dust ignores the naivety of Australia’s support for appeasement before the war. The failure of appeasement was a hard-won lesson not lost on Menzies. He was determined that Australia would, at the very least, play a part in the development of nuclear technology and develop local skills to ensure Australia was not left behind.⁹

The events that led to Britain testing nuclear weapons in Australia were a consequence of the United States’ nuclear weapons policy. Canada had provided uranium for the Manhattan Project and, in concert with the United States, was supported to develop its own nuclear energy industry.¹⁰ However, the McMahon Bill,¹¹ passed by the United States in 1946, suspended assistance to Britain to develop its nuclear capability for the next decade. During this period, Menzies capitalised on the opportunity for nuclear cooperation with the British, stating publicly that he was not aiming to ‘destroy people’ but to one day make nuclear energy ‘the servant of peaceful enterprise’.¹²

Menzies had the same concerns as political leaders today about the safety of nuclear reactors, the propensity for conflating nuclear industries with nuclear weapons, and the problem of storing nuclear waste. But Menzies thought the potential of Australia’s atomic age was only limited by our skills and imagination.¹³ The Lucas Heights facility, while not quite the nuclear reactor envisaged by proponents of nuclear weapons, was more than just a case of antipodean hubris, or ‘what are they doing here that can’t be better done elsewhere?’¹⁴ It provided opportunities for training Australian scientists, as well as sharing and transferring nuclear-related research and knowledge.

Declassified documents show that Menzies wanted to develop Australia’s nuclear capability at the height of the Cold War, but publicly at least he focused on enabling infrastructure and skills that could rapidly progress Australia’s nuclear capability should the need arise. This chapter traces Menzies’s role in the development of Australia’s nuclear industry, and the impact of his legacy on Australia’s nuclear science and technology capabilities today.

Cold War and the Atomic Age

The post-war period before Menzies’s election in 1949 was marked by the onset of the Cold War. Under President Truman, a Democrat, the United States was keen to hold on to the monopoly of nuclear technology it had achieved during the preceding global conflict for as long as possible. Consequently, in 1946, the McMahon Act overturned the Quebec Agreement between Churchill and Roosevelt for ‘the “full and effective” exchange of information on atomic research and development’.¹⁵ British Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee attempted to reinstate Britain’s technological relationship with the United States; however, he was ‘undermined by a series of spy scandals’ involving the leaking of nuclear information to the Soviet Union.¹⁶ With Attlee having no other option, the Chifley government capitalised on the opening and negotiated a ‘joint project’ to help the United Kingdom develop nuclear weapons by providing access to skills and the space for nuclear tests. The arrangement became the impetus for Australia’s nuclear industry.

Spurred on by the British and the Americans, in 1948 the Chifley government announced a £25 000 reward for the discovery of uranium in Australia. Meanwhile, the nuclear threat increased when communist insurgents triggered the Malayan Emergency in 1948, and the following year, probably helped by British intelligence failures, the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear weapon.¹⁷ Near simultaneously, communist China came into being, and it would have its own ‘bomb’ by 1964. Britain, hampered by the McMahon Act and without sufficient territory to test nuclear weapons, looked to Australia, and to develop the plans first discussed with the Chifley government in 1946.¹⁸ The Woomera Rocket Range, uranium exploration, and extensive funding of the Australian National University to conduct nuclear research at the nearby Snowy River Scheme, itself established under the Commonwealth’s defence powers, were all initiatives of the Chifley Labor government—which thus predated Menzies coming to power.¹⁹

Not only did the Americans mistrust the British, but the United States also ‘had an embargo in place on intelligence to Australia’,²⁰ one that would only partially be lifted after the establishment of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to combat ‘the industrial and political power at the disposal of the pro-Soviet Australian Communist Party (ACP) and its adherents’.²¹ The influence of the communists in dockside unions had hampered Australian military efforts and was a concern for British officials pursuing a nuclear test site in Australia.²² The Chifley government established ASIO in an attempt to improve Australia’s security reputation, which was so maligned that the Americans had given Australia the same security classification as the Soviet Union.²³ However, far from meekly accepting what our ‘great and powerful friends’ told us to do, both Chifley and Menzies’s actions in the nuclear field were explicitly designed to enhance national security for a militarily weak nation at the far end of the earth—so that we would not have to rely almost entirely on Britain and the United States for defence.

After the Menzies government came to power, geopolitical tensions would only increase. The Korean War and the Malayan Emergency saw Australian troops from the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan formed into the Royal Australian Regiment and moved to operations in Korea and later Malaya and Vietnam. During Menzies’s entire tenure, Australian troops were overseas on operations up to and including the Vietnam War. With insufficient recruiting to meet the threats Australia faced, Menzies introduced national service in 1964, a controversial decision that speaks to why Australia would have a strong desire to use technological advantage to overcome a lack of military manpower.²⁴

Australia’s emergence into the atomic age began with the discovery of uranium at Rum Jungle in the Northern Territory, a region named after a teamster who used his cargo of rum to steal 750 ounces of gold from drunken miners.²⁵ The uranium discovery was confirmed in 1951, and the British and American Combined Development Agency (formed during the war) provided funding for the project, which was managed by the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, established in 1952. Meanwhile, the Montebello Islands off the coast of Western Australia had been selected as part of Operation Hurricane as the test site for the detonation of Britain’s first nuclear bomb on 3 October 1952. By that date, the atomic age had officially arrived on Australian shores.

Preceding the Chifley government’s nuclear ‘joint project’ with the British, and the Atomic Energy (McMahon) Act’s monopoly of nuclear weapons technology, was the Baruch Plan.²⁶ The plan, presented to the newly formed United Nations Atomic Energy Commission in June 1946, was designed to ensure US control of nuclear technology through an agency of the United Nations. In presenting his plan to the UN, US representative Bernard Baruch stated:

We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead. That is our business … Behind the black portent of the new atomic age lies a hope which, seized upon with faith, can work our salvation. If we fail, then we have damned every man to be the slave of fear.²⁷

As the UN debated the Baruch Plan, the United States adopted the McMahon Act. Although the Soviet Union had been involved in the Conference of Foreign Ministers discussions to establish the UNAEC and to dismantle nuclear weapons at the end of the war, and the United States had agreed to decommission all its nuclear weapons and to share its nuclear technology in exchange for inspections of nuclear developments as safeguards as part of the Baruch Plan, the Soviet Union did not agree with the plan and the proposed Atomic Development Agency was never established.

This push towards an internationalist approach to prevent the very prominent threat of nuclear war would be mirrored in Australia. During his wartime radio broadcasts, Menzies had toyed with the idea that nation-states would have to dilute their sovereignty to ensure world peace,²⁸ and while he later walked back from this, a similar proposal would be raised by J Robert Oppenheimer, who called for a world government to avoid nuclear holocaust. This anti-nuclear globalism would be expressed in the Australian publication This Atomic Age—and You!, Menzies’s copy of which still survives in the Menzies Collection. The author, John Earl Bowker, had trained as a radiologist in the 1920s and met Nobel Laureate Marie Curie, who had allegedly informed him of her plan to create a ‘radium bomb’ to cure cancer, not yet knowing that radium itself caused cancer.²⁹

In a letter to The Argus in 1949,³⁰ Bowker expressed the view that a total ban on nuclear technology was a necessity, going so far as to claim that even nuclear’s use in medicine was ‘overstated’ and should therefore be disregarded. Like Oppenheimer, Bowker believed that world government was the only way to curb nuclear’s capability to destroy the world, emotively concluding: ‘For the sake of our children let us awake before it is too late.’ The logical progression underpinning Bowker’s arguments for complete prohibition was that any nuclear experimentation inevitably moved from medical to energy, to weapons, and therefore any advancement in nuclear science ought to be discarded outright. No doubt Nevil Shute (who was born in Britain but spent his later years in Australia) and his 1957 novel On the Beach³¹ likewise did little to shore up Australian support for nuclear in the 1950s. The book would be adapted into a 1959 movie starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins, and Fred Astaire, with its plot involving people in Australia being the last humans to die from radiation poisoning following a nuclear war in Europe. However, at the same time as this media, the geopolitical reality was that the United States arguably used ‘nuclear blackmail’ to bring about the end of the Korean War, which added weight to the efficacy of nuclear weapons as a deterrent.³²

Against such a backdrop, Menzies was keen to progress Australia cautiously into the atomic age, but there were already early linkages between the socialist left and nuclear hysteria—signs of what would become the powerful anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, especially to the political left of the Labor Party. In particular, the Australian Communist Party saw the advantages of linking itself with anti-nuclear sentiment as a way of disarming a Cold War enemy.³³ This was apparent in the 1998 deal between Prime Minister John Howard and the Democrats’ Meg Lees that prohibited nuclear energy in Australia, a decision that enabled the construction of the open pool Australian lightwater reactor, or OPAL, which replaced the HIFAR and became operational in 2007. The issues Menzies faced in the atomic age have never been far from policy debates about nuclear in Australia ever since.

From Proliferation to Plowshares³⁴

Uranium mining in Australia provided an opportunity to contribute to the West’s dominance in the atomic age without Australia committing directly to a nuclear weapons program. Menzies thus showed a keenness for uranium exploration, which would be utterly repudiated by the Hawke government in 1984 with its adoption of a ‘no new mines’ policy (which restricted Australian mining to the three existing mines)—only for the Howard government to overturn the policy in 1996. In contrast, enthusiasm for uranium mining in Australia in the 1950s was tempered only by the lack of skilled workers who were otherwise needed to work in existing mining operations, particularly iron and coal. Menzies acknowledged that higher wages would need to be paid to encourage miners to work in the tropics, but such an approach would simply shift the existing workforce rather than create more skilled workers.³⁵

Britain did not have enough workers either, so Menzies was hesitant about commencing large-scale uranium mining operations until adequate skills had been developed. At the same time, he was keen to learn of discoveries of uranium deposits. For example, when three private prospectors discovered uranium near the Edith River in the Northern Territory, the Geraldton Guardian reported:

Indications given by their uranium detector were so powerful that, when they reported their find, the Administrator of the Northern Territory, accompanied by a gologist [sic], a geophysicist and a Mines Branch inspector, hurried to the locality by car, and tests having indicated the discovery of a major field, they telegraphed the news to the Prime Minister (Right Hon. R.G. Menzies, M.P.).³⁶

Despite clear enthusiasm, the Guardian noted that there were drawbacks to such a find:

These two new discoveries, so early in the history of serious prospecting for radio-active ore, cannot fail to greatly increase the interest of the outside world in the future of the Commonwealth as a producer of uranium, for the known supplies are still far short of the world’s potential requirements, whether the matter is viewed from the aspect of defence strategy or the development of industrial power. In the meantime we would do well to remember that Australia’s uranium wealth makes her tempting bait for covetous Communist countries. So close attention must be paid to our defence—on the principle of ‘What we have we shall hold!’³⁷

Neither Edith River nor the Nichols Nob discovery in South Australia ‘would interfere with the American interest in the Rum Jungle or Radium Hill fields’, for which adequate skilled workers were soon found.³⁸

Menzies opened the Rum Jungle uranium ore processing plant on 17 September 1954. In the words of the Brisbane Telegraph, Australia ‘took another step forward in this atom age’.³⁹ But the Warwick Daily News warned that:

Enormous additional responsibilities have been thrust on the Australian people to secure the defence of this vitally strategic area. Rum Jungle and its fantastic supplies of uranium must be a rich prize dangling before covetous eyes to the north.⁴⁰

When Menzies ‘pressed the button’ to open the Rum Jungle processing plant, and later to start the HIFAR at Lucas Heights in 1958, nuclear energy seemed like an immediate prospect for Australia. That is why the Menzies government had established the HIFAR for £9 million, a significant investment not just in terms of cost but also manpower.⁴¹ However, while it was initially intended to test materials for a wider nuclear network, the focus of the reactor’s work would shift towards producing radioisotopes and conducting research.⁴²

By 1962, when Menzies officially opened the Atomic Energy Establishment, he was already expressing a more gradualist view of nuclear’s potential:

It is quite true that there are many parts of Australia where vast supplies of coal make the problem of power production technically simple, though it may be, occasionally, financially difficult; there are great enterprises of hydro-electric power both on the mainland and in Tasmania. But there will come a time as the population of this country increases, as new resources are uncovered in remote parts of this country, when nuclear power will become as much the servant of peaceful enterprise as thermal power or hydro-electric power. Indeed I am told by those who understand these matters that it may well be that in parts of Australia remote from coal, or water, in an appropriate position, nuclear power may become quite competitive by the early years of the next decade, by the early 1970s. It doesn’t end there … no doubt very largely by the use of nuclear power … [there exists] experimental work on taking the salt out of water. Think of what this could mean to Australia; think of what this could mean to a continent whose greatest problem is water, having regard to its area and to the distribution of its population.⁴³

While this put off any widespread use of nuclear as an electricity generator to the distant future, its defensive capabilities would likewise not come to be realised for Australia. On this front, Menzies deserves some criticism for assuming that Britain would share its nuclear weapons secrets with Australia, although there were ongoing discussions below the prime-ministerial level to that effect.⁴⁴ Paul Grace has suggested that had Menzies requested nuclear weapons technology before agreeing to allow the British to conduct nuclear tests in Australia, he may have got his wish.⁴⁵ He argues that Menzies did not discuss Australia’s ‘nuclear capability’ with the British Government until 1961.⁴⁶ In a letter to British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Menzies requested ‘full manufacturing data for the production of operational weapons’ or ‘the supply of ready-made weapons’.⁴⁷ But by this stage, the British were engaging with the Americans again about obtaining nuclear technology and Macmillan replied that he would need to talk to them before agreeing to provide anything to Australia.

British nuclear tests in Australia concluded in 1963. The 1962 Polaris Sales Agreement re-established the nuclear relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom, giving the United Kingdom access to the nuclear weapons it had long desired.⁴⁸ In 1963, Britain, along with the United States and the Soviet Union, signed the United Nation’s Limited Test Ban Treaty that ‘banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water’.⁴⁹ Consequently, British interest in Australia as a nuclear partner waned, and along with it, Australia’s chances of obtaining nuclear weapons. With Menzies’s prediction about nuclear energy not becoming economical until at least the 1970s, and the prospects for nuclear weapons now mostly out of reach, the Australian nuclear industry (publicly at least), went into an effective hibernation, in which a continuous but somewhat faint heartbeat was dedicated to medical and research purposes.

Nuclear Secrets

With the benefit of hindsight and access to declassified documents, we now know that Menzies was keen to pursue nuclear weapons, as was his predecessor, Chifley.⁵⁰ However, in the public’s imagination, Menzies is solely to blame for the aftermath of the British nuclear tests. On coming to power in 1983, the Hawke government instigated the McClelland Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia.⁵¹ Conveniently, the ‘terms of reference were limited to 1952 onwards’, ensuring ‘that no Labor icons were accidentally embarrassed’.⁵² The British themselves were less critical of Menzies. In her 1987 history of the British tests in Australia, Lorna Arnold gives Menzies the credit for fostering the relationship with the United Kingdom:

Menzies towered over Australian politics throughout the whole period of weapon tests … Menzies was the presiding genius of the very special relationship. His support, and that of his government, for the British atomic weapons test programme were crucial, as Australian public opinion became more restive. If he had lost power, it was possible that Labour [sic] government under Dr Evatt would have put an end to the tests. The British were well aware of how much they owed to Menzies and how much depended on his personal support and his continuation in office.⁵³

In sharp contrast to Menzies’s deliberate fostering of a special relationship, former Labor Senator James McClelland may have had bias in the other direction, as he is said to have ‘liked to stick it up the Poms whenever he got the chance’.⁵⁴ While these were personal traits of the two men, in part they reflect changing attitudes within Australia between the 1950s and the 1980s, hence that the commission was judging the actions of a prior government based on a set of values which had significantly altered in the interim.

The royal commission did gather important evidence of the consequences of the tests, which can offer vital lessons for decisionmakers in the future. It found the oral evidence of illnesses sustained by Indigenous people in the vicinity of the nuclear tests to be sufficiently corroborated to be believed. The commission also found that inadequate ‘attention was paid to Aboriginal safety’, and that ‘attempts to ensure Aboriginal safety … demonstrate[d] ignorance, incompetence and cynicism on the part of those responsible for that safety’.⁵⁵

However, the commission’s anachronistic attempt to pass judgement on the past without fully appreciating its context goes against all the training of a historian. As biographer AW Martin has argued, applying a 1980s sense of morality to the 1950s strategic situation ignores Menzies’s ‘conception of responsibility’ for national defence at the time.⁵⁶ The circumstances Australia faced during Menzies’s tenure, which were regional conflicts in Malaya, Korea, and Vietnam, and not on some far-off European battlefield, would have weighed heavily on any Australian prime minister regardless of their party affiliation.

Peter Butt’s 2001 documentary Fortress Australia includes key footage of Sir Philip Baxter, a British chemical engineer who was recruited to the University of New South Wales in 1953 and was a passionate advocate of both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons for Australia. Although Butt’s documentary was referred to the ABC’s Independent Complaints Review Panel for a ‘lack of balance’, Baxter’s position was quite clear. He advocated nuclear weapons for Australia as the only way to ensure a credible national defence that did not rely on alliances that might result in a repeat of the situation following the fall of Singapore in 1942.

Menzies was no doubt conscious of Australia’s precarious position, but he also had to walk the tightrope of diplomacy. The ANU, to which the Chifley government had granted several times more funding to develop a nuclear physics capability compared with its foundational funding, created problems with key personnel working on national security projects while also trying to develop civilian skills. The Americans wanted all personnel working on nuclear weapons capabilities to be under direct government control, rather than passive observance by ASIO.⁵⁷ Sir Marcus Oliphant, head of the ANU’s nuclear program, was the Australian physicist who had played an important role in the development of the Manhattan Project, but he was effectively sidelined as a result of the security requirements and the actions of his former colleague at the University of Birmingham that came to light during the Petrov Royal Commission.⁵⁸

That Australia was able to develop the skills needed to have any nuclear capability at all during this period is both remarkable and at the same time an opportunity missed. Following Menzies’s retirement in 1966, his hand-picked successor, Harold Holt, continued to pursue nuclear weapons and energy, as did John Gorton after Holt’s disappearance. Holt was pro-American and viewed the 1951 ANZUS Treaty as the cornerstone of Australia’s defence. Holt’s defence minister, Allen Fairhall, stated that ‘the price we pay [for the alliance] takes the form of the facilities provided at Woomera, Pine Gap, and North West Cape’.⁵⁹

Gorton’s failed attempt to establish a nuclear reactor on Commonwealth land at Jervis Bay was largely caught up in the diplomatic issues of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The treaty meant that the United States and Britain would be unable to transfer nuclear weapons technology to Australia. In talks with US Secretary of State Dean Rusk in Canberra in 1968, Gorton was ‘acutely aware of the ongoing political and military instability in South-East Asia’ and ‘fiercely opposed to Australia giving up its “nuclear option” when it could not be certain how events would unfold in the region’.⁶⁰

Further, Gorton agreed with Oliphant that ‘Australia could best be defended by nuclear weapons’, arguing in a Senate speech in 1957 that:

While … a potential attacker of this country might be deterred by the possession of hydrogen bombs by the [US or Britain] … I think that we should be trusting very much indeed to the help that those great countries could give if we put our faith solely in a deterrent held by them.⁶¹

Gorton was keen to ensure Australia took a further step into the atomic age with the Jervis Bay reactor. Under pressure from the United States, he signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970, although it was not ratified in parliament until the Whitlam government in 1973. It is clear that the true purpose of the reactor was to develop Australia’s nuclear defence option, but then Gorton lost the confidence of the party room and McMahon, a ‘nuclear sceptic’, became prime minister in 1971.⁶² McMahon quickly moved to end Australia’s nuclear option, thus curbing Menzies’s legacy and Australia’s atomic ambitions at the last hurdle.

Menzies’s Legacy and AUKUS

Menzies was willing to face up to the realities of Australia’s national security concerns. Claims he courted Britain merely because he was ‘British to the bootstraps’ ignore the clear strategic rationale behind the relationship, and are part of a political and media narrative that tends to justify pacifism at any cost.⁶³ This is a narrative which Menzies himself was openly critical of. In a letter to his daughter in 1967, Menzies made it clear that he thought journalists who reported on American bombing in the conflict in Vietnam were of the opinion that the Americans ‘should fight at a self-imposed disadvantage’. He went on to write that the media were sent to Vietnam

for one purpose only, so far as I can tell, and that was to send back propaganda against the US bombing of North Vietnam and against the military policies being pursued, under some difficulties, in that area. Meanwhile, it sets out … to undermine American public opinion by creating well-advertised doubts about American policy and actions.⁶⁴

Menzies would write in 1973 that Australia’s foreign policy was courting the same communists he had fought against for years. He was concerned that the abolition of compulsory military service and school cadet corps, and the weakening of ASIO (including Lionel Murphy’s raid), were compromising Australia’s defence capability at a time when self-sufficiency was most important.⁶⁵

Until McMahon and Whitlam, Chifley, Menzies, and Gorton had adopted pragmatic and positive approaches to nuclear technology. Since Australia’s capabilities remain somewhat underdone, the everpresent tension between national security versus civil liberties that would be driven by Australia becoming a nuclear power has not yet materialised.⁶⁶ Whether one supports nuclear technology for energy or defence purposes, or otherwise supports nuclear non-proliferation in its entirety, remains the stuff of politics.

It is arguable that without Menzies’s enthusiasm for the atomic age, Australia would not have developed its capability to produce nuclear research and radioisotopes for life-saving medical procedures. That the development of nuclear weapons begat energy that enabled life-saving nuclear products is a regrettable fact of the human condition. Likewise, while nuclear tests had very negative and in parts preventable consequences for those in the vicinity, Menzies’s actions were crucial to Australia’s security alliances which helped to protect the nation as a whole. Moreover, they have enabled Australia to have a small yet reputable cadre of skilled nuclear physicists, regulators, and other scientists, scholars, and administrative and legal professionals who continue to contribute to human knowledge, all the way to the beginnings of the universe itself.

Menzies likely read Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, a copy of which survives in the Menzies Collection. In the book, Franklin suggests that we should aim to imitate Socrates and Jesus while knowing that we will shine little more than a speckled axe.⁶⁷ Menzies was not without his imperfections, but he was Australia’s longest-serving prime minister. If it is indeed a truism that Australian voters are always right, then Menzies’s election victories from 1949 until his increased majority at the 1963 election confirm Australians’ confidence in his ability to steer the ship of state in uncertain times—including in relation to the nuclear issue.

As we enter an era of nuclear-powered submarines, it is worth reflecting on Menzies’s legacy in the atomic era that ensured Australia had access to medical products while also having the potential to access nuclear energy or protection at some point in the future. Without Menzies’s legacy, his unlikely successor Scott Morrison may not have had the necessary capabilities to secure the AUKUS agreement as Australia’s most potent strategic deterrent during a period of global unrest and declining defence capability.

CHAPTER 9

ANTARCTICA

The Forgotten (Menzies) Flank

Elizabeth Buchanan¹

AUSTRALIA’S LONGEST-SERVING PRIME minister, Robert Menzies, is well captured in numerous biographies and studies of his political legacy. Menzies’s international agenda arguably placed Australia on the map, with his inking of various pacts and treaties from ANZUS to the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. Menzies made Canberra a true and trusted stakeholder in international defence and security affairs. Seemingly struck from the official record, however, is Menzies’s involvement in the establishment of (arguably) the world’s most successful Cold War-era international agreement: the Antarctic Treaty. The National Archives of Australia, in the immense coverage of Menzies in its Australian Prime Ministers collection, fails to even reference the inking of the Antarctic Treaty.²

Australia’s Antarctic leadership in the foundation of this global peace treaty is an overlooked aspect of the Menzies government. The period 1957–60 was one of irreversible change for the Antarctic continent, paving the way for a brokered peace between Cold War superpowers over Antarctica and at the same time protecting Australia’s southern flank from militarisation. Of course, the treaty also served to protect and secure the addition of some 5.9 million square kilometres of Australian territory. Equating to an area almost two times the size of India, this was no small feat.

Over sixty years have passed since then and the success of this period for the Menzies government can only be further underscored by the fact that the Antarctic Treaty remains in place today. This chapter explores Menzies and the Antarctic Treaty milestone, specifically examining the period pre-treaty, the treaty negotiation years, and the advent of the first Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting which was hosted by Canberra in 1961.

Two prominent avenues of inquiry arise when considering the absence of Antarctica from the Menzies legacy. First, had Menzies allowed Antarctica to fall under the remit of other parts of his government, resulting in limited bandwidth to promote it? Indeed, it was known that Antarctica was a specific hobby horse for Richard Casey (Menzies’s minister for external—now foreign—affairs from May 1951 to February 1960). Dubbed by our very own Australian Antarctic Division a ‘pioneer in Antarctica’, Casey’s linkage to Antarctica reached back to the 1937 position he held as chairman of the ‘polar committee’ of the Imperial Conference in London.³ Menzies tasked Casey with External Affairs and CSIRO until his retirement, a period in which Casey bolstered Australia’s Antarctic position and research prestige in Antarctic science.

The fact that an Australian Antarctic research station is named Casey, in a nod to his legacy, also furthers the notion that Australia’s Antarctic vision sat squarely with Casey, not Menzies. After all, there is no permanent research station in Antarctica named after Menzies. He does, however, have his name etched on maps in the form of Mount Menzies, a peak on the Fisher Glacier in Antarctica. Of interest is the fact that Menzies assumed both the prime-ministerial position and that of minister for external affairs upon Casey’s retirement. Indeed, the period in which Menzies’s Antarctic story began was no doubt overshadowed by the ramifications of the 1954 Petrov Affair. Furthermore, building upon Menzies’s fight against communism in Australia, and the eventual royal commission into espionage, there appears to have been little ‘room’ to promote his work on Antarctica at the time.

A second avenue of inquiry as to how Antarctica fell from the Menzies history books is perhaps more haunting. Did Menzies purposefully distance his Antarctic work from the mainstream, or reduce it, because of the close engagement it necessitated with the Soviet Union? There was a requirement to work with the Soviets in partnership to negotiate an agreement to essentially manage the sovereign Australian territorial claim. This would have been at odds (to say the least) with Menzies’s domestic communism agenda, or ‘red scare’, at the time. Sparring with Evatt over Soviet reaches into Australia, only to partner in negotiations with Moscow over Australian territory elsewhere? Difficult to navigate, to say the least.

Pre-1950s: Meltdown

The question of Antarctica did not appear overnight. Indeed, during the period in question, various efforts were underway to solve the problem of Antarctica—the earth’s remaining unowned continent, one of geostrategic wealth and immense resource potential. For Australia, Antarctica is our closest neighbouring continent. It is one of rich historical linkage, dating back to at least 1898, when the first Australian, Louis Bernacchi, is known to have landed in Antarctica as part of a wintering expedition party.⁴ In 1911, Australian explorer Douglas Mawson led the Australasian Antarctic Expedition. Then, in 1933, Australia accepted the transferral of territory claimed by the United Kingdom to form the Australian Antarctic Territory.

Meanwhile, in 1948, the United States formally moved from an approach of pushing a world park or United Nations trusteeship idea for Antarctica to a position of seeking a ‘condominium’ agreement with the seven claimant states. Here, parties would merge and manage claims under the auspices of a world park of sorts. At the same time, one of the claimant states, Chile, proposed a treaty arrangement which neither rejected or accepted the seven claims but instead facilitated global collaboration on and in the continent. This was the first time the notion of pushing the problem of sovereignty to the side arose.

While Australia’s concerns sat around the future of the Australian Antarctic Territory—since codified in domestic law—Canberra had growing concerns over Soviet activity in that territory. Another element of Australian insecurity at the time was immense distrust of Washington over Antarctic affairs. A group called the Polar Committee was even set up by Britain and Australia to discuss US plans in Antarctica and its designs on the continent.

1957: Eviction

In a 1957 report by Australia’s Joint Intelligence Committee, the ‘communist threat to Australia from Antarctica’ was seen to be—first, economic: ‘Discoveries of economic value might, however, be made’; and second, scientific: ‘The establishment of scientific bases in Antarctic would provide the communists with data which would be valuable in the development of long-range weapons.’⁵ In terms of the threat posed by a Soviet military presence, the committee noted that ‘because of the relative unimportance of targets in Australia and the serious logistical difficulties in maintaining such operations from Antarctica … [Moscow is] most unlikely to develop bases in Antarctica for [a military] purpose’.⁶

Significantly, the committee report noted, with regard to long-term Soviet interest in Antarctica, it was plausible that the region would assume strategic importance as developments progressed in the exploitation of the natural resource sphere.

Meanwhile, debate went around in circles regarding the best way to solve the Antarctic problem. It wasn’t until the International Geophysical Year of 1957, a collaborative year of scientific missions focused on polar human endeavour, that geostrategic concerns forced Antarctic stakeholders to the negotiation table.

At the time, Soviet research vessels still made port calls in Australia en route to Antarctica. It is important to note, although unsurprising given ‘rampant anti-communism’, that when it came to these visiting vessels, ‘the Menzies government tried to extract some form of recognition from the Soviet Union that they were travelling towards the Australian Antarctic Territory’.⁷ Efforts were made, yet failed, to extract acceptance of Australia’s sovereignty over the areas in which the Soviets were preparing to set up camp for the 1957 IGY.

The 1957 IGY saw some seventy countries come together across the world in the pursuit of science. President Eisenhower noted ‘the most important result of the International Geophysical Year is that demonstration of the ability of peoples of all nations to work together harmoniously for the common good’.⁸ This was indeed the case for those scientists based in Antarctica for the IGY. However, towards the end of the program, it became apparent that the Soviets had little intent to pack up their research camps or dismantle established stations for the IGY program of work. This was concerning given the 1957 Joint Intelligence Committee report in no uncertain terms concluded, ‘Australian policy should be directed towards ensuring that the USSR evacuates the Australian sector on conclusion of the IGY.’⁹

Of course, for Menzies, still fresh from battling communism in parliament and dealing with Soviet diplomats in Canberra (the Petrov Affair), this new ‘red scare’ of Soviet bases in Australianclaimed territory was likely worrisome. Of interest is the fact that during this period, diplomatic ties between Canberra and Moscow had been severed, with the USSR closing its embassy in Canberra back in 1954 and expelling Australia’s ambassador in Moscow. Ties remained suspended, as a result of the Petrov Affair, until 2 June 1959. Evidently, the hosting of Soviet vessels en route to Antarctica for the 1957 IGY occurred in the midst of this breakdown in formal dialogue. It was the United Kingdom which acted as an intermediary for Soviet– Australia IGY and Antarctic matters: from port calls in Port Adelaide for the IGY to preliminary treaty discussions.

1958: Negotiations

Soon after the 1957 IGY came to a close, negotiations as to an Antarctic solution started once more. A global peace treaty began coming together in 1958, at the height of the Cold War, and during a period of prolonged Australia–Soviet diplomatic crisis. This was a mammoth task, essentially bringing together the two blocs of the time to agree to disagree over sovereignty and work together towards a greater global good. For many, this was considered to be an unattainable feat. Until it proved possible.

Australian Department of External Affairs cables shed light on the Menzies government’s position going into preliminary negotiations about what an Antarctic agreement might look like. Protection of the Australian Antarctic Territory, the sovereign territorial claim Canberra held, was of utmost significance for Menzies. Non-militarisation of Antarctica was the second priority, and the third aim for negotiations was to ensure no international authority gained the power to govern Antarctica.¹⁰

Interestingly, given the eventual 1990s ban on mineral exploitation and extraction which Australia prides itself on having negotiated, it was the position of Canberra in 1958 to avoid any restrictions on exploiting resources.¹¹ An explicit tension for Australia was evident, as the Menzies government set out to protect Australia’s Antarctic claim by asking all parties to set aside the question of sovereignty, but at the same time Canberra wanted to protect its ability to act on potential extraction rights as well.

Negotiations with Antarctic counterparts required diplomatic finesse. Former Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Richard Woolcott noted it was Casey’s diplomatic edge in discussions that brought the Soviet Union to the table: ‘I thought that Casey dealt very effectively with [Soviet Minister] Firubin, which I would not have necessarily expected.’¹² He went on to state:

I think that Casey had an important role in negotiating or helping negotiate Article IV of the Antarctic Treaty, which dealt with further territorial claims by states, and to which the then Soviet Union was very opposed. I think Casey played a major part in persuading the Russians to go along with that and so that was an effective thing that he did, even though I never read much about it.¹³

But the glory of successful negotiations with the Soviets was more or less absorbed by Menzies in any case. Menzies opened the 1959 Liberal Party Conference at Albert Hall in Canberra with a speech marking ten years of power. Looking back on his government’s decade of ‘wins’, Menzies referenced the Antarctic Treaty negotiations held in Washington. While the treaty was still forthcoming at this point, Menzies nonetheless foregrounded the strides made in Antarctica under his leadership:

[We are] going to see an international sort of affairs in Antarctica which will achieve much good results … two things in particular; one, I won’t say the demilitarization of Antarctica because it hasn’t been militarised, but an agreement that it shall not be used for military purposes. That would have seemed silly, wouldn’t it, once, until they began to develop rockets and guided missiles and sputniks and the like; very important today. And in the second place, the combination of the resources of nations for the exploitation of scientific knowledge or, indeed, of scientific matter of any kind in the Antarctic area and that again is of tremendous importance to us. Even meteorologically, it would be a wonderful thing if we could have access to all the scientific meteorological knowledge gathered by other nations that have a foot-hold in the Antarctic so that we might pool the results; it would improve our own poor knowledge of our weather in Australia out of all recognition.¹⁴

1959: Treaty

The Antarctic Treaty was signed on 1 December 1959, in Washington, and entered into force in 1961. Signatories included the twelve states active in Antarctica during the IGY of 1957. Seven states hold territorial claims: Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom. The United States and Russia (inheriting the Soviet Union position) are also original signatory states; however, they both maintain a position that they have the right to assert a claim to any or all of Antarctica. This ‘status-quo’ position is a holding pattern which the Antarctic Treaty facilitates. Belgium, Japan, and South Africa make up the rest of the twelve original signatory states.¹⁵

Since 1959, forty-four other states have acceded to the treaty, making a total of fifty-six parties in total. Seventeen of these acceding states have demonstrated their interest in Antarctica as well as scientific commitment to the standard required to join the original twelve signatories to be dubbed ‘Consultative Parties’. These twenty-nine parties are decision-makers when it comes to Antarctica, as these are the states able to vote at Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings.¹⁶

The Antarctic Treaty is the founding document for the agreed governance of Antarctica. A series of conventions, and annexes, have since been inked which taken together represent the broader Antarctic Treaty System. Key conventions include the Madrid Protocol (a ban on mining). The basic provisions of the Antarctic Treaty are summarised in Table 9.1.

Table 9.1 Summary of Antarctic Treaty provisions

Article I

Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only; all military activities (including testing) are prohibited. Military persons and equipment may be used, however, for support of scientific endeavour.

Article II

Freedom of scientific investigation in Antarctica.

Article III

In support of scientific investigation and to promote international cooperation, scientific findings and information should be exchanged and made freely available.

Article IV

The treaty does not recognise, dispute or allow the establishment of territorial claims, and no new claims shall be asserted while the treaty is in force.

Article V

Nuclear explosions and disposal of radioactive waste are prohibited.

Article VI

Provisions of the treaty apply to the area south of 60 degrees latitude, inclusive of land and ice shelves. But high seas are covered in international law.

Article VII

Free access—including aerial observation—to any area for inspection, inclusive of all stations, installations, and equipment. Advance notice of activities and presence of military personnel must be given.

Article VIII

Observers/inspecting parties under Article VII and scientific personnel are under the jurisdiction of their own states.

Article IX

Consultative parties and other states that have acceded to the Treaty shall meet periodically to exchange information and to further treaty objectives. These Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings shall be open to parties that conduct substantial scientific research.

Article X

Treaty states will ensure no one engages in activities in Antarctica contrary to the principles of the treaty.

Article XI

Disputes are to be settled peacefully by the parties concerned or, in the event this is not possible, by the International Court of Justice.

Article XII

The treaty may be modified or amended at any time by the unanimous agreement of consultative parties. Thirty years after the treaty has come into force, any consultative party may request a conference to review the operation of the treaty. Any modifications or amendments made at such a conference require majority support of consultative parties.

Article XIII

The treaty is subject to ratification by signatory states and is open for accession by any state that is a member of the UN or is invited with the consent of all consultative parties.

Article XIV

The United States is the repository of the treaty and is responsible for duly providing certified copies to signatories and acceding states.

Menzies celebrated the Antarctic Treaty in terms of its protection of Australian territory and the codification of leadership responsibilities for Australia over the future of Antarctica. Menzies worked to underscore the truly Australian element of Antarctica. Often, he signalled his displeasure that too few Australians knew about their Antarctic legacy. For Menzies, the story of Mawson was central to reminding the nation of her Antarctic roots:

I think it is one of the ironies of life, at least of contemporary life, that if you were to say to the average citizen, ‘who are the best-known people?’ he would at once think in terms of headlines. The footballers would come first; and the cricketers would come second; and the politicians a most honourable third; and the rest nowhere. This has always seemed to me to be something of a monstrosity. Never more do I think that than when we are here to think about Douglas Mawson and his character and his achievements and his enormous stature, not only in our own country, but in the world, one of the very greatest of Australians¹⁷

1961: Meeting

In July 1961, the first Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting was opened by Menzies in Canberra. It was a proud moment, akin to a ‘mini-UN’, with UN translators from New York flown over and specific soundproof booths built in (old) Parliament House just to facilitate the event. This first meeting of the consultative parties to the Antarctic Treaty served to solidify the central principles and purposes of the treaty.¹⁸ The meeting also aimed to progress recommendations for future areas of consensus, and, of course, to kick off momentum in terms of collaborative engagement between nation-states.

Menzies opened the meeting with ‘personal regret’ that Casey, whom he noted ‘played a most active part in the negotiation’ of the Antarctic Treaty, was not present to see the fruits of his work.¹⁹ Casey was no longer part of the Australian Parliament in July 1961; he was, however, in the Soviet Union at the time of the first consultative meeting—engaging with the Polar Institute in Leningrad.

Menzies framed Australia’s closeness to Antarctica in his remarks. In a departure from contemporary strategic assessment of Australia’s proximate northern approaches, Menzies noted ‘we have not only a sense of neighbourhood about the Antarctic …[but] a deep and practical interest in it’.²⁰ While highlighting the fact that the first consultative meeting had brought together twelve different nations, four of which were the nuclear powers of the time, Menzies pointed out the three major unifying principles overhanging their business in Canberra:

[First, Antarctica] is not to be regarded as a region in which preparations for war or conflict can be engaged … it is not a place of war … this is a place of scientific research, of study, of enlarging the boundaries of knowledge, of friendly co-operation …

[Second] is the emphasis … upon cooperation. [The IGY] turned out to be a most remarkable demonstration of cooperation, with each country helping the other, with the pooling of the results, with the advantages that all felt could be secured from the activities of each … In the whole nature of science, it is an international matter …

[Third,] under the Treaty we have agreed to set aside the argument about territorial claims.²¹

It is Menzies’s articulation of territorial claims, to our competing claimant states no less, which is worth exploring in detail—particularly given the enduring misconceptions of how Antarctic territorial claims are dealt with by the treaty. As Menzies states, when it comes to claims: ‘nobody abandons his own’.²² Australia has an enduring and expansive claim to 42% of the continent. Menzies noted that, ‘by a singular stroke of wisdom … when this treaty was being negotiated it was agreed not to abandon claims but to put to one side the argument about them’.²³

In retrospect, Menzies’s belief that ‘there are more important things than arguing about our rights’ was rather naive, particularly given the subsequent expansive rise of global China. Of course, the era in which these words were spoken was very much an era of bipolar superpower competition—a competition that was somewhat managed, with clear ‘red’ lines, and avenues for both mutual assured destruction and facilitated communication. It was a very different strategic environment to that of today, an emergent multipolar global order, with few agreed terms of engagement and, in the case of Russia–US ties, rather scant avenues for dialogue.

Interestingly, Menzies’s remarks indicate that the treaty was not conceptualised to be the ‘end-state’ for Antarctica. The idea that the Antarctic Treaty was crafted to be the end-all for dealing with the continent is one which permeates scholarly literature. Certainly, it is one thing to celebrate the enduring nature and successes of the treaty. But it is potentially misleading to characterise the problem (or future) of Antarctica as ‘solved’. Menzies underscores this trend in stating:

And if, someday somebody wants to argue about territorial rights, that will be time enough for it, but we will have established in the meantime that when twelve nations concentrate their best resources of intellectual power and of bold and exploratory spirit in an area like the Antarctic, enormous things may result for the world as a whole.²⁴

Menzies clearly viewed the apparent scientific engagement occurring over and in Antarctica as reason to have faith in the future proliferation of said cooperation. He appeared to believe this would form an established practice of sorts, strong enough to weather any stresses of ‘territorial argument’ at a later date. The 2022 and 2023 iterations of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting have of course illustrated something pervasive in the undercurrents of scientific cooperation, with states like Russia and China consistently blocking environmental missions and frustrating consensus efforts as a whole.²⁵

Conclusion

The reasons for Menzies’s missing Antarctic legacy remain quite mysterious. Perhaps it was a mix of both avenues of inquiry undertaken by this chapter. Namely, Casey had the legitimate interest in Antarctica which conjured a particular currency with counterparts like the USSR, which Menzies might have profited off to realise his own foreign policy ambitions. Furthermore, Menzies could do so without explicitly articulating the partnership in which Australia had to work with the Soviets to ink the Antarctic Treaty and successfully deliver on its first integral milestone: the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting of 1961. It is no coincidence that the signing of the Antarctic Treaty in 1959 coincided with the resumption of Australia–Soviet diplomatic relations.

Overall, this chapter draws two key conclusions from the study of Menzies and the Antarctic Treaty. First, Menzies did not necessarily expect the treaty to hold, to remain in place post the Cold War. While ideals of the treaty remaining into perpetuity are often highlighted in public discourse, it is apparent that Menzies viewed the treaty as a ‘holding pattern of sorts’ to allow liberal democracies, like Australia, to stave off Cold War conflict and communist bases from Antarctica. Second, Menzies had a somewhat idealistic view of science and the utility of global cooperation on this front. Science in Antarctica today is very much a Trojan Horse of sorts for ramping up state activity and footprints on the continent. Menzies lauded science and the prospects of international collaboration as reason enough to have states set aside disputes over Antarctic territorial rights.

But science in the 2020s is not that of the 1950s Menzies era. While it has always had dual-use capabilities, the advent of technology and advances in this space have even more critically blurred military– civilian lines in science. Today, science is not the basis for cooperation but the basis for coercive and conflictual activities in Antarctica. It would seem that Menzies’s ‘glue’ for Antarctic cooperation was science, to a stage where all states are indeed interested in it and it is a useful point of commonality and communication.

For Menzies, staring down the potential of a Cold War front opening on Australia’s southern approaches, this probably meant that an international agreement to commit to science as a basis for presence in Antarctica was the least bad solution. In any case, Menzies heralded science and collaboration in Antarctica as the means by which to stave off geostrategic competition and potential war on Australia’s back doorstep.

At the opening of a research institute in 1961, Menzies stated: ‘I hope that Antarctic research from our point of view in Australia will continue to be something that we regard as of immense importance.’²⁶ No doubt Menzies would be disappointed to learn that today, Australian Antarctic leadership is under threat thanks to decades of underfunding and a ‘southern blindness’ to the need for a robust presence in the Australian Antarctic Territory. He’d probably marvel at our $528 million icebreaker Nuyina, though.

CHAPTER 10

MENZIES, EISENHOWER, AND SUEZ

Robert Bowker¹

THE ASWAN HIGH DAM project was the centrepiece of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s plans for the modernisation of the Egyptian economy. In July 1956, the United States and the United Kingdom abruptly withdrew the possibility of Egypt securing US, World Bank, and British funding for the construction of the dam. Anger at the reversal of their earlier stance of sympathetic interest in the Egyptian proposal, and fury at the humiliating manner in which that decision was conveyed to the Egyptians by US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, led, a week later, to the nationalisation of the mainly French and British-owned Suez Canal Company.

Though not a party to the dispute, Australia was affected. Australia immediately joined the United Kingdom in seeking to reverse the nationalisation of the canal. In early September 1956, following a conference in London of canal user countries, and at the request of the United States and Britain, Robert Menzies led a delegation to Cairo seeking—without success—to persuade Nasser to relinquish control of the canal to an international body.

The archival record demonstrates that Menzies was determined to see Suez in similar terms to UK Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his Cabinet colleagues, strongly suggesting it was an approach which resonated with him at both a personal and a political level. He was willing to take risks to defend British actions that, in the absence of a clearly articulated political objective, and without firm US backing, made no strategic sense. He valued the intimacy of his relations with British leaders. And, as Menzies proceeded with Eden down the march of folly which culminated in the fiasco of November 1956, he had no shortage of fellow travellers.²

Although subsequent negotiations under the auspices of the UN secretary-general made substantial progress towards resolving the dispute,³ Anglo-French forces invaded Egypt in early November 1956, supposedly to protect the Suez Canal from fighting between Egypt and Israel.⁴ In fact, the attack, launched initially by Israel in late October, was part of a plan conceived by France and Israel, and coordinated with the United Kingdom, that sought to achieve the overthrow of Nasser through the humiliation of a major military defeat.

When the conflict broke out, at the direction of Menzies, Australia gave strong support to the actions of Britain and France. With Washington and London deeply divided over how to respond to the Suez Crisis, and during the conflict that followed, Australia consistently backed the United Kingdom in the UN Security Council, of which it was a non-permanent member at the time, usually in very limited company.⁵ In response, Australia’s diplomatic relations with Egypt were severed by the Egyptians on 6 November 1956 and not restored until late 1959. In effect, Australia became part of the United Kingdom’s imperial twilight in the Middle East.

Numerous authors have examined the performance of Menzies regarding the Suez Crisis of 1956, including his unsuccessful mission to Cairo.⁶ The aim of this chapter is to consider an aspect of the crisis that has been less studied, namely how the United States was perceived on the Australian side throughout the period leading to the crisis, and how the Australian approach during the crisis affected the relationship with Washington.

Australia, Britain, and Suez

At first glance, and especially from the perspective of a very different Australia seventy years later, Australia’s vocal and unequivocal support for the United Kingdom throughout the Suez Crisis seems anomalous. Major changes in Australia’s strategic thinking took place in the 1950s under the Menzies government. The growing relationship with the United States of America, ANZUS, responses to the Korean conflict and the insurgency in Malaya, the creation of the Colombo Plan, and joining SEATO all indicated how Australian foreign policy priorities were shifting. Despite those changes, the stance taken by Menzies over Suez ultimately reflected perceptions of Australia, and of Australia’s place in the world, and concern at the decline of an empire to which, in many respects, Australia and most Australians still wished to belong.⁷

An array of intangible factors peculiar to the 1950s shaped the Australian approach. Popular and political connections to Britain, the visit of Queen Elizabeth II in 1954, and the notion of shared innate qualities of national character all supported alignment with the UK government of the day, despite the emergence of an Australian foreign policy focus on the Asia-Pacific, and recognition of the strategic importance of the United States to Australia’s future security.

Menzies’s own views concerning the relationship with Britain were especially important in shaping the Australian approach. He dominated his Cabinet. The records of Cabinet discussions suggest the majority of his Cabinet colleagues were willing to believe that he enjoyed a privileged relationship with the UK Government. The freedom of passage for shipping to and from Australia through the Suez Canal represented Australia’s main interest in the Middle East during the 1950s, and concern for the security of Australian trade connections to the United Kingdom through the canal loomed large.

Antagonistic popular attitudes towards Egypt and Egyptians were shaped to some extent by successive negative Australian wartime experiences, by racist condescension regarding Nasser and Egypt, and by an overly excited imagination (including quite possibly on Menzies’s part, as well as Eden’s) regarding risks to the security of Western interests arising from Egypt’s nationalisation of the canal.

The primary carriage of the relationship with the United Kingdom rested with the Australian prime minister. The archival evidence of Cabinet discussions, and Menzies’s own position as revealed in discussions with the British and in his public statements, make it clear that the issue of whether Australia wished to align itself with the United Kingdom in whatever steps she was planning to take was considered more as a political issue than as a strategic one. As Menzies put it in a message to Eden as the conflict unfolded on 1 November, ‘You must never entertain any doubts about the British quality of this country.’⁸

In the Middle East, the decade witnessed the transition of key Arab countries from colonial administration and monarchical rule into authoritarian republics; and the decline of British power, which was also occurring globally. Following the failure of successive attempts by Egypt and Syria to place their relations with Israel on a stable and predictable basis, there was a steady rise in the tension between Israel and its immediate neighbours, and especially with Egypt.

Strong reactions were engendered among the British and French leaderships by the actions and anti-colonial rhetoric of Nasser. Egypt lent support to the struggle against the French in Algeria and the British elsewhere; Nasser enjoyed the limelight alongside Tito, Chou En Lai, and Sukarno in the Non-Aligned Movement; and in 1955 he turned to the Soviet Union for arms purchases when Western governments declined to assist Egypt to build its defence capabilities vis a vis Israel.

Nasser was also remarkably successful in reaching out to Arab popular audiences, calling for Arab unity (under Egyptian leadership, of course) at the expense of the political interests of monarchical and other regional regimes friendly towards the West, most of whom the United States was seeking to bring together into a collective security arrangement, later known as the Baghdad Pact. Washington intended the pact primarily to counterbalance the Soviet Union, but Nasser saw it, with justification, as a potential challenge to Egypt’s leading role in the region. He responded to it with a combination of rhetoric and threats of subversion against the Arab governments considering joining it.

With a larger Cold War agenda in mind, and with a view to winning Arab support for basing rights to check Soviet penetration in the region—but taking place also against a background of political friction and commercial competition, especially between US and British oil interests—American officials had sought to develop a positive relationship with Nasser and his colleagues on the Revolutionary Command Council which overthrew the Egyptian monarchy in July 1952.⁹

During the early 1950s, as tortuous negotiations between Egypt and Britain over the ending of the presence of British forces on the Suez Canal progressed,¹⁰ Washington was determined to retain Egypt as the basis for the defence of the Middle East. In order to secure its larger strategic concerns, including, initially, the proposed creation of a Middle East Command sponsored by Britain, France, the United States, and Turkey,¹¹ the United States was willing to deal with Nasser, to consider the provision of aid to Egypt, and to encourage British concessions to Egypt regarding the future of the British–Egyptian co-dominion over Sudan.¹²

US thinking regarding Egypt and how best to deal with Nasser hardened as Egypt drew closer to the Non-Aligned Movement and the Soviet Union. By 1956, Eisenhower and Dulles, like the British, had arrived at the conclusion that it would be better to see Nasser gone, and they agreed to explore possibilities to that end.¹³ But Eisenhower remained determined to avoid the use of force against Egypt, and to find, in response to the nationalisation of the canal, a peaceful resolution of the situation through the UN that would ensure the canal remained open. Britain and France, on the other hand, saw this as a valuable opportunity and pretext for military action—after first engaging in discussions with Egypt in the UN context—to seek Nasser’s downfall. Eden refused to heed Eisenhower’s explicit warnings against the use of force.

Furious at the duplicity shown to him by the United Kingdom about its intentions, and its disregard of his warnings, Eisenhower responded with the full force of the diplomatic and economic leverage available to him when the attack on Egypt began.¹⁴ The outcome of the conflict—a ceasefire followed by withdrawal imposed on the United Kingdom and France by Eisenhower, the humiliation of Eden and the UK Government, and the end of Eden’s political career—was as inevitable as it was predictable.

Casey

When it came to policy matters, External Affairs Minister Richard Casey (who unlike Menzies was sceptical about the direction of British policy under Eden) generally was reluctant to offer advice to the British about Middle East issues.¹⁵ Despite serving in Cairo as the British minister in the Middle East during World War II, from 1942 to 1944, Casey had little interest in, or affinity for, the region: he once remarked that ‘the only Arab he ever got to know and like’ was Nuri al-Said, an Anglophile Iraqi and co-founder of the Baghdad Pact who was a bitter foe of Nasser.¹⁶

Suez and Cold War concerns aside, there were few Australian interests at stake in the Middle East apart from the canal, oil and civil aviation, and none that demanded sustained attention by ministers and officials. Australian representation in the Middle East was limited to two recently established posts: Cairo and Tel Aviv. Their inputs carried much less weight in policy terms than representations made directly to Menzies by Eden, Harold Macmillan and other British political figures.

For their part, prior to the outbreak of conflict, Australian officials were largely correct in their analysis of the likely consequences should the British seek to use military force against Nasser. Casey, also, could see the risk of a mishandling of the Suez issue transforming a British retreat into something much worse, with collateral damage to the Commonwealth.

Although he shared a sense of anxiety with Menzies over the changing shape of the global and regional order, the record shows Casey had a wider view than his colleagues of what was really at stake over Suez. He understood the many dimensions of the canal issue. He approached the British with fewer tribal delusions than Menzies. He came early and emphatically to the conclusion that the British had left it too late to reassert their place in the Middle East. Suez was not a matter of life or death for the British, he told Menzies, but ‘more likely death than life’ if they were to try to resort to military measures to reverse the situation into which they had entered in the preceding few years.¹⁷

When it came to the delivery of effective policy outcomes at critical moments, however, Casey could not articulate the risks in ways that convinced his colleagues. With Menzies seemingly immune to unsolicited advice, Casey failed to close the gap between, on the one hand, his own logic, and his department’s analysis and policy advice, and on the other hand, the government’s policy decisions. Rather than considering the implications, and appropriateness in terms of Australia’s interests, of the British seeking the overthrow of Nasser through the use of military force, Australian policy debate and diplomatic energy were directed mainly towards goals that were either beyond reach—such as the restoration of international control of the canal—or the question of freedom of navigation through the canal, the disruption of which was perhaps a ‘disconcerting possibility’, according to the initial briefing to Menzies,¹⁸ but far from an actual or unmanageable threat.

Meanwhile, British flattery of Menzies spoke to mythologies about a shared British identity, and nobility of purpose, that were largely immune from Casey’s concerns and arguments. Menzies, the Anglophile Australian nationalist, wanted Eden’s approval. Eden was happy to oblige by waving him off to Cairo to deal with Nasser. Menzies repaid the favour by giving Eden the strongest possible personal and political support as events unfolded and the British position deteriorated, maintaining direct contact with Eden throughout the crisis, mainly through the UK High Commission in Canberra and only very rarely through the Australian diplomatic communications network. There is no evidence of inputs by External Affairs or by Casey to Menzies’s correspondence with Eden.

Australian Perceptions of the Role of the United States in Egypt

There was substantial continuity in the approach taken by Australia in responding to the US position on the crisis. During the 1950s, there were differences between the respective perceptions and policy orientations of Australia and the United States in regard to the British presence in Egypt that mirrored frictions on that issue in the Anglo-American context. Those Anglo-American differences were especially evident during the canal base negotiations between Egypt and the United Kingdom from 1949 onwards.

Unlike their US counterparts, Australian officials were not inclined initially to support the United Kingdom making concessions to Egypt on sticking points in the negotiations, notably over the question of selfdetermination for Sudan.¹⁹ Moreover, the US ambassador to Egypt, Jefferson Caffery, was regarded in Canberra as a ‘mischievous element’ who caused concern by refusing to confirm US support for the British position on the conditions for future access to the Canal Zone Base should an emergency arise after the British forces had departed, a key point in the negotiations.²⁰

Caffery’s advocacy of the provision of US aid to Egypt ahead of the conclusion of an agreement regarding the Suez Canal base, as a means of paving the way for greater cooperation on strategic matters, was met with astonishment by the Australian minister in Cairo, Hugh McClure Smith. He told Canberra that such an approach

would seem even worse than slamming the door after the horse was out; it would amount to giving the horse some sugar to sustain it on its way. Were the United States induced, by whatever specious arguments, to change her policy now and to extend substantial economic aid to Egypt while the Canal Zone negotiations remain deadlocked, there would remain very little chance indeed of ever bringing them to a successful conclusion.²¹

McClure Smith also reported that his British colleague feared Caffery might not have been averse to seeing a deadlock develop between Egypt and the United Kingdom which would permit the United States to ‘“pick up the pieces” and mediate’.²²

By 1953, Australian officials had arrived at a more constructive view of what needed to be done to secure an agreement between Egypt and the United Kingdom. But concerns among officials at posts and in Canberra about the British approach to the Suez Canal base issue under Churchill’s prime ministership—concerns which were often shared by their British counterparts—rarely achieved political traction. Although they urged Casey, mostly without success, to persuade a reluctant Menzies to raise the issue with Churchill, there is no evidence Menzies did so.²³

In the event, US promises at key moments of economic aid, and dangling the possibility of arms supplies, proved instrumental in the resolution of the key differences between Egypt and the United Kingdom. The breakthrough in those negotiations came after sustained US urging of the British to modify their stance,²⁴ and, in 1954, after the United States advised Nasser that

there could be no question of Egypt receiving long-term American aid, either military or economic, until the question of the Canal Zone Base was disposed of in a manner acceptable to both parties, and that judged from the defensive needs of the free world, America regarded the Egyptian position on availability [of the facilities to the UK in time of crisis] as much too restrictive.²⁵

Although the US representations to Nasser were a major factor in eventually removing the impasse in the Anglo-Egyptian negotiations, the importance (and wisdom) of those US interventions went largely unacknowledged by Australian ministers and officials.

Moreover, Washington also had very different views from Menzies about how to deal with Nasser. Whereas the Americans observed, and criticised, elements of colonial thinking lingering behind the British determination to put Nasser in his place, Menzies continued to see the sovereignty of regional governments as desirably subject to the strategic interests and global responsibilities of more powerful Western countries. Menzies was not averse, if all else failed, to seeing force used to that end. As he put it to the House of Representatives on 25 September 1956, ‘we should not get into a timid state of mind in which every mention of the word “force” becomes forbidden’.²⁶

In contrast to the overall warmth and ease of communication between Australian and UK officials, especially at posts, Australian officials, like their British counterparts, were also rather wary towards, and at times dismissive of, US diplomacy in the region, especially before the Canal Zone Base issue was resolved. Visiting the region in March 1953, Department of External Affairs Secretary Alan Watt reported to Casey that he found

real difference in psychological approach between the staff of the [UK and US] Embassies [in Cairo]. Local Americans are not unsympathetic to British interests but fundamentally I think they feel in the last resort little or nothing can be done to improve defence of the Middle East without the willing co-operation of Egypt and Arab countries. For this reason they tend to advocate tactics which would foster such co-operation even though Egyptian demands may be unreasonable and difficulties which arise from time to time (for instance difficulties regarding Sudan since signature of agreements) are largely created by the Egyptians themselves. The attitude of the staff of the Embassy resembles the attitude of the ‘Far East boys’ in the State Department on the subject of Indonesia and Dutch New Guinea.²⁷

Menzies in Cairo

Most Australian historians of the period point to ideological blinkering and systemic weaknesses under Menzies in the formulation of foreign policy where Britain was concerned. William Hudson, who wrote close to the time of the Suez events and with access to the officials involved, strongly argues that ‘blind loyalty’ to the British (and the notions of Britishness in Australian politics and society that are his central theme) drove the Australian approach in a general sense. Hudson’s views are shared by other notable historians who wrote at the time, including W Macmahon Ball, as well as by the leading biographer of Menzies, Allan Martin.²⁸

The archival record that has become available since that period also demonstrates that Hudson’s depiction of Menzies’s stance as ‘blind loyalty’ to his British connections and sense of British identity is perfectly apt. In the complex nexus between politics, personalities, and foreign policy advice, romanticised notions of a British–Australian identity—Tina Turner’s ‘sweet, old-fashioned notion’—impacted powerfully upon Australia’s policy choices. Moreover, they did so despite obvious shifts in the relativities of national power in the post– World War II Middle East.

At the wider political level in Australia, and in much (but not all) of the bureaucracy as well, the identification of Australia with notions of a British identity, and the interpretation of events mainly through British lenses, was consistent throughout the crisis.²⁹ But that loyalty was not the reason for the failure of the Menzies mission. Simply put, the case Menzies presented to Nasser on behalf of the British, and the United States and other canal users, failed on its merits, against the background of a determination on Nasser’s part to be rid of the vestiges of Western colonialism.

Depiction of the mission as a dismal failure, however, is simplistic. Despite the chicanery of Eden and his colleagues, Menzies went to Cairo hoping to restore ‘international’ control over the canal, because that was deemed to be in Australia’s interests; because it was standing up for Britain’s place in the region and the world; and because he was willing (indeed keen) to carry the ball for Eden, and for Dulles—who was probably too canny to be involved in a mission almost certain to be unsuccessful.

From British and French perspectives, Nasser’s refusal was an outcome they welcomed as part of clearing the deck to fulfil their undeclared ambition of Nasser’s removal from power. For Dulles, on the other hand, the Menzies mission, and the Suez Canal Users Association fiasco that came in its wake (as the US and UK governments established the body after Menzies’s talks, and then publicly revealed clear differences in their perceptions of its role),³⁰ were a means of buying time for negotiations in New York to go forward.³¹

Menzies insisted his was not a negotiation with Nasser but rather a presentation and explanation of the proposals arising from the London conference of canal user countries. He shared Eden’s concern not to engage in discussion of counter-proposals either—a logical stance, given that Nasser’s interests would be best served by engaging in such discussions while defusing canal user country concerns by demonstrating that the canal would continue to operate effectively under Egyptian control.³² Menzies was hardly bothered by the outcome in Cairo: he had downplayed the prospects of success to his Cabinet colleagues from the outset;³³ gained a measure of international prominence and positive political focus within Australia for playing a part; and his robust approach stood him in good stead with Eden and others whose approval he desired.

It is also worth noting, in regard to the question of whether Menzies erred in failing to demonstrate willingness to negotiate, that it seems that at that juncture, Nasser was not particularly interested in engaging in negotiations either. Before Menzies arrived, Nasser told a US diplomat that although it might take the Menzies committee two days to present its case, it would only take Nasser one hour to present his position.³⁴ In his discussions with the delegation, Nasser said arrangements could be made on ‘questions of finance and tolls’, but he firmly rejected the substance of the case Menzies put to him.³⁵ Nasser’s detailed written response to the letter from Menzies placing the proposals of the delegation on the record was both entirely dismissive of the proposals, and devoid of any suggestion that the Egyptian position was negotiable.³⁶

Although it probably mattered little to the personal and political calculus of either man, Menzies’s discussions with Nasser were not acrimonious. The only moment at which tempers were raised between Menzies and Nasser, and Nasser threatened somewhat theatrically to walk out, came when Menzies told Nasser rather clumsily that an Egyptian refusal to accept international administration of the canal would be ‘the beginning of trouble’, and that ‘only if there were no agreement your people can be imposed upon’.³⁷ Few words could have offended the Egyptians more.³⁸ But although Nasser and his colleagues were offended by Menzies’s imperious style,³⁹ the vilification of Menzies in the Egyptian media as an ‘imperialist mule’ came a little later.

Menzies and Eisenhower

Menzies chose to ignore US advice and clearly exceeded his brief when he warned Nasser informally that he should not exclude the possibility of conflict. From the outset of the crisis, Dulles had told Menzies of his concerns at the prospect of Britain and France ‘taking quick and firm military action to bring Nasser to heel’,⁴⁰ and he told the London conference of canal user countries that ‘there should be no ultimatum to Egypt’ arising from the meeting.⁴¹ Secretary of State Herbert Hoover, who was later to play a key part in the US response to the crisis, and other State Department officials had reinforced the message in blunt terms.⁴² No record exists in the Australian archives of Menzies’s meeting with Eisenhower on 3 August 1956, at which it is highly likely Eisenhower would have reiterated his opposition to the use of force.

Nasser, however, had already told the Americans that he expected the Western powers to attempt to use military force against him when a pretext arose.⁴³ Mohamed Heikal claims Nasser repositioned Egyptian forces in the Sinai accordingly.⁴⁴ Although it appears Nasser believed the prospect of war had receded during August, the Egyptian High Military Command prepared plans on 1 September anticipating a British attack. What took Nasser by surprise in late October was the fact that the British had chosen to join forces with Israel to mount their assault: his initial reaction to Egyptian intelligence that such a move was impending was one of disbelief that the British could be so unprincipled and obtuse.⁴⁵

Nasser had already made it clear both publicly and in private that he would not rescind the nationalisation of the canal.⁴⁶ After the Cairo visit concluded, however, Menzies seized upon supposed comments by Eisenhower to rationalise his inability to win his case with Nasser, telling his Cabinet colleagues it would have been better to ‘leave (Nasser) guessing’ about the possible use of force—even though, as mentioned earlier, Menzies had no authority whatsoever to suggest military action was possible.⁴⁷ Menzies even complained directly to Eisenhower about the alleged comments, without providing details. Eisenhower, however, could not recall saying anything while Menzies was in Cairo, and dismissed the complaint.⁴⁸

A careful reading of the record of the Cairo meetings and associated minutes of meetings of the Menzies committee, Menzies’s own correspondence with Eden through the British Embassy in Cairo (neither of which make any reference to remarks by Eisenhower while Menzies was in Cairo), Nasser’s immediate informal dismissal of Menzies’s presentation on 3 September, and the timing of Menzies’s criticism of Eisenhower (which began only after Menzies had returned to London and met with Eden) all strongly suggest Menzies’s complaints about Eisenhower were mostly, if not entirely, an exercise in political management in Australia—and possibly with a view to his memoirs—of the negative result in Cairo.⁴⁹

Menzies wished the United States and the United Kingdom would act in unison regarding Suez, but unlike Lester Pearson, the Canadian foreign minister who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, there is no archival evidence that Menzies sought to bridge the differences between Washington and London beyond rhetorical appeals. His main concern throughout the crisis, and in its immediate aftermath, was to persuade Eisenhower of the correctness of Eden’s approach.

Like the remainder of his Cabinet (with the exception of Casey and Defence Minister Philip McBride, each of whom took a more sophisticated view of what was involved), Menzies was determined that Nasser be put in his place, and that Britain was not to become ‘another Portugal’. He was scathing about the concern of Eisenhower to seek solutions to the crisis through the United Nations, telling his Cabinet colleagues, ‘We get feebler and feebler every day … The lawyers are the gutless wonders of the world—they eviscerate everything.’⁵⁰ For all his talk about the importance of maintaining unity between the United States and Britain on major international issues, there was a large degree of condescension on Menzies’s part towards Washington. As he wrote after the conflict to Macmillan, complaining about the reference of the Suez issue to the UN Security Council by the United States:

The whole thing is, of course, very odd and lends itself to the most confusing sophistries. Our only escape from this fog of legalisms (which are so dear to the Department of State) is to get the Americans to understand that, in the long run, the great nations who are friends keep the peace by remaining friendly or provoke war by quarrelling with each other.⁵¹

The archival evidence is quite clear that Menzies was aware of the disagreement between London and Washington over Suez. He was in possession of correspondence between Eden and Eisenhower highlighting Eisenhower’s rejection of Eden’s arguments for the use of force, which he withheld from his Cabinet colleagues.⁵² He was surely aware of the personal rancour between Eden and Dulles. While Menzies sought afterwards to play it down, there was friction in Cairo between Menzies and the US delegate, Loy Henderson, who Menzies discovered to his consternation had been instructed by the State Department to explore the possibility of negotiation.⁵³

It would probably have made little difference if Menzies had shared with his Cabinet colleagues the full extent of his knowledge of the differences between Eden and Eisenhower over Suez—or more precisely, over the question of whether military force should be used against Egypt. Throughout the crisis, the intellectual quality of debate within the Menzies Cabinet regarding Suez was mostly abysmal.⁵⁴

When the conflict broke out, Cabinet’s determination to support the United Kingdom was based entirely on political grounds, unencumbered by strategic analysis, willingness to question UK motives, consideration of possible consequences for US–Australia relations, or even any assessment of Eden’s prospects of success. There was a general feeling in Cabinet of condescension towards the United States, including references to the need to ‘tone up’ the US approach to align with that of the United Kingdom.⁵⁵ Analysis of regional political realities was entirely absent. The risk to Australia’s relations with the United States of giving such strong support to Eden was barely mentioned in Cabinet discussions or in briefings.

Casey counselled restraint, but this went unheeded. Throughout the crisis, those External Affairs officials regarded by Menzies as ‘Casey’s men’, including Secretary of External Affairs Arthur Tange, were marginalised; Tange was excluded from the meetings between Menzies and Nasser. Later, when Eisenhower insisted on the withdrawal of UK and French forces, Tange tried to dissuade Menzies from criticism of the US role. He failed.⁵⁶

Officials skirted the question of whether, as the United States insisted, Suez was being used by the United Kingdom merely as a pretext for a reassertion of British power against Nasser and revisionist tendencies sweeping the Middle East. External Affairs never examined or offered advice on whether the overthrow of Nasser (as distinct from military pressure to leverage diplomacy) served Australia’s interests—including whether it was appropriate, feasible, and sustainable.

Casey and the Menzies Correspondence with Eisenhower

In one of the most remarkable but almost unknown moments in Australian diplomacy, some eleven days after President Eisenhower had imposed his will on the British and broken Eden’s career as prime minister, Menzies took it upon himself (with Eden’s enthusiastic support⁵⁷) to write to Eisenhower castigating him for the US stance. The idea of interjecting unsolicited advice into the spat between Eden and Eisenhower should, as Banjo Paterson would have said, have made even the boldest hold their breath. But Menzies waved his proverbial stockwhip and told Eisenhower that the British role—furiously rejected by Eisenhower—had been proper and correct.

Menzies said that the United States had failed to understand the British position, and that US handling of the issue in the United Nations had been inopportune and had left the British and French ‘not only rebuked but humiliated’, to the benefit of the Russians and Nasser. He warned Eisenhower that unless the UN peacekeeping force being assembled as the Anglo-French forces withdrew was ‘cohesive, powerful and effective enough’ to settle the ‘great issues’ (that is, as Menzies put it elsewhere, to prevent Nasser from remaining ‘in possession of the spoils’), then ‘quick consideration may conceivably be given to resuming military operations …’⁵⁸

It fell to Casey, who was in New York, to deliver the message to Eisenhower in Washington. Fortunately for Casey, Eisenhower did not want to see him. While he waited for an appointment, Casey and his senior accompanying External Affairs official, James Plimsoll, shared the Menzies message with their British counterparts and came up with what Casey described as a ‘summary of its main points’. They handed this over, together with the Menzies letter, to Acting US Secretary of State Herbert Hoover Jr.⁵⁹ The ‘summary’ (which Casey wisely did not send back to Canberra until after his meeting) and the record of the discussion with Hoover excluded the condescending language employed by Menzies, and the inflammatory reference to resuming the conflict, in favour of some gracious comments about US strength and prestige, and the importance of the United States and Britain resolving their differences. Eisenhower provided a cool but courteous response to Menzies a week later,⁶⁰ and the exchange of letters between the heads of government sank without trace.⁶¹

There is no doubt that the finest diplomacy exercised by Australia during the Suez Crisis was the part played by Casey and Plimsoll in exchanges between Menzies and Eisenhower.

Menzies remained unreconciled to the outcome over the canal and robust in defending his government’s approach. When Dulles visited Canberra in March 1957, there was an awkward moment when, contrary to the position Menzies had firmly promoted, Dulles said bluntly that he regretted Egypt had been attacked because Eden had feared the negotiations in the UN to resolve the dispute were making headway and he wanted Nasser gone. The record of the talks that was distributed more widely to officials made no mention of Dulles’s remarks.⁶² Menzies responded that for his part, he had never sought the overthrow of Nasser but had negotiated with him in good faith. Reporting his discussion with Dulles to Macmillan, Menzies said he ‘did not believe it practical politics to make a bargain with Nasser and thereafter take steps to undermine him and I did not believe this was your view. “Nobody,” I said, “could prophesy whether Nasser’s successor would be better or worse than himself.”’⁶³

It was not only the British who misled Menzies: while Eisenhower’s stance was perfectly clear, Dulles may have given Menzies and Eden a misleading impression that the United States might not be entirely opposed to the use of force against Nasser. Moreover, Dulles continued to tell Menzies, falsely, that he took the decision against funding the Aswan High Dam because of US doubt about Egypt’s economic capacity. The real trigger for Dulles was almost certainly a combination of frustration with Nasser, an ill-advised attempt by the Egyptian ambassador in Washington to suggest the Soviet Union would fund the project if the United States did not, lobbying by US cotton industry interests against the project, and Dulles’s determination to head off a congressional attempt to interfere with his prerogatives, as secretary of state, on the subject.

Though they were short-lived, mostly because of being overtaken by developments in New York and on the ground in Egypt, there were still occasional moments of unreality verging on hubris in the department’s advice, as well as in the Australian policy stance after the ceasefire had been imposed. Despite the insistence of the United States on the withdrawal without delay of Anglo-French forces from Egypt, the challenges facing the UN secretary-general in giving the decisions of the General Assembly practical effect unless Egypt consented, and advice from London that the United Kingdom had decided on withdrawal, Australia persisted in arguing for the presence in Egypt of a UN force that would be capable of constraining Egyptian sovereignty.⁶⁴

Menzies’s fundamental intention was to prevent Nasser enjoying the fruits of victory at British expense. External Affairs was concerned to see the UN impose its will on Nasser, and to open, somehow, the way for the resolution of the Arab–Israel conflict. But both Menzies and the department were misguided. Nasser had indeed secured a victory, and Eisenhower wanted the British out. The effect of Menzies’s ongoing efforts to reverse Nasser’s fortunes, and to buttress the British against US pressure—including his ill-judged letter to Eisenhower—was mostly to put Australia’s relations with the United States at risk.

The overall result of this series of unrewarding and frustrating encounters with the issues, countries, and key personalities of the Arab world during the 1950s was a diminution of Australian interest in Middle East affairs. Like the United Kingdom, Australia found it could live with the outcome regarding the canal and the accelerating decline of British influence, which was compensated to some extent by a more assertive US approach to the region, and the erosion of Nasser’s political momentum by the early 1960s. The existential crunch for Britain arising from Egyptian control of the canal, predicted by Eden and Macmillan, never came.

The awkwardness between Australia and the United States over Suez dissipated, facilitated by Casey’s timely intervention in November 1956, Eden’s departure from political life, and a successful summit in Bermuda between Eisenhower and Eden’s successor, Harold Macmillan, in March 1957. Officials were at liberty to advocate for a more discerning approach to Middle East issues, and a more constructive and strategic approach by Australia in the UN context.⁶⁵

It is unlikely that the part played by Menzies over Suez had any serious impact upon US perceptions of Australia, or Australia’s interests in the US relationship, once the crisis had passed and US relations with London were restored to Washington’s satisfaction. Menzies had been part of a lion’s last roar, but it was the end of the imperial era that was significant for the United States, not the part Menzies had played, loyally and perhaps naively, in seeking to preserve Britain’s fading role.

CHAPTER 11

SKILFUL HANDLING

Menzies and the West New Guinea Dispute

Sean Jacobs¹

IN DECEMBER 1959, Prime Minister Robert Menzies visited Indonesia for a period of seven days.² The visit, during which Menzies was hosted by President Sukarno as the ‘guest of honour’ at an official dinner, was seen as a thawing in Menzies’s stance—from active broker to ‘an interested bystander’³—on Dutch claims to West New Guinea. According to Indonesian media, it also signalled an end to Australia’s ‘Kangaroo imperialism’,⁴ and foreshadowed a final 1962 Menzies Cabinet decision to support placing WNG under Jakarta’s control.⁵ Indeed, both Menzies’s visit and changed position arguably reflected an ‘about face’ from a decade earlier, when Menzies and his External Affairs ministers Percy Spender and Richard Casey bolstered Dutch insistence and, throughout the 1950s, helped frustrate Indonesian WNG claims in forums such as the UN General Assembly.⁶

On face value, a shallow analysis of the event may emphasise Menzies’s inconsistency and even weakness in the face of an unstable and lumbering Indonesia. But a more careful consideration of Menzies and his governments throughout the WNG dispute (1950–62) reveals the cadence of an independent, measured, and balanced Australian foreign policy—independent in that it ran slightly at odds with the US and Britain’s non-interventionist WNG policies, measured in that Menzies never sought military provocation in support of Dutch efforts, and balanced in that it urged compromise between the Dutch and US–British positions. Menzies’s principled persistence for a liberal and practical commitment to the individuals of WNG in their hopes for self-development, which could offset Australian security concerns, is also detectable.

Both elements were critical in the wake of World War II and the vulnerabilities of Australia’s security environment emerging from an expanding Soviet Bloc, communist China, and Indonesian instability. They also highlighted broader issues, such as the US fight against communism in South-East Asia and, closer to home, the foreign policy formulation that Menzies entertained from his equally effective Cabinet colleagues Spender and Casey. Ultimately, the WNG dispute revealed Menzies’s skilful handling in enhancing Australian interests within this contested—and dynamic—geopolitical environment.

Menzies’s Post-war Geopolitical Environment

In 2005, Prime Minister John Howard noted that the most significant and transforming event ‘in my lifetime’ had been ‘the fall of communism—something which changed the world and represented the greatest single triumph for liberty’.⁷ Such significance—let alone the horrors of communism—is lost on younger generations of Australians. But it is important to briefly appreciate it in the context of Menzies’s 1949 ascendence to the prime ministership and the subsequent decade.

Shortly after the Allies’ victory in World War II, communist parties won large vote shares in the elections of France and Italy. By the end of the 1940s, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union had split Germany, blockaded Berlin, taken out the last democratic state via coup in Czechoslovakia, and exploded a nuclear weapon five years ahead of schedule. In 1949, closer to home, China’s communists seized power by defeating the Nationalist Army, and the Indochina War was underway. Adding to an already fickle security environment, the Korean War commenced in 1950—a conflict that eventually killed 37 000 UN troops, including 339 Australians.⁸ The Korean War is particularly important, especially in terms of signalling a change in dynamism around regional communist expansion. The North’s June 1950 attack on the South, in the words of President Harry Truman, made ‘it plain beyond all doubt that communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war’.⁹

Although Australian post-war collective memory is dominated by Vietnam, it should be recalled that significant communist disturbances in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaya, and Singapore were also key features of this early Cold War period. This not only heightened genuine fears of conflict closer to home but, in a sense, evoked memories of the swift Japanese advancement in World War II, the rapid success of which throughout South-East Asia and the Pacific dissolved older notions of defence. Despite the sheer fatalities, a young Australian today is unlikely to appreciate just how systemic, violent and oppressive—in global terms—communist regimes would become. While the total loss of lives attributed to communism is contested, estimates range up to a staggering 110 million.¹⁰

At the 1951 federal election, in squaring off against Labor’s Ben Chifley, Menzies noted his palpable hostility to the communist threat, labelling the ideology ‘debased, treasonable, utterly undemocratic’, while adding: ‘We are pledged to fight it, and to defeat it.’¹¹

Heightening Concerns: Communism, Security, Territory

Indonesia was not unplugged from these darkening conditions. Three concerns in particular occupied Menzies.

First, clearly, were Indonesia’s communist vulnerabilities. These were particularly acute from 1953 onwards, when communist sympathies emerged from within the Indonesian Cabinet.¹² Allen Dulles, then National Security Advisor to President Eisenhower, noted ‘at least eight of the twenty Cabinet ministers were pro-Communists’.¹³ At around the same time, Australian External Affairs Minister Richard Casey, writing to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, further noted that, while Indonesia’s Communist Party (PKI) was not yet strong enough to ‘seize power at present, the danger lies in the Government eventually becoming so weak that [communist] forces can take over for lack of any real opposition’.¹⁴ Casey would also keep a concerned eye on Indonesia’s Soviet-backed military build-up.¹⁵

The key concern around Indonesia—if it fell to communist control by its own volition—was that it severely undermined Australia’s ‘forward defence’ posture of fighting potential threats before they advanced and materialised closer to Australian shores. Indonesia’s proximity was therefore a major concern and, even much earlier in 1939, former Prime Minister Billy Hughes had notably sounded the alarm on ‘the occupation of New Guinea by a potentially hostile power’, famously labelling it ‘a dagger aimed at the heart of Australia’.¹⁶

The second issue for Menzies, therefore, was territorial. ‘Underlying the Australian attitude was the fear that Jakarta’s control of western New Guinea would undermine New Guinea’s role as an effective bulwark for Australia’s defence,’ notes academic Hiro Umetsu, ‘and that it would extend Indonesia’s territorial ambitions over Australian New Guinea.’¹⁷ As historian Geoffrey Blainey adds, given WNG’s ‘southern coast was only 250 kilometres from the tip of Cape York and only 400 kilometres from Arnhem Land, it was of vital interest to Australia’.¹⁸

The third main issue for Menzies, into the early 1950s, was Indonesia’s political and economic instability. Newly independent in 1945 following the end of World War II, the new republic had emerged after a bitter four-year tussle with the Netherlands. However, internal tensions also grew between Sukarno and senior military figures, the PKI, and nationalist and religious groups. The PKI would emerge as one of the largest communist parties in the world. From the mid-1950s, regional rebellions against Sukarno were underway among top military officials in central Sumatra and north Sulawesi. These tensions created space not only for communist but anti-communist and anti-Sukarno sympathisers—an opening probed by the US Government that generated a point of difference with Menzies’s cabinets, ‘concerned about America’s scheme for the fragmentation of Indonesia by securing Sumatra or Sulawesi as an alternative seat of government’.¹⁹

Indonesia Versus Dutch Claims

In addition to these currents, Indonesia was insistent on WNG. While a thorough historical analysis of Dutch and Indonesian claims to WNG is beyond the scope of this chapter, the competing motivations are worth briefly considering in understanding the convictions of both sides.

Dutch control over the Indonesian archipelago—the Dutch East Indies—is generally observed as lasting between the sixteenth century and Indonesia’s independence in 1945. This period, however, did not imply complete Dutch control, given that Indonesia as we know it today simply did not exist, and many areas within Indonesia’s vast archipelago—ruled by various atomised groups—were untouched by Dutch governance and trade.

Historians, when broadly examining the Dutch East Indies, note two major events throughout the period of Dutch rule. First is the ‘cultivation policy’, which ran from 1830 to 1870, and compelled primarily Javanese peasants to portion their harvests to the Dutch in exchange for non-market compensation. While profitable in driving Dutch state revenue, opposition emerged from within Indonesia and in Dutch political circles ‘both for humane and for economic motives’,²⁰ given that famines occurred ‘in Cirebon and Central Java as cash crops took precedence over rice production’.²¹

The second notable event is the Ethical Policy directed in 1901 by Dutch Queen Wilhemina that, ostensibly, aimed to raise living standards within the East Indies under the banner ‘irrigation, education and emigration’.²² As one source notes, however, the policy ‘was a case of “too little too late” for most of the Natives/inlander peoples of the colony’.²³

In August 1945, fast-forwarding to Indonesia’s independence, it was now Indonesians, at least according to the Dutch, who were seeking the opposite—‘too much, too soon’. Four years of armed military and diplomatic struggle ensued between the Dutch—backed by Britain and Japan—and the Indonesians, backed by Indian and Japanese defectors. Brutal in parts, four years of fighting claimed at least 100 000 lives, and as recently as 2022 brought about a formal apology from Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte for the Dutch Army’s use of ‘systematic and extreme violence’.²⁴ The conflict would eventually result in the Hague Round Table Conference in mid to late 1949. The outcome, in the words of the covering resolution, was ‘to achieve in the earliest possible time, an appropriate and lasting solution of the Indonesian conflict by reaching agreement between the participants on the way of transferring real, complete and unconditional sovereignty to the Republic of the United States of Indonesia’.²⁵

Unsurprisingly, Indonesia—led by Mohammad Atta—and the Dutch delegation clashed over debt payments and, notably, the specific inclusion of WNG in the sovereignty transfer. Jakarta argued that the transfer should include all of the Dutch East Indies’ territory, while the Dutch argued that the WNG population’s distinct ethnic traits excised the territory from any links to Jakarta and the new Indonesian republic.²⁶ Sukarno’s ultimate national goal was for a ‘Republic of Indonesia from Sabang to Merauke’, meaning from its western-most point to WNG’s most eastward point.²⁷ To a domestic Australian audience, as academic Henry Albinski recorded, Menzies

upheld the Dutch case on well-publicized grounds: inadequate Indonesian legal or historical title to the territory; ethnic differences between New Guinea Papuans and the Indonesians; absence of any noticeable native agitation to become incorporated into Indonesia; available Dutch financial, technical, and administrative resources to build up the area and prepare it for eventual self-determination.²⁸

Menzies also, quite simply, appreciated the Dutch. They were a wartime ally and, although falling swiftly to Nazi Germany, maintained a ‘government in exile’ which resisted Japanese advancements towards the then Dutch East Indies. In January 1941, when visiting Jakarta (then Batavia), Menzies expressed personal admiration at meeting Alidius Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer—the Dutch governorgeneral—and jotted in his diary that ‘If Japan strikes, the Dutch will definitely resist’.²⁹ This past camaraderie in a recent existential struggle would not have been lost on Menzies. Paired with Sukarno’s ‘irrational’ invocation of anti-colonialism in an effort to ‘convert Dutch New Guinea into an Indonesian colony’, Menzies no doubt would have felt more comfortable with sustained Dutch rule in WNG.³⁰

To save the entire 1949 conference from breaking down, however, the WNG issue was excised for later consideration. The final agreement read ‘the question of the political status of New Guinea be determined through negotiations between the Republic of the United States of Indonesia and the Kingdom of the Netherlands’, which were slated to take place a year from transfer.³¹ The dispute, however, would not be settled for another twelve years.

The Policymakers: Consolidating Australia’s Position

In regard to the formulation of a WNG policy response, it is useful to turn immediately not to Menzies but to Percy Spender—Menzies’s external affairs minister, architect of ANZUS, and proponent of the Colombo Plan.

On 9 March 1950, four months after Menzies defeated Chifley, Spender delivered a tour-de-force foreign policy address to parliament: a 40-page ‘white paper’ of its day which covered everything from Menzies’s foreign policy aims—the ‘preservation of peace and our way of life’³²—through to supporting the conditions for a democratic, and arguably liberal, foreign policy. This included important deferments to raise material conditions for the people of South-East Asia, and respecting the individual choices of people within the region—even if that meant Chinese citizens selecting communist over democratic leaders. ‘It is not for us,’ Spender conceded, ‘to question the kind of government the Chinese people live under.’³³

In terms of Menzies’s overall position, Spender’s mini-treatise offers an extrapolation of Menzies’s three main regional concerns noted above—communism, security, territory. Spender emphasised Australia’s physical place in the world, working cooperatively within the region and the importance of shoring up alliances, and reeling in traditional allies such as Britain and the United States to be more involved in South-East Asian affairs.

In touching on the importance of geography to national success, Spender noted that ‘the foreign policy of any country must have regard primarily and constantly to its geographical situation and its special needs over a reasonably long period of time’.³⁴ He also noted—in more than a nod to Indonesia and WNG—the need for sustained peace on Australia’s doorstep:

Situated as we are in the south-west corner of the Pacific, with the outlying islands of the Asian continent almost touching our own territories of New Guinea and Papua, our first and constant interest must be the security of our own homeland and the maintenance of peace in the area in which our country is geographically placed.³⁵

Given these signals from the Menzies government, it is unsurprising WNG featured as strongly as it did. Geography was important, as it is today, but even more so in the context of communist expansion. Today, we look back on domino theory as overly simplistic—an overreaction precipitating excessive US communist countermeasures in South-East Asia, especially in the protracted and lost ‘quagmire’ of Vietnam. But it was hard for Menzies and Spender to not take communist expansion and its potential consequences seriously. ‘Should the forces of communism prevail and Vietnam come under the heel of Communist China,’ Spender noted, ‘Malaya is in danger of being outflanked and it, together with Thailand, Burma and Indonesia, will become the next direct object of further Communist activities.’³⁶

In terms of alliances, Spender noted the shifting focus of traditional allies Britain and the United States from Europe towards the region. ‘The aims of Australian foreign policy are self-evident and unchanging,’ he said. In addition to ‘the preservation of peace and our way of life’—clear Menzian language—Spender added the need for ‘the closest possible co-operation within the British Commonwealth and with the United States of America and other nations friendly to the Commonwealth’.³⁷

Turning specifically to Indonesia, Spender appeared optimistic. He noted its fresh independence and its new government ‘trying to mould a new nation out of Indonesia’s 70 000 000 people’, adding a personal observation:

I spent several days in Djakarta on my way to the Colombo Conference, and had the opportunity of meeting President Soekarno and most of his Cabinet. I formed the conclusion that they were able men with moderate views and a sober realization of the immensity of the tasks in front of them. I also formed a clear impression that the Netherlands Government, and the Dutch officials who are remaining on in Indonesia to help the new government run its administration, are equally determined that Indonesia shall return to prosperity in the shortest possible time.³⁸

Stepping In: An Activist Stance?

Such optimism and cooperative spirit would inevitably unravel as the Indonesians ramped up their WNG claims, and as Spender tilted the Menzies government towards an ‘interventionist stance’ with a desire for direct influence on WNG negotiations. This, notes Umetsu, ‘encountered strong opposition from the US [and] UK’, which collectively feared ‘Jakarta’s attitude towards the New Guinea question would be stiffened’.³⁹ Notably, the great Winston Churchill, in power again from October 1951, sought compromise and not intervention on WNG.⁴⁰ The British would see bigger issues emerge with Indonesia as part of the Malaysian ‘confrontation’ campaign from 1963 to 1966. But before this, post-Suez Prime Minister Macmillan would take an even more pro-Jakarta side on the WNG issue.

It seemed the more Indonesia pushed on the WNG issue, the more the Dutch and Australia pushed back. Between 1954 and 1957, Jakarta continually brought the WNG question to the UN General Assembly. However, its resolutions to reopen WNG talks could not gain a two-thirds majority, due to joint Australian–Dutch efforts ‘in lobbying the US, the UK and Asian/African nations’.⁴¹ Menzies and the Dutch attempted to keep the WNG issue—at the very least—in ‘cold storage’.⁴²

Jakarta’s attitudes were not the only element for Menzies to consider. Richard Casey, who took over from Spender in 1951, and served as external affairs minister until 1960, also began to strategise about self-determination in the context of a Netherlands withdrawal. It was important, Casey noted, for Canberra to consider WNG uniting with eastern New Guinea—if the individuals of WNG so wished.⁴³ This essentially liberal commitment—a return to what individuals and people wanted, despite the grand wranglings of colonial claims and geostrategy—was an important bookmark of the WNG dispute throughout the Menzies prime ministership.

US Foreign Policy

It was also a philosophy shared by the United States, especially in the face of communist expansion. Yet America carried slightly altered convictions to Menzies’s insistence that they be an ‘active broker’. This could be observed in the language of and approach taken by US leadership towards the region at the time. Dean Acheson—secretary of state from 1949 to 1953—was encouraged by figures such as the great Cold War architect George Kennan to believe ‘that the U.S. should let nature take its course in Asia’.⁴⁴ Even a lumbering risk such as China would eventually see the Soviets as its true enemy, Acheson and Kennan reasoned, ‘unless the United States made China their enemy first’.⁴⁵ This sort of thinking also extended to Japan, where US reconstruction efforts were centred not on political reform but on economic restoration.⁴⁶

The United States, therefore, was firmly in the game of persuasion in Asia. Further south, it set itself to not antagonise Indonesia, and sought the approach of avoiding active brokering or taking sides in WNG—at least initially. It shared the British desire for compromise and, as John Howard writes in The Menzies Era, ‘the United States had remained neutral on the issue—partly because if all other things were equal, Washington always liked to be seen as siding with those who had thrown off colonialism’.⁴⁷

However, as the end of the 1950s approached, the Americans did self-select to be an active broker—but in Indonesia’s favour. In 1958, US Ambassador to Indonesia Howard P Jones was appointed by President Eisenhower. Jones was ‘already an outspoken proponent of the idea that the US should allow Indonesia to have WNG’, according to historian Stuart Doran.⁴⁸ By 1961, Indonesia had managed to tip the scales at the UN and, with US support, brought the issue to the General Assembly. The WNG issue ‘deep freeze’ was starting to thaw as Sukarno flagged with Jones—alarmingly—that he was on the cusp of invading WNG. ‘Demonstrating a fine intuitive grasp of American fears,’ Doran notes, ‘Sukarno said that in three days he would be holding a meeting with the Indonesian armed services chiefs; the US had until then to “make its voice heard”.’⁴⁹

The following sequence is important to quote at length from Doran:

Jones cabled Washington immediately, saying he was ‘convinced there is a grave and imminent danger of some form of military action by Indonesia’ … [He] urged President John F. Kennedy to write a letter to Sukarno containing ‘something special to give Sukarno hope that a political solution of this question is still possible in the near future’. Kennedy, who had been reluctant to act in Indonesia’s favour, accepted Jones’s advice. Jones was instructed to ‘seek to persuade Sukarno that if he does not give a signal for force on Monday, we can and will intensify our efforts with [the] Dutch and with [the] Australians and will hope to be able to indicate significant progress to him as these efforts proceed’. Sukarno said he would postpone any military activity ‘pending [the] promised US initiatives’, but maintained pressure on the Americans by failing to reveal what he would say on 19 December to a mass rally that would, in his words, take place ‘to demand that I give them the order to march on West [New Guinea]’.⁵⁰

This was supplemented by British pressure on Menzies to offer Sukarno ‘a definite bargain’.⁵¹ Menzies, however, firmly messaged back:

If you and the Americans feel constrained to make some approach to Sukarno, I wish you would consider telling him frankly the unwisdom of his present tactics. He and his Ministers need to be persuaded that his threats of force are likely to reduce the opportunities for a negotiated settlement and drive the foreign policy of Indonesia in direction [sic] dangerous for the country’s future.⁵²

Hardened Realities: ‘A Choice of Evils’

Menzies clearly felt that the Americans and British had overreacted to Sukarno’s imminent WNG threats. He agreed that Sukarno was ‘bluffing’, in the words of Australia’s US Ambassador, Howard Beale, ‘in order to obtain maximum concessions’.⁵³

But an inevitable change was clearly in the air. After over a decade, the final blow came from British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. In late December 1961, Macmillan met with JFK and discussed, among a range of issues, the WNG dispute. Writing to Menzies, Macmillan sharply summarised the changed circumstances, especially between communist advances and the Dutch position:

In this message I would like to make only one point [on WNG]. If we should find ourselves helping the Dutch in military operations against the Indonesians we must assume that retaliatory action would be taken against Western interests in Indonesia. The President and I were inclined to think that the preservation of those interests and the discouragement of Communist influence in Indonesia are more important to the West than the maintenance of the Dutch position in Dutch New Guinea. For this reason it seemed to us that we must do our utmost to persuade the Dutch to find some tolerable means of extricating themselves from their position there … We realise of course that Indonesian ambitions in New Guinea present special problems for you and the recent developments must be causing you a good deal of anxiety. I fear however that we are faced here with a choice of evils.⁵⁴ [author’s emphasis]

By August 1962, the Americans had convened the New York Agreement to enable a glide path for the UN followed by Jakarta’s taking possession of WNG. By October, WNG had been placed under the administration of the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority and the United Nations Security Force. In May 1963, Indonesia would raise its flag over WNG—or Irian Jaya as it is referred to by Indonesians—and concede to holding a referendum. The dispute had taken Jakarta fourteen years. It could now finally lay claim to a completed republic ‘from Sabang to Merauke’.

Contemporary Realities: Irian Jaya

Jakarta moved quickly in consolidating political control. In 1969 it held a contested referendum which supported Indonesian ownership. ‘So effectively did Indonesia organise the flow of Javanese to the new province,’ notes Blainey, ‘that today they form about half of the population.’⁵⁵

Many within the contemporary Free West Papua Movement (OPM) contest the basis of both the 1962 New York Agreement and the referendum. They make fair points, certainly in so far as no one from WNG was present when the agreement was debated, and, undoubtedly, about the atmosphere of intimidation that would have existed within WNG at the time of the referendum.

While a contemporary analysis of the modern Irian Jaya dispute is beyond the scope of these pages, it is worth noting that Menzies’s original insistence that the people of WNG decide their own future strongly aligns with OPM positions and those of modern-day West Papua activists. Menzies burnt political capital with Jakarta—and Downing Street and the White House—on the WNG dispute. But, I suspect, he will not redeem any historical reverence from OPM or other activists. Menzies, after all, is exclusively and unfairly seen by some as serving his prime ministerships with ‘uncritical subservience to policymakers in Whitehall and Westminster’.⁵⁶ He was accused of ‘blind loyalty’ to Britain, exemplified by his commitment to the 1956 Suez Crisis.⁵⁷ The WNG dispute—where Menzies took an alternative stance to the United States and Britain—is a pronounced footnote against these assumptions.

One other small point to note, especially from a modern perspective, is the side-by-side between West New Guinea and East New Guinea—or Irian Jaya and now Papua New Guinea. Bringing the two sides together, as Casey hypothetically explored, offers an interesting comparison of state power and state capabilities—important in the Menzian context of governments creating opportunities for individuals.

In 2007, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, when travelling through both PNG and Irian Jaya, recorded an interesting observation:

The Indonesian state has plenty of weaknesses of its own and suffers from corruption, as does PNG. But its ability to concentrate power and to use that power to enforce its authority is much more clearly evident in a multitude of ways, from the military and police forces that are omnipresent throughout the province of Papua, to the generally higher quality of roads, schools, and public services.⁵⁸

This opens up a fascinating comparison between governance systems and the much-needed capacity for state power to, as Menzies would note, create the conditions for people to prosper and do well.

Conclusion

Indeed, Menzies was constant in this respect throughout the WNG dispute—staying true to creating positive conditions for economic development and freedom while, at the same time, underscoring the importance of ultimately giving the people of WNG a choice. The fact that Menzies sustained this core conviction in the pursuit of independent, measured, and balanced positions on the WNG question is a testament to skilful handling.

But it also, in frank political terms, enabled Menzies to not lose face on the WNG issue at home by ultimately conceding to Macmillan and JFK’s positions abroad. In a notable 1959 parliamentary exchange, Menzies scolded Labor Opposition leader Arthur Calwell for challenging Menzies for his inconsistency and not pursuing selfdetermination on the WNG issue. Menzies was astonished, and responded sharply by reading from a November 1957 declaration, reminding Calwell of the long-sustained and joint Dutch–Australian position to ‘promote an uninterrupted development of this process until such time as the inhabitants of the territories concerned will be in a position to determine their own future’.⁵⁹

This was not a position Menzies deployed for political convenience in case the Dutch were forced to concede, but was, after all, simply the right thing to do. As Spender noted, in setting the foreign policy tone for Menzies at the very start of the dispute, ‘the experience of two world wars has shown that authority which depends on force alone rests upon hollow foundations if it is not sustained by honesty of purpose, and a recognition of the value of individual human beings’.

Menzies could not be accused of otherwise. Skilful handling ensured that recognition of both the value of individuals and Australian interests would be paramount, regardless of great power politics and a dynamic strategic environment.

CHAPTER 12

ALICK DOWNER’S IMMIGRATION PROGRAM

The Menzies Government Building a Bigger Australia

Paul Brown¹

It is of utmost significance to the British speaking race that such a vast continent should have as its population a people and a form of government corresponding in outlook and in purpose to Britain … this country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race.²

John Curtin, 1941

THE PREVAILING HISTORICAL narrative fully acknowledges the role of the Chifley Labor government and its immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, in broadening the sources of Australian immigration and ushering in the great post-war migration boom. It likewise gives credit to Harold Holt for ending the bulk of the White Australia Policy, and Gough Whitlam for its formal abolition. What is given less attention are the incremental but vital changes made in the intervening Menzies period, and that those changes were made at a time when the Australian Labor Party was backsliding away from its Calwellian record and reverting to its traditional position of viewing non-British migration as a potential threat to workers’ wages and Australian social cohesion.

By May 1958, it had become apparent to the Menzies government that the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 needed reform. Minister for Immigration Alick Downer described it as an ‘archaic mechanism’. However, the reasons for change were not always agreed to by the Opposition, and reforms such as the abolition of the dictation test found resistance in somewhat surprising areas. Much of this centred around Britishness, a concept which the ALP prided itself on defending. Despite being an Anglophile, Alick Downer held as part of his family credo a commitment to nation-building, and he was driven by the perceived need for expansionary immigration policies, which would lead him to compromise on the Britishness of our migrant intake.

The assertion that Alick Downer made significant changes to the White Australia Policy needs to be evaluated against the backdrop that his new Migration Act was first and foremost a revision of the ‘archaic mechanism’, not a root and branch review of policy. This chapter will caution against viewing the Menzies government and Downer as wholesale reformers. There was agreement with the general continuity of the White Australia Policy. While Downer aimed for a bigger Australia from the beginning of his ministry in 1957, this was initially conceived through more British migrants. It was only when this was seen to have increasingly obvious constraints that he turned to alternative sources and methods, such as wider ministerial discretion powers.

Although Downer reformed certain crude means of denying entry, such as the dictation test, his contribution to the incrementalism which ultimately eroded the White Australia Policy lies in a more obscure, subordinate, and yet significant area. It was his tendency to bring into the open the small changes in practice regarding exceptions made to the policy, which allowed the admission of particular Asian individuals, and which had hitherto been covered up. Both ministerial discretion and increased ‘Asian exceptions’ had the effect of weakening the policy and paving the way for Harold Holt to allow non-Europeans to settle in Australia on a general basis for the first time in 1966.

Each of these important reforms needs to be examined in greater detail as the pathway to slowly building a larger nation. First, the public discussion of changes was rare prior to Downer, as both parties were concerned that the electorate would view what the head of the Department of Immigration in 1958, Tasman Heyes, described as ‘modification by degrees’ as a betrayal of British race patriotism. Downer’s close identification with Menzies and all things British saw the two committed to maintaining the White Australia Policy. It is therefore more likely that Downer, in his attempts to humanise the clumsy and internationally embarrassing administrative structures, may have considered that minor changes were the means for ensuring its overall continuity. Downer could see that by removing the excesses of the policy, he would bolster it. By countering criticisms which were starting to appear, such as those directed at the dictation test and the refusal to allow in high-achieving Asian immigrants and removing the dictation test, he was actually bolstering the conservative macro objective of securing the success of the policy.

This argument is reinforced by the fact that, well into his term as immigration minister, Downer had solidified his resistance to widespread Asian immigration. Reflecting on his position at the time of his Roy Milne Lecture in 1960, Downer stated that a

section of the Press fanned a campaign for an annual quota of Asians. Newspapers such as the Melbourne Herald and those controlled by Rupert Murdoch constantly criticised my refusal—with strong Cabinet concurrence—to countenance such a doubtful expedient.³

In other words, well after his reforms to the Migration Act and the exceptions being made for distinguished Asians, he was still advocating strongly for the White Australia Policy.

Given that there was a moderate reformist tendency at work in Downer’s administration, the changes he implemented were really only meant to maintain the policy. Downer admitted as much himself in the second reading of the Migration Bill on 1 May 1958 when he declared:

The purpose of this bill is to consolidate and amend Australia’s immigration statutes. It has nothing to do with the Government’s current immigration policy; its primary concern is with the mechanism by which national policy is implemented.⁴ [author’s emphasis]

Neither party officially altered its policies during the Downer immigration ministry, although they were in some agreement on what they described as ‘humanising’ the administrative means by which non-Europeans were excluded.

If Downer was to make changes to the policy, however modest, they would have to be achieved through the constraints of wider cultural and bureaucratic institutions. At the heart of this was the incremental nature of the changes to the White Australia Policy. The contention is that its demise was not brought about by any one event or entity, but rather by a series of related institutions of similar progressive perspectives often not in agreement with each other in many other respects. Bureaucracies such as the Immigration Department and Foreign Affairs, as well as pressure groups such as the Immigration Reform Group, influenced changes to policy in a gradual, piecemeal fashion, and to varying degrees, in the 1950s and 1960s. All of this occurred against an international backdrop of changes to Australia’s role in Asia, the collapse of Britishness with the end of Empire, and an international resistance to racism in public policy. By 1967, Prime Minister Harold Holt could declare:

The issues before us are those of national growth, the welfare of the people, national security, our place in the international community … and the encouragement of a special relationship with Asia. These things carry us forward and others drop away into the mist.⁵

The nation was being changed, and Downer’s contribution in abolishing the controversial dictation test may well be understood within this incrementalism. Changes were being progressed cautiously and conservatively. There were multifarious contributors in the journey towards dismantling the policy and Downer was but one participant. And yet Downer was not recommending broad policy change. His main concern was to make the process more dignified, with the core restrictions remaining. Part of this process was the role of bureaucracies such as the Immigration Department, which often led the discussion around the nature of change.

The central legacy of Downer’s work in humanising the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 was the Migration Act legislation passed in September of 1958. While this focused on reforming the dictation test, what is not as widely known is the important legislative reform introduced in the repealing of the 1910 Emigration Act in the same year. The reform of the Emigration Act enabled Indigenous Australians, such as artist Albert Namatjira and vocalist Harold Blair, to leave the country for the first time without the requirement of special government permits.

Prior to 1958, all Indigenous peoples were prohibited from emigrating without permits issued by the Commonwealth Government. Alick Downer’s changes removed racial stereotyping and discrimination around this question. Labor Senator Percy Clarey recognised this profound reform and welcomed the changes:

The third matter I wish to mention relates to clause 64 which deals with the emigration of certain aborigines. I express my pleasure at the fact that aborigines will now be freed of the restriction contained in the act of 1910 which related to the emigration of young persons and Australian natives. No restriction or interference will be placed upon such aborigines, as was possible under the old Act.⁶

Downer condemned the previous practice of pooling all Indigenous people who applied for emigration in the same negative category. In other words, regardless of whether there was a constraint on someone emigrating to another country as an Indigenous person, they were categorised with everyone else. Downer argued the ‘Act fails to distinguish between those who have been freed of all disabilities and those who have not’.⁷

Senator Denham Henty commented upon the significance of this breakthrough in the second reading of the Bill on 23 September 1958 with the following observation:

In regard to aborigines, the underlying principle of the Bill is that any aboriginal should be free to leave Australia if he is not subject to restrictions in the State or territory in which he lives; or if he is otherwise exempted by the Minister from the need to apply for an emigration permit.⁸

Clause 64 of the Act made a clear distinction in ensuring the breakdown of racial stereotyping of Indigenous people in this area of emigration. Downer went on to comment on the significance of this new provision removing racial generalisations about the Indigenous population. Change had been authorised from the community or, as Burke would have argued, authorised by the evolving ‘prejudices’ within the constituency.

Prior to the Menzies government, both the Curtin and the Chifley governments in the 1940s had declined to abolish the dictation test. Arthur Calwell, minister for immigration in 1946–49, had not relaxed any of the major racial restrictions that led to a large inflow of European migration in preference to Asian migration. While Calwell built a strong post-war immigration program, this was always based on a preference for British migrants, whether English, Irish, or Scottish.⁹ Calwell explained his desire for this ‘Britishness’ to be fully appreciated: ‘My aim, and that of the Government, is to make the word, “Australian” mean all that it truly stands for to every member of our community. We shall try to teach the children that they are fortunate to be British, and even more fortunate to be Australian.’¹⁰ The active application of the dictation test ensured that Asians were not given every opportunity to settle in Australia.

The Menzies government’s strategy was to promote a suite of legislation, including the Nationality and Citizenship Bill 1958, which received faint praise from Calwell, who took exception to the Bill’s prohibition on deporting anyone who had already been naturalised as an Australian citizen:

In some respects I think the changes made in the act are too sweeping. There are one or two categories of persons in respect of whom the Minister should reserve some power to himself. He is assuming now, very generously, I think, that everybody who seeks Australian citizenship is well-intentioned and will act honestly and fairly towards this country. I am not so sure about that. I have a certain suspicion about some of these people.¹¹

Moreover, within the Migration Act debate, the reluctance of the leader of the Opposition, Dr Herbert Evatt, showed further evidence that, although Alick Downer was taking positive measures for change, it was without complete bipartisan support. While Labor on aggregate supported the Bill, during the readings of the Bill it opposed some of the key measures, including the complete abandonment of the dictation test. In an exchange with Gordon Freeth, the member for Forrest in Western Australia, Evatt argued that the dictation test should be kept as a backup measure, to be used on limited occasions. He would not accede to its complete removal, contending that ‘the test could always be held in reserve’.¹²

As well as abolishing the dictation test, the Act introduced safeguards which checked the minister’s discretionary power to deport people (which Calwell had widely utilised), via the introduction of an independent commissioner. Downer stated that, without an independent commissioner recommending deportation, the current circumstances ‘are capable of the greatest abuse’. Clause 14 of the Bill made it mandatory for a commissioner to initiate deportation recommendations. Downer asserted in the debate that deportation ‘can only be by the Minister on the recommendation of an independent Commissioner’. The commissioner himself ‘must be a serving or retired judge of the federal or state Supreme Court, a barrister or solicitor of five years standing on the High Court or Supreme Court’.¹³ This was one of several ‘important checks’ on the power of the minister regarding deportation regulations. The Bill centred around three main areas: immigration, deportation, and the emigration of children and Aboriginal people. Throughout the debate over the Bill, Downer constantly referred to the arcane, ‘clumsy, creaking operation’ which had resulted in ‘resentment outside Australia’ and needed to be replaced by the ‘neat, simple expedient of an entry permit’.¹⁴

When Downer was invested as minister for immigration by Viscount Slim on 20 March 1958 in Sydney, he inherited a different immigration policy landscape from the one which had prevailed when he began his parliamentary career in 1949. A reversal had occurred between the two major parties that would make immigration reforms even more challenging to pursue. In the intervening years, Downer’s Liberal Party had softened its approach to Asian immigration, not through changes to policy but through ministerial discretion, and had increased the ratio of southern European to northern European immigrants. In contrast, the Australian Labor Party, following its National Conference in Queensland in July 1958, decided to return to a smaller immigration intake and to focus predominantly on British migrants.

The Migration Act saw the abolition of the dictation test and the review of the Emigration Act of 1910. However, the steps leading to these changes had commenced earlier. Prior to the appointment of Downer as immigration minister, his predecessor Harold Holt had begun a process of allowing more Asian immigration through ministerial discretion.¹⁵ This process was understood within the Australian polity as a means of providing more flexibility for the White Australia Policy, safe beyond the glare of public examination. Holt doubled the number of Asian people allowed to stay in Australia between 1950 and 1956 by intervening in his department. Downer continued this approach. Holt had also attenuated the policy by reversing the decision of Calwell to deport 800 Asian refugees who had remained in Australia after World War II, and Calwell’s actions to repatriate all Japanese war brides. The Liberal Party’s support of the High Court’s decision to overrule the O’Keefe deportation case following Labor’s election defeat in 1949 was further evidence of the political turnaround.

The abolition of the dictation test during Downer’s administration raises the central question of whether this initiative was designed to consciously weaken or at least moderate the White Australia Policy and make its continuance ultimately unsustainable, or whether it was a minor action which was in no way meant to undermine the policy’s significance. This chapter takes the view that it was an attempt to provide a more acceptable public profile in light of international criticism of such an undesirable criterion for rejecting peoples from other countries.

It is probably best seen as part of incrementalism which is not a conscious process but in which each small liberalisation of the policy ultimately leads to its dissolution. The major objective of Downer and Menzies in their understanding of Britishness was always the maintenance of the overall purpose of the Immigration Restriction Act.

Nation-building in this instance is understood as the continuation of primarily a white Australia. If the nation is to expand, it must be essentially within this paradigm. Concessions can be made in particular with southern European sources of migration and ministerial exceptions, but these are accepted at the margins. Incrementalism was the process that Downer was working within, either consciously or unconsciously, in response to the forces around him.

When ALP immigration spokesman Fred Daly described the major parties as sharing a ‘Unity ticket’ supporting the broad provisions of the White Australia Policy in the House of Representatives in March 1966, he was articulating what both sides of the House had long understood.¹⁶ To comprehend the slow nature of reform to the White Australia Policy, one needs to appreciate the breadth and depth of this unanimity around its central proposition.

The ALP had always claimed consistent support of the policy, and in the 1950s, when Downer was immigration minister, it often took a more conservative position than the minister himself. Why had the Labor Party maintained its resistance to immigration reform? Part of the answer can be found in the ALP’s commitment to Britishness.

The pan-Britishness of Australian society, described by WK Hancock as a state of ‘being in love with two soils’, was a doctrine originally held by both parties.¹⁷ John Curtin had championed Deakin’s description of ‘independent Australian Britons’ and, as Neville Meaney and James Curran have argued, Curtin’s aim was to interpret Britishness for Australia’s role within the dominions.¹⁸ Arising from this, but not as closely examined, was Labor’s pan-Britishness in the sphere of immigration in the mid to late 1950s, when it vigorously competed with the conservatives for British loyalties. Downer did not see Britishness and the widening of the migrant intake to embrace people from a wide range of nationalities as necessarily incongruous. Labor leaders were asking for them to be seen increasingly as mutually exclusive, and they sought to create a binary division.

This pan-Britishness was embodied in the approaches of Labor parliamentarians Clyde Cameron and Leslie Haylen. Cameron welcomed an ‘Anglo-conservative’, such as Alick Downer, to his new position as immigration minister after the weak policy enforcements of his predecessors Athol Townley and Harold Holt. Surely Downer, educated as a proud Anglophile at Oxford, would restore the integrity of the policy. Cameron praised Downer by stating: ‘At long last we have a Minister for Immigration who believes in Labor’s policy of giving preference to people of British stock—in keeping Australia British.’¹⁹

Later, in the House of Representatives, Cameron stated: ‘The ALP does not believe it should apologise to anybody for wanting to keep Australia British any more than we would expect the Poles wanting to keep Poland Polish.’²⁰

Leslie Haylen had been authorised by the Chifley government to research the scope and sources for migrants from Europe as an envoy in July 1946. He provided a research report for Calwell in 1946 as immigration minister. As a Labor traditionalist, Haylen argued: ‘The number one priority was given to the British migrant because he did not need to be assimilated at all … In my father’s house there are many mansions for him.’²¹ Labor was widely critical of the conservatives for going weak on Asian immigration.

The ALP had begun to narrow its approach to immigration after the Brisbane National Conference of 1958. Conversely, Alick Downer was inquiring about new ways to build a bigger Australia. As Downer attempted to increase immigration, stressing a renewed focus on European sources of potential citizens, he met trenchant opposition from the Australian Labor Party.

The inevitable cost of widening immigration sources would be to reduce the influence of British traditions and trading protocols within the Anglo-Australian relationship. Downer, as a confirmed Old Commonwealth supporter, was acknowledging that a sacrifice would need to be made in the English connection in order to expand the Australian population through migration. He argued that the cost of this would be to move away from ‘the traditional affection Australia has for the United Kingdom and place Australia’s membership of the British Commonwealth more on a basis of practical self-interest’.²²

Given the controversial nature of this statement and the threat it posed to existing vested interests in Anglo-Australian relations, it may have been thought that the main opposition would come from within the Liberal Party itself. However, the fiercest and most relentless commentary would come from Labor, as exemplified in this question posed by Eddie Ward on 8 September 1960 in the House of Representatives:

Did you when delivering the 1960 Roy Milne Memorial Lecture state that the immigration plan being pursued by the government was weakening the ties between Britain and Australia and does the government look with favour on this development?²³

Downer argued that ‘in the last 13 years we have seen perhaps the most spectacular increase in Australia’s population that our national history has known’.²⁴ However, he also maintained that ‘we need to approach these matters in the spirit of self-examination’, and that ‘if we become self-satisfied, self-congratulatory and complacent about migration the danger signals will indeed be going up’.²⁵ Downer was asserting that, although the population had risen from 7.4 million in 1946 to 10 million in 1959, with 1.4 million of these population increases from migrants, unless the policy continued to develop creative solutions to the tightening of British immigration, Australia could not expect the same successful results. Had Downer not insisted upon this expansion of immigration at a time when Labor, under Evatt, was appealing for contraction, it is unlikely that the momentum for immigration reform would have continued and that ultimately the dismantling of the White Australia Policy would have been achieved. Downer argued that the current crisis required a ‘continual exercise of imagination, resourcefulness and a persistent willingness to try new methods’, all the time ‘mindful’ of but not enslaved ‘to convention and precedent’. Downer was appealing to the Opposition to work with him to develop a recasting and rediscovery of European migration which would inevitably ‘attract new people to Australia whilst they are still willing to come’.²⁶

Conservatism is not merely about making gradual authorised changes when they are appropriate, but also about holding on to the changes already confirmed at elections authorised by the community. This was the basis of Downer’s defence of southern European migration which came under criticism in the parliament. The ALP had moved against its previous position, as confirmed by the following statement made in September 1958 by Leslie Haylen. He summarised the new ALP position, referring to the July National Conference, in the following way:

We must not desert the principle of British migration. The discussions and decisions of the Australian Labor party, particularly at its Brisbane conference and other conferences, have been that because of the attitude and the breakdown of Menzies Government migration, we believe that there should be a curtailment in migration.²⁷

It has often been contended that Arthur Calwell began and sustained an expansionary immigration policy position by the ALP, based on southern European sources, and that, without this policy, Australian post-war immigration would have floundered. This argument that the ALP and Calwell were the sine qua non for immigration success needs closer examination in order to understand the counterbalancing role of Alick Downer.

The post-war immigration policy of the ALP is probably best understood in two stages. The first stage, led by Calwell as minister for immigration, focuses on the expansion beyond British migrants to include southern Europeans. The second stage is the reversal of this policy. While Calwell’s widening of immigration has been relatively well documented, what has not so clearly been identified is the major change which occurred in 1958 following the July National Conference of the ALP in Brisbane. At this conference, Labor decided to return to a minimalist position on immigration, rejecting the emphasis upon southern European migration.

Led by Opposition Leader HV Evatt, the ALP conference now recognised that the party had made many mistakes, although it had been well intentioned. The ALP was now arguing that ‘in the early days we fell in to many grave errors’. Evatt argued at the conference for a contraction of immigration, and now Haylen was concluding in the Parliament, on behalf of the ALP, that they had been ‘naive’ because Australia was ‘so remote from European affairs’.²⁸ Labor was now moving away from southern European immigration and back to a pre–World War II exclusivist position recommending that only British migrants be preferred.

In this crucial debate, which was a turning point for Labor, the party rejected the previous successes of Calwell and Chifley to return to a narrower position. Labor was arguing that it had been initially misled by ‘poker-work cushions and folk dancing outside the Albert Hall here in Canberra’, but now regretted that it had not screened migrants more effectively. Labor’s post–World War II immigration policy, Haylen was arguing, had failed for three reasons. The first was the emphasis upon the wrong migrant profile of southern Europeans, in particular Italians. The second reason was that ‘our migration screenings were bad’, and third, ‘we believe that in some cases our health screenings were bad’.

These arguments represented a volte-face from the position taken by the Chifley–Calwell administration in post–World War II Australia. It represented a new phase in Labor Party policy and, hence, a rejection of Downer—whereby a repudiation of the bipartisan agreements surrounding expanding immigration in the Holt–Downer immigration ministries was now being challenged and, in fact, actively opposed on the floor of the parliament.

Evatt, as leader of the ALP, was also conspicuous now by his silence. Rather than making a number of detailed statements on immigration, he had chosen parliamentarians such as Percy Clarey and Leslie Haylen to make the case. Evatt, as leader of the Opposition, declined the opportunity at the citizenship convention in Canberra in January 1958 to outline the successes of the immigration policy, particularly in the Chifley–Calwell government of 1946–49. Alan Hulme observed that Evatt ‘disclaimed any credit whatsoever for that section of the immigration program which followed the bringing of the first 200 000 displaced persons into the country’.²⁹ Hulme contended that the Labor Party had now reversed its position, and that the reason its leader had become silent on the matter was that the ALP was following exactly the same line of argument. He also argued that it was now through Evatt’s proxies, Clarey and Haylen, that Labor was calling for a ‘curtailment of immigration’.³⁰

Evatt was backing a reduction in immigration consistent with his previous announcements regarding the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901. As has been observed in the debate regarding the abolition of the dictation test, he had even called for the matter to be referred back to a parliamentary committee.

The struggle for Alick Downer was therefore made more difficult by a reluctant Opposition. Although Downer had recognised the achievements of Calwell throughout the immigration debates, and his vision of developing alternative sources of migrants, particularly from southern Europe, he was the one now being left to defend Calwell’s vision. Downer, in recognising the achievements of Calwell, sought to expand this platform, only to find that in the end he had to fight just to maintain it.

Alick Downer’s term as minister for immigration from 1958 to 1963 witnessed him as both a moderate reformer and a conserver of the gains made in southern European immigration. This was primarily as a defence of what the electorate had previously authorised in federal elections in relation to southern European immigration.

Downer was in broad agreement with the continuity of the White Australia Policy and, although he reformed the objectionable processes of denying entry, such as the dictation test, he never wavered in his commitment to the overall direction of the policy. He did introduce small changes in practice regarding Asian exceptions, and considerably increased levels of ministerial discretion, but this was designed to ensure continued overall electoral acceptance of the policy. By removing many of the administrative anomalies and humanising its public profile, he hoped to strengthen it and ensure its continuity. Reviewing these complex policy positions pursued by Alick Downer, he may be better viewed as a statesman with a liberal heart and conservative mind than as a ‘progressive conservative’.

This chapter has revealed that the core administrative reforms of Downer’s ministry—the abolition of the dictation test, the repeal of the Emigration Act 1910, and the maintenance of southern European migration—were achieved against frequent opposition from within, but particularly from outside, his own party. Downer had sensed both a shift in public sentiment surrounding the ‘archaic’ Immigration Restriction Act and a need to continue southern European immigration despite the fact that powerful populist elements within the polity disagreed.

CHAPTER 13

MENZIES, HASLUCK, AND WENTWORTH

Three Approaches to Aboriginal Affairs

Damien Freeman and Andrew Bragg¹

ON 31 MAY 1961, at the close of the period of The Menzies Ascendency, the Union of South Africa withdrew from the British Commonwealth and became a republic. This action occurred in response to a resolution at the 1961 Prime Ministers’ Conference in London moved by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, which denounced South Africa’s racial policies as being ‘inconsistent with the ideals on which the unity and influence of the Commonwealth rest’.²

Macmillan’s resolution exercised Menzies. In a cable to John McEwen summarising developments at the conference, Menzies wrote that ‘this means (a) South Africa is being given notice to quit, and (b) in view of our plainly discriminatory immigration policy we have a good chance of being next in line’.³ David Kemp explains that Menzies was obliged to invoke the principle in the UN Charter that countries were sovereign over their domestic policies to defend South Africa, because he knew Australia was vulnerable to international attack ‘over its treatment of Aborigines, its race-based immigration policy and its role in Papua New Guinea’.⁴ Kemp concludes: ‘The future would show that Menzies was correct in believing that Australia would come under increasing international criticism, and that its sovereignty would continue to be eroded by a range of forces.’⁵

This vignette provides an unexpected insight when considering a dispute between historians about the status of Aboriginal affairs in the Menzies years. On the one hand, it has been argued by AW Martin that there was an indifference to Aboriginal affairs under Menzies. On the other hand, Troy Bramston has rejected this analysis, maintaining that there were initiatives in Aboriginal affairs that show it was on the political agenda, even though Menzies lacked understanding about, and empathy for, Aboriginal people.

This chapter surveys a few developments that occurred during the period 1954–61. It does so with the intention of considering the role of Liberal politicians’ understanding and empathy in Aboriginal affairs at this time. In particular, we consider the approaches of Menzies, PMC Hasluck, and WC Wentworth. We suggest that while Bramston is correct that there was genuine political interest in Aboriginal affairs, it is also important to appreciate that there is evidence of understanding and empathy. While Bramston’s conclusion might be true of Menzies personally, for whom external factors, such as international criticism, contributed to a motivation for action in Aboriginal affairs, Menzies also enabled Hasluck’s political action, which was informed by understanding, and Wentworth’s, which was informed by empathy.

The State of Aboriginal Affairs at the Time of the Menzies Ascendency

The first fifty years of the Commonwealth saw Aboriginal affairs regarded primarily as a matter of state responsibility, a fact that was traced back to the Constitution itself.⁶ Furthermore, Aboriginal people were not permitted to participate in federal elections unless they had been accorded the same right by the law of a state.⁷ There had been calls by Aboriginal people, such as David Unaipon, to address their parlous situation,⁸ and some acknowledgement of the need to address the problem by Stanley Bruce, who, as prime minister, committed to an inquiry into how Aboriginal interests could be addressed.⁹ This resulted in JW Bleakley’s 1928 report on The Aboriginals and Half-castes of Central Australia and North Australia, which made recommendations on how to ameliorate the situation.¹⁰ There were discussions about the proposals in 1929 which would have seen the Commonwealth take increased responsibility for addressing these issues; however, no progress was made.¹¹

In 1937, a Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities was held, and this resulted in a commitment to a uniform policy of assimilation of Aboriginal people who were not of ‘full blood’.¹² This was also the year of William Cooper’s petition to King George V, signed by 1814 Aboriginal people from all the states and presented to the federal government, which chose not to forward it to the king on the basis that Aboriginal issues were a matter for the state governments, not the Commonwealth.¹³ The following year, a Day of Mourning was held on 26 January, and a deputation of Aboriginal representatives met with the prime minister, Joseph Lyons.¹⁴ The Curtin government sought power to deal with Aboriginal affairs among a range of other social and economic powers, but nothing came of this.¹⁵ Thus, although there was acknowledgement of the need for action in both government and Aboriginal circles, progress had been slow in the federation’s first five decades.

The Menzies ascendency overlapped with the rise of the civil rights movement in the United States, from 1954 onwards, and this no doubt influenced the development of organised Aboriginal activism in Australia. The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders was formed in 1958.¹⁶ It was established at a meeting of organisations including churches, trade unions, student bodies, labour councils, and various committees and councils for Aboriginal rights. Its goals were the ‘repeal of all legislation, federal and state, which discriminated against the Aborigines’, and, from 1962, to amend the Constitution ‘to give the Commonwealth government power to legislate for Aborigines as with all other citizens’.¹⁷ The 1960s saw the growth of political movements critical of discriminatory measures, demanding the extension of rights, equal wages, and campaigning for a referendum to change the Constitution and give the Commonwealth powers over Aboriginal affairs. In 1963, two bark petitions were presented to the Australian Parliament’s House of Representatives, constituting the first formal attempt by the Yolŋu to have their land rights recognised.¹⁸ In 1966, Vincent Lingiari led a walk-off of 200 Aboriginal people from Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory as a protest against the work and pay conditions.

As prime minister, Menzies presided over a number of developments in Aboriginal affairs, at a time of growing support for greater Commonwealth involvement. Notable initiatives included the Welfare Ordinance 1953 in the Northern Territory (then under the direct control of the Commonwealth), which Hasluck developed, based on the principles of assimilation and social advancement. A major achievement of the period was the Social Services Act 1959, which enabled increased numbers of Aboriginal people to receive social service benefits from the Commonwealth, by enabling all Aborigines who were not ‘nomadic or primitive’ to receive the maternity allowance, widows’ pensions, old-age and invalid pensions, unemployment, and sickness benefits.¹⁹ Prior to 1959, access to these benefits was dependent on Aboriginal people being exempted from state and territory ‘protection’ laws.²⁰ Another significant achievement was an amendment to the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 in 1962 which permitted Aboriginal people to be enrolled to vote in Commonwealth elections. Finally, 1965 saw Menzies introduce a Bill for a referendum on counting Aboriginal people in the census—a reform which his successor, Harold Holt, expanded into a wider proposal that also included amending the race power at the successful referendum in 1967.

Menzies’s Attitude to Aboriginal People and Aboriginal Affairs

The political approach to Aboriginal affairs under Menzies needs to be considered in the context of his personal attitude to Aboriginal people. When in an interview recorded in 1969, he was pressed to reflect on his earliest impressions of them as a schoolboy in Ballarat, he recalled with admiration their aptitude for football, but revealed a more dismissive attitude towards them as an ‘idle community’ lacking ambition, but not presenting as a problem that needed to be addressed.²¹ Towards the end of his life, he spoke about the ‘Aboriginal problem’ in a way that suggests he subscribed to a neo-Darwinist anthropology in which there is a hierarchy of ‘races’, and the ‘Aboriginal race’ is regarded as ‘the lowest form of human life’.²² However, it must be noted that these statements were made in an interview conducted after a major stroke, which his biographer AW Martin suggests may have caused ‘emotional damage, even personality change’.²³ Martin therefore cautions against using the interview as evidence of ‘supposed long-standing attitudes’.

On official visits, Menzies struck some observers as having no interest in engaging with Aboriginal culture, such as when he declined an invitation to view Aboriginal paintings at an art gallery set up by Albert Namatjira.²⁴ But others were taken by the tenderness he could show, such as when singing softly to two Aboriginal children at the Weipa Presbyterian Mission.²⁵

There is one personal relationship that might offer some insight into Menzies’s attitude to Aboriginal people: his long-term friendship with his driver, Alf Stafford. Stafford was a Gamilaroi and Darug man who was employed by the Commonwealth Transport Department to drive senior political figures, including eleven prime ministers, over the course of a 35-year career. Paul Daley provides a detailed study of the friendship that developed between Stafford and Menzies. It is apparent that there was a genuine closeness born of a shared love of cricket, but extending beyond that to various instances in which Menzies made arrangements to support Stafford in his personal life. When Stafford’s children were reunited with Menzies’s daughter, Heather Henderson, decades later, they asked her if she or her father realised that Stafford was Aboriginal. She replied, ‘I mean, when we look back at photos of my father … you think, of course he was. But back then you didn’t even give it a thought.’ Daley provides the gloss: ‘Menzies was no fool—he could probably work it out for himself. But Heather just said it never occurred to her.’²⁶ This exchange and the gloss offer a way into understanding Menzies’s approach: he was perfectly comfortable engaging with Aboriginal people as individuals, but he didn’t take any particular interest in them as Aboriginal people. That was probably also reflected in his approach to Aboriginal affairs: he was concerned to address the needs of Aboriginal people as people, but did not see any particular significance in them, or their needs as Aboriginal people.

Despite the failure of the Communist Party referendum in 1951, Menzies was prepared to make another attempt at amending the Constitution to repeal section 127, which stipulated that people of the Aboriginal race were not to be counted in reckoning the population for the purposes of the Constitution. He could see that this was not in keeping with mid-century Australia’s values. He was not prepared, however, to amend section 51(xxvi) of the Constitution, which excluded the people of the Aboriginal race from the race power (permitting parliament to make laws about the people of any race for whom it was deemed necessary to make special laws). His objection focused partly on the fact that the race power was fundamentally discriminatory, in that it enabled parliament to discriminate against people on the basis of race, and that it was not in the interests of Aboriginal people for them to be brought within the ambit of such potential discrimination. Furthermore, he believed that the Commonwealth should not aspire to make a special body of laws for Aboriginal people, but rather that they should be treated the same as everyone else and integrated into the broader community.²⁷ Ultimately, Menzies’s views did not prevail, and the proposal that was put to a referendum (after his retirement) in 1967 included an amendment to remove the words excluding the Aboriginal race from the race power.

Historians have disagreed about how we should understand the state of Aboriginal affairs under Menzies. Judith Brett presents Menzies as rather dismissive of Aboriginal people collectively, although she acknowledges that he admits there had been Aboriginal people of talent and achievement, and he expected increasing numbers of these in the future.²⁸ Martin notes instances in which Menzies ‘showed no curiosity’ about Aboriginal populations during prime ministerial visits,²⁹ and suggests that his ‘personal lack of interest in meeting Aborigines and observing Aboriginal culture symbolised what in many quarters was a prevailing attitude of his time’.³⁰ Troy Bramston rejects Martin’s analysis, however, pointing out that there were important initiatives in Aboriginal affairs during the Menzies years, and therefore objecting to Martin’s claim that such matters were not ‘on the political agenda’.³¹ Bramston suggests that the problem was that Menzies’s attitude to ‘race’ was dated by the 1960s, observing: ‘It is telling that within months of Menzies leaving parliament, cabinet effectively reversed key decisions on immigration and the Indigenous referendum. He lacked empathy and understanding of these matters.’³²

The exchange about South Africa’s racial policies might genuinely have been concerned with issues of national sovereignty, but it might also reveal a lack of understanding or empathy. It is telling that Menzies knew that Australia’s approach to immigration, New Guinea, and Aboriginal people was also going to be a problem for Commonwealth partners who were supposed to share common values with Australia. Neither understanding nor empathy could shake Menzies’s convictions when it came to South Africa. From a 21st-century perspective, this is hard to fathom even when one understands the principles that he was invoking. The same can be said of his approach to Aboriginal people. This is not to say, however, that he was resistant to the efforts of Cabinet and party room colleagues who demonstrated greater understanding or empathy.

Hasluck, Aboriginals Ordinance, and Understanding

Paul Meernaa Caedwalla Hasluck represented the seat of Curtin in the House of Representatives from 1949 to 1969, when he resigned to accept Elizabeth II’s commission as the thirtieth governor-general of the Commonwealth of Australia. During that time, he also served in the fifth Menzies ministry and every subsequent ministry up to the first Gorton ministry, variously being appointed minister for territories, minister for external affairs, and minister for defence. In his memoirs, Hasluck writes about the interest in Aboriginal people that he acquired as a schoolboy, which formed part of a broader interest in local history and antiquarianism. He writes of his ‘long association with them in all kinds of situations’ and generally recollects forming a positive impression of them.³³ His early interest led to an MA thesis at the University of Western Australia which made a special study of Aboriginal people, and this study in turn formed the basis for his later work in Aboriginal affairs as minister for territories. Robert Porter writes that ‘Hasluck’s academic grounding in administrative policy towards Aborigines, combined with his own personal experiences in Western Australia, was the principal factor that generated a political commitment by Hasluck to the initiation of a new approach to Aboriginal policy within Australia’.³⁴

The new approach is summed up by Geoffrey Bolton as follows: ‘Central to his thinking was the recognition that Aboriginal people should be counted as Australian citizens by right … this was a radical break with the past.’³⁵

Hasluck identified three conclusions in his own journalism, which he believed were groundbreaking:

• There had been no policy of planning a future for the aborigines but only, during the past quarter of a century, more efficient care in making their lot easier and protecting them from some of the less pleasant phases of civilisation.

• Considering the conditions with which they had to contend throughout the century, it could not be concluded that any decrease in their numbers meant that they were doomed to extinction and perhaps we should adjust our views and plan a future that was not based on the expectation that sooner or later the aborigines must die out.

• The time was overdue for us to decide definitely what our policy towards them should be. That decision could only be made when we had firstly a far wider knowledge concerning them, their distribution, their present conditions, their capability, and the best method of helping them, and secondly when we had a clearer idea of how much we were prepared to spend.³⁶

When his turn came, his own policymaking was a response to these conclusions, and is seen to best effect in the Welfare Ordinance 1953.

As minister for territories, Hasluck was responsible for this ordinance, which was essentially a measure for managing Aboriginal affairs in the Northern Territory. It was subtitled ‘An Ordinance to Provide for the Care and Assistance of Certain Persons’. What was significant about the measure was that it assiduously avoided referring to racial categories. The ‘certain persons’ to which the ordinance applied were Aboriginal people, but it was to apply to them on account of their being people in need of assistance rather than on account of their being people of the Aboriginal race. Previous legislation would have provided for these people’s care on the basis that they were Aboriginal and in need of care by virtue of being Aboriginal. When Hasluck became minister for territories, he convened a conference with state counterparts who all agreed that legislation for Aboriginal welfare should be cast in terms of people in need, rather than people of the Aboriginal race; however, the state legislation remained racially based.³⁷

Hasluck’s position was that Aboriginal people needed to become full citizens of the Commonwealth. By this he did not mean citizens in a legal sense, but in a broader sense of full members of the community that was the Commonwealth. In order for Aboriginal people to be full members of this community, the state had to accept responsibility for them and equip them with the skills necessary for full participation. This was basically an assimilationist policy: once Aboriginal people had the ability to assimilate into settler society, they should be free to do so and should enjoy the full rights and privileges of belonging to such a society; until then, they remained wards of the state, which had a duty to provide guardianship and tutelage to enable them to reach their full potential as citizens of the Commonwealth.³⁸

Hasluck’s approach to assimilation is set out in Native Welfare in Australia, in which he explains that assimilation

is a policy of opportunity. It gives to the aboriginal and to the person of mixed blood a chance to shape his own life. If he succeeds, it places no limit on his success but opens the door fully. Segregation of any kind opens the door into a peculiar and separate world for coloured people only.³⁹

Hasluck’s approach was that the state should only recognise its members as citizens; however, he also admitted the need for special legislation for Aboriginal people. The problem that such legislation sought to address was to be regarded as a social problem rather than a racial problem. To classify Aboriginal people as being in need of special assistance to overcome social problems was to assign a revocable legal status to them, rather than an irrevocable racial category. He was determined that the law should not use racial categories, even though he felt comfortable using categories such as ‘Aborigines’, ‘natives’, ‘fullbloods’, and ‘halfcastes’ politically.⁴⁰

Russell McGregor writes that although the ordinance was contentious in its day for its approach to addressing Aboriginal social problems without reference to racial categories, historians have subsequently found it contentious for its assimilationist policies.⁴¹ Hasluck’s approach to assimilation has also met with criticism for his ideological commitment to individualism, although McGregor points out that this critique tends ‘to underrate the importance it placed on membership of a community’.⁴²

As to Hasluck’s understanding of Indigenous people and their predicament in the mid-twentieth century, we should also consider his approach to the indigenous populations of Papua and New Guinea. Reflecting on his firsthand experience in New Guinea, he writes:

The people have interests more broadly based than that of a chicken pecking its way out of an egg and emerging into daylight. They have had a life of their own for a long time. The people think of themselves in other terms than being one factor in an urgent problem someone else is trying to solve. The people have desires and hopes other than to be an economic unit in a development project devised by a distant group of experts. ‘Emerging’, ‘emergent’ and ‘developing’ are inadequate words to describe a people living in their own society and rooted in their own culture.⁴³

This was a politician whose policymaking was informed by his deep understanding of the circumstances of indigenous people. He understood that the problems faced by indigenous peoples were often a result of a failure of understanding on the part of earlier colonial authorities:

No intelligent pronouncement can be made about any policy of economic development or any policy of political development in isolation from the total situation of the country and people. Many of the ill-consequences of nineteenth-century colonialism were due to such thinking in isolation. Development was thought to be a sufficient good in itself. Are we neglecting that warning of history? Development not only disturbs ground; it also disturbs people. After the disturbance has taken place you can tidy up the surface mess with a bulldozer, but it takes a long time for trees to grow again or for people to recover their trust.⁴⁴

There is much to be said for the difficulty of recovering indigenous people’s trust after the disturbance of development. Hasluck was keen to do right by these people, but also to see Australia extend its influence in the South Pacific so that it could ultimately create a Melanesian federation which would include not only Papua and New Guinea, but the other islands to the east, and West New Guinea when the Dutch withdrew. He argued unsuccessfully in Cabinet for this, alongside the minister for external affairs, RG Casey, not only because it was in Australia’s strategic interest, but because he believed it would serve the interests of the indigenous populations.⁴⁵

Whether or not contemporary historians share Hasluck’s understanding of indigenous peoples, what cannot be denied is that he was a thoughtful man with an abiding interest in Aboriginal people, and that his understanding of them informed his political action at the time of the Menzies ascendency.

Wentworth, AIAS, and Empathy

William Charles Wentworth represented the seat of Mackellar in the House of Representatives from 1949 until 1977. During that time, he also served as minister for social services and minister in charge of Aboriginal affairs under the prime minister in the first and second Gorton ministries and the McMahon ministry.

For present purposes, we are particularly interested in his advocacy for the establishment of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS, later the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies), as this occurred at the end of the period primarily covered in this book. In subsequent years, Wentworth’s interest in Aboriginal affairs endured. In 1965, he introduced a private member’s Bill for a referendum which was more extensive not only than Menzies’s 1965 Bill, but also more ambitious than Holt’s 1967 Bill.⁴⁶ For a time, his abiding interest turned into a ministerial responsibility. At the time of the Wave Hill walk-off, he visited Wattie Creek, where the Gurindji were camped, and as minister acknowledged their concerns.⁴⁷ He tried to address these; however, action stalled.⁴⁸ His subsequent ministerial speeches in the House of Representatives demonstrate not only a concern for the advancement of Aboriginal people but the need to shift away from paternalism.⁴⁹ When he returned to the backbenches, he continued to take an active interest in this portfolio, speaking on Aboriginal issues in parliament; for example, commenting on the Aboriginal Land (Northern Territory) Bill 1975 and the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Bill 1976, as well as speaking in favour of bilingual education and the use of Aboriginal languages in Aboriginal schools.

Together with the anthropologist WEH Stanner, Wentworth was central to the establishment of the AIAS. As the archaeologist John Mulvaney explains:

The concept of an Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies was proposed under that title by WC Wentworth MP in about August 1959. He circulated a discursive nine-page paper which stressed the ‘importance of the Study of Primitive Peoples’ and the urgency of salvage research before traditional Australian Indigenous culture perished.⁵⁰

It was Wentworth who developed initial proposals on the institution’s format and membership, including potentially affiliating it with the (then relatively new) Australian National University. He was a member of the interim council appointed by Menzies in November 1961 to report on the formation of the future AIAS, and has been credited with having been responsible for the establishment of the interim council.⁵¹

Ultimately, the AIAS was established by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Act 1964. In a debate on the Bill for that Act, Wentworth said that the creation of the institute was a matter of urgency:

I think our task is, in so far as we can do so with the resources of scholarship available to us, to increase our operations as quickly as possible. But they will be only small operations even at their peak, and their peak will not be held for any length of time, because the fields of study are vanishing with the vanishing of the old knowledge and the old ways …

We are preserving the linguistics, the semantics, the material for art studies, for studies of material culture, of the nature of authority and, indeed, of the nature of man. What is available for study here cannot be studied anywhere else. It can only be studied in Australia, now.⁵²

He was the politician who most acutely appreciated the urgency of preserving Aboriginal culture, and he remained invested in the AIAS as a parliamentary representative on the institute’s council until 1968, and then again from 1973 until 1977, as well as serving on the council in other capacities following his departure from politics.

Wentworth stands out not only for what he did, however, but also for why he did it. It was apparent to his colleagues that Wentworth had a peculiar attachment to Aboriginal affairs and Aboriginal people. Philip Ruddock, who served in parliament with him, recalls, ‘Billy was a fascinating character. He used to go out every year to just bond with Indigenous people. In recess, he would just pack up in his four-wheel drive and go.’⁵³

This bonding seems to have cultivated an increased sensitivity that translated into policy proposals. In 1968, as minister for Aboriginal affairs, he advocated for the 22-member AIAS council to include an Aboriginal person on the basis that ‘There are important psychological advantages I think in having an Aboriginal on the Council because it acknowledges the existence of Aboriginals as human beings rather than as being simply objects for study’.⁵⁴

With the benefit of hindsight, however, it is clear that notwithstanding how real Wentworth’s empathy was, it also had the limitations of a man of his times. On the fiftieth anniversary of what was now AIATSIS, Colin Tatz said:

Like many, I like Bill Wentworth. Can you say did he mean well? Of course he meant well. Was he good hearted? Sometimes. Was he the father of this Institute? Yes he was. He wanted two things: one was this Institute, the other one was that he wanted Aborigines to have a human rights set of clauses in the Constitution eventually. He didn’t get that but he got the referendum instead in 1967. But Bill’s whole nature was that we were going to study man in nature or nature in man. And to him man was this noble savage, one foot up, with a headband, a spear in his hand looking on into eternity into the Dreamtime. And it was all very romantic and it was all very nice but what the hell was it doing for blackfellas at Yuendumu and Papunya?⁵⁵

For all that, Wentworth exemplified Liberal leadership in Aboriginal affairs founded on empathy at the time of the Menzies ascendency and its aftermath.

Conclusion

In Buraadja, Andrew Bragg quotes the following passage from Wentworth’s second reading speech on the State Grants (Aboriginal Advancement) Bill 1969: ‘The Government believes it is essential to provide Aboriginal citizens with regular opportunities to make their desires and views known to those at the centre of policy formation and as far as practicable to help in the formulation of policy.’ He does so in the context of making the case for a constitutional guarantee that Indigenous voices would be heard by policymakers, and offers the gloss that ‘Wentworth, conservative member of the Liberal Party decades ago, wanted to put the Indigenous voices at the centre of policymaking. So it isn’t a trendy “Woke” thing.’⁵⁶ It is important to remember that ideas that become fashionable might have an earlier pedigree that is in no way contingent on current fads.

When it comes to Indigenous affairs more generally, it is important to tell the whole story, and to tell it properly. In a speech to the Menzies Research Centre, Julian Leeser lamented that, although the Labor Party is good at telling its history, the Liberal Party has not been so good at telling its history—particularly when it comes to Indigenous affairs.⁵⁷

At the time of the Menzies ascendency, it can hardly be said that all was well with Indigenous affairs. It should not be said, however, that there was a general indifference to the plight of Indigenous people. Important reforms were implemented by Hasluck, and the foundations for others were being laid by Wentworth. Moreover, Hasluck exemplified understanding and Wentworth empathy that might have seemed singular at that time, but which is now de rigueur. Possibly, the Menzies who presided over all of this was a social Darwinist. Certainly, he was the Menzies who bonded with Alf Stafford over a shared love of cricket.

CHAPTER 14

ROBERT MENZIES, CANBERRA’S APOSTLE

Ted Ling¹

ROBERT MENZIES FIRST resided in Canberra on a semi-permanent basis in 1934 to take up the position of attorney-general in Joseph Lyons’s government. In his later memoir The Measure of the Years, Menzies admitted that he did not like Canberra at first, regarding it as a place of exile, but he soon realised the decision to make Canberra the capital had been taken. It was necessary, therefore, to make the city a focal point for national pride and sentiment. ‘Once I had converted myself to this faith,’ he wrote, ‘I became an apostle.’² This chapter tells the story of how, from a position of indifference towards Canberra when he first moved there, Menzies became Canberra’s champion.

Menzies was instrumental in establishing the National Capital Development Commission in 1957. The commission’s task was to plan for, develop, and construct Canberra, both as a place to live in and as the national capital. It did all this until its abolition in 1989. Throughout its lifetime it had a dramatic impact on Canberra’s planning and development. Today, older Canberrans remember it as the NCDC, while many younger Canberrans have probably never heard of it.

What is also sometimes forgotten is the substantial role that Menzies had in the commission’s creation and operation until his retirement in January 1966. Menzies fought for the commission and the funding it needed to carry out its work, despite regular criticism from the states, and even from within his own party.

Suburbs Searching for a City

By the late 1940s, Canberra consisted of a few disjointed suburbs on either side of where the future Lake Burley Griffin would be. The effects of the Great Depression and World War II were still being felt. Walter Burley Griffin’s grand design had not been brought to fruition, and the nation’s capital appeared to be little more than a series of ‘suburbs still searching for a city’.³ Other Canberra put-downs included ‘a good sheep station ruined’ and ‘a cemetery with lights’.

Further, most Commonwealth departments were based in Melbourne, making effective administration from Canberra exceedingly difficult. In April 1948 Ben Chifley’s government announced plans for the relocation of more than 7000 public servants from Melbourne to Canberra over the next ten years, yet little happened. Shortages of manpower and materials, lack of actual funding, and public service resistance all helped to undermine the government’s plans.

During the election campaign of December 1949, Menzies gave scant regard to Canberra, but he soon appreciated the problems that Chifley’s government had faced. A series of Cabinet committees was established after the election, one of which was for the development of Canberra. In March 1950 Menzies wrote to the committee’s chairman, Philip McBride (minister for the interior), asking for a report on future development.⁴ McBride later transferred to the Defence portfolio and there is no evidence that the report Menzies called for was actually prepared.

In January 1952 Menzies met with Bill Dunk, chairman of the Public Service Board. Dunk told Menzies of the work he had done for the Chifley government and his proposals for relocating public servants to Canberra. Dunk called for the introduction of a development plan, and the centralisation of the public service in Canberra.⁵

In July 1954 Wilfrid Kent Hughes, the minister for the interior, announced the government’s intention to transfer more than 6000 public servants from Melbourne to Canberra.⁶ In response to the announcement, The Canberra Times published an editorial in which it bemoaned:

Nothing could be less profitable than to recall the number of occasions on which Commonwealth governments have committed themselves to a programme for the transfer of departments from Melbourne to Canberra, only to abandon those intentions when it became more expedient politically to cut the financial provision for Canberra than the expenditure in electorates with greater political voting power than is possessed by the residents of the Australian Capital Territory.⁷

The lamentation proved prescient, as the government’s 1954 proposal effectively went nowhere.

The Beginnings of Canberra’s Resurgence

In November 1954 Senator John McCallum called for the appointment of a Senate Select Committee to examine and report on the development of Canberra. When alerted to the committee’s pending establishment, Menzies said, ‘I see no objection.’⁸ The committee was duly formed, and in September 1955 it presented a report containing seventy-six recommendations, including the establishment of a single authority for Canberra’s administration and development, instead of the current joint responsibility between the Department of the Interior and the Department of Works; accelerated movement of government offices and staff from state capitals; the commencement of major works, including on Lake Burley Griffin; and the extension of suburban facilities, including schools and shopping centres.

Canberra’s post-war resurgence can be set almost to the day with the birth of a baby girl, Edwina Henderson, on 6 March 1956. She was Robert and Pattie Menzies’s first grandchild and they doted on her, but her birth brought home to the prime minister the poor state of Canberra’s development. For Menzies was soon being harassed by Pattie and daughter Heather Henderson (Edwina Henderson’s mother) about the lack of facilities in Canberra.

‘Bob, you try pushing a pram round these awful footpaths,’ said Pattie Menzies.

‘Dad, it’s almost impossible to find somewhere to live here,’ said Heather Henderson.

To which Menzies replied: ‘Well, we’re stuck with Canberra, whether we like it or not, so we might as well do it properly.’⁹

In April that year, possibly as a result of the barrage he was receiving at home, Menzies undertook a drive through Canberra. He was not impressed with what he saw. He noted the prevalence of squat, flattopped buildings which he said needed ‘only a few bales of hay and a goat on the roof to be painfully reminiscent of Suez or Port Said’. He later wrote to Allen Fairhall (who had replaced Wilfrid Kent Hughes as minister for the interior), voicing his concerns. He concluded by saying, ‘I will turn a very cold eye on proposals for Canberra expenditure until I am satisfied that the business is being attended to in a businesslike and effective way.’¹⁰

Documenting Canberra’s Problems

Prior to leaving for a conference in London in July 1956, Menzies asked Ken Herde, a senior official with the Prime Minister’s Department, to prepare a paper on Canberra’s problems together with ideas on how they could be resolved, so that Canberra’s future planning and development could be corrected. Herde presented his report that same month. He wrote that the government had to accept Canberra as an essential national responsibility and develop the city as a national project. He suggested a separate authority be established to develop Canberra over the next five to seven years. The authority would undertake the planning, supervision, coordination, direction, and expediting of all construction work in Canberra. Herde also suggested that the government seek advice from a person who had proved themself in this field and suggested William Holford, professor of town planning at the University of London.

Cabinet considered Herde’s recommendations in November 1956. While there was general support for them, Minister for Territories Paul Hasluck was reluctant to commit to Canberra’s development. During the discussion, he said that ‘if we think of [the] relative importance of things we would put development of [the] national capital fairly low on the list of priorities’.¹¹

Menzies took an entirely different view. He told his colleagues that there had to be a concentration of policymaking departments located in Canberra, and that elements of Defence should be the first to relocate. What was required was a program of developing the city with the provision of schools, services, and roads. Menzies supported the suggestion of an authority solely responsible for achieving this goal. He said ‘if we don’t decide now that this process will occur it will not be done in our lifetime’.¹²

The government later approved the engagement of William Holford, who spent two weeks in Canberra in June 1957 before returning home to London. Coincidentally, Menzies was in London at the time and the two men met at the Savoy Hotel. Holford wrote a record of the meeting in which he said that Menzies told him to speak frankly about his ideas. The two men discussed housing, the need for an auditorium for concerts and a theatre, a new Commonwealth Avenue bridge and the filling of the lake below, and possible sites for a new Parliament House.

Holford told Menzies that a commission was needed with the power and resources to develop Canberra over a period of five to ten years. Menzies agreed and suggested that while there might be some opposition from the press, the Australian public in general would not object to the provision of £5 million per year for the next ten years to develop a genuine capital city. Menzies was perhaps overly optimistic about public support for Canberra, however, and in the ensuing years he would repeatedly have to defend the funding allocated to develop Canberra against criticism.

Menzies asked Holford if he could return to Canberra in the near future. Holford concluded his note by saying that the prime minister ‘seemed very keen on taking the necessary steps to lay down a revised programme for Canberra before leaving office’.¹³

Later, Menzies cabled Arthur Fadden, who was acting prime minister in Menzies’s absence, informing him of the meeting with Holford. ‘I found Holford’s opinions impressive and lively,’ he said.¹⁴

Legislation to establish the single authority supported by Menzies and others came into effect in late 1957, although it would not become fully operational until March 1958. It was known as the National Capital Development Commission, the name originally suggested by Ken Herde.

The First Five-Year Plan

In February 1959 the commission released its first five-year plan of proposed capital works for Canberra. The program included the Lake Scheme, preparations for a new Parliament House on the shores of the proposed lake, construction of Pentagon-type Defence offices near the Australian–American war memorial (this became Russell), expansion of the shopping centre at the civic centre, a new repertory theatre, permanent Supreme Court, luxury hotel, new police station and municipal services, and parking around the new business premises. The proposed works would cost an estimated £55 million.

Cabinet considered the program on 28 April 1959. Menzies was overseas at the time but had already made known his support for the program, particularly funding for the Lake Scheme, which was approved by those ministers present at the meeting.¹⁵

Opening of First Defence Building, Russell, 17 November 1960

The first new facility to be completed was a building for the Department of the Air at Russell. The Russell Defence complex would ultimately house 2500 personnel in seven buildings. When opening the complex on 17 November 1960, Menzies used the opportunity to answer criticisms of the funding being provided to Canberra. He said that the investments being made in Canberra were ‘dividendpaying investments in the best sense of the word … [they] represented an investment in national pride and feeling … The moaning over the lake scheme and other projects in the building of Canberra gained no sympathy from him.’¹⁶

Perhaps to lighten the mood, Menzies also took the opportunity to praise John Overall, NCDC chief commissioner, saying:

Now this man Overall occasionally frightens me. He looks to you to be a mild and disarming character. He has associated with him Commissioners of great talent who are equally mild and disarming. But I’ll tell you the great secret of this man; when he learns on the telephone that the Cabinet has approved of something, some scheme, some project, that concerns him, he has the bulldozers in on the site next morning.¹⁷

In the next few years, other projects would come to fruition and Menzies would often be asked to attend the official openings.

Opening of Kings Avenue Bridge, 10 March 1962

Menzies opened Kings Avenue Bridge, the first of two bridges to cross the newly formed lake, in March 1962. During the ceremony Menzies said that not so long ago, ‘people from other places looked at Canberra as an excrescence—some still do. Others considered Canberra as a remote town, with the Prime Minister as the Lord Mayor. He prohesised [sic] that Australia was destined for great things and so Canberra also would be destined for great things.’

The bridge had cost £818 000, and once again there was criticism. Menzies defended the cost by saying that the funding ‘was not wasted. Anything spent here to make Canberra a better place will attract more people.’¹⁸

Opening of Monaro Mall, 6 March 1963

Monaro Mall, located in the city centre, was the first Australian three-storey, fully enclosed and air-conditioned shopping centre. Construction began in July 1961 and Menzies officially opened the mall in March 1963.

This was one occasion when Menzies did not have to defend construction—the mall had significant private funding, so the Commonwealth did not foot the full bill. Menzies recounted how he’d come to Canberra thirteen or fourteen years prior when the population was about 6000. Now the population was 60 000. He said that in a city like Canberra, ‘you are entitled to have the last word in shopping facilities and here I think you have them’.

There was, however, one negative factor. Menzies said everything in the mall was displayed so invitingly that women would spend more money than their husbands could afford. ‘It is wonderful, immoral, tempting and terribly satisfactory.’¹⁹

National Carillon, 12 March 1963

On 12 March 1963, the fiftieth anniversary of Canberra’s founding, Menzies announced that the British Government had gifted substantial funding for whatever the Australian Government chose. Menzies said he favoured a fountain or chimes of bells, ‘something I have always wanted to see’.²⁰ The government chose a carillon, to be located on Aspen Island. The National Carillon was opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 26 April 1970.

Opening of Government Printing Office, Kingston, 29 August 1963

In August 1963 Menzies attended the official opening of the Government Printing Office at Kingston. The facility had cost £3.3 million to build. Referring to the office’s many achievements to that point, Menzies asked his audience if they had ever wondered at the millions of words the office had had to cope with from politicians. He said that before going to sleep the previous night, he had tried to calculate how many words he himself had spoken in the past thirty-five years, but ‘after approaching the one million mark I fell into a sleep thickly studded with nightmares’.²¹

Opening of Royal Australian Mint, Deakin, 22 February 1965

After several years of deliberation, in April 1963 the government announced its intention to abandon the existing imperial currency in favour of a decimal-based currency. In June 1963 Treasurer Harold Holt told the nation that the new currency would be named the ‘Royal’.²² Holt said he was confident that the public would become used to the name once the novelty had worn off. It had the advantage of being unique in the English-speaking world without sacrificing any of the country’s traditional associations.

In making this decision, the government miscalculated badly. The Royal was greeted with almost universal scorn, and in the end the government adopted the American term ‘dollar’. A new mint was built in the Canberra suburb of Deakin to allow for the production of the new coinage, scheduled to be released in 1966 on Valentine’s Day, 14 February. The new mint cost £4.5 million.

The Duke of Edinburgh was invited to open the new mint, the ceremony taking place on 22 February 1965. Menzies greeted the duke upon his arrival, the latter saying that he did not think a reference to opening a mint was acceptable, and that perhaps ‘inauguration’ might be a more appropriate term.²³

While Menzies sang the duke’s praises, this was another occasion where he did not have to publicly defend expenditure on Canberra. There was also no mention of the Royal.

Robert Menzies and the Lake

The most notable construction event during this time was the beginning of the lake. Over the years there had been calls to build a lake of some description, but the work had never proceeded. The NCDC had argued that the lake was essential to the proper development of Canberra, and that it provided the only effective means of integrating the two parts of Canberra into a single city.²⁴

Initial funding of £1 million for the lake was approved by Cabinet in April 1959. Although not present at the actual meeting, Menzies had argued strenuously for the funds. He was overseas, happy in the knowledge that the funding had been secured. He was unaware, however, that Treasury officials were opposed to the funding and managed to convince several ministers that the funds should be struck out. Upon returning home, Menzies learned what had happened and at a meeting of Cabinet demanded that the funds be struck back in. Without Menzies’s efforts, it is unlikely that the lake would have been built.

Work on the Lake Scheme began in September 1960 with the construction of Scrivener Dam. The dam’s valves were closed in September 1963, allowing the lake to fill. Although it was assumed that the lake would be full by the end of the year, Canberra was in drought and the lake did not fill until April 1964. Menzies subsequently opened the lake on 17 October 1964. Despite the suggestion from ministers, including Minister for the Interior Gordon Freeth, that the lake be named after him, the prime minister declined, noting at the time that there was no monument dedicated to Walter Burley Griffin.

Once more Menzies was obliged to counter criticism concerning the expenditure on Canberra. He responded that

Australians had a natural instinct for parochial thinking and for thinking in terms of States and State loyalties … it was a hard and constant battle to make people understand that the Commonwealth was not a foreign power—that the Commonwealth was something that was interwoven through the whole structure of Australia and in the hearts and minds of the people … The nation is more important than any part of it and the nation is symbolised by the capital.²⁵

National Library of Australia, Parkes, 1963–66

During the celebrations to mark Canberra’s fiftieth anniversary in 1963, Menzies announced that Cabinet had approved outline drawings for a new National Library in the heart of Canberra. Plans would be complete by the end of the year.

The library would be the site of one of Menzies’s last acts as prime minister. On 31 March 1966, two months after his retirement, he laid its foundation stone. Of all the Canberra landmarks that he had opened, this seemed to be one to which he was particularly attached. He reflected philosophically:

It is our duty in this generation so to store, so to attend to the books that are produced, that the future will learn something about us. We are learning from the past, we are learning from each other, we are helping to instruct and inform the future; this is the most tremendous process in the human mind, because it gives everybody a sense of continuity … It’s only when we realise that we are part of a great procession, that we’re not just here today and gone tomorrow, that we draw strength from the past and we may transmit some strength to the future.²⁶

Menzies said the library was situated in a city to which he had devoted a great deal of thought, ‘egged on’ by Pattie Menzies who was the ‘most one-eyed supporter of Canberra to be found in the world’. Menzies said he would ‘like to live long enough to be brought along in a wheelchair or ushered aboard a boat on the lake and see the magnificent white library reflected in the water, the Parliament House on the lake shore and the High Court on the other side of the Parliament’.²⁷

The library would be officially opened by Prime Minister John Gorton on 15 August 1968.

Conclusion

Robert Menzies retired as prime minister in January 1966. In that moment Canberra lost its apostle. He had fought tirelessly for the city and its development despite regular criticism. Later, in his memoirs, he wrote:

I remember how every penny spent on Canberra used to be grudged and how many arguments I had to engage in when travelling from State to State, I am delighted in my old age to think that Australia’s capital has now become an object of pride and pleasure. This was always a national conclusion devoutly to be wished.²⁸

When opening the first building at the Defence complex at Russell in November 1960, Menzies had said he wished he could return to Canberra in fifty years to see the fruits of the government’s labour. Canberra would by then be ‘a marvel, a pride and a joy’.²⁹ If Menzies had returned to Canberra after fifty years, he would have seen a city of about 358 000 people. The city was spreading in all directions. Four satellite cities had been established: Woden, Belconnen, Tuggeranong, and Gungahlin. A number of national buildings had been completed, including the new Parliament House, the High Court of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, National Museum of Australia, National Portrait Gallery, and Questacon.

Menzies’s wish to have the public service centralised in Canberra had also been realised. Finally, he would have seen the R G Menzies Walk, a 2-kilometre walk along the northern edge of Lake Burley Griffin designed to recognise the lake and Menzies’s contribution to its creation; a statue of Menzies was dedicated on the walk in 2012.

When Robert Menzies died on 15 May 1978, The Canberra Times said: ‘Canberra has particular reason to be grateful for his active interest in the building of a worthy national capital. The memory of such an outstanding Australian must be given fitting and permanent recognition.’³⁰

Sir Robert Menzies Statue
Source: Ted Ling

CHAPTER 15

MENZIES’S CLOSE SHAVE

Queensland and the 1961 Federal Election

Lyndon Megarrity¹

THE YEAR 1961 was significant in Australian political history. Crucially, the Queensland electorate dramatically turned away from the Menzies government in the 1961 election, a swing which almost resulted in the ALP winning power. Somewhat shocked by the results, Menzies told the press that: ‘In Queensland the electors have come to believe, and I think quite wrongly, that Queensland has had a poor deal among the States of the Commonwealth … Unquestionably, on polling day … the people of Queensland felt Queensland was a neglected state.’²

In making this statement, the prime minister was acknowledging, somewhat belatedly, the political impact of his government’s perceived national indifference to Queensland priorities in areas such as defence and economic development. This chapter investigates the extent to which the claims of Queensland neglect had substance, the role of the perception of Queensland neglect in the 1961 poll, and how that pivotal election altered the political relationship between the Commonwealth Government and Queensland.

A Recurring Theme: Queensland ‘Neglect’

If we are to understand the nature of the Queensland electorate which Menzies encountered during the early 1960s, some historical and geographical context is essential. From the colonial period onwards, Queensland’s political, economic, and cultural dynamics differed from those of other mainland states because of the electoral strength of its large regional population centres. Mostly located on or near the coast, cities such as Townsville and Rockhampton serviced Queensland’s major primary industries: mining, pastoralism (especially cattle), and agriculture (chiefly sugar). The importance of regional centres challenged the dominance of the state capital, Brisbane, and gave Queensland politics a distinctly agrarian flavour. Up until at least the 1960s, the Queensland branch of the ALP retained strong ideological and union connections with rural areas; and, by the late 1930s, Queensland Labor’s most significant political rival was the Country Party (later the National Party). Although the Country Party formed a coalition with the Queensland division of the Liberal Party in 1949, Liberal MPs—often with backgrounds in the professions or commerce—had less power in this political arrangement during the Menzies era because there were more Country Party MPs in state parliament.

While each state and territory has their own complaints about Canberra-centric government, Queenslanders have been the most vocal in expressing a sense of neglect since Federation in 1901. There are a number of reasons for this. In the first place, while many Queenslanders live in geographical proximity to the most powerful states in the Commonwealth, namely Victoria and New South Wales, Queensland remains on the edge of the national conversation except around election time. This sense of being ignored by Canberra—and for that matter, Brisbane—doubles, triples, and quadruples the further north you travel. Although its amenities have improved remarkably since the 1970s, Queensland’s sense of physical and psychological isolation from ‘down south’ remains part of the political landscape. Much of the notion of Queensland neglect gains its energy from resentment at ambitious infrastructure projects being refused, delayed, or postponed by the central authorities. However, the perception of Queensland neglect is also an expression of anxiety about whether the state measures up to its southern counterparts.³

Ironically, Queensland Premier Sir Samuel Griffith (1883–88; 1890–93) had been a major player in the push towards Federation. After he departed the local political scene, however, the Queensland Government chose to remain largely aloof from Federation debates and finalisation of the Australian Constitution between 1893 and 1898. This was partly because leading federationists such as Alfred Deakin wanted to abolish the use of indentured South Sea Islander labour within the sugar industry as a symbol of an emergent ‘White Australia’. Many Queenslanders feared that such a policy would cause severe economic disruption. Furthermore, anti-federationists argued that once the Commonwealth introduced interstate free trade, Queensland manufacturing would decline due to competition from more established southern firms. It is likely, however, that the potential market benefits of removing interstate tariffs on agricultural products helped persuade Queensland to join the federation.⁴

Following its establishment, the Commonwealth Parliament—initially based in Melbourne, and, from 1927, in Canberra—became a scapegoat for Queensland political and economic problems. While the sugar industry did not collapse following the deportation of South Sea Islanders after 1906, numerous Queensland politicians resented the increased power of the Commonwealth, which had taken over postal revenue and other major sources of income previously enjoyed by the former colonies. Denied such economic levers, successive Queensland governments found it hard to cope with demands for development and the alleviation of isolation in an exceptionally decentralised state. ‘The Federal Government,’ complained Queensland Premier Robert Philp (1899–1903; 1907–08) in 1902, ‘was taking none of the financial obligations, and the States, with diminished revenue, were being allowed to struggle along as best they could, shouldering all the burden of borrowed money.’⁵ While Philp made a few fiery statements in support of a Queensland secession movement, his advocacy was, in actuality, mostly a protest against the Commonwealth’s looming abolition of the South Sea Island labour trade and a sense that Queensland’s interests were being neglected by the federation.

Less drastic than Philp’s seeming support for secession, but ultimately more genuine, was the persistence of the New State movement in Queensland from roughly 1901 to 1960. Among its champions, at least in 1910, was future Labor premier TJ Ryan. By carving the existing Queensland borders into two or even three states (North, Central and South Queensland), New State advocates believed that Brisbane-centred state government would be made a thing of the past and the voice of North Queenslanders would be heard more clearly by the federal government. However, while the proposal gained the support of numerous enthusiasts, it never became a mass movement.⁶

The theme of Queensland neglect became more prominent in national debates during the first Menzies government (1939–41). Periodic complaints in previous years that Canberra’s political class was ignorant and forgetful of Queensland’s people and interests developed a more serious edge as World War II approached.⁷ In May 1939, Queensland Labor Premier Forgan Smith blasted the new Menzies government for allocating only £30 000 of £1 342 000 current defence works to Queensland projects:

There was little to assure the people of this State that there was a conscious realisation in Canberra of the vulnerability of Queensland … They were reminded by the Minister for Defence (Mr. Street) of the bases at Darwin and Port Moresby. Obviously, the Minister had not the slightest idea of the distances in Queensland and North Australia.⁸

In the early years of the war, the Queensland branch of the ALP continued to criticise the Commonwealth for spending far more on defence in South Australia and Victoria than in the north, with federal deputy Opposition leader (and Queenslander) Frank Forde claiming that ‘The Menzies Government is dominated by big business interests in Melbourne’.⁹ Rightly or wrongly, the notion that Menzies was out of touch with Queensland concerns was drawn on by Labor as a political strategy in the post-war years. Queensland Labor Premier Ned Hanlon in 1950 alleged that ‘When he (Mr. Hanlon) had drawn public attention to lack of defence measures in Queensland [during Menzies’s first prime ministership] Mr. Menzies had sneeringly suggested that as he knew so much about it he should be appointed Chief of the General Staff’.¹⁰

Commonwealth–Queensland Relations, 1945–59

One of the most important decisions of the Curtin Labor government (1941–45) was to make the Commonwealth the sole collector of income tax. More than any preceding measure, it increased the financial and political power of the federal government. It raised expectations that the central authorities would play a larger role in supporting state infrastructure projects, and Queensland subsequently competed with other states for Commonwealth subsidies.¹¹

The Queensland Government and its citizens framed many of their post-war infrastructure proposals as having not only regional significance but major national significance as well. Ned Hanlon, for example, argued in the 1940s that accelerated economic development of the Burdekin River region with Commonwealth backing would not only assist local farmers, but was a strategic necessity to protect Australia’s northern approaches from future invasion. Hanlon was influenced in this view by the then popular belief that to prevent potential Asian threats to White Australia, the sparsely populated ‘Empty north’ needed more European settlers and evidence that its resources were being developed. Angered by Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley’s apparent lack of interest in northern Queensland infrastructure projects, Hanlon insisted that ‘The Burdekin River is much more important to the safety of Australia than is the Murray River … the Japanese are safely put away for a generation, but they have not been put away for all time’.¹² Chifley offered only lukewarm support for a proposed Burdekin River irrigation scheme jointly funded by the Commonwealth and Queensland governments. The proposal was quietly shelved after Menzies became prime minister in 1949.

Queensland associations such as the Cairns Chamber of Commerce subsequently suggested that the development of a military base in northern Queensland would not only increase regional economic development but would benefit the nation by being in close proximity to potential Asian enemies.¹³ For much of its time in office, the Menzies government was dismissive of such proposals, arguing that while most Australian troops were stationed in the southern states, they had the capacity to be deployed at a moment’s notice if there was a military threat.¹⁴

The Menzies government generally took a cautious approach to investment in ambitious state infrastructure, although it could sometimes be inconsistent. For example, it inherited the Chifley Labor government’s Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme and funded it generously. The scheme became popularly regarded by Australians as a nation-building project, although its main beneficiaries were parts of Victoria and New South Wales.¹⁵

This is not to say, however, that the Menzies government during the 1950s ignored the issue of Queensland economic development altogether. For instance, it demonstrated a financial commitment to agricultural research in Queensland conducted by the Bureau of Agricultural Economics and the CSIRO. In addition, the Commonwealth negotiated a 1951 agreement between Britain and Australia which guaranteed a UK market for Australian meat for fifteen years. This action contributed to the continued prosperity of pastoralism in Queensland and other states.¹⁶

The Menzies government, however, tended to believe that the Queensland Government and private enterprise were more than capable of shoring up the state’s economic development. As Menzies wrote in 1959, ‘one constantly feels the thrill which comes from the knowledge that the future possibilities of Queensland are unrivalled’.¹⁷ During the post-war years, for example, mining companies and investors became increasingly interested in developing Queensland’s mineral resources. Having prospered due to the high demand for copper during World War II, Mount Isa Mines in the state’s north-west was a significant mining company and employer during the Menzies era. Further north, Comalco, in the late 1950s, commenced preparations for mining bauxite near Weipa.¹⁸ Its mine possessed ‘2000 million tons of recoverable ore reserves’.¹⁹

Any parochial resentment over favoured projects being rejected for Commonwealth funding did not seem to have much impact on the Queensland federal election results during the period between 1949 and 1958. Queensland electors voted overwhelmingly for the non-Labor side of politics in 1949: fifteen out of eighteen Queensland House of Representatives seats went to either the Liberal Party (nine) or the Country Party (six). The Brisbane Truth theorised that the ‘Queensland vote [in 1949] was a vote of resentment against Canberra … Federal Labor … was looked upon as an alien party that belongs to Canberra more than to Australia.’²⁰

A more positive interpretation of the result was offered by Charles Porter, the Queensland Liberal campaign director, who, along with his party colleagues, was initially worried by the Melbourne ‘silvertail’ image that the federal Coalition leader projected. They encouraged Menzies to appeal to the electorate as a family man who had raised himself up by his own efforts and natural abilities. According to Porter: ‘From this [image-making process] emerged the “Meet the People” tours that began in Queensland and were later adopted in other States as a major component of 1949 campaigning.’²¹

The ALP’s internal divisions during the 1950s, including sectarianism, undoubtedly had an impact on voters.²² The majority of Queensland House of Representative seats during this decade were won by the Liberal–Country Party Coalition.²³ In 1955, Menzies reflected gratefully on his support among Queensland electors: ‘I never come into Queensland myself without remembering that in 1949, in 1951, in 1953 and in 1954, this State of Queensland was my sheet anchor.’²⁴

Queensland Vs Commonwealth: Heightened Tensions, 1959–61

Between 1959 and 1961, the issue of Queensland neglect was accentuated in political debates. This was partly due to heightened tensions between the new Country Party-dominated Coalition government in Queensland and its Commonwealth counterpart. Elected in 1957, Queensland Premier Frank Nicklin sought to ramp up funding for economic development. He pushed for federal support for a number of large projects designed to assist Queensland primary industries. These included an all-weather road from Mount Isa to Townsville and a gravel road between Laura and Weipa, neither of which attracted Commonwealth funding.²⁵ Menzies did, however, agree in 1959 to support the reconstruction of the Townsville to Mount Isa railway line with a £20 million loan. Nicklin publicly described the Commonwealth’s offer as ‘niggardly’ and delayed signing off on the deal.²⁶

Other Queensland politicians echoed Nicklin’s sentiments. In 1960, State Development Minister Ernie Evans criticised the Menzies government’s ‘neglect’ of Queensland in the Legislative Assembly.²⁷ He subsequently claimed that Queensland-based Supply Minister Alan Hulme’s ‘lack of interest in his own state [was] well known’.²⁸ The member for Gregory, Wally Rae, also argued that a ‘great break’ existed between the Commonwealth and Queensland, claiming that when a federal parliamentary delegation including Deputy Prime Minister Jack McEwen visited the Channel Country that year, their attitude was ‘the sooner we get out of here the better’.²⁹

By August 1961, Nicklin was furious. Menzies claimed to be ‘astonished’ to receive a telegram from the Queensland premier which read: ‘Recently announced Rail Aid to Western Australia and South Australia has brought instant and violent reaction comparing so much grant aid in those cases with proposed absence [of] aid for Queensland.’³⁰

On 31 August, Nicklin and Queensland Treasurer Tom Hiley met Menzies in Canberra to iron out their differences. The prime minister and the premier subsequently released a statement claiming that ‘misunderstandings had been removed’: the Mount Isa railway agreement, unaltered, would be signed off by Queensland, and the Commonwealth would contribute up to £5 million for the construction of Queensland beef roads.³¹ Later, in November, as the federal election approached, the Menzies government announced that it would provide a £100 000 loan plus a £100 000 grant to improve port facilities at Gladstone for coal loading.³²

If Menzies had hoped such firm commitments would shore up support for the Coalition in the December 1961 election, he was sadly mistaken. According to the Brisbane Courier-Mail, ‘The offer of help for beef roads came so late as to look like a pre-election sop.’³³ Further, with one exception, state ministers representing Country Party electorates refused to campaign with the federal Coalition. Possibly annoyed at his failure to get a better deal over the Mount Isa railway, Nicklin was in the audience when Menzies spoke in Brisbane but did not share the platform.³⁴

Was Queensland a Neglected State?

There was some substance behind the Queensland perception of a neglected state. A Prime Minister’s Department briefing for a Queensland visit by the acting prime minister noted in 1960 that in recent times, Queensland’s share of Commonwealth loan funds represented about ‘11.7% of the total amount available to the States’.³⁵ Subsequently, in 1962, a Treasury official remarked that Western Australia appeared to be more favourably treated than Queensland because the huge expanse of Western Australia made its road grants more expensive than other states’.³⁶

The Commonwealth’s actions in November 1960 to drastically reduce inflation also impacted sharply on Queensland compared with other states. Among other measures, the Menzies government imposed tight restrictions on loans as well as increased sales taxes, particularly on motor vehicles. As a result, a notable rise in unemployment and bankruptcies occurred throughout 1961. Some 71 115 people were unemployed in Australia in January 1961, rising to nearly 116 000 by the end of the year.³⁷ Queensland had the highest percentage of registered unemployed by 31 December 1961, with 4.5 per cent of the workforce out of work compared with the overall national total of 2.8 per cent. The higher unemployment levels were in large part due to the lack of diversity in the economy, with Queensland focused more heavily on primary industry. The Commonwealth’s economic restrictions also exacerbated the effects of drought conditions experienced in parts of Queensland.³⁸

Queensland Votes: The 1961 Federal Election

Having adopted what one key adviser called ‘a policy of masterly inactivity’,³⁹ the Menzies government did not alter its economic belt-tightening policy in the lead-up to the 1961 poll. This gave Queensland politicians and citizens time to worry about the future. The recession came at a time when the northern state was in transition. Because of bulk loading of sugar, there was less work on the wharves. Mechanisation also reduced the need for manual labour—sugar towns were aware, for example, that mechanical harvesting would soon take the place of cane cutters.⁴⁰ In addition, with rising numbers of electors on unemployment benefits and a decline in revenue, Premier Nicklin was feeling the pressure, complaining to Menzies that ‘We are running out of official capacity to spend at a sufficient rate to attract your matching grant for roads and University’.⁴¹

Despite the economic recession, Menzies appeared supremely confident in the days before the election on 9 December. ‘I am unable to discern any swing against my Government,’ he claimed. ‘In Queensland I have been delighted with the large attendances at my meetings, and the enthusiasm of my supporters.’⁴² He was to receive a rude awakening. The Coalition won sixty-two seats to Labor’s sixty, which meant that once the speaker had been elected, the Menzies government ruled the forthcoming term with a one seat majority. This paper-thin majority was made possible by Queensland MP Jim Killen, who only narrowly won his seat.⁴³ Notably, the greatest swing towards Labor was in Queensland at 10.21 per cent, compared with 5.3 per cent in Australia overall. Having previously won only three out of eighteen House of Representatives seats in the 1958 federal poll, the ALP in Queensland won eleven seats in 1961, compared with seven for the Liberal–Country Party Coalition.⁴⁴

Defeated Liberal MPs suggested that one of the central reasons for the electoral setback in Queensland was that they ‘had found it impossible … to overcome a conviction … that the Federal Government had neglected Queensland’.⁴⁵ Reflecting this perception, the Courier-Mail published a cartoon of Menzies in the bathroom having had his morning shave. He was depicted applying ‘After-Close-Shave Lotion’, a lotion which had ingredients such as ‘more awareness’, ‘more nationwide thought’, and ‘development’. A figure peering through the door representing Queensland advised the prime minister to ‘Rub that stuff well in, Bob!’⁴⁶

Labor and the 1961 Election Campaign

Coalition politicians also acknowledged that Labor in Queensland had run a tight and well-disciplined campaign. In its appeal to Queensland electors, Labor took full advantage of both the unpopularity of the Menzies government’s economic policies and the theme of Queensland neglect which ironically had been highlighted by the state’s Country Party politicians, Menzies’s supposed allies. This dual approach was shown in Labor’s electoral advertising, in which voters were urged to ‘Put Queensland back into Australia. Vote A.L.P.’⁴⁷

Deputy Opposition Leader Gough Whitlam also used the Queensland neglect theme, combining it with the argument that the Commonwealth was neglecting the whole of northern Australia. Whitlam’s ‘whistle-stop’ tours to northern districts and his emphasis on Labor’s commitment to Queensland development may have been one of the factors which led to Labor regaining seats like Capricornia and Herbert from the Coalition.⁴⁸ As Bill Hayden later wrote:

Whitlam dazzled the Queensland electorate … he mesmerised the northerners with visions of rivers being turned inland and running backwards, of dams and roads littering the vast and sparsely populated top end of the country … Thereafter Queensland loved Whitlam. Whitlam’s economics might have been fractured but his vision was perfect. It was this vision which helped get me elected.⁴⁹

Menzies Resets the Commonwealth–Queensland Relationship

At the 1963 election, however, Labor lost three Queensland House of Representatives seats in south-eastern Queensland, and the Menzies government subsequently held ten out of the state’s eighteen seats. This improved performance might have been partly due to the Coalition’s efforts to improve its overall image by reducing sales tax on motor vehicles, increasing unemployment benefits, and re-establishing a 5 per cent rebate on income tax.⁵⁰ Queensland electors may also have returned their votes to Menzies because a change of government might have seemed risky following the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of John F Kennedy, and other disturbing global events.⁵¹

By the first election after Menzies’s retirement in 1966, the Coalition’s majority was even higher, notably securing the northern Queensland seats of Herbert and Kennedy, previously held by Labor. The fact that twelve out of eighteen lower house federal seats in Queensland were in Coalition hands after the 1966 poll can be explained by two main factors. First, with developments such as the sealing of the Bruce Highway from Brisbane to Cairns, and the opening of a university college in Townsville in 1961, Queenslanders, especially in the major coastal towns, were now less isolated from the rest of Australia.⁵² Second, between 1961 and 1966, the Menzies government displayed a clear public commitment to major Queensland projects, including the beef road program, a Townsville branch of CSIRO specialising in tropical pasture research, and the Brigalow land development scheme.⁵³ Further, the 1964 decision to build an army base in Townsville gave Menzies’s successor Harold Holt a means of expressing the Coalition’s championing of northern development at the opening of the base in 1966.⁵⁴

Reflections

It is likely that the shock of the 1961 election result encouraged the Menzies government to successfully address the issue of Queensland neglect in its funding policies. However, since the Menzies era, the issue of Queensland neglect has remained politically potent. Improved transport and communications have reduced physical isolation, but a Queensland sense of isolation from the centre remains. Often coupling it with the broader theme of northern neglect, Australian politicians such as Gough Whitlam and Tony Abbott have periodically returned to the issue of Queensland neglect over the decades to shore up their personal followings and, more importantly, to gain public support in the northern state at election time.⁵⁵

CHAPTER 16

WAS MENZIES LUCKY?

Greg Melleuish¹

LUCK OR GOOD fortune is often underestimated as an aspect of political life. Political life is marked by contingency—or more simply, ‘things happen’. There are unforeseen circumstances, including people dying, such as happened in 1940 when key members of Menzies’s Cabinet died in an air crash.² A capable politician both rolls with the punches and is able to make the best of unexpected good fortune. Those possessing political skill know how to make the most of the circumstances in which they are placed, and to exploit the weaknesses of those who are, or could be, their rivals. It is part of what is best termed the art of politics, the subject, of course, of an essay Menzies wrote for The New York Times in 1948.³

If we are to consider the years from 1954 to 1961, it was the time when Menzies consolidated his position as prime minister and leader of the Coalition. His good fortune almost came to an end in 1961 when his government was returned with the barest of majorities.

When one considers the role of luck—or more generally fortune—in political life, one starting point is what Niccolò Machiavelli writes on the subject at the end of The Prince:

I conclude, then, that since circumstances vary and men when acting lack flexibility, they are successful if their methods match the circumstances and unsuccessful if they do not. I certainly think that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you want to control her, it is necessary to treat her roughly. And it is clear that she is more inclined to yield to men who are impetuous than to those who are calculating. Since fortune is a woman, she is always well disposed towards young men, because they are less cautious and more aggressive, and treat her more boldly.⁴

Machiavelli believed in audacity and boldness; he was an admirer of Cesare Borgia. He also lived in a world of constant war. Menzies similarly lived through extremely dangerous times, even if, by the mid-1950s, large-scale war was in the past.

Menzies proves Machiavelli to be wrong. Menzies was essentially a man of peace; he was neither young, nor impetuous, nor aggressive. For Machiavelli, one massive key to political success was the need to avoid contempt and, hence, to establish one’s auctoritas and stature. One can argue very strongly that Menzies managed to avoid the contempt of the Australian people. His electoral success is evidence of that. Among ordinary Australians he commanded respect. Nevertheless, this does not mean that certain elements of the Australian media and intellectual class held him in high regard during the late 1950s and early 1960s. This should not surprise us, as Menzies’s cultural values, including his taste in art and literature, were fairly conventional.

It is well known that Menzies and The Sydney Morning Herald of the 1950s were often at odds. Hence, it is not surprising that the English editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, John Douglas Pringle, writing in 1958, did not have a high opinion of Menzies:

Well read and cultured, he is a man who prefers to rely on the knowledge acquired in his youth rather than seek out new knowledge in his mature years. As a result, he often seems out of touch with the temper and thoughts of today … To sum up, he is a supremely successful politician—ruthless, adroit, cunning—whose special device is to pose always as a statesman.⁵

Pringle acknowledges that Menzies is an expert Machiavellian politician, even to the point of portraying Menzies as someone who has the capacity to appear as something that he is not, but Pringle also characterises him as old fashioned and out of date, out of touch with the times. This begs the question of why someone who belongs in an earlier age should be so in touch with the Australian electorate of his own age. At the same time, Pringle does not have a high opinion of Evatt, acknowledging that he did not seem to have firm political principles: ‘he has said so many different things at different times’.⁶

The eminent economist Colin Clark, writing in the late 1950s after having spent many years serving the Queensland Labor government, similarly did not have a high regard for Menzies. He claimed that ‘Mr Menzies’ governments have had an almost continuous record of failure to take the right action at the right time’.⁷ For Clark, Menzies was a ‘barrister politician’ who thought, erroneously, that when he had won the debate, he had done something.⁸ He was good at speeches but bad at action. Again, the criticism took the form that Menzies mastered the appearance of politics but fell short in the practice of doing things. Clark likewise did not have a positive view of Evatt, citing his willingness to bargain with ‘Communists and near-Communists’.⁹

Writing a few years later, in 1964, Donald Horne accused Menzies of being out of touch with what he termed ‘The positive characteristics of his “Age”—the spread of affluence, the considerable relaxation in social styles, the increase in national self-assurance’. Menzies’s attitude, Horne contended, ‘has been largely nostalgic’ and hence more attuned to the concerns of an earlier time.¹⁰ Menzies was essentially a ‘do nothing’ leader who was failing the country because he did not enact myriad new policies to keep up to date: ‘With policy making slowing down and sometimes stopping the permanent heads of the government departments get on with the job of administering departments in a way that will not cause trouble.’¹¹

Again, Horne possessed a certain respect for Menzies’s political skill: ‘He is essentially arrogant, although courageous, with a scorn for most other men (perhaps all other men).’ Horne concluded that ‘he uses his power to little purpose’.¹² What exactly that purpose was meant to be is not spelled out, although it would appear, especially given Horne’s subsequent career, that it should consist of being modern and innovative. ‘Menzies,’ he claimed, ‘has seen few of the potentialities of the age.’¹³ As with Clark, Horne takes the position that one of the problems is the leader of the Opposition. In Horne’s eyes, Calwell is even more antediluvian than Menzies.¹⁴

The final example of critiques of Menzies comes from when he had retired. Journalist and public commentator Craig McGregor wrote.

A skilled politician, yes; but throughout his long career Menzies proved himself little more than that. After the longest Prime Ministership in Australian history it is difficult to cite any one field and say ‘in this he has made his mark’. He initiated no memorable policies, brought no new impetus to government … an administrator rather than an innovator.¹⁵

Horne, Pringle, and McGregor were all Sydney based. McGregor had even worked for The Sydney Morning Herald. Horne quotes Pringle with approval.¹⁶ Their attitudes may reflect a Sydney bias against Victorian dominance in the Liberal Party. Certainly, the policies and actions they desired would be quite different from those of Colin Clark, who was closer intellectually to Santamaria than to Labor.

The implication is that Menzies was all talk and no action, a master of rhetoric and superb at appearing to be doing things, a man who simply administered the country but lacked any real vision. He was a good showman who practised masterly inaction. He adroitly manipulated the art of Machiavellian appearance, or seeming, while using his Machiavellian political skills, to maintain power. Fortune favoured him by serving up two Opposition leaders, Evatt and Calwell, who were even worse than he was.

The notion that Menzies was a mixture of cunning politician and mere administrator without vision was meant as a criticism, but was it? Was his masterly inaction really such a bad thing? To determine that, one must understand the nature of the country that he led during the 1950s.

Historians differ from philosophers, theorists, and ideologues in that they seek to understand the specific context within which people live and take decisions. The period between 1914 and 1945 was the most tempestuous in Australia’s history, with war followed by depression followed by another war. During the two world wars, Australians lived effectively under a state of emergency. These years had a profound effect on those who lived through them. The 1930s was a traumatic decade that affected Australians to the extent that the birth rate dropped dramatically—the annual average rate of increase between 1933 and 1947 was 0.96 per cent.¹⁷ Writing in 1940, Bertram Stevens expressed the fear that population growth in Australia would cease.¹⁸ Interestingly, the latter part of World War II offered some economic light as Australia became a major supplier of the American war effort in the Pacific, and the birth rate increased.¹⁹ In these circumstances most Australians craved a measure of security marked by peace and the holding of secure jobs that enabled families to live decent lives. It was the age of what, following Justice Higgins’s turn of phrase, can best be termed ‘modest comfort’.²⁰

In this regard I want to invoke Menzies’s famous term the ‘Forgotten People’,²¹ ordinary Australians who worked in banks, insurance companies, and the trades, who lived quiet suburban lives seeking to provide opportunities for their children. They were not bold entrepreneurs looking to create new industries, thereby enriching themselves. They knew how to practise frugality as part of their everyday existence, and their culture was shaped by the trauma of two world wars and the depression, and the need to make sacrifices both for their family and the wider community. Hence Menzies, in The Forgotten People, advocated obligation and duty as something that free citizens of a democracy should practise.²²

The Forgotten People were far more than a fancy rhetorical device dreamed up by Menzies. The Forgotten People were a living and breathing group of Australians, and they were certainly still around in the years 1954–61. What strikes me as emblematic of the Forgotten People were all the bank workers who came out to protest the attempt by Chifley to nationalise the banks back in 1947.²³ There were, I suspect, more women than men who could be counted among the Forgotten People.

This was a society with a culture very different from our own:

• Credit was very limited. This was an age when thrift and saving were highly valued. Children were encouraged to regularly put money into bank savings accounts. I once possessed a rain bonnet from the now defunct CBC Bank that had ‘save for a rainy day’ on it.

• The standard of living was much lower than today. Far fewer people owned automobiles, and many household appliances taken for granted today either did not yet exist or were only available for the affluent few. Most people did not go out for coffee or to restaurants, and the invention of smashed avocado was decades away.

• The range of foods available was quite limited. There was effectively no fast food in Australia (except fish and chips) before 1968, when the first KFC stores opened. It was the age of Sunday roasts, puddings, and sponge cakes. This is how David Malouf describes the food of the 1940s and 1950s:

For tea at night, Shepherd’s Pie or Irish Stew (the Yanks have not yet shown us that we can eat steak—and salad, for heaven’s sake, with avocado!—at some other meal than breakfast). Or pork sausages with mashed potato or mashed pumpkin, and peas of an unnatural greenness from the good pinch of bicarb that has gone into the boiling water. Or corned beef and cauliflower with white sauce. At the weekend, a baked dinner—beef with Yorkshire pudding. And on Saturday mornings the week’s leftover bread turned into cold Bread Pudding. And the puddings! Diplomat Pudding, Golden Syrup Pudding, Queen of Pudding.²⁴

• There was very little in the way of supermarkets. Milk and bread continued to be delivered to the home.

• In most states there was still the six o’clock closing of hotels. New South Wales abolished it in 1955, but the old tradition of the six o’clock swill remained in Victoria and South Australia.

• Sabbatarianism was still in force in the 1950s. Sunday was the ‘rest day’ for Test cricket matches. Theatres and cinemas were closed on a Sunday. Only bona fide travellers could buy alcohol on a Sunday. The shops, with some exceptions, were closed and bread could not be baked on a Sunday. A good number of people either attended church or sent their children to Sunday school. My brother was taught at Sunday school in the late 1950s by Brian Booth, Australian Test cricketer and Sabbatarian.

• Naughty books were banned. Censorship to protect public morals was still taken seriously, especially by preventing undesirable books from entering the country.

• Then there was the tyranny of distance. Travel overseas in the 1950s was still largely by ship, and within Australia, a trip from Sydney to Melbourne by automobile was still somewhat of an ordeal on a single-lane highway of questionable quality. At least it was a sealed road, unlike many other so-called highways. Newspapers, radio, and the newly introduced television remained tied to the capital city of the state in which they were located.

The culture of the Forgotten People was parochial and local and restricted. Each of the Australian states had its own distinctive variety of the Forgotten People, but they had much in common, sharing a highly moralistic outlook on life, and this included the Catholics with their Irish Jansenist heritage. This was a society that is more than adequately described by Judith Brett’s term the ‘moral middle class’.²⁵ One could be both a socialist and a cultural conservative in this period, as the case of Arthur Calwell indicates.²⁶

It was a middlebrow culture, as wonderfully described by David Malouf:

When I look back on the world I was growing up in, in the late ’30s to the early ’50s, what I am struck by is how homogeneous the culture was, how little it offered, beyond its own particular kind of richness, to specialist or divergent taste; the degree to which all the members of a family, for instance, young and old, shared the same social occasions and enjoyed the same interests: card-games like Euchre or Five Hundred or Auction Bridge, the pictures on Saturday night—always the same theatre, irrespective of what was on, and in the same booked seats. There was, as yet, no separate ‘youth culture’, though by the mid-’50s, with Rock ‘n’ Roll and the growing beach culture, the first signs of it were beginning to emerge.²⁷

As Malouf argues, this was a middlebrow culture, and Menzies was as middlebrow as they came,²⁸ while Evatt dabbled with the new and avant-garde. The Forgotten People could identify with Menzies as one of them, sharing their tastes and habits. Listening to Menzies with his clear enunciation and well-defined views on the world was reassuring. Menzies’s favourite meal was reputed to be Irish stew.

The experience of what had happened after World War I and then the Depression, coloured the outlook of Australians who felt the constant threat of economic insecurity and feared that another downturn could be just around the corner. Much of the impetus for reconstruction during World War II came from a deeply held belief that there would be a considerable economic downturn once the war was over. For many, the only answer was more, and increased, planning. This happily coincided with a long-held desire by Labor to increase the powers of the Commonwealth Government. The Labor government largely failed in its attempts to gain increased control of the economy in the 1940s, just as it had failed in 1911 and 1913—one reason why Menzies was elected to power in 1949 was Labor’s reluctance to yield the last of its wartime powers. This does not mean, however, that fear of economic insecurity did not continue to lie under the surface of the national psyche, or that older habits did not linger, just as my father continued all his life to turn off any unnecessary lights in the house.

An expected post-war economic apocalypse did not eventuate and although there were some economic difficulties, Australia moved increasingly towards a much more prosperous future. As Greg Whitwell puts it: ‘Australia had avoided what past experience had deemed inevitable—collapse into depression following an intense but shortlived postwar boom.’²⁹ Given the lived experiences of many Australians, it is worth considering the implications of such a change of perspective. The depression could be assigned to something that had happened in the past and one could expect a measure of economic wellbeing in the future. Australia was being transformed. Even so, Menzies was cautious, warning that prosperity could lead to its own undoing.³⁰

At the same time the treasurer, Artie Fadden, was concerned about the conflict between increased consumption and the need to expand the economy into the future.³¹ Increased consumption meant the expansion of credit; hire purchase was enabling many Australians to buy goods, especially household goods that had previously been beyond their grasp. This consumerism was assisted by the availability of many goods that were becoming cheap and plentiful. Refrigerators were replacing iceboxes.

The problem was that Australians were becoming too ‘affluent’ too quickly. They were buying goods, on credit, that would make their lives easier and happier after years of living far more restrictive lives. These years can be viewed as the beginning of what can be termed ‘pax moderna’ across the Western world as it became more productive, generating increasing wealth and affluence. It meant that governments could increase their spending across a whole range of areas, and one wonders if this growing ‘affluence’ may be one reason why the Commonwealth Government began to fund the universities after 1957.

It was in these years of the Menzies era that prosperity really took hold in Australia, and the fears and apprehensions of the Forgotten People began slowly to be assuaged, as people began to believe that they were enjoying an age of consistent economic growth that would not be destroyed. In 1956 Treasury was concerned about the decline of thrift and possible excessive consumption, stating in a report that

we are like a family that has been spending not only the whole of its earnings but also the money it has in the bank—spending it partly to enlarge the house and acquire other durable possessions but partly to have a general good time.³²

For many Australians it was no longer a matter of ‘saving for a rainy day’ but of making use of increased credit to make one’s life more comfortable.

Credit grew during the 1950s:

• Outstanding advances of hire-purchase companies rose from $180 million in 1953 to $474 million in 1957, and by April 1960 had leapt to $824 million.

• Of $520 million of new hire-purchase credit granted in 1959, twothirds was used to purchase new and used cars, with most of the rest used to purchase household goods.

• Eight per cent of householders in 1947 were purchasing their homes by instalments; this rose to 15 per cent in 1954 and 22 per cent in 1961.³³

My point is that the Menzies years saw a very significant shift in Australian culture, especially, but not only, in terms of economic attitudes. Old habits, however, could die hard. My parents, who were both born during World War I and were members of the Forgotten People, never borrowed money from the bank or another credit provider. They spoke disparagingly of the ‘never-never’. It would be interesting to know if the ‘credit habit’ was largely adopted by the younger generation.

This was a crucial stage in Australian history during which a culture based on ‘modest comfort’ and frugality was replaced by one of prosperity and borrowing. The old days of the pawnbroker and its associated stigma were over. Credit was becoming increasingly respectable. For many Australians there now existed a means that enabled them no longer to worry about the conundrum of Mr Micawber: ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.’

It was a slow process but, in material terms, genuine. In many ways it was the most extraordinary transformation in Australian history as the culture and lifestyle of the country were profoundly changed by sustained prosperity. As anyone who has read Tacitus and Seneca knows, prosperity has its challenges that are as significant as they are different from those of privation. As Tacitus put it, ‘prosperity tests the spirit with sharper goads, because we simply endure misfortune, but are corrupted by success’.³⁴ Privation builds social solidarity, while prosperity tends to encourage individualism.³⁵ Prosperity creates a new type of politics. For example, the age of prosperity, pax moderna, saw the decline numerically of many associations created during earlier and more difficult times, including trade unions and political parties.

What did prosperity mean in the second half of the 1950s?

• Refrigerators: a major development as they enabled food to be stored for much longer periods of time.

• Washing machines: washing had been a major weekly activity involving considerable physical activity, even with machines that had wringers. They were a real blessing.

• Televisions were first sold in 1956. By today’s standards they were primitive machines with black-and-white pictures and were quite expensive.

• Brick veneer houses.

• Motor vehicles.

All of these goods forever changed the way of life of Australians. Maintaining a house became easier, as did the storage of food; mobility became easier, both for shopping and for pleasure. Nevertheless, the changes of the 1950s were still largely in the realm of ‘comfort’ rather than ‘luxury’. They eased the burden of running a home by making cleaning and cooking much easier. Generation Z of the twenty-first century would have found this period in which the dreaded ‘boomers’ grew up to be one of austerity.

Australia remained quite conservative in its cultural habits in the late 1950s. As already mentioned, two states retained six o’clock closing, Sabbatarianism reigned supreme, and the rhythm of life changed but slowly. The Forgotten People were still there, including the army of clerical workers on ‘staff’ (as opposed to ‘wages’), working away in offices that still largely relied on manual calculation that required considerable skill (particularly in the age of pounds, shillings, and pence); they helped to form the ‘moral middle class’. Of those who voted, at the age of twenty one, it was not until 1961 that the first wartime baby cast a ballot.

The Billy Graham Crusade in 1959 attracted 130 000 people to the Melbourne Cricket Ground on a single day, more than Taylor Swift recently attracted.³⁶ One irony was that the crusade was unable to sell its songbooks when its meetings were held on a Sunday. These numbers are extraordinary, especially when it is considered that a quarter of Australians were Catholic and would therefore have no interest in the celebrity Protestant preacher. The Graham Crusade was a mixture of old-style social solidarity as crowds came together, and new-style individualism as their members made personal pledges. Again, Gen Z would be astonished by these numbers. They matched the Royal Visit in 1954 when people turned out in their millions to welcome the Queen. An interesting reflection is that only five years later it was The Beatles who drew massive crowds.

In the period between 1954 and 1961, the age of prosperity, or pax moderna, had begun, but large parts of the Australian people, especially the Forgotten People, still largely lived in the world of ‘modest comfort’. The same was true of those ‘new’ Australians who had migrated from a war-devastated Europe after 1945, including many refugees. They were moving down the road towards a consumer society but were still wary of the world and what it had to offer. The Pringles and the Hornes and the McGregors were not necessarily typical of the wider Australian population in their desire to be modern and progressive.

The late 1950s were on the cusp between the old Australia in which most saw frugality as a virtue and lived in fear of the threat of a severe economic downturn, and the new prosperous Australia founded largely on credit. New technology and a growing economic prosperity offered them a better life in material terms such as would not have been imaginable twenty years earlier. I think it can be argued that what most of these people—especially those born between 1900 and 1920—wanted was security and the opportunity to enjoy this newly found prosperity. They did not want bold new plans to transform the country and the world. They wanted to live useful lives and raise their families.

A good argument can be made that Menzies was the ideal leader for these circumstances. He was reliable, reassuring, and non-threatening. He instinctively developed a political style appropriate for the times in which he lived and the people who elected him to lead them. In a backhanded way, Horne recognised this when he wrote:

It is surely Menzies to whom the blame belongs: and what might be described as the ‘Stupid Generation’ with whom he finds emotional security and whom he has maintained in power beyond their natural term.³⁷

Having heavily critiqued the years of Labor ‘reconstruction’, Menzies had no intention of making use of bureaucratic means to try to make a new Australia. He was criticised by the academic economic profession because he did not seek to engage in economic planning, preferring to rely on Treasury and its advice.³⁸

That Menzies may have been masterfully inactive suited the times. Why wouldn’t one keep the best aspects of the regime that he supplanted along with the best public servants available? In this period, in particular, Menzies was the prime minister for the Forgotten People. There was no real pressure to engage in reconstruction. That was yesterday’s dream. The people did not want vast social engineering projects. In any case, reconstruction had been a bit of a flop.

Hence the criticism of Menzies by the likes of Pringle, Clark, and Horne, that he was both a ruthless politician and extremely good at appearances, may simply indicate that he was a very effective politician, as described by Machiavelli. This is not a criticism, and Menzies did not engage in violence or immoral or illegal behaviour, but simply an acknowledgement that Menzies practised the ‘art of politics’ to provide what the voters of that time desired: a peaceful, secure, and prosperous country.

It was not until after Menzies retired, and a new generation of voters emerged who had not experienced war and the privations of a severe economic downturn, that an appetite for the sort of social engineering that had marked the Labor reconstruction years returned. Whitlam appealed to the new generation who took prosperity for granted and assumed that it would always be with us.³⁹ He looked back to the reconstruction era even as he proclaimed that he was taking Australia into a future marked by progress. Again, Whitlam was good at appearances, seeming to be the embodiment of the modern and progress. But, unlike Menzies, he does not appear to have had the required Machiavellian skills to maintain power, and proved to be less in tune with the aspirations of the Australian people than he thought. He promised emancipation and delivered economic disaster.

Of course, Menzies was very close to being undone by the socalled ‘credit squeeze’ of 1961. The credit squeeze was, in fact, the first recession of pax moderna in Australia, brought on by an overheating of the economy stimulated by growing consumption based on the extension of credit. It would be the first of many such occurrences of the age of prosperity. It proved to be almost terminal for the Menzies government. This may well have been because the government took its eye off the ball and failed to react to the changing circumstances of the age of prosperity. The rules of the game of politics were changing. I think that it was also the case that the Australian voters of 1961—and remember that the youngest of them had been born in 1940—were still hyper-sensitive to any possibility of economic distress. Even relatively minor downturns would have their effect. These were still transition years and the whole business of credit was not yet properly appreciated or trusted. Interestingly, my parents bought a business in 1961, but they paid in cash, selling their house in order to do so.

In this case, perhaps, Menzies did have some luck, but he was able to recover. This was because the close call of 1961 was not caused by contempt of the electorate and a belief that he was no longer fit to lead the country. If anything, it was his two Labor opponents of these years, Evatt and Calwell, who were more subject to contempt. Fortune favoured Menzies because he was the leader for his times, and because he possessed the skills required both to manipulate the art of politics in his favour and to win the support of an Australian populace that was finally enjoying some prosperity after three decades of trouble and tribulation.

APPENDIX

Paul Kelly Keynote Speech, Delivered to the Robert Menzies Institute Third Annual Conference, November 2023

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. It’s a privilege for me to deliver the opening address at this Third Annual Conference of the Robert Menzies Institute. I thank Georgina Downer for her welcome and for her leadership of the institute.

I never met Robert Menzies. But starting work in the Prime Minister’s Department in East Block in 1969, just three years after his retirement, I was regaled with Menzies stories—typically about Scotch or cricket or his insistence on proper process. But my real link with Menzies was through his voice, that memorable compelling voice coming through the radio, made for parliament and public speaking. Menzies belonged to a different age, but he had that eternal, indispensable quality for the successful politician: he was a communicator, he knew how to persuade. Everyone understood what Menzies was saying in a voice that attracted like a magnet. He said and lived the axiom that ‘the prime art of politics is that of persuasion’.

My friend the late John Nethercote told me of a discussion he had with Sir Robert’s biographer, Allan Martin. Martin had said to John: ‘You were the first person who told me I was doing important work rather than wasting my time on Menzies.’ It testifies to the intellectual torpor that long surrounded attitudes towards Menzies notably from the academy.

Australia was transformed as a country between 1949 and 1966, the period of Menzies’s second prime ministership. As John Howard said: ‘Menzies’s greatest legacy as a statesman was to lay the foundations of modern Australia.’ One reason critics have tried to ignore Menzies’s story is because they dislike the modern Australia that he shaped. Menzies was the slayer of many Labor dreams, and that has not been forgiven.

In fact, Menzies rewrote every record book, serving eighteen years and winning seven successive elections. We can assume these results will not be bettered in the future.

In my comments today, I want to make some broad observations about Menzies and then make some direct remarks about the period being reviewed, 1954 to 1961.

In my view, debate about Menzies has been bedevilled by several factors. First, the longevity of his governance defies any easy branding or interpretation—while Menzies was PM, the United States had four presidents: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson; the United Kingdom had six prime ministers: Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, and Wilson. The sheer length of the Menzies political era encompasses a series of shorter yet decisive political eras. Accordingly, there are many manifestations of Menzies: the champion of free enterprise against nationalisation; the anti-communist at home; the full employment, high-growth specialist; the manufacturing industry protectionist; the Cold War pro-American warrior; the Queen’s man; the messiah for the Forgotten People; the education prime minister; the architect of the Vietnam commitment and upholder of White Australia.

In his political views and outlook, Menzies was remarkably consistent over the decades, yet those views were applied to a remarkably wide range of events over a remarkably long time—leading to a prime minister who made an extraordinary number of decisions, domestic and international. The task, therefore, is to grapple with Menzies in his full portrait—not an easy job—rather than seize upon one chapter in a vastly bigger story (which is what most commentary on Menzies does).

I have always seen the Menzies prime ministership in four phases: the survival period, 1949–54, with his 1954 election win being the decisive moment when his entire project was most threatened; the Menzies consolidation, 1954–61, that saw his unrivalled command of the nation across three election victories, but coming to the brink of defeat in 1961 after the credit squeeze; the recovery phase, 1961–63, when Menzies in his sixth term, with Labor’s help, staged a resurgence with a strong victory at the 1963 election; and the mid-1960s phase—the passing of the Menzian age—when the discontinuity between a changing nation and Menzies’s stubborn attitudes as PM became apparent.

The irony of the Menzies prime ministership is the insistence by his critics that while Australia changed, this apparently had little to do with Menzies. In his 1964 book The Lucky Country, Donald Horne said Menzies did little that really mattered, and that ‘his great talent was to preside over events and look as if he knew what they were all about’. In short, Menzies apparently dominated the age but somehow, someway, wasn’t responsible for what happened to Australia.

In a sense, such confused critiques are a tribute to Menzies. His skill was reassurance. Menzies under-promised and over-delivered. He presided over extraordinary changes in Australia’s economy, society, and population, yet created the impression either that nothing much dramatic was happening or that progress was in safe hands—a bit of both, I think. Menzies was an incrementalist, a proponent of managed change, a champion of continuity. Where Whitlam exaggerated change to promote himself, Menzies downplayed change to keep the public assured. The upshot is that many critics fell into the ludicrous claim that nothing of real importance happened in Australia between 1949 and 1966.

Other critics suggest Menzies’s success was more about Labor’s weakness and the ALP Split than Menzies’s own skill. Yet a leader can only defeat the rivals he faces, and Menzies had the ascendency over both HV Evatt and Arthur Calwell. It was the Labor veteran Clyde Cameron who said: ‘He looked like a PM, he behaved like a PM, and he had the presence of a PM.’ How many PMs since Menzies could justify that description? Some, but not too many.

The ALP Split became pivotal to the extent of Menzies’s dominance, but I believe Menzies would have won in 1955 and 1958 even without the Split. The 1961 election was different. The DLP saved Menzies at this election, an assessment that is also John Howard’s. That is, without the Split, Menzies would have lost in 1961 and his prime ministership would have been eleven years or five terms, still the longest serving. Menzies, overall, was assisted by luck, notably the emergence of the DLP, but he also made his own luck: witness his path-breaking support for state aid before the 1963 election. The bottom-line assessment remains: you can only be judged against your opponents at the time.

In the aftermath of his retirement, Menzies suffered because of the cult of the 1960s—its mission was to denigrate the 1950s as a time of boredom and reaction. The 1960s cult was driven by cultural and social change enshrined as progress. The swinging sixties of The Beatles, abandonment of inhibition, campaigns for political rights and for massive government interventions typecast the fifties as holding back the tide of progress. In her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan claimed the suburbs were ‘burying women alive’. In America, the Kennedy glamour mocked the Eisenhower passivity. In Australia, the Coalition was anxious to consign the Menzian age to history almost as soon as Menzies left, with Harold Holt casting himself as a far more modern Liberal and John Gorton trying to market himself as a change agent. When Whitlam arrived, the narrative was complete—although the actual results from early 1970s policies were another story.

Recent decades, however, have seen a more realistic interpretation of the 1950s. In surveys in recent years, Eisenhower has been ranked number five in the list of best presidents, suggesting high-quality political management of the 1950s. A far more balanced assessment of Menzies is emerging, helped by historians as different as Allan Martin, David Kemp, Gerard and Anne Henderson, Judith Brett, John Howard in his book The Menzies Era, the book Menzies: The Shaping of Modern Australia edited by John Nethercote, and a range of memoirs by people who knew Menzies, notably Sir John Bunting.

The Menzies reassessment is assisted by another factor—the disappointing performance of our political elites and prime ministers since John Howard left politics. In a sense, the more time advances, the more people are inclined to ask: how did Menzies do it? Who was he? What made his success?

As we watch contemporary prime ministers struggle to get past one term, the notion that we might learn something from Menzies, who served seven terms, becomes irrefutable. The keys to Menzies’s success were his sustained intellectual philosophy of liberalism; his policy and political judgement; his leadership of the party, preserving internal unity for so long; and his persuasion with the public. His values were remarkably consistent: individual freedom, personal responsibility, private enterprise, national patriotism, self-reliance, prudence, and selfrestraint. Menzies had a deep grasp of the practical—you only make changes when necessary. He read public opinion but rarely got ahead of it.

Writing of Menzies, Bunting said he was ‘without any doubt, the boss’. He slept well. He could dismiss the day and ‘get untroubled sleep’. He was able to manage pressure. He knew at a deep level how the system worked: the executive, the parliament, the public service. He reflected and learned from the mistakes from his initial leadership. Bunting said:

Menzies always seemed to know what the core of a matter was. He knew what problems came first and meant most. He knew that the most urgent were not always the most important. Most of all, he would know which was the critical point. I can still hear him say to me, to others, to his cabinet, ‘Now there it is, that is the determining factor.’¹

Governing was easier in the Menzies era, much easier. The incessant demands of the 24-hour media cycle and scores of lobby groups did not exist. The stage was less complicated. Governing was much slower. It was an age of conformity, an age of mass loyalty, the era of big corporations, big unions, big churches, big mass media. A PM dealt with concentrated, organised institutional power. Class divisions were set, but not the cultural divides that fracture society today and make governing far more difficult. Menzies governed before the fax machine, colour television, talkback radio, morning television, the mobile phone, and social media. He understood how the industrial age worked and was spared the anarchic nature of the digital age.

He tended to run on his record, a luxury he would be denied today. It is hard to imagine Menzies in our current age of inflated expectations, daily media-driven initiatives and declarations, endless demands for individual and group rights, and the cult of narcissism. One arena where he would prevail is the political competition around leadership. Menzies was a very tough politician, one on one.

Looking at the three terms from 1954 to 1961, it was a time of extraordinary Menzian ascendency. I see this period as shaped by three pervasive themes: the construction of Australia’s middle-class prosperity; the promotion in the widest sense of Australia’s national development; and the entrenchment, at home and abroad, of an anti-communist foreign and security policy, and promotion of defence via ‘great and powerful friends’. These themes under Menzies became the Liberal Party’s ideological DNA. They became the meaning of the party, and they remain to this day. John Howard likes telling the story of how Alan Greenspan told him at their first meeting: ‘Australia has the biggest middle class in the world.’ Greenspan didn’t know that this was the ultimate tribute to Menzies.

Menzies’s initial victory in 1949 was for free enterprise against nationalisation. It is tempting given the Attlee legacy in Britain to see the 1949 election as the most enduring in our history. This is when people voted for free enterprise over socialism. But the point is, Menzies had to deliver on the economy, and he did deliver in the 1950s. He benefited from the long post-war boom, and Australia’s results were remarkable. Over fifteen years from 1950, annual GDP growth was above 4 per cent, and average per capita income growth was 2 per cent—figures to make the current generation weep. Inflation was low, and unemployment averaged below 2 per cent. There was prosperity and it was widely spread. Home ownership during the Menzian age rose from just about 50 per cent to just over 70 per cent.

It was the Keynesian age, or in Australia, the age of ‘fine tuning’ of the economy. Economic growth was driven by domestic demand, high immigration, and capital inflow. Manufacturing expanded behind high tariffs. A highly centralised industrial relations system, with union membership of the workforce at above 60 per cent, did the job—there were real wage gains, no wage breakouts.

The economic technocrats of the Menzian age delivered. Their record growth was impressive, but their model was mired in deepening inefficiencies and poor resources allocation. These defects would erupt in the 1970s and 1980s. As Ergas and Pincus argue, most Australian economists at the time were supportive of the economic model. The notion of the reform age, as we talk about today, didn’t exist. Why would it? The structural economic crisis was in the future. The notion of a reform agenda as we understand it from the 1980s was not yet in existence.

The Menzian economy was creating a free enterprise middle class, the likes of which Australia had never seen. But the flaws in the model would be exposed by changes in the global economy after Menzies’s departure. The great victim, ironically, was Gough Whitlam in his epic 1972 big government promises, which assumed a continuation of the Menzian growth model. But the 1970s stagflation killed that assumption. In the end it was Bob Hawke and Paul Keating who inaugurated the notion of an economic reform age that brought to an end much of the economic orthodoxy of the Menzies era.

The second theme I identify is national development. When I arrived in Canberra in 1969, this idea was still pervasive—from the minerals boom, to the Japan trade, to expanding higher education, to Australia’s extraordinary high immigration program. Menzies championed much of the Chifley government initiatives: the Snowy Mountains scheme, expanding manufacturing industry, and increasing Australia’s population. In twenty years, Australia accepted more than two million migrants. Immigrants accounted for 70 per cent of the increase in the workforce in the 1950s. Arthur Calwell had said, when introducing the program in the 1940s, that there was a risk of World War III—the security factor was fundamental in underpinning the program. Menzies, British to his boot heels, pursued the search for migrants far beyond Britain, creating the conditions for a transformed Australia, eventually a multicultural Australia, of a dimension I doubt he would have approved.

In 1957 Menzies accepted the Murray Report on the expansion of university education in Australia. The Commonwealth would begin to move to establish responsibility and funding for the university sector. Menzies got there, initially reluctant, not as a visionary reformer, but as a practical man. He didn’t believe there were votes in it, but felt it was the right step for a growing nation. His view of universities was idealistic, probably naive, influenced by Oxbridge, but an expression of his liberalism, and his conviction that education was the path to individual fulfilment and the strengthening of Australia’s democracy and capability. The surge into universities over the next fifteen years was extraordinary in transforming Australia’s professional class, but I suspect Menzies would have reservations about the university model we see today.

My third benchmark in this period of consolidation is national security. Menzies governed during the Cold War, the nuclear age, the contest between communism and democracy, the legacy of the 1949 Chinese Revolution, the fear of communism in Asia, and the Korean War. He was a foreign policy realist. His outlook was shaped by World War II, and his method was to seek closer ties with the United States and United Kingdom in an agenda of forward defence in the region. The ANZUS Treaty was negotiated; Australia committed to the Korean War; Menzies for some time had great hopes for SEATO; and the government aspired to deepen the US alliance by opening the way for joint facilities, with the North West Cape base becoming an election issue in the 1960s.

After Korea, there were three military commitments: the Malayan Emergency, the Indonesian Konfrontasi, and the Vietnam War. The government was serious about the security threats in the region where it made military commitments in cooperation with allies. A decisive breakthrough was the 1957 commerce agreement with Japan—it was John McEwen’s work, just as ANZUS was Percy Spender’s work—but the agreement had vast consequences for the future of economic and political relations between Australia and Japan.

The foreign and defence policies of the Menzies government reflected its core beliefs, but this was reinforced by the need to ensure DLP preferences at the elections. These preferences were vital in sustaining the government. Throughout the period, Menzies used national security as a domestic political weapon against Labor. This became integral to Liberal Party identity.

In conclusion, I believe that Menzies’s commitments and policies during this 1954 to 1961 consolidation phase created a framework and an ideological anchor for the Liberal Party that has sustained it through the decades since, even though circumstances have changed. I observe that Menzies’s initial conception of the Liberal Party was to provide a voice to the middle class that had no voice, no organised power, and no institutions to promote its interests. Herein lay the meaning of the Liberal Party. It wasn’t to be a party of business, or trade unions, or institutional power.

When we observe the cultural transformation in Australia today—witness the recent Indigenous Voice referendum—with virtually every institution in the power structure opposed to the formal Liberal Party position, the Menzian model looks strikingly relevant to the current situation. The Voice debate exposed the gulf between elites and the people, between insiders and outsiders, between the power structure and people without power. It demonstrated the ongoing relevance of a party designed to stand for middle-class beliefs and the ‘Forgotten People’. The division over the referendum suggested an ongoing and contemporary relevance for the Menzies vision.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archives

National Archives of Australia

Acting Prime Minister’s visit to Queensland June 1960—Brief, A463 1960/4383.

Cabinet meeting, 3 April 1957, NAA, A571/138, 1957/1206 Pt 1.

Cabinet meeting, 19 February 1957, NAA, A4940/1, C1571.

Defence of Northern Australia, A1945 83/1/30.

Frank Chamberlain, interviewed by Mel Pratt, nla:obj-221556016;0.50.45-0.51.42.

Henry Bolte, interviewed by Mel Pratt, 1976, ORAL TRC 121/73, National Library of Australia digitised item.

Macmillan to Menzies, 27 Dec. 1961, in A1838/276, TS3036/6/1, Pt 14, NAA.

Northern Australia Development Committee (NADC) Interim Reports, A9816 1946/302 Pt 3.

Personal papers of Prime Minister McEwen, Brisbane visit, January 1962, M58 312.

Personal papers of Prime Minister McEwen, Nicklin, M58 344.

Representations by the Premier of QLD re the Problem of Aboriginal Welfare, 17pp, A432 1961/5314.

Robert Menzies, press conference, 10 April 1957, NAA 571/1957, 1205 Pt 2.

Uniform Taxation—Abandonment Policy File, A571 1952/1712 Pt 2.

National Library of Australia

‘Draft Press Statement’ by the Australian Bankers Association, 12 February 1957, NLA, Ms 4936, Box 433, Folder 8.

Fadden to Menzies, 10 April 1957, NLA, Ms 4936, Box 433, Folder 7.

Fadden to Menzies, 22 March 1957, NLA, MS 4936, Box 433, Folder 10.

Menzies, ‘Banking’, 15 February 1957, NLA, Ms 4936, Box 433, Folder 10.

Menzies, ‘Banking’, 24 February 1957, NLA, Ms 4936, Box 433, Folder 10.

Menzies, ‘Banking’, 17 March 1957, NLA, MS 4936, Box 433, Folder 10.

Menzies, Fremantle By-election Speech, Fremantle, WA, 15 August 1945, Robert Menzies Papers, NLA, MS 4936, Box 253, Folder 15.

Menzies to Fadden, 2 April 1957, NLA, Ms 4936, Box 433, Folder 10.

Reserve Bank of Australia Archives

Norman, Montagu, Letter to OA Smith, RBAA S-L-119, 31 August 1925.

University of Melbourne Archives

Liberal Party (Victorian division) 1972.0032, 1974.0063.

Newspapers

The Argus (Melbourne)

The Australian

Brisbane Courier

Brisbane Telegraph

The Bulletin

The Canberra Times

Courier-Mail

Daily Mercury (Mackay)

Geraldton Guardian

The Herald (Melbourne)

Lot’s Wife

Maryborough Chronicle, Wide Bay and Burnett Advertiser

Morning Bulletin (Rockhampton)

News (Adelaide)

North Queensland Register

Recorder (Port Pirie, SA)

Sun (Sydney)

The Sydney Morning Herald

Townsville Daily Bulletin

Truth (Brisbane)

Parliamentary Papers

Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives.

Queensland Parliamentary Debates.

Books and Theses

Adam, Asvi Warman, and Dewi Fortuna Anwar, Violent Internal Conflicts in Asia Pacific: Histories, Political Economics, and Policies, Yayasan Obor Indonesia, 2005.

Agung, Ide Anak Agung Gde, Twenty Years Indonesian Foreign Policy: 1945–1965, Mouton & Co, The Hague, 1973.

Alexander, Fred, Campus at Crawley: A Narrative and Critical Appreciation of the First Fifty Years of the University of Western Australia, F.W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1963.

Allan, Lyle, A Party in Disarray: Victorian Labor after the Split, 1955–65, MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1980.

Anon., Queensland Centenary: The First 100 Years 1859–1959, Penrod Publishing, Brisbane, 1959.

Arnold, L, A Very Special Relationship: British Atomic Weapon Trials in Australia, HMSO Publications, London, 1987.

Attwood, Bain, and Andrew Markus, The Coalition Government and the Demand for a Referendum, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2007.

——The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2007.

Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee, A Crisis in the Finances and Development of Australian Universities, AVCC, Canberra, 1952.

Birch, IKF, Constitutional Responsibility for Education in Australia, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1975.

Blainey, Geoffrey, The Story of Australia’s People: The Rise and Rise of a New Australia, Viking, Melbourne, 2016.

Blazey, Peter, Bolte: A Political Biography, Jacaranda Press, Milton, Qld, 1972.

Bolton, GC, A Thousand Miles Away: A History of North Queensland to 1920, 3rd edn, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1972.

Bolton, Geoffrey, The Oxford History of Australia, Volume 5: The Middle Way 1942–1995, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, 1996.

——Paul Hasluck: A Life, UWA Publishing, Crawley, 2014.

Bongiorno, Frank, Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia, La Trobe University Press, Collingwood, Vic., 2022.

——The People’s Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition, 1875–1914, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1996.

Bowker, JE, This Atomic Age—and You!, E & E Publishing, Melbourne, 1948.

Bowker, Robert, Australia, Menzies and Suez: Australian Policymaking on the Middle East before, during and after the Suez Crisis, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canberra, 2019.

Bowker, Robert, and Matthew Jordan (eds), Australia and the Suez Crisis 1950–1957, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canberra, 2021.

Bragg, Andrew, Buraadja: The Liberal Case for National Reconciliation, Kapunda Press, Brisbane, 2021.

Bramston, Troy, Robert Menzies: The Art of Politics, Scribe Publications, Brunswick, Vic., 2019.

Brett, Judith, The Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003.

——Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, University of Melbourne Press, Carlton, 2007.

Bunting, John, R.G. Menzies: A Portrait, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1988.

Button, John, As It Happened, Text, Melbourne, 1998.

Cain, John, John Cain’s Years: Power, Parties and Politics, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1995.

Calwell, Arthur, Be Just and Fear Not, Lloyd O’Neil, Hawthorn, 1972.

Campion, Edmund, Rockchoppers: Growing up Catholic in Australia, Penguin, Melbourne, 1982.

Carr, M, Australia and the Nuclear Question: A Survey of Government Attitudes, 1945 to 1975, MA thesis, UNSW, 1978.

Chavura, Stephen A, and Greg Melleuish, The Forgotten Menzies: The World Picture of Australia’s Longest-serving Prime Minister, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2021.

Chesterman, J, and B Galligan, Citizens without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997.

Chesterton, Jon, Sacha Maller and Bunty Turner (eds), PRA: The Story: Celebrating 50 Years, 2005, PRA Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association, South Bend, IN, 2005.

Clark, Colin, Australian Hopes and Fears, Hollis & Carter, London, 1958.

Commonwealth of Australia, Report of the Royal Commission to Inquire into the Monetary and Banking Systems at Present in Operation in Australia, Canberra, 1937.

Conley Tyler, M et al. (eds), R.G. Casey: Minister for External Affairs 1951–1960, Australian Institute of International Affairs, Canberra, 2012.

Coombs, HC, Trial Balance, Macmillan Australia, Melbourne, 1981.

Crawford, JG, Australian Trade Policy 1942–1966: A Documentary History, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1968.

Crockett, Peter, Evatt: A Life, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1993.

Croucher, Gwilym, and James Waghorne, Australian Universities: A History of Common Cause, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2020.

Cullather, N, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia, Harvard University Press, Harvard, MA, 2010.

Daly, Fred, From Curtin to Kerr, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1977.

Deane, RP, The Establishment of the Department of Trade: A Case Study in Administrative Reorganization, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1963.

de Kock, MH, Central Banking, 3rd edn, Staples Press, London, 1959.

De La Rue, Kathy, A Stubborn City: Darwin 1911–1978, Historical Society of the Northern Territory, Casuarina, 2017.

Devine, Robert A, Eisenhower and the Cold War, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1981.

Dow, C, and J Gardiner-Garden, Overview of Indigenous Affairs: Part 1: 1901 to 1991, Parliamentary Library, Canberra, 2011.

Downer, Alick, The Downers of South Australia, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2012.

Duncan, Bruce, Crusade or Conspiracy? Catholics and the Anti-Communist Struggle in Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2001.

Feeney, David, Children of the Intervention: Political Construction and Deconstruction, the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party 1955–1996, Master of Public Policy thesis, Monash University, 1997.

Fitzgerald, John, Federal Intervention in the Victorian Branch of the Australian Labor Party, 1970, MA thesis, La Trobe University, 1975.

Fitzgerald, Ross, The Pope’s Battalions, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2003.

Fitzgerald, Ross, Lyndon Megarrity and David Symons, Made in Queensland: A New History, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2009.

Fitzgerald, RT, Through a Rear Vision Mirror: Change and Education, Australian Council for Educational Research, Hawthorn, Vic., 1975.

Forsyth, Hannah, A History of the Modern Australian University, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2014.

Franklin, B, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Amazon Classics, Seattle, 1996.

Furse-Roberts, David (ed.), Menzies in His Own Words: A Collection of Quotes, Jeparit Press/Connor Court Publishing, Redland Bay, Qld, 2020.

Galligan, B, Utah and Queensland Coal: A Study in the Micro Political Economy of Modern Capitalism and the State, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1989.

Gallman, Waldeman J, Iraq and General Nuri al-Said, My Recollections 1954–58, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1964.

Garden, Don, Victoria: A History, Nelson, Melbourne, 1984.

Gilbert, RS, The Australian Loan Council in Federal Fiscal Adjustments, 1890–1965, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1973.

Glezer, L, Tariff Politics: Australian Policy-making 1960–1980, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1982.

Goodhart, Charles, The Evolution of Central Banks, London School of Economics, London, 1985.

Gorman, Zachary, Joseph Cook, Australian Biographical Monograph 19, Connor Court, Redland, Qld, 2023.

Grace, P, Operation Hurricane: The Story of Britain’s First Atomic Test in Australia and the Legacy that Remains, Hachette, Sydney, 2023.

Griffin, James, Daniel Mannix: Beyond the Myths, Garratt Publishing, Melbourne, 2012.

Hancock, WK, Australia, Jacaranda Press, Brisbane, 1966.

——The Battle of Black Mountain: An Episode of Canberra’s Environmental History, Australian National University, Canberra, 1974.

Hasluck, Paul, An Open Go, Hawthorn Press, Melbourne, 1971.

——The Government and the People 1939–1941, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1952.

——Mucking about: An Autobiography, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1977.

——Native Welfare in Australia: Speeches and Addresses, Paterson Brokensha, Perth, 1953.

Hayden, Bill, Hayden: An Autobiography, Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1996.

Hazlehurst, Cameron, Menzies Observed, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1979.

Heikal, Mohamed, The Cairo Documents, Doubleday, New York, 1973.

Henderson, G, Cardinal Pell, the Media Pile-on & Collective Guilt, Connor Court, Redland, Qld, 2022.

Henderson, Heather, A Smile for My Parents, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2013.

Hocking, J, Lionel Murphy: A Political Biography, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997.

Hogan, Michael, The Sectarian Strand: Religion in Australian History, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1987.

Hopf, Ted, Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years, 1945–1958, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012.

Horne, Donald, The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1964.

Horner, David, The Spy Catchers: The Official History of ASIO, 1949–1963, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 2014.

Horsfall, JC, The Liberal Era: A Political and Economic Analysis, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1974.

Howard, John, The Menzies Era: The Years that Shaped Modern Australia, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2014.

Hudson, WJ, Blind Loyalty: Australia and the Suez Crisis, 1956, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1989.

Hughes, Colin A, and BD Graham, A Handbook of Australian Government and Politics, 1890–1964, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1968.

——Voting for the Australian House of Representatives 1901–1964, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1974.

——Voting for the Victorian Legislative Assembly, 1890–1964, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1975.

Isaacson, W, and E Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1997.

Kelly, CR, One More Nail, Brolga Books, Adelaide, 1978.

Kelly, P, The End of Certainty: Power, Politics and Business in Australia, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, NSW, 1994.

Kemp, David, A Liberal State: How Australia Chose Liberalism over Socialism, 1926–1966, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2021.

Killen, James, Killen: Inside Australian Politics, Mandarin Australia, Melbourne, 1985.

Klapdor, Michael, Moira Coombs and Catherine Bohm, Australian Citizenship: A Chronology of Major Developments in Policy and Law, Department of Parliamentary Services, Canberra, 2009.

Kyle, Keith, Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1991.

Lee, David, The Second Rush: Mining and the Transformation of Australia, Connor Court, Redland Bay, Qld, 2016.

Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965–2000, HarperCollins, New York, 2000.

Leigh, Andrew, The Luck of Politics: True Tales of Disaster and Outrageous Fortune, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2015.

Love, Kennet, Suez: The Twice Fought War, Longman, London, 1970.

Lucas, W Scott, Divided We Stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1991.

Lynch, Philip, Payments to or for the States and Local Government Authorities, 1976–77, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1976.

Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince, eds Quentin Skinner and Russell Price, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988.

Macintyre, Stuart, Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2015.

Malouf, David, Australia’s British Inheritance, Quarterly Essay, Issue 12, 2003.

Martin, AW, Robert Menzies: A Life, Volume 2: 1944–1978, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1993.

Mathews, RL, and WRC Jay, Federal Finance: Intergovernmental Financial Relations in Australian since Federation, Nelson, Melbourne, 1972.

May, AL, The Battle for the Banks, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1968.

McClelland, JR, The Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1985.

McGregor, Craig, Profile of Australia, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1968.

McGregor, Russell, Environment, Race, and Nationhood in Australia: Revisiting the Empty North, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2016.

McLean, Ian W, Why Australia Prospered: The Shifting Sources of Economic Growth, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2013.

McManus, Frank, The Tumult and the Shouting, Rigby, Adelaide, 1977.

McMullin, Ross, The Light on the Hill: The Australian Labor Party, 1891–1991, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1991.

Megarrity, Lyndon, Northern Dreams: The Politics of Northern Development, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2018.

——Robert Philp and the Politics of Northern Development, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2022.

Menzies, Robert, Afternoon Light: Some Memories of Men and Events, Cassell, Melbourne, 1967.

——Central Power in the Australian Commonwealth: An Examination of the Growth of Commonwealth Power in the Australian Federation, Cassell, London, 1967.

——Dark and Hurrying Days: Menzies’ 1941 Diary, eds AW Martin and Patsy Hardy, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1993.

——The Forgotten People and Other Studies in Democracy, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1943.

——The Measure of the Years, Cassell, Melbourne, 1970.

Menzies, RG, and H Henderson, Letters to My Daughter, Murdoch Books, Millers Point, NSW, 2011.

Muir, Barry, Bolte from Bamganie, Hill of Content, Melbourne, 1973.

Murray, K, et al., Report of the Committee on Australian Universities, Commonwealth Government Printer, Canberra, 1957.

Murray, Robert, The Split: Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1970.

Norton, Andrew, Mapping Australian Higher Education 2023, ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods, Canberra, 2023.

Pinkstone, Brian, Global Connections: A History of Exports and the Australian Economy, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1992.

Porter, Charles, The ‘Gut Feeling’, Boolarong Publications, Brisbane, 1981.

Porter, D, Coal: The Australian Story: From Convict Mining to the Birth of a World Leader, Connor Court, Redland Bay, Qld, 2019.

Porter, Robert, Paul Hasluck: A Political Biography, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 1993.

Pringle, JD, Australian Accent, Chatto and Windus, London, 1958.

Prior, Tom, Bolte By Bolte, Craftsman, Burwood, Vic., 1990.

Reid, A, The Whitlam Venture, Hill of Content, Melbourne, 1976.

Reynolds, W, Australia’s Bid for the Atomic Bomb, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1997.

Richardson, Nick, 1956: The Year Australia Welcomed the World, Scribe, Melbourne, 2019.

Rix, A, Coming to Terms: The Politics of Australia’s Trade with Japan 1945–1957, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1986.

Rowse, T, Nugget Coombs: A Reforming Life, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1992.

Schedvin, CB, Emissaries of Trade: A History of the Australian Trade Commissioner Service, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canberra, 2008.

——In Reserve: Central Banking in Australia, 1945–75, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1992.

Serle, Geoffrey, The Rush to Be Rich: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1883–1889, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1971.

Shenk, C, Britain and the Sterling Area: From Devaluation to Convertibility in the 1950s, Routledge, London, 1994.

Shuckburgh, Evelyn, Descent to Suez: Diaries 1951–56, Longman, London, 1970.

Shute, N, On the Beach, Vintage International, New York, 1957/2010.

Singleton, J, and PL Robertson, Economic Relations between Britain and Australasia, 1945–1970, Palgrave, Basingstoke, UK, 2002.

Sloane, Clyde, A History of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme 1947–1992, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1995.

Snedden, BM, Commonwealth Payments to or for the States, 1971–72, Commonwealth Government Printing Office, Canberra, 1971.

Stevens, BSB, Planning for War and Peace, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1940.

Strangio, Paul, Neither Power Nor Glory: 100 Years of Political Labor in Victoria, 1856–1956, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2012.

Tacitus, Histories Books I–III, trans. Clifford H Moore, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1925.

Tescher, Tom, and Andrew Bain, Australian Union of Students Commonwealth Scholarships Submission 1972, AUS, Melbourne, 1972.

Tweedie, S, Trading Partners: Australia and Asia 1790–1993, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1994.

Tynan, E, Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga Story, NewSouth, Sydney, 2016.

——The Secret of Emu Field: Britain’s Forgotten Atomic Tests in Australia, NewSouth, Sydney, 2022.

Valentino, Benjamin, Final Solutions: Mass Genocides and Killings in the 20th Century, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2013.

Walker, Frank, Maralinga: The Chilling Exposé of Our Secret Nuclear Shame and Betrayal of Our Troops and Country, Hachette Australia, Sydney, 2014.

Ward, Stuart, Australia and the British Embrace: The Demise of the Imperial Ideal, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2001.

Waters, C, Australia and Appeasement: Imperial Foreign Policy and the Origins of World War II, I.B. Taurus, London, 2014.

West, Katherine, Power in the Liberal Party: A Study in Australian Politics, F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1965.

White, Kate, John Cain & Victorian Labor, 1917–1957, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1982.

White, Patrick, Northern Promise: North Queensland and the Politics of Northern Development: From 1939 to 1969, PhD, James Cook University, 2022.

Whitlam, Gough, Towards a National Party with a National Purpose: Texts of Speeches to Three State Conferences of the Australian Labor Party, 1967.

——The Whitlam Government 1972–1975, Viking, Ringwood (Vic.), 1985.

Whitwell, Greg, The Treasury Line, Allen & Unwin Australia, North Sydney, 1986.

Wilks, Stephen, ‘Now Is the Psychological Moment’: Earle Page and the Imagining of Australia, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2020.

Wright, Raymond, A People’s Counsel: A History of the Parliament of Victoria 1856–1990, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992.

Journal Articles and Chapters in Edited Collections

Albinski, Henry, ‘Australia and the Dutch New Guinea Dispute’, International Journal, vol. 16, no. 4, 1961, pp. 358–82.

Ball, W Macmahon, ‘The Australian Reaction to the Suez Crisis: July–December, 1956’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 2, no. 2, May 1957, pp. 121–50.

Bennett, Scott, and Richard Webb, Specific Purpose Payments and the Australian Federal System, Parliamentary Library (Commonwealth), Research Paper no. 17, 14 January 2008.

Bessant, Bob, ‘Robert Gordon Menzies and Education in Australia’, Melbourne Studies in Education, vol. 47, nos 1 & 2, November 2006.

Bramston, Troy, ‘Young Robert’, in Zachary Gorman (ed.), The Young Menzies: Success, Failure, Resilience 1894–1942, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2022.

Bridge, Carl, ‘Sir Earl Christmas Page (1880–1961)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 11, National Centre of Biography, ANU, Canberra, 1988.

Butlin, SJ, ‘Australian Central Banking, 1945–59’, Australian Economic History Review, vol. XXIII, no. 2, September 1983, pp. 95–192.

Chesterman, J, ‘Defending Australia’s Reputation: How Indigenous Australians Won Civil Rights’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 116, 2001, pp. 20–39.

Daley, Paul, Driving Mr Menzies: How Al Stafford, Gamilaroi and Darug Man, Stamped His Presence on the Capital, Meanjin, autumn 2016, pp. 26–36.

Deery, Phillip, ‘Santamaria, the Movement and the Labor Split of 1954–55: A Re-examination’, Journal of the Catholic Historical Society, vol. 22, 2001.

Dodds, K, ‘Awkward Antarctic Nationalism’, Polar Record, vol. 53, no. 1., 2017.

Doran, Stuart, ‘Toeing the Line: Australia’s Abandonment of “Traditional” West New Guinea Policy’, Journal of Pacific History, vol. 36, no. 1, 2001, pp. 5–18.

Edwards, Peter, ‘The Foreign and Defence Policies of Robert Menzies: 50 Years on’, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 28 January 2016.

Endres, D, ‘The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2009, pp. 39–60.

Fox, C, ‘The Fourteen Powers Referendum of 1944 and the Federalisation of Aboriginal Affairs’, Aboriginal History, no. 32, 2008, pp. 27–48.

Friedman, E, ‘Nuclear Blackmail and the End of the Korean War’, Modern China, vol. 1, no. 1, 1975, pp. 75–9.

Gerber, LG, ‘The Baruch Plan and the Origins of the Cold War’, Diplomatic History, vol. 6, no. 1, 1982, pp. 69–95.

Goddard, Martyn S, ‘How the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme Began’, Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 201, 2014.

Harper, Norman, ‘Australia and Suez’, in Gordon Greenwood and Norman Harper (eds), Australia in World Affairs, 1950–55, F.W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1957.

Harrison, Jennifer, ‘Donald Alastair Cameron (1900–1974)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 13, National Centre of Biography, ANU, Canberra, 1993.

Harvey, Ernest, ‘Central Banking’, Economic Record, vol. 3, no. 1, May 1927, pp. 1–14.

Hassam, Andrew, ‘From Heroes to Whingers: Changing Attitudes to British Migrants, 1947 to 1977’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 51, no. 1, 2005.

Hayes, Tim, ‘Faith of Our Fathers: The Fate of the Expelled’, in Brian Costar, Peter Love and Paul Strangio (eds), The Great Labor Schism—A Retrospective, Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2005, pp. 278–83.

Henderson, Gerard, ‘B. A. Santamaria, Santamariaism and Cult of Personality’, 50 Years of the Santamaria Movement, Eureka Street Papers, no. 1, Jesuit Publications, Melbourne, 1992.

Hugo, Graeme, ‘Changing Patterns of Population Distribution in Australia’, Joint Special Issue, Journal of Population Research and NZ Population Review, September 2002.

James, Laura M, ‘When Did Nasser Expect War? The Suez Nationalization and Its Aftermath’, in Simon C Smith (ed.), Reassessing Suez 1956: New Perspectives on the Crisis and Its Aftermath, Ashgate, Aldershot, UK, 2008, pp. 140–64.

Johnson, Lesley, ‘A History of the Humanities in Australian Universities, 1945–2000’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 54, no. 3, 2023, pp. 405–23.

Jones, P, ‘David Unaipon (1872–1967)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 12, National Centre of Biography, ANU, Canberra, 1990.

Jordan, Matthew, ‘The Reappraisal of the “White Australia Policy” against the Background of a Changing Asia, 1945–66’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 2, 2006.

Jupp, James, ‘Victoria: Left, Right and Centre’, in Andrew Parkin and John Warhurst (eds), Machine Politics in the Australian Labor Party, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1983.

KK, ‘Queensland’ [Australian Political Chronical, July–December 1961], Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 8, no. 1, 1962, pp. 111–13.

Lee, David, ‘Australia’s Embargo of the Export of Iron Ore: A Reconsideration’, Journal of Australian Mining History, vol. 18, 2020, pp. 96–112.

——‘Australia’s Window to China in the Cold War: The Trade Commission in Hong Kong’, in Sue Onslow and Lori Maguire (eds), Consuls in the Cold War, Brill, Leiden, 2023, pp. 212–37.

——‘Comalco’s Development of Queensland Bauxite, 1955–1975’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 62, no. 1, 2016, pp. 44–58.

——‘Reluctant Relaxation: The End of the Iron Ore Export Embargo and the Origins of Australia’s Mining Boom, 1960–1966’, History Australia, vol. 18, 2016, pp. 149–70.

Maher, LW, ‘The Lapstone Experiment and the Beginnings of ASIO’, Labour History, no. 64, 1993, pp. 103–18.

Markus, A, ‘William Cooper and the 1937 Petition to the King’, Aboriginal History, vol. 7, nos 1 & 2, 1983, pp. 46–60.

Martin, Allan, ‘Menzies the Man’, in Scott Prasser, JR Nethercote and John Warhurst (eds), The Menzies Era: A Reappraisal of Government, Politics and Policy, Hale & Ironmonger, Sydney, 1995.

——‘R.G. Menzies and the Murray Committee’, in John Nethercote (ed.), The Whig View of Australian History and other Essays, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2007.

——‘R. G. Menzies and the Suez Crisis’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 23, no. 92, April 1989, pp. 63–85.

May, RJ, ‘Political Review’, Australian Quarterly, vol. XXXIV, no. 1, 1962, pp. 90–7.

McGregor, Russell, ‘Avoiding “Aborigines”: Paul Hasluck and the Northern Territory Welfare Ordinance, 1953’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 51, no. 4, 2005, pp. 513–29.

Meaney, Neville, ‘Britishness and Australian Identity: The Problem of Nationalism in Australian History and Historiography’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 32, no. 116, 2001, pp. 76–90.

—‘Britishness and Australian Identity: The Problem of Nationalism and Transnationalism in Australian History: A Reply to Marilyn Lake and Christopher Waters’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, 2015, pp. 209–32.

Megarrity, Lyndon, ‘The Lion and the Fox: Whitlam, Bjelke-Petersen and the Queensland Electorate 1961–1975’, ANU Historical Journal II, no. 3, 2022, pp. 23–52.

——‘Northern Visions: The Commonwealth and the North since 1945’, Northern Territory Historical Studies, no. 27, 2016, pp. 26–36.

——‘The Neglected North: Developing Northern Australia from the South since 1901’, in Carolyn Holbrook, Lyndon Megarrity and David Lowe (eds), Lessons from History: Leading Historians Tackle Australia’s Greatest Challenges, NewSouth Press, Sydney, 2022, pp. 314–31.

Melleuish, Greg, ‘Democracy, Liberalism and the Challenge of Social Solidarity’, Social Science, vol. 7, no. 7, 2018, p. 110.

——‘The Whitlam Narrative’, in Scott Prasser and David Clune (eds), The Whitlam Era, Connor Court, Redland Bay, Qld, 2022, pp. 51–70.

Memorandum of Discussion, 302d Meeting of the National Security Council, Washington, 1 November 1956, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955-1957, vol. XVI: Suez Crisis: July 26-December 31, 1956, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1990.

Mendelson, Danuta, ‘Devaluation of a Constitutional Guarantee: The History of Section 51 (xxiiia) of the Commonwealth Constitution’, Melbourne University Law Review, vol. 23, 1999.

Mulvaney, DJ, ‘WEH Stanner and the Foundation of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1959–1964’, in M Hinkson and L Beckett (eds), An Appreciation of Difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal Australia, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2008, pp. 58–75.

Paisley, F, ‘Federalising the Aborigines? Constitutional Reform in the Late 1920s’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 111, 1998, pp. 248–66.

Palmer, Kingsley, ‘Dealing with the Legacy of the Past: Aborigines and Atomic Testing in Australia’, Aboriginal History, vol. 14, nos 1 & 2, 1990, pp. 197–207.

Patten, J, and W Ferguson, ‘Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights!’, in J Horner (ed.), Vote for Aboriginal Freedom: A Biography, Australia and New Zealand Book Co., Sydney, 1974, pp. 192–9.

Pincus, JJ, ‘Federalism in the Menzies Years’, in JR Nethercote (ed.), Menzies: The Shaping of Modern Australia, Connor Court in association with the Menzies Research Centre, Redland Bay, Qld, 2016, pp. 309–22.

Pollock, Zoe, ‘Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders’, The Dictionary of Sydney, 2008.

Powell, Graeme, ‘Keeffe, James Bernard (1919–1988)’, The Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate, vol. 3: 1962–1983, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2010, pp. 332–8.

Prasser, Scott, ‘Federalism and Commonwealth–State Relations’, in Scott Prasser, JR Nethercote and John Warhurst (eds), The Menzies Era: A Reappraisal of Government, Politics and Policy, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1995, pp. 137–50.

Reynolds, Wayne, ‘Rethinking the Joint Project: Australia’s Bid for Nuclear Weapons 1945–1960’, The Historical Journal, vol. 41, no. 3, 1998, pp. 853–73.

Roskam, John, ‘Federalism and the Liberal Party’, in Upholding the Australian Constitution, Volume 18, Proceedings of the Eighteenth Conference of The Samuel Griffith Society, Lane Cove, NSW, 2006, pp. 369–80.

——‘Liberalism and Social Welfare’, in JR Nethercote (ed.), Liberalism and the Australian Federation, Federation Press, Sydney, 2001.

Rydon, Joan, ‘Some Aspects of Voting in the 1961 Elections’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 8, no. 1, 1962, pp. 98–101.

Sawer, G, ‘The Australian Constitution and the Australian Aborigine’, Federal Law Review, vol. 2, June 1966, pp. 25–35.

Strangio, Paul, ‘Closing the Split? Before and after Federal Intervention in the Victorian ALP’, in Brian Costar, Peter Love and Paul Strangio (eds), The Great Labor Schism: A Retrospective, Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2005, pp. 340–65.

——‘John Cain Snr: The Star-crossed Premier’, in Paul Strangio and Brian Costar (eds), The Victorian Premiers, 1856–2006, Federation Press, Sydney, 2006.

——‘The Split: A Victorian Phenomenon’, in Brian Costar, Peter Love and Paul Strangio (eds), The Great Labor Schism: A Retrospective, Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2005, pp. 23–45.

Umetsu, Hiroyuki, ‘Australia’s Actions Towards Accepting Indonesian Control of Netherlands New Guinea’, Journal of Pacific History, vol. 41, no. 1, 2006, pp. 31–47.

——‘Australia’s Response to the West New Guinea Dispute, 1952–53’, The Journal of Pacific History, vol. 39, no. 1, 2004, pp. 59–77.

——‘The Impacts of Indonesia’s Civil War and the US–Soviet Tug of War over Indonesia on Australia’s Diplomacy Towards West New Guinea’, The Journal of Pacific History, vol. 40, no. 2, 2005, pp. 171–91.

Walsh, J, ‘Surprise Down Under: The Secret History of Australia’s Nuclear Ambitions’, The Nonproliferation Review, fall 1997, pp. 1–20.

Waters, Christopher, ‘The Last of Australian Imperial Dreams for the Southwest Pacific: Paul Hasluck, the Department of Territories and a Greater Melanesia in 1960’, Journal of Pacific History, vol. 51, no. 2, 2016, pp. 169–85.

Whitwell, Greg, ‘Economic Policy’, in Scott Prasser, JR Nethercote and John Warhurst (eds), The Menzies Era: A Reappraisal of Government, Politics and Policy, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1995, pp. 166–84.

Wright, DI, ‘The Politics of Federal Finance’, Historical Studies, vol. 13, no. 52, April 1969.

Speeches and Broadcasts

Baruch, B, speech before the first session of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, Hunter College, New York, 14 June 1946.

Chifley, Ben, election speech, Canberra, 14 November 1949.

Howard, John, address at the launch of the publication The Conservative, Parliament House, Canberra, 8 September 2005.

Menzies, Robert, ‘The Challenge to Federalism’, Allen Hope Southey Memorial Lecture, 1960.

——election speech, Canterbury, Vic., 5 May 1954.

——election speech, Canterbury, Vic., 15 November 1955.

——farewell speech for Rev. Dr Frank Rayward of Wesley Methodist Mission, Sydney, 30 March 1958.

——first William Queale Memorial Lecture, Adelaide, 22 October 1954.

——policy speech, Melbourne, 10 November 1949.

——press, radio and television conference given at Parliament House, Canberra, 20 January 1966.

——speech at the Atomic Energy Establishment, Lucas Heights, 23 March, 1962.

——speech at the laying of the foundation stone of the National Library of Australia, 31 March 1966.

——speech at the opening of the Janet Biddlecombe Wing, Ballarat, 1959.

——‘Speech by the Prime Minister, Mr. Menzies, to 700 Businessmen at Finney’s Auditorium’, Brisbane, 22 July 1955.

——‘Speech by the Prime Minister the Rt. Hon. R.G. Menzies at the Opening of Federal Council of Liberal Party Conference at the Albert Hall’, Canberra, 1959.

——‘Speech by the Prime Minister the Rt. Hon. R.G. Menzies at the Opening of the Mawson Institute’, University of Adelaide, 15 April 1961.

——‘Speech by the Prime Minister the Rt. Hon. R.G. Menzies at the Opening Address on the Occasion of the First Antarctic Consultative Meeting’, Canberra, 1961.

——‘Speech by the Prime Minister, Rt Hon R G Menzies, at the opening of the Janet Biddlecombe wing of the Queen Elizabeth Home’, Ballarat, 12 September 1959.

——Statement to the Committee on the Future of Tertiary Education, 27 August 1961.

NOTES

Foreword

1 Justice of the High Court of Australia 1996–2009.

2 William Shakespeare, Julius Cesar I, pp. ii, 135.

3 Paul Strangio, Chapter 2, ‘Victorian Political Exceptionalism and Labor’s 1955 Split’.

4 Lyndon Megarrity, Chapter 15, ‘Menzies’s Close Shave’. See also Anne Henderson, Chapter 1, ‘Robert Menzies, Bert Evatt and the Labor Party Split’.

5 William Shakespeare, Julius Cesar, III, pp. ii, 66.

6 Paul Kelly, Appendix, p. 233.

7 Australian Communist Party v The Commonwealth (1951) 83 Commonwealth Law Reports 1.

8 Kelly, ibid., p. 236.

9 Andrew Norton, Chapter 6, ‘Menzies and Higher Education: 1954–61’, p. 78.

10 Michael de Percy, Chapter 8, ‘Australia in the Atomic Age’.

11 Paul Brown, Chapter 12, ‘Alick Downer’s Immigration Program’.

12 Damien Freeman and Andrew Bragg, Chapter 13, ‘Menzies, Hasluck, and Wentworth’.

13 Judith Brett, ‘The Menzies Era, 1950–66’ in A Bashford and S Macintyre (eds), The Cambridge History of Australia, Volume 2, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 112–46. See also Anne Henderson, Menzies Versus Evatt: The Great Rivalry of Australian Politics, Connor Court, 2023; and Chapter 1.

14 GC Bolton, ‘Herbert Vere Evatt (1894–1965)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1996, vol. 14, pp. 108–14.

15 Barbara Dale, ‘Mary Alice Evatt (1898–1973)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1996, vol. 14, pp. 114–15.

16 This was achieved under his successor, Harold Holt: Australian Constitution, s127, repealed by Act No. 55, 1967.

17 Elizabeth Buchanan, Chapter 9, ‘Antarctica’.

18 Sean Jacobs, Chapter 11, ‘Skilful Handling’.

19 Selwyn Cornish, Chapter 4, ‘RG Menzies and the Creation of the Reserve Bank’.

20 Ted Ling, Chapter 14, ‘Robert Menzies, Canberra’s Apostle’.

21 Sir Richard Jebb, The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeos, Hand Press Publishing, London, 2020.

Introduction

1 Menzies had technically passed the milestone halfway through the preceding day, but instead chose to mark the occasion based on whole numbers rather than fractions: ‘Prime Minister’s Record Term’, The Canberra Times, 30 November 1954, p. 2.

2 See, for example, Richardson, 1956 the Year Australia Welcomed the World.

3 Paul Keating, ‘The 1950s’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 27 February 1992.

4 Hopf, Reconstructing the Cold War, pp. 242–53.

5 Menzies, election speech, Canterbury, Vic., 15 November 1955.

6 Ibid.

7 See Horner, The Spy Catchers.

8 See Gorman, Joseph Cook.

9 Alfred Deakin, quoted in Wright, ‘The Politics of Federal Finance’, p. 464.

10 Menzies, Afternoon Light, p. 232.

11 Menzies suggested there was an ‘attractive argument’ for removing the race power: Robert Menzies, ‘Constitutional Alteration Bill’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 11 November 1965.

12 From 1949, the Australian Capital Territory had one seat in the House of Representatives. However, its elected representative had constrained voting rights. It had no Senate representation during the Menzies era.

Chapter 1 Robert Menzies, Bert Evatt and the Labor Party Split

1 Anne Henderson AM is the deputy director of the Sydney Institute and the author of Menzies Versus Evatt: The Great Rivalry of Australian Politics.

2 Alan Reid, ‘Canberra Comment’, The Sun (Sydney), 21 September 1954, p. 26.

3 McManus, The Tumult and the Shouting, p. 74.

4 Hayes, ‘Faith of Our Fathers’, pp. 278–83.

5 National Library of Australia, Frank Chamberlain, interviewed by Mel Pratt, nla:obj-221556016;0.50.45-0.51.42

6 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 15 February 1949, p. 265.

7 Daly, From Curtin to Kerr, p. 102.

8 The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 September 1951, p. 1.

9 Cartoon by John Frith, The Herald (Melbourne), 10 September 1953, p. 4.

10 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 13 April 1954, p. 326.

11 Murray, The Split, p. 139.

12 The Argus, 12 May 1954, p. 1.

13 The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 April 1954, p. 2.

14 Daly, From Curtin to Kerr, p. 105.

15 News (Adelaide), 10 September 1954, p. 1.

16 Murray, The Split, p. 179.

17 Alan Reid, ‘Canberra Comment’, The Sun (Sydney), 12 October 1954, p. 28.

18 Daly, From Curtin to Kerr, p. 128.

19 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 28 October 1954, p. 2475.

20 ‘Document J’ was later proved to have been authored by Australian Rupert Lockwood—a communist. It was an assessment provided to the Soviet Embassy and contained information—both accurate and false—on Japanese and American connections within Australia.

21 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 28 October 1954, p. 2478.

22 Crockett, Evatt, p. 288.

23 The Canberra Times, 11 October 1954, p. 1.

24 The Age, 4 October 1954, p. 2.

Chapter 2 Victorian Political Exceptionalism and Labor’s 1955 Split

1 Paul Strangio is an emeritus professor of Politics in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University.

2 This chapter draws on my history of the Victorian Labor Party, Neither Power Nor Glory: 100 Years of Political Labor in Victoria, 1856–1956.

3 Killen, Killen, p. 51.

4 Hughes and Graham, A Handbook of Australian Government and Politics.

5 Michael Koziol, ‘“The Massachusetts of Australia”: John Howard Plays Down Liberals’ Drubbing in Victoria’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 November 2018.

6 See Strangio, Neither Power Nor Glory.

7 This is based on data in Hughes and Graham, A Handbook of Australian Government and Politics.

8 The early handicaps faced by Labor in Victoria are explored in a number of sources, including Bongiorno, The People’s Party, especially ch. 3; and Strangio, Neither Power Nor Glory, chs 1–2.

9 Garden, Victoria, pp. 227–35; Serle, The Rush to be Rich, ch. 2.

10 Strangio, Neither Power Nor Glory, pp. 22–4, 95–6.

11 Wright, A People’s Counsel, p. 125.

12 See Hughes and Graham, Voting for the Victorian Legislative Assembly, 1890–1964.

13 Strangio, Neither Power Nor Glory, chs 4, 6.

14 See here Strangio, ‘The Split’.

15 Important sources on that mobilisation include Duncan, Crusade or Conspiracy; and Ross Fitzgerald, The Pope’s Battalions.

16 Quoted in Henderson, ‘B. A. Santamaria, Santamariaism and Cult of Personality’, p. 43.

17 Quoted in Duncan, Crusade or Conspiracy?, p. 153.

18 On this subject, among other sources, are Duncan, Crusade or Conspiracy?; Griffin, Daniel Mannix; and Hogan, The Sectarian Strand.

19 Duncan, Crusade or Conspiracy?, p. 389; and Campion, Rockchoppers, pp. 114–15.

20 Murray, The Split, pp. 36–7, 58–9, 95–100; White, John Cain, pp. 159–61. See also Deery, ‘Santamaria, the Movement and the Labor Split of 1954–55’, pp. 50–3.

21 Murray, The Split, p. 62.

22 Accounts of the Cain government of 1952–55 include Strangio, Neither Power Nor Glory, chs 9, 10; Strangio, ‘John Cain Snr’, pp. 250–74; and White, John Cain.

23 Murray, The Split, p. 355.

24 Fitzgerald, The Pope’s Battalions, p. 145.

25 For an account of the Split in Victoria, the best sources are Murray, The Split; and Strangio, Neither Power Nor Glory, chs 9, 10.

26 McManus, The Tumult and the Shouting, p. 73.

27 Quoted in ibid.

28 On that subject, there are a number of useful sources, including Allan, ‘A Party in Disarray’; Feeney, ‘Children of the Intervention’; and Strangio, ‘Closing the Split?’.

29 Cain, John Cain’s Years, p. 9.

30 To illustrate this point, it would be more than two decades following the Split before a Catholic joined the Victorian parliamentary Labor Party, being Pauline Toner in 1977.

31 Jupp, ‘Victoria’, p. 73.

32 Whitlam, Towards a National Party with a National Purpose, p. 12.

33 On the Participants, see Strangio, ‘Closing the Split?’, pp. 347–9.

34 Labor Comment, vol. 4, no. 2, May 1969, p. 2.

35 Button, As it Happened, p. 141.

36 Federal intervention in the Victorian ALP is discussed in a number of sources, including Feeney, ‘Children of the Intervention’; Fitzgerald, ‘Federal Intervention’; and Strangio, ‘Closing the Split?’, pp. 352–7.

37 The electoral figures in this and the following paragraph are drawn from Hughes and Graham, A Handbook of Australian Government and Politics; and Hughes and Graham, Voting for the Australian House of Representatives.

38 In the opening of chapter 25 of The Prince, Machiavelli wrote: ‘I hold it to be true that fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less.’

39 For an interesting discussion of the role of luck in politics, see Leigh, The Luck of Politics.

Chapter 3 ‘Falling Dully’ on His Ears

1 Dr Stephen Wilks is a lecturer in the ANU’s National Centre of Biography.

2 Horsfall, The Liberal Era, p. 216.

3 Howard, The Menzies Era, p. 524.

4 Blazey, Bolte, p. 128.

5 Ibid., pp. 43, 69.

6 Ibid., p. 128.

7 Prasser, ‘Federalism and Commonwealth–State Relations’, p. 145.

8 Roskam, ‘Federalism and the Liberal Party’.

9 Pincus, ‘Federalism in the Menzies Years’, p. 314.

10 Skelton, Lot’s Wife, 9 July 1970, p. 6.

11 Chavura and Melleuish, The Forgotten Menzies, pp. 8, 35–40.

12 The Age, 19 May 1970, p. 6.

13 Menzies, ‘The Challenge to Federalism’, p. 1.

14 Prior, Bolte By Bolte, pp. 92–3.

15 West, Power in the Liberal Party, p. 231.

16 Blazey, Bolte, p. 87.

17 The Canberra Times, 14 July 1972, p. 9.

18 Mathews and Jay, Federal Finance, p. 213—sourced from Commonwealth data published in 1970–71; population share figure from Hugo, ‘Changing Patterns of Population Distribution’, p. 3.

19 For further details, see Mathews and Jay, Federal Finance, pp. 210–12.

20 University of Melbourne Archives, minutes of the second Federal Council meeting, 1972.0032 1/2/1.

21 Menzies speaking to the premiers at the 1952 Premiers’ Conference, as reported in Hansard, 26 February 1953, p. 397.

22 For further details, see Mathews and Jay, Federal Finance, p. 214; and Gilbert, The Australian Loan Council, pp. 251–2.

23 National Archives of Australia, ‘Notes on Resolution Seeking Abandonment of Uniform Taxation’, A571 1952/1712, part 2, Uniform Taxation—Abandonment Policy File.

24 Menzies, ‘The Challenge to Federalism’, p. 12.

25 Mathews and Jay, Federal Finance, pp. 239–40.

26 Gilbert, The Australian Loan Council, p. 263, based on Commonwealth data.

27 The Argus, 24 June 1955, p. 10.

28 National Archives of Australia, ‘Notes on Resolution Seeking Abandonment of Uniform Taxation’, A571 1952/1712, part 2, Uniform Taxation—Abandonment Policy File.

29 Ibid.

30 The Canberra Times, 29 August 1957, p. 1.

31 University of Melbourne Archives, ‘Abolition of Uniform Taxation-Policy Statements’, 1972.0032 3/1/37.

32 University of Melbourne Archives, ‘Policy Research Group, Federal–State Financial Relations’, 1972.0032 3/1/38.

33 University of Melbourne Archives, Menzies to Moore, 2 September 1957, 1972.0032 2/2. The offending article appeared in the Sun News-Pictorial of 31 August 1957, p. 12.

34 University of Melbourne Archives, Moore to Guthrie, 4 September 1957, 1972.0032 2/2.

35 University of Melbourne Archives, ‘Victoria’s Financial Position’, 1972.0032 3/1/37.

36 The Canberra Times, 6 June 1958, p.1.

37 University of Melbourne Archives, papers for the thirteenth annual meeting of the Federal Council, 27 September–1 October 1958, 1974.0063, box 1, p. 3.

38 Old Parliament House, ‘Election Speeches: 1958—Robert Menzies’, https://electionspeeches.moadoph.gov.au/speeches/1958-robert-menzies

39 Gilbert, The Australian Loan Council, p. 257, based on Commonwealth data.

40 Mathews and Jay, Federal Finance, p. 242, based on Commonwealth data.

41 Opening speech to the third Commonwealth and Empire Law Conference, Sydney, 24 August 1965, https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-1145

42 Menzies, ‘The Challenge to Federalism’, pp. 3, 6.

43 Ibid., p. 12.

44 Ibid., p. 6.

45 Ibid., p. 14.

46 Menzies, Central Power in the Australian Commonwealth, pp. 3, 24.

47 Ibid., p. 24.

48 Lee, From Third World to First, p. 369.

49 Prasser, ‘Federalism and Commonwealth–State Relations’, provides a useful full list of such entities: pp. 149–50.

50 The Canberra Times, 11 September 1964, p. 1.

51 The Age, 9 November 1971, p. 2.

52 Muir, Bolte from Bamganie, p. 157.

53 National Library of Australia, Henry Bolte, interviewed by Mel Pratt, 1976, ORAL TRC 121/73.

54 Prior, Bolte By Bolte, pp. 149, 120.

55 National Library of Australia, Henry Bolte, interviewed by Mel Pratt, 1976, ORAL TRC 121/73.

56 Kelly, One More Nail, p. 163.

57 Muir, Bolte from Bamganie, p. 143.

58 Kemp, A Liberal State, p. 431.

59 Bennett and Webb, Specific Purpose Payments, Figure 1; data drawn from ‘Discussion Paper on Commonwealth–State Relations’ by Western Australian Department of Treasury and Finance, 2006; also see Ross Garnaut and Vince Fitzgerald, Review of Commonwealth–State Funding, Final Report, Committee for the Review of Commonwealth-State Funding, Melbourne, August 2022, p. 63; Matthews and Jay, Federal Finance, details specific purpose grants by function: p. 228.

60 Pincus, ‘Federalism in the Menzies Years’, p. 137.

Chapter 4 RG Menzies and the Creation of the Reserve Bank

1 Selwyn Cornish is Honorary Associate Professor in the Research School of Economics at the Australian National University, and the Official Historian of the Reserve Bank of Australia.

2 Butlin, ‘Australian Central Banking’, pp. 161–92; Schedvin, Emissaries of Trade, ch. 9.

3 Martin, Robert Menzies, p. 363.

4 Goodhart, The Evolution of Central Banks, p. 7.

5 de Kock, Central Banking, pp. 22–3.

6 Ibid., p. 7.

7 Reserve Bank of Australia Archives, Norman to OA Smith, 31 August 1925, RBAA S-L-119.

8 Harvey, ‘Central Banking’, p. 10.

9 Ibid., p. 9.

10 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 1 May 1930, p. 1335.

11 Commonwealth of Australia, Report of the Royal Commission, p. 224.

12 Ibid., p. 202.

13 Ibid., pp. 202, 224.

14 Coombs, Trial Balance, p. 136.

15 Ibid., p. 133.

16 Ibid., p. 138.

17 Ibid., pp. 138–9.

18 Ibid.

19 National Archives of Australia, A11099, 1/23, Cabinet Meeting, 23–24 October 1956.

20 National Library of Australia, Ms 4936, Box 433, Folder 8, ‘Draft Press Statement’ by the Australian Bankers Association, 12 February 1957.

21 National Library of Australia, Ms 4936, Box 433, Folder 10, Menzies, ‘Banking’, 15 February 1957.

22 National Archives of Australia, A4940/1, C1571, Cabinet meeting, 19 February 1957.

23 National Library of Australia, Ms 4936, Box 433, Folder 10, Menzies, ‘Banking’, 24 February 1957.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 National Library of Australia, MS 4936, Box 433, Folder 10, Menzies, ‘Banking’, 17 March 1957.

27 Ibid.

28 National Library of Australia, MS 4936, Box 433, Folder 10, Fadden to Menzies, 22 March 1957.

29 National Library of Australia, Ms 4936, Box 433, Folder 10, Menzies to Fadden, 2 April 1957.

30 National Archives of Australia, A571/138, 1957/1206, part 1, Cabinet Meeting, 3 April 1957.

31 National Library of Australia, Ms 4936, Box 433, Folder 7, Fadden to Menzies, 10 April 1957.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 National Archives of Australia, 571/1957, 1205, part 2, press conference by Menzies, 10 April 1957.

37 Butlin, ‘Australian Central Banking’, pp. 115–16.

38 Schedvin, Emissaries of Trade, p. 290.

39 Coombs, Trial Balance, p. 140.

40 Martin, ‘Menzies the Man’, p. 1.

41 Hazlehurst, Menzies Observed, p. 7.

Chapter 5 Standing for the ‘Most Ample Provision in Respect of Old Age and Sickness’

1 Dr David Furse-Roberts is a research fellow at the Menzies Research Centre, who has published widely on Robert Menzies.

2 Menzies, Fremantle By-election Speech, Fremantle [WA], 15 August 1945, Robert Menzies Papers, NLA, MS 4936, Box 253, Folder 15.

3 Menzies, policy speech, Melbourne, 10 November 1949.

4 Ibid.

5 Menzies, first William Queale Memorial Lecture, Adelaide, 22 October 1954.

6 Roskam, ‘Liberalism and Social Welfare’, p. 270.

7 Bridge, ‘Sir Earle Christmas Page’.

8 Harrison, ‘Donald Alastair Cameron’.

9 Menzies, policy speech, Melbourne, 10 November 1949.

10 Ibid.

11 Menzies, The Measure of the Years, p. 120.

12 Ibid.

13 Earl Page, ‘National Health Bill 1953’, second reading speech, House of Representatives, 27 March 1953.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Percy Joske, ‘National Health Bill 1953’, second reading speech, House of Representatives, 19 November 1953.

18 Menzies, The Measure of the Years, pp. 120–1.

19 Earl Page, ‘National Health Bill 1953’, second reading speech, House of Representatives, 12 November 1953.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Menzies, The Measure of the Years, p. 122.

23 Ibid., p. 124.

24 Ibid.

25 Menzies, election speech, Canterbury, Vic., 5 May 1954.

26 Menzies, The Measure of the Years, pp. 124–5.

27 Roskam, ‘Liberalism and Social Welfare’, p. 280.

28 Ibid.

29 William McMahon, ‘Aged Persons Homes Bill 1954’, second reading speech, House of Representatives, 3 November 1954.

30 Ibid.

31 William Spooner, ‘Aged Persons Homes Bill 1954’, second reading speech, Senate, 11 November 1954.

32 Menzies, farewell speech for Rev. Dr Frank Rayward of Wesley Methodist Mission, Sydney, 30 March 1958.

33 Menzies, ‘Speech by the Prime Minister, Rt Hon R G Menzies, at the opening of the Janet Biddlecombe wing of the Queen Elizabeth Home’, Ballarat, 12 September 1959, Robert Menzies Papers, NLA, MS 4936, Box 268, Folder 121.

34 Menzies, The Measure of the Years, p. 125.

35 Menzies, ‘Speech by the Prime Minister, Rt Hon R G Menzies, at the opening of the Janet Biddlecombe wing of the Queen Elizabeth Home’, Ballarat, 12 September 1959, Robert Menzies Papers, NLA, MS 4936, Box 268, Folder 121.

36 Menzies, The Measure of the Years, p. 125.

37 Ibid., p. 127.

38 Chesterton, Maller and Turner, PRA the Story, p. 17.

39 Goddard, ‘How the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme Began’, p. S24.

40 Ibid.

41 (1945) 71 CLR 237.

42 Mendelson, ‘Devaluation of a Constitutional Guarantee’, p. 312.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid., p. 313.

45 (1949) 79 CLR 201.

46 Mendelson, ‘Devaluation of a Constitutional Guarantee’, p. 314.

47 Goddard, ‘How the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme Began’, p. S25.

48 Donald Cameron, ‘National Health Bill’, second reading speech, House of Representatives, 22 October 1959.

49 Ibid.

50 Sloane, A History of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, p 35.

51 Ibid.

Chapter 6 Menzies and Higher Education, 1954–61

1 Andrew Norton is a professor in the Practice of Higher Education Policy at Polis: The Centre for Social Policy Research at the Australian National University.

2 Menzies, press, radio and television conference given at Parliament House, Canberra, 20 January 1966, transcript ID 1229, PM Transcripts: Transcripts from the Prime Ministers of Australia, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

3 Bramston, ‘Young Robert’, pp. 405–23.

4 Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, No 7 1914, pp. 79–80.

5 Ibid.

6 Chavura and Melleuish, The Forgotten Menzies, ch. 2.

7 See Furse-Roberts, Menzies in His Own Words, ch. 5.

8 Martin, ‘R.G. Menzies and the Murray Committee’, p. 184.

9 Croucher and Waghorne, Australian Universities, p. 39.

10 National Security (Universities Commission) Regulations 1943. See Birch, Constitutional Responsibility, pp. 38–40, 69–76.

11 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 15 February 1943, p. 890.

12 Re-establishment and Employment Act 1945.

13 Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment, pp. 326–9.

14 Menzies offered some suggestions and criticisms regarding the ANU legislation, but he supported it: Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 5 July 1946, pp. 2290–4.

15 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 26 July 1945, esp. pp. 4612–13.

16 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 3 April 1946, p. 900.

17 Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment, p. 386.

18 Menzies, election speech, 10 November 1949.

19 Ben Chifley, election speech, delivered 14 November 1949. The Commonwealth scholarships had already been announced by John Dedman: Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 27 September 1949, pp. 580–1. Chifley had floated the funding review idea earlier that year: Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 18 February 1949, p. 497.

20 Administrative arrangements notices: 8 April 1947, 12 January 1950. Available from the National Archives of Australia: Parliamentary Library, Parliamentary Handbook of the Commonwealth of Australia, 2014, Department of Parliamentary Services, Canberra, 2014, p. 529. John Gorton took over as minister in charge of Commonwealth activities in education and research, under the prime minister.

21 Menzies, The Measure of the Years, p. 82.

22 ‘Federal Grant of £1 454 000 for Universities’, The Canberra Times, 13 January 1951.

23 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 27 November 1951, p. 2785.

24 Bennett and Webb, Specific Purpose Payments.

25 For the 1951–52 financial year, including the new grants to universities, specific purpose grants were 21 per cent of all grants to the states. For the 1975–76 financial year, after the Whitlam changes, specific purpose grants were 45.8 per cent of all grants to the states: own calculations from Harold Holt, Commonwealth Payments to or for the States, 1965–66, Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, p. 46; and Lynch, Payments to or for the States, pp. 5–6.

26 Tescher and Bain, Australian Union of Students, Table 5. As an example of costs, in 1958 the total cost of an arts degree at the University of Melbourne was ₤222 12s, which after adjusting to inflation for 2022 is $7844, just over half the cost of a single year of humanities study in 2022: The University of Melbourne Calendar 1958, Melbourne University Press Carlton, Vic., 1958, p. 215. Inflation adjustment using the RBA inflation calculator. The University of Western Australia had a free tuition policy, although it did charge for other student services. This was abandoned in the early 1960s: see Alexander, Campus at Crawley, pp. 346–9.

27 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 27 November 1951, p. 2785.

28 States Grants (Universities) Act 1951.

29 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 28 November 1951, p. 2972.

30 Ibid., p. 2973.

31 Announced by John Dedman, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 27 September 1949, pp. 580–1.

32 Commonwealth Scholarships Regulations 1951; Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia 1953, Commonwealth Government Printer, Canberra, 1953, pp. 235–6.

33 Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, Commonwealth Scholarships Board Annual Report 1971, Commonwealth Government Printing Office, Canberra, 1973, p. 20.

34 Time series assembled from Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, Commonwealth Government Printer, Canberra, 1946–47 to 1958 editions; 1948 was the peak year with 12 464 CRTSsupported university students.

35 The most easily available enrolment time series is the spreadsheet accompanying my Mapping Australian Higher Education 2023¸ ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods, Canberra, 2023, Figure 1.

36 Australian Bureau of Statistics, Consumer Price Index, Australia, ABS, Canberra, 2023 (all groups’ Australia measure). See also Figure 1.

37 Croucher and Waghorne, Australian Universities, pp. 91–101.

38 Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee, A Crisis in the Finances and Development of Australian Universities, AVCC, Canberra, 1952.

39 Time series assembled from Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia.

40 Waghorne and Croucher, Australian Universities, p. 102.

41 Forsyth, A History of the Modern Australian University, p. 55.

42 Murray et al., Report of the Committee on Australian Universities, p. 35.

43 Ibid., pp. 49–51.

44 Ibid., p. 81.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., p. 93.

47 Ibid., p. 91.

48 Ibid., pp. 91–3.

49 Ibid., p. 101.

50 Ibid., p. 102.

51 Menzies, The Measure of the Years, p. 84.

52 Martin, Menzies, p. 398.

53 Menzies, The Measure of the Years, pp. 85–6.

54 Menzies, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 28 November 1957, pp. 2694– 700. The subsequent legislation was the States Grants (Universities) Act 1958. It received royal assent in May 1958 with payments backdated.

55 Flinders, La Trobe, Macquarie, and colleges that became James Cook University and the University of Wollongong. The already existing Newcastle University College became the University of Newcastle in 1965. In 1960 the South Australian Institute of Mines and Industries became the South Australian Institute of Technology and received funding under the Commonwealth’s university funding program. Its subsequent status as the University of South Australia is still thirty years away and not included in this count.

56 Australian Universities Commission Act 1959, sections 13, 14.

57 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 22 April 1959, pp. 1433–4.

58 Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia 1963, Commonwealth Government Printer, Canberra, 1963, p. 755.

59 Calculated from Tescher and Bain, Australian Union of Students, Table 1.

60 Scholarships from CBCS, Year Book 1963, pp. 746–7; student numbers from p. 744. Scholarship numbers were not reported in the Year Book covering 1956. The number of Commonwealth-funded scholarships in the Year Book exceeds the number of Commonwealth scholarships, with Colombo Plan scholarships in addition to those available for domestic students.

61 Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, Report of the Australian Universities Commission on Australian Universities, 1958–1963, Commonwealth Government Printer, Canberra, 1960, pp. 69–75. In the 2020s, ‘tertiary education’ usually refers to higher education and vocational education together. In the 1960s, it meant universities and diploma-awarding colleges as distinguished from technical education that was more focused on trades and other manual skills.

62 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 23 November 1960, p. 3179.

63 Menzies, Statement on the Committee on the Future of Tertiary Education, 27 August 1961, transcript ID 360, PM Transcripts: Transcripts from the Prime Ministers of Australia, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

64 Martin, ‘R.G. Menzies and the Murray Committee’, pp. 202–3.

65 The social services and benefits referendum had more support than the other two referendum questions—on the marketing of primary products, and the terms and conditions of industrial employment—in every electorate. One reason given by the ‘yes’ case for the social services and benefits question was that it would create a more secure legal foundation for benefits already being paid. Some beneficiaries of these benefits may have voted ‘yes’ to protect their own receipt of benefits. The primary products and industrial employment questions failed to secure a majority in any of the seventeen seats won by the Liberal Party at the concurrent federal election, and only one of the twelve seats won by the Country Party. The social services question was successful in five Liberal seats and two Country Party seats. Menzies’s seat of Kooyong recorded a 43.6 per cent ‘yes’ vote on the social services question. This was 7 per cent higher than for either of the other two referendum questions, the third-highest margin among Liberal or Country Party seats over the other questions. Referendum data: Australian Electoral Commission, Australian Referendums 1906-1999 (CD-ROM), AEC, Canberra, 2000.

66 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 2 December 1953, pp. 837–9, 843.

67 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 7 June 1955, pp. 1483–5.

68 Election speeches are available from the Museum of Australian Democracy at the Old Parliament House website.

69 Bob Bessant’s paper on Menzies suggests that Liberal MPs would be ‘strongly opposed’ to large university spending increases on financial grounds: Bob Bessant, ‘Robert Gordon Menzies’.

70 ‘£23m Three-year Program for Universities Urged’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 November 1957.

71 Martin, ‘R.G. Menzies and the Murray Committee’.

72 Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment.

73 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 27 September 1949, pp. 580–1.

74 Comparing 1965–66 and 1971–72. Calculated using ABS CPI and data from Snedden, Commonwealth Payments to or for the States, Table 64.

Chapter 7 The Menzies Government and the Origins of the Open Economy, 1955–61

1 David Lee is associate professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Canberra.

2 Kelly, The End of Certainty.

3 McLean, Why Australia Prospered, p. 222.

4 Deane, Establishment of the Department of Trade.

5 Lee, The Second Rush.

6 The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 November 1955.

7 National Library of Australia, Sir John McEwen, interviewed by Ray Aitchison, ORAL TRC311/4, transcript, Folder 2, 1/40.

8 Schedvin, Emissaries of Trade, p. 138.

9 Ibid.

10 Extract from press interview held by McEwen in Crawford, Australian Trade Policy, p. 534.

11 See generally Singleton and Robertson, Economic Relations between Britain and Australasia.

12 National Archives of Australia, Cabinet decision 203, ‘Submission No. 174—Trade Negotiations with Japan’, 21 May 1956, A1838, 759/1/7, part 4.

13 National Archives of Australia, Submission from McEwen to Cabinet, 16 April 1956, M58, 219, part 4.

14 National Library of Australia, Letter from Crawford to R.V. Jackson, ‘Sir John McEwen’s Manuscript’, 8 September 1977, Crawford Papers, MS 4514, Box 206.

15 Leading article, The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 November 1956.

16 National Archives of Australia, Letter from McEwen to WS Robinson, 21 February 1956, M58 219, part 3.

17 See Lee, ‘Australia’s Window to China’, pp. 212–37.

18 Cullather, The Hungry World, p. 156.

19 ‘Wheat Sale to Red China Worth £27 M.’, The Canberra Times, 7 February 1961.

20 National Archives of Australia, letter from Patterson to Perrett, 28 December 1960, A2051/2, S325, part 1.

21 Pinkstone, Global Connections, p. 190.

22 National Archives of Australia, Submission by C. F. Adermann, Minister for Primary Industry to Cabinet, 10 March 1966, A5619, C410.

23 National Archives of Australia, Cablegram from Stuart to the Department of Trade, 5 November 1956, A1209, 57/5473.

24 See generally, Rix, Coming to Terms.

25 See generally Lee, The Second Rush.

26 ‘Import Trafficking Not Rife Says Mr McEwen’, The Canberra Times, 4 October 1956.

27 Don Whitington, ‘Behind the Headlines’, The Biz, 13 March 1957.

28 ‘Import License Allegations Not Supported’, The Canberra Times, 2 October 1957.

29 Whitwell, The Treasury Line, p. 132.

30 Note by Minister for Trade, ‘Balance of Payments and Import Policy’, 15 February 1960, Crawford Papers, MS 4514, Box 4.

31 National Archives of Australia, Report of Committee of Officials on Import Licensing, 19 February 1960, 12085, 179.

32 Martin, Robert Menzies, pp. 430–1.

33 National Archives of Australia, Letter from McEwen to Menzies, 30 June 1960, M58, 60.

34 Ibid.

35 Reid, The Whitlam Venture, p. 63.

36 National Archives of Australia, Letter from McEwen to Crawford, 24 June 1960, M58/2, 403.

37 JG Crawford, ‘The Economic Situation’, 12 March 1961, Crawford Papers, MS4514, Box 84.

38 Quoted in Whitwell, Treasury Line, p. 259.

39 McLean, Why Australia Prospered, pp. 220–2; see also Tweedie, Trading Partners.

40 Lee, ‘Australia’s Embargo of the Export of Iron Ore’, pp. 96–112.

41 Lee, ‘Reluctant Relaxation’.

42 Porter, Coal, ch. 6.

43 National Archives of Australia, Letter from Nevil Stuart, Commercial Counsellor in Tokyo, to EW Linder, Joint Coal Board, 9 April 1959, A1313, 1960/243, part 1.

44 National Archives of Australia, Minute from AJ Campbell, First Assistant Secretary, Department of Trade, to G. Paul Phillips, 19 April 1960, A1313, 1960/2473, part 1.

45 Lee, The Second Rush, pp. 45–6.

46 Ibid., p. 48; National Archives of Australia, Record of Conversation between Senator Spooner, Minister for National Development and Representatives of the Japanese Steel Industry, 13 June 1960, A1313, 1960/2473, part 1.

47 Lee, The Second Rush; Porter, Coal.

48 National Archives of Australia, Memorandum from Stuart to Department of Trade, 16 December 1959, NAA: A1313, 1960/2473 part 1.

49 Galligan, Utah and Queensland Coal.

50 Pinkstone, Global Connections, p. 189.

51 Ibid., pp. 180–1.

52 Glezer, Tariff Politics.

Chapter 8 Australia in the Atomic Age

1 Dr Michael de Percy FRSA FCILT is a political scientist and political commentator at the University of Canberra. He completed his PhD at the Australian National University and is a graduate of the Royal Military College, Duntroon. De Percy is a member of the Australian Nuclear Association and was appointed to the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts in 2022.

2 Menzies, speech at the Atomic Energy Establishment, Lucas Heights, 23 March 1962.

3 Phillips, ‘Australia Marches into the Atomic Age’, Brisbane Telegraph, 17 September 1954, p. 13.

4 Ibid.

5 Reynolds, Australia’s Bid for the Atomic Bomb, p. 5. The British, after securing American nuclear weapons, no longer needed Australia’s contribution and, no doubt as a result of security requirements, were reluctant to provide Australia with anything more than an experimental reactor at the time, hence Menzies’s ‘consolation prize’.

6 See, for example, Tynan, Atomic Thunder; Kingsley Palmer, ‘Dealing with the Legacy of the Past’; Walker, Maralinga.

7 See Endres, ‘The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism’. Nuclear colonialism is a term that draws on discourse theory to highlight power structures that disenfranchise indigenous people, but in the Australian case was conveniently applied to Menzies without due regard for the very real threat posed by imperial Japan, or for Britain’s inability to defend Australia during World War II, nor for the Chifley government’s part in establishing the joint project to secure nuclear weapons for Australia.

8 Reynolds, Australia’s Bid for the Atomic Bomb, p. 5, begins his book on Australia’s attempt to obtain nuclear weapons with the sentence, ‘History has not been kind to Menzies.’

9 Ibid., p. 853. See also Waters, Australia and Appeasement.

10 World Nuclear Association, ‘Nuclear Power in Canada’, 2023.

11 Which became the Atomic Energy Act.

12 Menzies, speech at the Atomic Energy Establishment, Lucas Heights, 23 March 1962.

13 The idea was touted that Australia could use nuclear blasts to excavate dams and harbours in remote regions of Australia. See Maher, ‘The Lapstone Experiment’.

14 Ibid.

15 Grace, Operation Hurricane, p. 29.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid., p. 36.

18 Reynolds, Australia’s Bid for the Atomic Bomb, p. 861.

19 Grace, Operation Hurricane, p. 47.

20 Reynolds, Australia’s Bid for the Atomic Bomb, p. 860.

21 Maher, ‘The Lapstone Experiment’, pp. 103–4.

22 Grace, Operation Hurricane, p. 64.

23 P Butt, Fortress Australia, Film Australia, 2001.

24 A McDermott, ‘On This Day: Robert Menzies Retires 50 Years Ago’, Museum of Australian Democracy.

25 B Beatty, ‘There’s Drama & Tragedy in Place Names’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 2 August 1947, p. 8.

26 Gerber, ‘The Baruch Plan’.

27 Baruch, speech before the first session of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, Hunter College, New York, 14 June 1946.

28 Menzies, ‘Freedom from Fear’, 17 July 1942.

29 Zachary Gorman, ‘This Atomic Age and You’, Robert Menzies Institute.

30 JE Bowker, ‘“Nightmare” of Atomic Power’, The Argus, 12 August 1949, p. 2.

31 Shute, On the Beach.

32 Friedman, ‘Nuclear Blackmail’.

33 ‘Sharkey Urges Heightened Efforts for Peace’, Tribune (Sydney), 6 March 1957, p. 3.

34 Dr HG Raggatt, secretary of the Department of National Development, discussed the idea of digging dams and harbours using nuclear explosives at the Academy of Science event that hosted Dr G Higgins, visiting US nuclear physicist and director of the Atoms for Peace project, ‘Operation Plowshare’.

35 ‘Uranium Mining Problems’, Morning Bulletin, 15 October 1953, p. 1.

36 ‘Australia’s Uranium’, Geraldton Guardian, 19 August 1952, p. 2.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

39 R Phillips, ‘Australia Marches into the Atomic Age’, Brisbane Telegraph, 17 September 1954, p. 13.

40 ‘Rum Jungle’, Warwick Daily News, 22 September 1954, p. 2.

41 Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, ‘Today We Celebrate 65 Years since the Official Opening of Australia’s First Nuclear Research Reactor in 1958’, 18 April 2023.

42 The reduction in purpose over time is reflected in the name changes of Australia’s major nuclear institution. The Industrial Atomic Energy Policy Committee, established in 1949, became the Atomic Energy Policy Committee, and later, in 1952, the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, and subsequently the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation in 1987.

43 Menzies, speech at the Atomic Energy Establishment, Lucas Heights, 23 March 1962.

44 Arnold, A Very Special Relationship, p. 92.

45 Grace, Operation Hurricane, p. 326.

46 Although the article ‘Menzies Considered Aust Nuclear Weapons Arsenal’ (The Canberra Times, 2 January 1989, p. 9) states it was discussed in 1958.

47 Ibid.

48 United States Navy, ‘Polaris Sales Agreement’, 2023.

49 United States National Archives and Records Administration, ‘Milestone Documents: Test Ban Treaty (1963)’, 2022.

50 See, for example, Arnold, A Very Special Relationship; Butt, Fortress Australia; Grace, Operation Hurricane; McClelland, The Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia; and Reynolds, Australia’s Bid for the Atomic Bomb.

51 McClelland, The Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia.

52 Grace, Operation Hurricane, p. 113.

53 Arnold, A Very Special Relationship, p. 27.

54 Grace, Operation Hurricane, p. 327.

55 McClelland, The Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, pp. 20, 22.

56 Martin, Robert Menzies, pp. 167–8.

57 Reynolds, Australia’s Bid for the Atomic Bomb, p. 127.

58 Ibid.

59 T Gilling, ‘The Push for an AUSSIE Bomb: It Took a Former PM almost Three Decades to Come Clean on His Ambition for Australia to Have a Nuclear Bomb’, The Australian, 23 August 2019.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

62 Menzies had a ‘distaste’ for McMahon, stating that McMahon’s ‘talents were real but are gravely exceeded by his ambitions’: Menzies and Henderson, Letters to My Daughter, p. 171.

63 See, for example, Grace, Operation Hurricane, p. 42.

64 Menzies and Henderson, Letters to My Daughter, pp. 138–9.

65 Ibid., pp. 248–9. See also Hocking, Lionel Murphy, for a counterpoint on Murphy’s relationship with ASIO. Murphy’s casting vote at the 1971 ALP Federal Conference prevented a future Labor government from disbanding ASIO, a course of action that would have been disastrous for Australia’s national security situation.

66 Butt, Fortress Australia.

67 Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, p. 95. Menzies received Franklin’s autobiography as a Christmas gift in 1956; see the Menzies Collection at the University of Melbourne.

Chapter 9 Antarctica

1 Dr Elizabeth Buchanan is a program director at the Modern War Institute at West Point Military Academy (US) and an expert associate of the Australian National University’s National Security College.

2 National Archives of Australia, Robert Menzies: During Office, NAA, 2024.

3 Australian Antarctic Division, Lord (Baron) Richard Casey (1890–1976), Australian Antarctic Division, 2024.

4 Australian Antarctic Division, The Scientific Era Begins, Australian Antarctic Division, 2024.

5 National Archives of Australia, A1838, 1495/3/2/1, part 5.

6 Ibid.

7 Dodds, ‘Awkward Antarctic Nationalism’.

8 Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, International Geophysical Year (IGY), National Archives, 2024.

9 Ibid.

10 National Archives of Australia, A1838, 1495/3/2/1, part 4.

11 Ibid.

12 Tyler, R.G. Casey.

13 Ibid.

14 Menzies, ‘Speech by the Prime Minister the Rt. Hon. R.G. Menzies at the Opening of Federal Council of Liberal Party Conference at the Albert Hall’, Canberra, 1959.

15 Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty, The Antarctic Treaty, 2024.

16 Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty, ‘Parties’, 2024.

17 Menzies, ‘Speech by the Prime Minister the Rt. Hon. R.G. Menzies at the Opening of the Mawson Institute’, University of Adelaide, 15 April 1961.

18 Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty, Report of First Consultative Meeting, Canberra, 1961.

19 Menzies, ‘Speech by the Prime Minister the Rt. Hon. R.G. Menzies at the Opening Address on the Occasion of the First Antarctic Consultative Meeting’, Canberra, 1961.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Chelsea Harvey, ‘China and Russia Continue to Block Protections for Antarctica’, Scientific American, 29 November 2022.

26 Menzies, ‘Speech by the Prime Minister the Rt. Hon. R.G. Menzies at the Opening of the Mawson Institute’, University of Adelaide, 15 April 1961.

Chapter 10 Menzies, Eisenhower, and Suez

1 Robert Bowker is honorary professorial fellow at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, Australian National University.

2 Bowker, Australia, Menzies and Suez, pp. 51–3.

3 Ibid., p. 38.

4 Eden and his colleagues consistently misled Menzies concerning the origins and objectives of the so-called ‘police action’ to intervene against Egypt. See the message from Eden to Menzies, 31 October 1956: Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 289.

5 Throughout the crisis, not a single NATO member gave support to the United Kingdom and France.

6 The most important studies of the role played by Menzies include Hudson, Blind Loyalty; Martin, Robert Menzies; Martin, ‘R. G. Menzies and the Suez Crisis’; Harper, ‘Australia and Suez’; and Ball, ‘The Australian Reaction to the Suez Crisis’.

7 Ward, Australia and the British Embrace, p. 9.

8 Cablegram to London 2545, 1 November 1956: Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 298.

9 For the tensions between Britain and the United States over Egypt, see generally Lucas, Divided We Stand.

10 See Bowker, Australia, Menzies and Suez, pp. 9–30.

11 Ibid., pp. 12–13. Although the Menzies government baulked at the idea of committing forces to the proposed Middle East Command, it was keen to explore the possibility of being party to the political direction of the proposed body. The United States, however, firmly dismissed such thinking, saying ‘any attempt now to build up any sort of political structure for the Command would be completely contrary to State Department thinking’. See National Archives of Australia, Washington cable 473, Washington to Canberra, 4 April 1952, A1838, 163/11/2/1A: Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 23. The idea of a Middle East Command was abandoned in light of Egyptian opposition, and the United States shifted towards sponsoring (but not joining) the creation of the Baghdad Pact.

12 US Secretary of State Dean Acheson suggested to Eden, for example, that the United Kingdom could make a statement that British forces would not remain in Egypt unless required for the Middle East Command, and could make concessions to Egypt over Farouk’s title over Sudan: National Archives of Australia, Cablegram 61, Spender to Casey, 12 January 1952, A1838, 163/11/8/1A. The State Department ‘implied that trouble in the Sudan might be better from the British point of view than continued trouble in Egypt’, and ‘would be likely to accept readily the necessity for considerable British concessions should a deadlock between the United Kingdom and Egypt block progress towards the creation of a Middle East Command’: see National Archives of Australia, Washington memorandum 3025, Summary of discussion with Wells Stabler (OIC Sudan affairs, State Department), 27 November 1951; Memorandum 172/52, Washington to Canberra, 1 February 1952; and Memorandum 252/52, Washington to Canberra, 18 February 1952, A1838 163/11/51/1, part 5.

13 Shuckburgh, Descent to Suez, p. 345.

14 For an entertaining account of the frictions between the United States and Britain over Suez, including Eisenhower’s reactions to Eden’s duplicity, see Devine, Eisenhower and the Cold War, pp. 84–8.

15 Bowker, Australia, Menzies and Suez, pp. 12–16.

16 The remark was all the more revealing because although Nuri al-Said traced his ancestry to Baghdad and his family to Arab tribes, some Iraqis (and others) claimed he was ‘a Kurd by birth, a Turk by education and an Iraqi by profession’: Gallman, Iraq and General Nuri al-Said, p. 9. Others suggest he was of Circassian origin.

17 National Archives of Australia, Cablegram 201, Casey to Menzies, 7 September 1956, A1838, TS163/4/7/3/3: Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 173.

18 Cablegram to Washington, 28 July 1956, provided a briefing for Menzies, who was en route from Canada to Washington: Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 78.

19 Harper, ‘Australia and Suez’, p. 352; and National Archives of Australia, Cablegram 533, Canberra to London, 9 February 1952, A1838 163/11/51/1, part 5: Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 20.

20 See, for example, National Archives of Australia, Cablegram 416, Cairo to Canberra, 28 December 1953, A1838, 854/10/13/4/1, part 2.

21 Marginal notes on McClure-Smith’s despatch indicate that DEA colleagues (Plimsoll, Dexter and Stuart) strongly agreed with him, with Stuart providing the comment that Caffery was a ‘mischievous element’. See National Archives of Australia, 50/53, Cairo to Canberra, 2 December 1953, A1838, 163/11/161, part 2: Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 47.

22 National Archives of Australia, Cablegram 133, Cairo to Canberra, 27 April 1953, A1838, TS163/11/2, part 1. See also Lucas, Divided We Stand, p. 16.

23 The British were constrained by a churlish stance on the part of Churchill, who was fighting a rearguard action over such arcane issues as uniforms for base personnel. An important element of the Conservative Party was also determined to resist a British withdrawal.

24 Washington Savingram 181 of 10 December 1953 (file 163/11/2/1G Part 3) reported the views of US officials that the issues of uniforms for base personnel and the renegotiation clauses which appeared to prolong the existing agreement were ‘the public symbols of occupation’, and noted that the issue of availability of the facilities in case of need would be less of a problem if the Revolutionary Command Council approved the solution.

25 National Archives of Australia, Cairo Despatch 6/54, McClure Smith to Casey, 3 February 1954, A1838, 163/11/51/1/2, part 3.

26 Statement by Menzies, Canberra, 25 September 1956: Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 225.

27 National Archives of Australia, Cablegram 79, Cairo to Canberra, 22 March 1953, A1838, TS163/11/2, part 1.

28 See Hudson, Blind Loyalty; Ball, ‘The Australian Reaction to the Suez Crisis’; and Martin, ‘R. G. Menzies and the Suez Crisis’.

29 To their credit, some officials in External Affairs, including William Forsyth and Keith Brennan, cautioned Tange and Casey against the use of force, despite the pro-British stance of Charles Kevin, William Landale, and others whose views aligned with Menzies. It was the latter group, however, who ultimately shaped the policy advice provided by the department: Bowker, Australia, Menzies and Suez, pp. 108–9.

30 Cablegram 2533, London (Spender) to Canberra, 18 September 1956: Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 201.

31 Unfortunately for Dulles, however, his public rejection of the use of force to secure freedom of navigation through the canal ultimately fuelled the friction between the United States and Britain over what course they should follow in regard to Nasser: Devine, Eisenhower and the Cold War, p. 83.

32 Message from Menzies to Eden Cairo, around 6 September 1956: Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 171.

33 Letter from Menzies to Fadden and Harrison, Cairo, 4 September 1956: Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 165.

34 Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 159.

35 Ibid., documents 168, 170, 172.

36 Ibid., documents 175, 176.

37 Bowker, Australia, Menzies and Suez, p. 71, italics added. This account, which does not appear in Australian reporting, is based on an unofficial verbatim transcript of the debriefing following the Suez Committee meeting with Nasser on 4 September 1956: National Archives of Australia, A1838, 854/10/13/4/1, part 4.

38 In his rather unreliable memoir, Mohamed Heikal claims the exchange ‘was the end’ for the Menzies mission: Heikal, The Cairo Documents, p. 102.

39 Love, Suez, p. 418.

40 Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 113.

41 Ibid., Document 148.

42 Ibid., Document 67.

43 Love, Suez, pp. 417–18. See also Kyle, Suez, p. 222.

44 Heikal, The Cairo Documents, pp. 90–91, 105.

45 In Nasser’s words, ‘Israel, France can do it, but the British cannot at all cooperate with the Israelis. They have dignity, and they will hesitate 100 times to co-operate with the Israelis’: James, ‘When Did Nasser Expect War?’, p. 159.

46 As the British ambassador in Cairo at the time, Humphrey Trevelyan, later put it, even if there was a phantom statement by Eisenhower, ‘it was not crucial at this point. Nasser would not have given way in any case.’ Cited in Lucas, Divided We Stand, pp. 185–6.

47 Cablegram from Menzies to Fadden, London, 11 September 1956: Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 179.

48 Ibid., Document 196.

49 Ibid., Document 196, 353 fn1. See also Kyle, Suez, pp. 220–1.

50 Bowker, Australia, Menzies and Suez, pp. 37–8; Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 242.

51 Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 438.

52 I thank my research assistant, Miguel Galsim, for finding the information discussed here.

53 Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 297. (A copy of the State Department cable is among Menzies’s personal papers in the National Library of Australia, MS4936 series.)

54 See, for example, Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, documents 116 (Record of Cabinet Meeting, 7 August 1956) and 189 (Record of Cabinet Meeting, 13 September 1956).

55 Bowker, Australia, Menzies and Suez, pp. 75–7; Cabinet Notebook, 7 August 1956: Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 116.

56 Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 414.

57 Ibid., Document 378. Eden told Menzies he was ‘immensely impressed’ with the message to Eisenhower and that he ‘agreed with every word’: p. 639.

58 For the full texts of the letters exchanged between Menzies and Eisenhower, see Bowker, Australia, Menzies and Suez, pp. 121–6. See also Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, documents 379, 400.

59 For the full text of the Casey note to Hoover, see Bowker, Australia, Menzies and Suez, p. 124; and Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 387.

60 There is a striking contrast between the formality of Eisenhower’s reply to Menzies (‘Dear Mr Prime Minister’) and the effusive terms of messages between Menzies and his British counterparts. For example, Menzies concluded his message to Macmillan of 16 March 1956: ‘This, my dear Harold, is all elementary to you but it does me good to set it down with my warmest good wishes’: Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 438.

61 The differences between Casey and Menzies over Suez were known to the US administration. See Memorandum of Discussion, 302d Meeting of the National Security Council, Washington, 1 November 1956, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, vol. XVI: Suez Crisis: July 26–December 31, 1956, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1990, p. 902.

62 The excised sentence read ‘[Dulles] believed that [force] had been used in an attempt to bring Nasser down and had been used when it was used because the British and French were afraid the Canal problem was about to be settled and there would be no other opportunity of toppling Nasser’: Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, documents 435, 436.

63 Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 438.

64 Minute, Renouf to Tange, 23 November 1956: Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, Document 394. For an equally unrealistic public statement by Menzies, see Document 415.

65 Bowker and Jordan, Australia and the Suez Crisis, documents 440, 446.

Chapter 11 Skilful Handling

1 Sean Jacobs is a Port Moresby-born Australian writer, and government relations and policy specialist.

2 University of Melbourne, ‘Visit to Indonesia (1959)’, 2013.

3 Umetsu, ‘The Impacts of Indonesia’s Civil War’, p. 190.

4 Ibid.

5 Umetsu, ‘Australia’s Actions Towards Accepting Indonesian Control’, pp. 31–47.

6 Umetsu, ‘The Impacts of Indonesia’s Civil War’, p. 174.

7 Howard, address at the launch of the publication The Conservative, Parliament House, Canberra, 8 September 2005.

8 National Museum of Australia, ‘Korean War’.

9 ‘Statement by the President, Truman on Korea: June 27, 1950’, Wilson Center, 17 January 2013.

10 Valentino, Final Solutions, p. 91.

11 Menzies, election speech, Melbourne, 10 November 1949.

12 Umetsu, ‘Australia’s Response to the West New Guinea Dispute’, p. 74.

13 Ibid., p. 66.

14 Ibid.

15 Umetsu, ‘The Impacts of Indonesia’s Civil War’, p. 176.

16 Billy Hughes, ‘Mr Hughes Replies to Germans’, Courier-Mail, 19 April 1939, p. 12.

17 Umetsu, ‘Australia’s Response to the West New Guinea Dispute’, p. 76.

18 Blainey, The Story of Australia’s People, p. 341.

19 Ibid., p. 175.

20 Indonesia Investments, ‘Colonial Period of Indonesia’.

21 Kathryn Pentecost, ‘A Brief History of the Dutch East Indies—Part 1’, The Indo Project, 2 December 2013.

22 Indonesia Investments, ‘Colonial Period of Indonesia’.

23 Kathryn Pentecost, ‘A Brief History of the Dutch East Indies—Part 1’, The Indo Project, 2 December 2013.

24 ‘Indonesia: Dutch Sorry for Independence War “Extreme Violence”’, Al Jazeera, 18 February 2022.

25 Round Table Conference, Results as Accepted in the Second Plenary Meeting Held on 2 November 1949, Ridderzaal, The Hague.

26 Agung, Twenty Years Indonesian Foreign Policy, p. 67.

27 Adam and Anwar, Violent Internal Conflicts in Asia Pacific, p. 219.

28 Albinski, ‘Australia and the Dutch New Guinea Dispute’, p. 365.

29 Menzies, Dark and Hurrying Days, p. 22.

30 Menzies, Afternoon Light, p. 232.

31 Round Table Conference, Results as Accepted in the Second Plenary Meeting Held on 2 November 1949, Ridderzaal, The Hague.

32 Percy Spender, ‘International Affairs’, House of Representatives, Debates, 9 March 1950, p. 621.

33 Ibid., p. 626.

34 Ibid., p. 622.

35 Ibid., p. 623.

36 Ibid., p. 627.

37 Ibid., p. 621.

38 Ibid., p. 628.

39 Umetsu, ‘Australia’s Response to the West New Guinea Dispute’, p. 62.

40 Doran, ‘Toeing the Line’, p. 7.

41 Umetsu, ‘The Impacts of Indonesia’s Civil War’, p. 174.

42 Albinski, ‘Australia and the Dutch New Guinea Dispute’, p. 370.

43 Umetsu, ‘The Impacts of Indonesia’s Civil War’, p. 185.

44 Isaacson and Thomas, The Wise Men, p. 477.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., p. 521.

47 Howard, The Menzies Era, p. 341.

48 Doran, ‘Toeing the Line’, p. 8.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid., p. 9.

53 Ibid., p. 10.

54 National Archives of Australia, Extract from Macmillan to Menzies, 27 December 1961, in A1838/276, TS3036/6/1, part 14.

55 Blainey, The Story of Australia’s People, p. 342.

56 Peter Edwards, ‘The Foreign and Defence Policies of Robert Menzies: 50 Years on’, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 28 January 2016.

57 Reynolds, ‘Rethinking the Joint Project’, p. 870.

58 Francis Fukuyama, ‘Governance Reform in Papua New Guinea’, World Bank, 2007.

59 Menzies, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 25 February 1959, p. 167.

Chapter 12 Alick Downer’s Immigration Program

1 Dr Paul Brown received a doctorate from the University of Wollongong for his study of Alexander Downer’s formative family policy influences.

2 John Curtin, ‘Defending White Australia against Japan’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 16 December 1941.

3 Downer, The Downers of South Australia, p. 141.

4 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 1 May 1958, no. 18, p. 1396.

5 Jordan, ‘The Reappraisal of the “White Australia Policy”’, p. 224.

6 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 8 May 1958, no. 19, p. 1643.

7 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 1 May 1958, no. 18, p. 1399.

8 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 23 September 1958, no. 39, p. 521.

9 Calwell expressed his preference this way: ‘Australian sentiment, based on reasons of kinship, language, culture, history and political and social institutions, preferred a larger proportion of British to non-British migrants’: quoted in Hassam, ‘From Heroes to Whingers’, p. 80; Calwell, Be Just and Fear Not, p. 99.

10 Arthur Calwell, ‘First Citizenship Ceremony Held at the Albert Hall in Canberra in 1949’, in Klapdor, Coombs and Bohm, p. 6.

11 Arthur Calwell, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, Canberra, 17 September 1958, p. 318.

12 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 8 May 1958, no. 19, p. 1645.

13 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 1 May 1958, no. 18, p. 1398.

14 Ibid., p. 1396.

15 Additionally, in September 1956, the federal government legislated for non-European spouses of Australian citizens to be eligible to qualify for naturalisation on the same basis as European spouses. In December 1956, under Holt as immigration the government took a further step in permitting other non-Europeans admitted to Australia for temporary stays to be able to qualify to apply for naturalisation after fifteen years’ residence. This would be underpinned by their ability to meet the normal requirements for citizenship.

16 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 15 March 1966.

17 Hancock, Australia, p. 68.

18 See Meaney, ‘Britishness and Australian Identity’, pp. 76–90; and Meaney, ‘Britishness and Australian Identity … a reply to Marilyn Lake and Christopher Waters’, pp. 209–32.

19 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 16 September 1958, no. 38, p. 1256.

20 Ibid., p. 1257.

21 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 16 September 1958, no. 38, p. 1275.

22 Ibid.

23 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 8 September 1960, no. 36, p. 1053.

24 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 14 April 1959, no. 18, p. 1179.

25 Ibid.

26 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 14 April 1959, no. 18, p. 1180.

27 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 16 September 1958, no. 38, p. 1275.

28 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 16 September 1958, no. 38, p. 1276.

29 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 16 September 1958, no. 38, p. 1262.

30 Ibid.

Chapter 13 Menzies, Hasluck, and Wentworth

1 Andrew Bragg is a Liberal senator for New South Wales and author of Buraadja: The Liberal Case for National Reconciliation. Damien Freeman is principal policy adviser at the PM Glynn Institute, Australian Catholic University, and author of Radical Conservatism: Tradition as a Guide for Managing Change. The authors are especially grateful to Alana Stone for her research in preparation for the writing of this chapter.

2 Kemp, A Liberal State, p. 450.

3 Ibid., p. 450.

4 Ibid., p. 450.

5 Ibid., p. 451.

6 In 1901, the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 (Imp.) came into force. Section 51(xxvi) of the Constitution gave the Commonwealth the power to make laws with respect to ‘the people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State, for whom it was deemed necessary to make special laws’. Section 127 of the Constitution provided: ‘In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.’ See Sawer, ‘The Australian Constitution and the Australian Aborigine’.

7 The Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 denied the voting rights of ‘Aboriginal natives of Australia … unless so entitled under Section 41 of the Constitution’. Garran advised that ‘half-castes’ were not disqualified from voting, ‘but that all people in whom the aboriginal blood preponderates are disqualified’. See Senate and House of Representatives, Debates, 9–10 April 1902, pp. 11450–599; Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens without Rights.

8 In 1926, David Unaipon, the distinguished Aboriginal writer, speaker, and inventor, pictured on the Australian $50 note, campaigned for a separate Aboriginal Territory of Centralia—a campaign which may have contributed to his arrest on a charge of vagrancy in the same year. See Jones, ‘David Unaipon’.

9 In 1927, Bruce announced a government inquiry into the conditions of ‘half-castes’ and Aborigines in north and central Australia. Constitutional restrictions the inquiry, to be undertaken by Queensland’s Chief Protector JW Bleakley, to the Northern Territory. However, Bruce promised parliament that the interests of all Aboriginal people would benefit from the inquiry: S Bruce, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 6 December 1927, p. 2708.

10 Bleakley’s 1928 report included recommendations for improved living conditions and minimum wages for pastoral workers, increased financial assistance for missions, increased protection (including ‘moral protection’ for females), closer administration of residents at the government institutions in Darwin and Alice Springs, and different policies based on degrees of descent and ‘civilization’. Bleakley included proposed amendments to the Northern Territory Aboriginal Ordinances. See The Aboriginals and Half-castes of Central Australia and North Australia: Report by J. W. Bleakley, Chief Protector of Aboriginals, Queensland, 1928; Government Printer, Melbourne, 1929; Parliamentary Paper, no. 21, 1929.

11 In 1929, Minister for Home Affairs CLA Abbott convened a meeting of groups (mainly missionary societies) interested in Aboriginal welfare to discuss Bleakley’s report. Many of the delegates argued for increased Commonwealth involvement in Aboriginal affairs, but this was rejected by Abbott as not an agenda item. For discussion of constitutional reform, see Paisley, ‘Federalising the Aborigines?’, pp. 248–66.

12 In 1937, the Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities was held in Canberra, from 21–23 April. The conference was attended by representatives of all states (except Tasmania) and the Commonwealth. Attendees exchanged ideas on the administration of Aboriginal affairs and agreed on uniform policy. AO Neville (commissioner of native affairs, Western Australia) and JW Bleakley (chief protector of Aboriginals, Queensland) were the influential speakers. Twenty resolutions were passed. The most significant resolution sanctioned an assimilation policy: ‘This conference believes that the destiny of the natives of aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth, and it therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to that end.’ See Aboriginal Welfare: Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities, Canberra, 21–23 April 1937, Commonwealth Government Printer, Canberra [1937].

13 See Markus, ‘William Cooper and the 1937 Petition to the King’, pp. 46–60.

14 In 1938, 26 January was declared a ‘Day of Mourning’ by Aboriginal activists led by William Ferguson and Jack Patten, who organised a ‘Day of Mourning’ conference in Sydney. A Ten Point Plan based on resolutions from the Day of Mourning conference was presented by a deputation of Aborigines to Prime Minister Lyons, such as the following resolution: ‘We, representing the Aborigines of Australia, assembled in conference at the Australian Hall, Sydney, on the 26th day of January, 1938, this being the 150th Anniversary of the Whiteman’s seizure of our country, herby make protest against the callous treatment of our people by the whiteman during the past 150 years, and we appeal to the Australian nation of today to make new laws for the education and care of Aborigines, and we ask for a new policy which will raise our people to full citizen status and equality within the community.’ See Patten and Ferguson, ‘Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights!’; see also Dow and Gardiner-Garden, Overview of Indigenous Affairs.

15 See Fox, ‘The Fourteen Powers Referendum of 1944’.

16 Zoe Pollock, Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, The Dictionary of Sydney, 2008.

17 National Museum of Australia, ‘Collaborating for Indigenous Rights’, Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

18 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 14 August 1963, p. 81; Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 28 August 1963, p. 561; National Archives of Australia, ‘Documenting a Democracy, Yirrkala Bark Petitions’, 1963.

19 Chesterman, ‘Defending Australia’s Reputation’, pp. 20–39.

20 Ibid.

21 Robert Menzies appearing on the ABC radio recording ‘The School Years in Ballarat’, 25 February 1969, interviewed by Ken Taylor, quoted in Brett, Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, p. 118.

22 Bramston, Robert Menzies, p. 211.

23 Martin, Robert Menzies, p. 562.

24 Ibid., p. 268.

25 Ibid., p. 374.

26 Daley, Driving Mr Menzies, pp. 26–36.

27 Attwood and Markus, The Coalition Government and the Demand for a Referendum, pp. 36–7.

28 Brett, Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, p. 118.

29 Martin, Robert Menzies, p. 268.

30 Ibid., p. 569.

31 Bramston, Robert Menzies, p. 210.

32 Ibid., p. 211.

33 Hasluck, Mucking about, pp. 202–3.

34 Porter, Paul Hasluck, p. 194.

35 Bolton, Paul Hasluck, p. 244.

36 Hasluck, Mucking about, pp. 214–15.

37 The governments of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia joined the Commonwealth Government to discuss common policy in Aboriginal affairs at the September 1951 Native Welfare Conference in Canberra. In tabling the report of the conference, Hasluck stressed the importance of a policy of assimilation, saying, ‘The recent Native Welfare Conference agreed that assimilation is the objective of native welfare measures. Assimilation means, in practical terms, that, in the course of time, it is expected that all persons of aboriginal blood or mixed blood in Australia will live as do white Australians. The acceptance of this policy governs all other aspects of native affairs administration’: P Hasluck, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 18 October 1951, p. 873. The conference established a native welfare council of the ministers of the Commonwealth and of state governments, from which Hasluck hoped to ‘see emerge practical and effective proposals for nation-wide action’.

38 See McGregor, ‘Avoiding “Aborigines”’, p. 513.

39 Hasluck, Native Welfare in Australia, p. 18.

40 McGregor, ‘Avoiding “Aborigines”’, p. 528.

41 See ibid., p. 514, for literature on this topic including analysis of Geoffrey Partington, Robert Porter, Cora Thomas, Will Sanders, and Tim Rowse.

42 Ibid.; see also p. 523 for a discussion of Hasluck’s own critique of the excesses of individualism.

43 Hasluck, An Open Go, p. 100.

44 Ibid., p. 101.

45 See Waters, ‘The Last of Australian Imperial Dreams’, p. 169.

46 For a discussion of his 1965 private member’s Bill in the context of the subsequent referendum, see Attwood and Markus, The 1967 Referendum, p. 37. His arguments are set out in a statement in parliament, where he said that section 127, regarding the counting of Aboriginal people in the census, ‘is an archaic section and one which has no place in our Constitution. I am fairly certain that in this House there would be unanimity that it should go’: WC Wentworth, ‘Second reading speech: Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 1964-65’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 18 May 1965, pp. 1594–6. Regarding section 51(xxvi), he proposed to remove the entire paragraph (not merely the words ‘other than the aboriginal race’), and replace it with a new paragraph prohibiting laws adversely discriminating on the basis of race. For his account of what he was trying to achieve in the popular press, see WC Wentworth, ‘Does Referendum Go Far Enough?’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 November 1965, reproduced in Attwood and Markus, The 1967 Referendum, pp. 114–15.

47 WC Wentworth (minister in charge of Aboriginal affairs), ‘Visit to Wave Hill Lease’, media release, 12 April 1968, included the following statement: ‘The Gurindji told me of their desire to hold and develop a small area of some eight square miles as their own home area and of their plans for improving it. With them I inspected the area which they wanted … In consequence I am now, as a matter of urgency, examining with all the interested parties the implications and the methods of resuming this area from the Wave Hill Lease, and making it available for the purpose for which it has been requested. This would, of course, require the payment of equitable compensation to the present lessees. Should this area become available, it would be necessary to provide assistance on a self-help basis with fencing and building material, so that the Gurindji can develop their home area in the way which they have said they would do.

48 Wentworth and Peter Nixon committed the government to establishing ‘a residential centre and eventually township site on Crown land at Wave Hill about four miles from the Wattie Creek site’: P Nixon (minister for the interior) and WC Wentworth (minister in charge of Aboriginal affairs), ‘Settlement of Aboriginals at Wave Hill, Northern Territory’, media release, 10 July 1968. The proposal met with criticism from the Opposition as being insufficient, however, and debate continued on the wishes of the Gurindji people and land rights more generally.

49 Further States Grants (Aboriginal Advancement) Acts were passed in the following years, and in his second reading speech for the 1969 Bill, Wentworth signalled a new direction in Aboriginal affairs, saying, ‘I believe profoundly that the future of Aboriginal policy can be no better than the future of consultation with the Aboriginal citizens themselves. I am seeking to bring this about in a fuller fashion by two means. One is to assist wherever possible with seminar-type discussions, in particular those in which Aboriginals themselves take part. We have already given considerable help in this respect, and we have found the information and comment provided by such occasions very valuable. The other and more important is to push on with direct consultation with representative groups of Aboriginals by my Office and the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. The Government believes it is essential to provide Aboriginal citizens with regular opportunities to make their desires and views known to those at the centre of policy formation and as far as practicable to help in the formulation of policy’: WC Wentworth, ‘Second reading speech: States Grants (Aboriginal Advancement) Bill 1969’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 11 September 1969, pp. 1240–5.

50 Mulvaney, ‘WEH Stanner’.

51 K Beazley, ‘Second reading speech: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Bill 1964’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 20 May 1964, p. 2160.

52 WC Wentworth, ‘Second reading speech: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Bill 1964’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 20 May 1964, pp. 2166–7.

53 Bragg, Buraadja, p. 46.

54 Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, ‘The AIATSIS Journey’, 2024.

55 Ibid.

56 Bragg, p. 53.

57 Julian Leeser, Menzies Research Centre Thought Leader Series, Sydney, 31 August 2017.

Chapter 14 Robert Menzies, Canberra’s Apostle

1 Dr Ted Ling is a former employee of the National Archives of Australia and the National Library of Australia. He is the author of the research guides on government records about the Australian Capital Territory, published in 2013, and the records relating to former prime minister Robert Menzies, published in 2021.

2 Menzies, The Measure of the Years, p. 143.

3 Hancock, The Battle of Black Mountain, p. 5.

4 National Archives of Australia, A462, 192/1, 14 March 1950.

5 National Archives of Australia, A462, 192/1, 18 January 1952.

6 ‘Transfer Programme to Bring More than 6000 New Population’, The Canberra Times, 16 July 1954, p. 1.

7 ‘Building a National Capital’, The Canberra Times, 16 July 1954, p. 2.

8 National Archives of Australia, A462, 192/16, 3 November 1954.

9 Henderson, A Smile for My Parents, pp. 82–3.

10 National Archives of Australia, MS 4936, box 16, folder 139, 28 April 1956.

11 National Archives of Australia, A11099, Cabinet notebook 1/23, 2 November 1956, pp. 67–8.

12 Ibid., pp. 68–9, 2 November 1956.

13 National Library of Australia, William Holford, AU 14, 12 July 1957.

14 National Archives of Australia, A4940, C1698, 17 July 1957.

15 National Archives of Australia, A4940, C2353.

16 ‘P.M. Replies to Critics of National Capital Expenditure’, The Canberra Times, 18 November 1960, p. 1.

17 National Library of Australia, MS 4936, box 271, folder 141, Speech by the Prime Minister at the opening of the Russell Offices, 17 November 1960.

18 ‘Police Ensured “Official” Opening’, The Canberra Times, 12 March 1962, p. 1.

19 ‘Acoustics Criticised’, The Canberra Times, 7 March 1963, p. 5.

20 ‘10 Awards, Memorial for Jubilee’, The Canberra Times, 13 March 1963, p. 1.

21 ‘P.M. Speaks on the Printed Word’, The Canberra Times, 30 August 1963, p. 1.

22 ‘Holt Announces Currency Values, “Royal” Chosen as Main Unit’, The Canberra Times, 6 June 1963, p. 1.

23 ‘Guests Swelter, Duke Mints First New Cents at Deakin’, The Canberra Times, 23 February 1965, p. 1.

24 National Capital Development Commission, Report Covering Proposals for the Five-Year Period, 1959–1964, February 1959, p. 8, para 35.

25 ‘Menzies Calls for Greater National Outlook’, The Canberra Times, 19 October 1964, p. 1.

26 ‘Speech by Robert Menzies at the Laying of the Foundation Stone for the National Library’, Sound Recording, National Library of Australia, ORAL TRC 60.

27 ‘Menzies Officiates, Stone-laying at Library’, The Canberra Times, 1 April 1966, p. 1.

28 Menzies, The Measure of the Years, p. 147.

29 ‘P.M. Replies to Critics of National Capital Expenditure’, The Canberra Times, 18 November 1960, p. 1.

30 ‘The Era and the Man’, The Canberra Times, 16 May 1978, p. 2.

Chapter 15 Menzies’s Close Shave

1 Dr Lyndon Megarrity is adjunct lecturer at James Cook University in Townsville.

2 ‘Election Was a “Dumper” Says Mr. Menzies’, Townsville Daily Bulletin, 14 December 1961, p. 1.

3 I have explored the notion of Queensland neglect in greater depth in Lyndon Megarrity, ‘The Lion and the Fox: Whitlam, Bjelke-Petersen and the Queensland Electorate 1961–1975’, ANU Historical Journal II, no. 3, 2022, pp. 23–52.

4 See Megarrity, Robert Philp, pp. 152–3.

5 Brisbane Courier, 20 September 1902, p. 4; see also Megarrity, Robert Philp, p. 180.

6 Bolton, A Thousand Miles Away, p. 338; Stephen Wilks, ‘Now is the Psychological Moment’, pp. 49–50; ‘New States’, Maryborough Chronicle, Wide Bay and Burnett Advertiser, 21 July 1910, p. 2.

7 For complaints of Commonwealth neglect in the interwar period, see ‘“In the Cold”: Neglect of Far North’, Brisbane Courier, 3 September 1926, p. 13; ‘Closure of Kairi State Farm: “Neglect of Far North”’, Courier-Mail, 24 June 1935, p. 15.

8 ‘Neglect of Queensland: Mr. Forgan Smith’s Comment’, Daily Mercury (Mackay), 9 May 1939, p. 7.

9 ‘Queensland Defences Neglected’, Truth (Brisbane), 8 September 1940, p. 15.

10 ‘N. Queensland Defence’, Recorder (Port Pirie, SA), 22 September 1950, p. 1; see also ‘Gross Neglect of Queensland’, Truth (Brisbane), 9 May 1954, p. 3.

11 Fitzgerald, Through a Rear Vision Mirror, p. 257.

12 Hanlon, quoted in the Report of the Premiers’ Conference, August 1947, in National Archives of Australia, NADC (Northern Australia Development Committee) Interim Reports, A9816 1946/302, part 3. For background to the ‘Empty north’ theme, see McGregor, Environment, Race, and Nationhood.

13 National Archives of Australia, KM Kehoe, Secretary, Cairns Chamber of Commerce to Minister for Defence, AG Townley, 4 October 1962, in Defence of Northern Australia, A1945 83/1/30; KM Kehoe to Prime Minister RG Menzies, 7 December 1962, in ibid.

14 National Archives of Australia, Press Statement: Reply by Mr Townley to Statement by Mr Calwell, 4 January 1961, in Defence of Northern Australia, A1945 83/1/30. See also Notes on Mr [Malcolm] Moore’s Paper on the Development and Defence of Northern Australia [prepared May 1950 by the Department of Defence] in ibid.

15 For the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, see, for example, Bolton, The Oxford History of Australia, Volume 5, pp. 56–7.

16 Megarrity, Northern Dreams, p. 86.

17 RG Menzies, ‘A Special Message from the Prime Minister of Australia’, in Anon., Queensland Centenary: The First 100 Years 1859–1959.

18 For mining in the 1950s, see Lee, ‘Comalco’s Development of Queensland Bauxite’, pp. 44–58; De La Rue, A Stubborn City, pp. 155, 173; Fitzgerald, Megarrity and Symons, Made in Queensland, p. 188.

19 Lee, ‘Comalco’s Development of Queensland Bauxite’, p. 48.

20 Editorial, ‘Pledges Must Be Honored by Govt.’, Truth (Brisbane), 18 December 1949, p. 2.

21 Note that Porter was initially campaign director of the Menzies-aligned Queensland People’s Party, which became the Queensland division of the Liberal Party in 1949: Porter, The ‘Gut Feeling’, p. 77.

22 See Bongiorno, Dreamers and Schemers, pp. 223–39.

23 Unless otherwise stated, Queensland electoral statistics for Commonwealth House of Representatives election results are sourced from Whitlam, The Whitlam Government 1972–1975, p. 760.

24 Menzies, ‘Speech by the Prime Minister, Mr. Menzies, to 700 Businessmen at Finney’s Auditorium’, Brisbane, 22 July 1955.

25 North Queensland Register, 16 September 1961, p. 1; National Archives of Australia, Brief for Acting Prime Minister, dated 28 April 1960, in Acting Prime Minister’s visit to Queensland June 1960—Brief, A463 1960/4383.

26 ‘Queensland: Stuck like a Limpet?’, The Bulletin, 9 December 1961, p. 6.

27 ‘Government Parties Worried at State–Federal Rift’, The Canberra Times, 7 October 1960, p. 2.

28 Mugga, ‘That Queensland Vote’, The Bulletin, 23 December 1961, p. 4.

29 ‘Anger at Attack on Ministers’, The Canberra Times, 24 September 1960, p. 3.

30 National Archives of Australia, Nicklin to Prime Minister, telegram, 29 August 1961, in [Personal Papers of Prime Minister McEwen] Nicklin, M58 344; Prime Minister to Nicklin, 29 August 1961, in ibid.

31 KK, ‘Queensland’, p. 112.

32 Ibid.; Robert Menzies, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 1 May 1962, p. 1812; ‘New Grant to Qld. for Beef Roads’, The Canberra Times, 2 September 1961, p. 3.

33 Editorial, Courier-Mail, 11 December 1961, p. 2.

34 Mugga, ‘That Queensland Vote’, The Bulletin, 23 December 1961, p. 4.

35 National Archives of Australia, Brief for Acting Prime Minister, dated 28 April 1960, in Acting Prime Minister’s visit to Queensland June 1960—Brief, A463 1960/4383.

36 National Archives of Australia, Commonwealth Treasury, ‘Commonwealth Assistance for Queensland and Western Australia—1961/62’, 23 January 1962, in [Personal Papers of Prime Minister McEwen] Nicklin, M58 344.

37 For Menzies government economic measures, see Whitwell, The Treasury Line, pp. 129–37; and Martin, Robert Menzies, pp. 430–4.

38 National Archives of Australia, Ken J Morris, Minister for Labour and Industry, 4.1.62 Queensland Cabinet Submission no. 3478 re: The Related Problems of Unemployment and Full Employment, in [Personal Papers of Prime Minister McEwen] Brisbane Visit, January 1962, M58 312; Department of Labour and National Service, ‘Review of the Employment Situation—End December 1961’ (News Release, Broadcast 15 January 1962), in ibid.

39 Martin, Robert Menzies, p. 431.

40 See the comments of Fred Campbell (MLA Aspley), Queensland Parliamentary Debates, 22 August 1961, p. 21.

41 National Archives of Australia, Nicklin to Menzies, 9 August 1961, in Representations by the Premier of QLD [Queensland] re the Problem of Aboriginal Welfare [17 pages], A432 1961/5314.

42 ‘“No Major Changes” Forecast Menzies’, Courier-Mail, 7 December 1961, p. 13.

43 May, ‘Political Review’, p. 91.

44 Rydon, ‘Some Aspects of Voting in the 1961 Elections’, pp. 99–100.

45 Elgin Reid, ‘Shock Must Alert Govt.’, Courier-Mail, 11 December 1961, p. 3.

46 Ian Gall cartoon, Courier-Mail, 12 December 1961, p. 2.

47 ALP electoral advertisement, Courier-Mail, 8 December 1961, p. 11. For Labor’s Queensland election campaign in 1961, see Industrial Reporter, ‘Why A.L.P. Did Well’, Courier-Mail, 12 December 1961, p. 3; and Powell, ‘Keeffe, James Bernard’, p. 334.

48 For general details about Whitlam’s foray into Queensland politics during the 1960s, see Whitlam, The Whitlam Government 1972–1975, pp. 230–1, 760–3; Megarrity, ‘Northern Visions’, pp. 26–36.

49 Hayden, Hayden, pp. 68–9.

50 Whitwell, The Treasury Line, p. 135.

51 See McMullin, The Light on the Hill, pp. 292–4.

52 Megarrity, Northern Dreams, pp. 94–5.

53 Fitzgerald, Megarrity and Symons, Made in Queensland, p. 153; Megarrity, Northern Dreams, p. 99.

54 White, Northern Promise’, p. 230.

55 See Megarrity, ‘The Neglected North’.

Chapter 16 Was Menzies Lucky?

1 Greg Melleuish is a professor in the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the University of Wollongong.

2 Hasluck, The Government and the People, p. 244.

3 Robert Menzies, ‘Politics as an Art’, The New York Times, 28 November, 1948.

4 Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 87.

5 Pringle, Australian Accent, p. 65.

6 Ibid., p. 66.

7 Clark, Australian Hopes and Fears, p. 228.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid., p. 230.

10 Donald Horne, The Lucky Country, p. 202

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., p. 203.

13 Ibid., p. 205.

14 Ibid., p. 204.

15 McGregor, Profile of Australia, p. 192.

16 Horne, The Lucky Country, p. 209.

17 Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia: No. 53, 1967, Canberra, 1967, p. 172.

18 Stevens, Planning for War and Peace, p. 98.

19 McLean, Why Australia Prospered.

20 This phrase originated from Justice Henry Bournes Higgins’ decision in the Harvester judgment of 1907.

21 Menzies, The Forgotten People.

22 Ibid., p. 183.

23 May, The Battle for the Banks, ch. 3.

24 Malouf, Australia’s British Inheritance, p. 9.

25 Brett, The Australian Liberals.

26 Calwell, Be Just and Fear Not.

27 Malouf, Made in England, p. 14.

28 Ibid., p. 15.

29 Whitwell, The Treasury Line, p. 111.

30 Ibid., p. 112.

31 Ibid., p. 121.

32 Quoted in ibid., p. 120.

33 Ibid., pp. 136–7.

34 Tacitus, Histories Books I–III, p. 29.

35 Melleuish, ‘Democracy, Liberalism and the Challenge of Social Solidarity’.

36 Jessica Longbottom, ‘The Day Billy Graham Transfixed a Massive MCG Crowd’, ABC News, 23 February 2018.

37 Horne, The Lucky Country, p. 209.

38 Whitwell, The Treasury Line, p. 139.

39 See Melleuish, ‘The Whitlam Narrative’.

Appendix

1 Bunting, R.G. Menzies, pp. 56–7.

INDEX

Page numbers including ‘n’ indicate endnotes.

Aboriginal Australians see Indigenous Australians

Acheson, Dean 160

Aged Persons Homes Act 1954 64, 70–3, 77

Albinski, Henry 156

Antarctica

Antarctic Treaty xvi, 121–32

Australian Antarctic Territory 121–6, 129, 130, 132

anti-communism

Catholic 2, 9, 19–21, 22

Menzies’s 4–5, 123, 125, 153, 236

ANZUS Treaty (1951) 118, 238

armed forces

national service 110–11, 119

overseas deployment 110, 112, 117, 119, 152–3, 158, 238

Arnold, Lorna 116

atomic energy see nuclear technology

Atomic Energy Policy Committee 269n42

Atoms for Peace project (‘Operation Plowshare’) 268n34

Attlee, Clement 109

AUKUS agreement xv–xvi, 119–20

Australian Atomic Energy Commission 107, 111, 269n42

Australian Capital Territory xviii

Australian Democrats 113

Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS) 189–91

Australian Labor Party

electoral performance 6–10, 13, 16–17, 24, 25, 214; see also elections (federal)

factions and divisions 2–3, 8–10, 11–12, 21, 22

Groupers 2, 11–12, 22

immigration policy 165, 166, 167–8, 170–7

purge of dissidents (1955) 13

state branches see New South Wales Labor; Queensland Labor; Victorian Labor

support for Commonwealth involvement in higher education 81–3, 84, 89, 90–3

support for uniform taxation 33, 34

see also Cain (John Snr) Labor government (Victoria); Chifley government; Curtin government; Hawke government; Scullin government; Whitlam government

Australian Labor Party splits xii, 2–3, 19

and 1961 election outcome 233–4

Evatt, Menzies and 1955 split 1–14

Victoria as epicentre of 1955 split 2, 16, 19–26

Australian National University (ANU), Canberra 81, 110, 117–18, 190

Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation 269n42

Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) 6, 110, 118, 119

Australian Universities Commission (AUC) 88–90, 93, 94

Australian Wheat Board 98–9

Baghdad Pact 136

Ball, W Macmahon 142

Bank of England 43, 44–6, 47

banking see central banking; Commonwealth Bank of Australia; Commonwealth Savings Bank; Commonwealth Trading Bank; Reserve Bank of Australia; trading banks

Barry, Bill 2

Baruch Plan 111

Baxter, Philip 117

On the Beach (Shute) 112

Beale, Howard 161

Bentley, JE 31

Bernacchi, Louis 123

Blainey, Geoffrey 154, 162

Blazey, Peter 27–8

Bleakley, JW 180, 278n11, 278n12

Bolte, Henry xiii

attempts to restore state income tax 28, 32–6, 38

Gorton and 38, 39

Menzies and 27–30, 38–9

on Playford 39

premiership and electoral success 24–5

on quality of life 29

renown 39

on uniform taxation 28, 32, 38

Bolton, Geoffrey 186

Bourke, Bill 7

Bowker, John Earl 112

Bragg, Andrew 191–2

Bramston, Troy 180, 184

Brett, Judith 184

Bridges, AD 31

Britain see United Kingdom

British and American Combined Development Agency 111

British Medical Association, Australian Branch 73–4, 75

Brown, Allen 58

Bruce, Stanley 180

Bunting, John 235

Burdekin River irrigation scheme, Queensland 209

Bureau of Agricultural Economics 210

Bureau of Mineral Resources 104

Butlin, SJ 42, 61

Butt, Peter 117

Button, John 23, 24

Caffery, Jefferson 140

Cahill, Joe 33, 35

Cain (John Snr) Labor government (Victoria) 2, 19, 21, 22

Cain, John Jnr 23, 24

Calwell, Arthur 8, 20, 164, 165, 219, 220, 233

immigration policy 170, 172, 174, 175–6, 177, 237

support for Commonwealth involvement in higher education 91

Cameron, Clyde 173, 233

Cameron, Donald xiv, 66–7, 75–6

Canada, nuclear energy industry 108

Canberra, development of xviii, 193–204

Casey, Richard

Antarctic Treaty and 122, 126, 129, 131

on communism in Indonesia 153

Menzies’s correspondence with Eisenhower xvi, 147–8, 150

Suez Crisis and xvi, 137–9, 140, 141, 146, 147–8, 150

West New Guinea dispute and 151, 152, 159, 163, 189

Catholic anti-communism 2, 9, 19–21, 22

Catholic Federation 11–12

Catholic influence 11–12

Catholic Social Studies Movement (the Movement) 1–2, 9, 12, 19–21, 22, 23; see also National Civic Council; Santamaria, BA

central banking 42–4

Bank of England advice 44–6

Central Reserve Bank proposed 46

Commonwealth Bank of Australia central banking functions 44–6, 47–60

Reserve Bank of Australia established xiii, 42, 60–3

Central Queensland Coal Associates 105

centralisation of policy and fiscal power xii–xiii, 28, 32, 34, 37–8, 40; see also income tax (uniform taxation)

Chamberlain, Frank 3

Chavura, Stephen 79

Chifley, Ben 3, 5, 7

Chifley government 4, 5, 6, 40, 64, 67

ANU funding for nuclear research 110, 117

and Burdekin River irrigation scheme 209

education policy 81–3, 84, 90

immigration policy 165, 170, 172, 174, 176–7

Joint Coal Board 104

joint project with UK on nuclear

weapons 108, 109–10, 119

Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme 74–5

plan to re-locate public servants from Melbourne to Canberra 194

Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme 110, 209–10, 237

China 131, 152, 160

trade with xv, 95, 97, 98–9, 103

Churchill, Winston 109, 140, 159

civil rights movement 181

Clarey, Percy 169, 177

Clark, Colin 219, 220, 228

Clunies Ross, Ian 85

coal mining and export xv, 96, 103, 104–5

Cold War x–xi, 4, 109–13, 152–3, 160

commerce see trade agreements

Commonwealth Bank of Australia

central banking advice from Bank of England 44–6

central banking functions separated from xiii, 42, 60–3; see also Reserve Bank of Australia

commercial operations 44, 46, 47, 48–50, 61; see also Commonwealth Trading Bank establishment 44

functions 44–60

legislation 48–50, 51, 60–1

Menzies’s views on separation of functions 50–60

opposition to import restrictions 101

Royal Commission (1935–37) view of functions 47

savings bank operations 44, 50, 53; see also Commonwealth Savings Bank

Special Accounts procedure 48, 50, 51, 53, 58

Commonwealth Banking Corporation 61

Commonwealth Development Bank 61

Commonwealth government department re-location to Canberra 194–5; see also Canberra

Commonwealth government role

Aboriginal affairs 185–92

Federation 206–7

funding for higher education 80–5, 87–8, 90–1, 92

intergovernmental bodies 37–8

Commonwealth powers

Aboriginal affairs 181–2

centralisation of policy and fiscal power 28, 32, 34, 37–8, 40, 80; see also income tax (uniform taxation)

defence powers 80–1

provision of medical and dental services 74–5

see also federalism

Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme 81, 84, 90

Commonwealth Savings Bank 46, 50, 54, 55, 58, 61

Commonwealth Scholarships xiv, 84, 89, 93

Commonwealth Trading Bank 50, 51–63

communism 152–3

Catholic anti-communism 2, 9, 19–21, 22

in Indonesia 153–4

Menzies’s anti-communism 4–5, 123, 125, 153, 236

Communist Party of Australia 3, 5, 110

constitutional law see Commonwealth powers; High Court

Coombs, HC 48–50, 62, 101, 102

Cooper, William, petition to the King 181

Country Party in Queensland 206, 211–12

Crawford, John 96–7, 98, 100, 102

Crockett, Peter 12

CSIRO 85, 122, 210, 216

Curran, James 173

Curtin, John 3, 165, 173

Curtin government 28, 30–1, 40, 170

Commonwealth involvement in higher education 80–1, 90

Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme 73–4

sought power to deal with Aboriginal affairs 181

uniform taxation see income tax (uniform taxation)

Daley, Paul 183

Daly, Fred 5, 7, 9, 172–3

Dalziel, Allan 7, 9, 11

Day, AJ (‘Jack’) 104

Day of Mourning 181

de Kock, MH 43

decimal currency 200–1

Dedman, John 81, 82, 93

Democratic Labor Party (DLP) 2, 22–3, 25, 233–4, 238

Department of Commerce and Agriculture (DCA) 95, 96–7

Department of Defence complex, Russell (Canberra) 198, 203

Department of External Affairs xvi, 122, 125–6, 139, 141–2, 147, 149–50, 273n29; see also Casey, Richard; Spender, Percy

Department of Immigration 167, 168

Department of National Development 104–5

Bureau of Mineral Resources 104

Department of Trade 95, 96–7, 99, 100–1, 103, 104–5, 106

Department of Trade and Customs (DTC) 95, 96–7

Doran, Stuart 160–1

Downer, Alexander (Alick) xvii, 165–78

Duffy, Michael 23

Dulles, Allen 153

Dulles, John Foster 133, 137, 143, 144, 146, 148–9

Dunk, Bill 194

Dunstan, Albert 30

economic and social conditions xviii–xix, 5–6, 220–30, 234, 235–7

economic initiatives of Menzies as groundwork for Hawke economic reforms xv, 95–106

Eden, Anthony

Suez Crisis 133–50

West New Guinea dispute 153

education see higher education colleges and institutes (non-university); university education

Egypt, and the Suez Crisis 133–50

Eisenhower, Dwight xvi, 124–5, 137, 144–9, 150, 234

elections (federal)

1949 4, 64, 82, 92, 210–11, 236

1951 xiii, 153, 211

1953 211

1954 6–8, 10, 13, 91–2, 211, 232

1955 x, 2, 14, 25

1958 x, 2, 14, 25, 35–6, 60, 62

1961 xviii, 15, 16, 25, 30, 96, 205, 213–15, 229–30, 232–3

1963 215, 233

1966 215, 233

1969 24

elections (state)

1955, Victoria 33

Evans, Ernie 211–12

Evatt, HV (Bert, ‘Doc’) xii, 1, 19, 74, 101, 219, 220, 233

ambitions 3, 12

career 4

Chifley on 7

immigration policy 170–1, 176, 177

on the Movement and Labor members’ perceived disloyalty 8–10, 12

and Petrov Royal Commission 7–8, 10–11, 13

rivalry with Menzies 3–14

support for Commonwealth involvement in higher education 89, 91

temperament and behaviour 7, 9–10, 12–13

Fadden, Arthur 5–6, 49, 50, 55–60, 86, 197

Fairhall, Allen 118, 196

Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders 181

federalism xii–xiii, 40–1, 80

Liberal Party platform 35

Menzies’s 28–30, 36–40

federal–state relations

on income tax see income tax (uniform taxation)

see also Commonwealth government role; Commonwealth powers; constitutional law

Federation 206–7

Fitzgerald, Ross 21

Forde, Frank 208

foreign policy x–xi, xvi–xvii, 4–5, 119, 157–8, 164, 238; see also Korean War; military commitments; national security; South-East Asia regional instability; Suez Crisis; Vietnam War; West New Guinea dispute

foreign trade see trade agreements

Forgotten People 221–8, 239

Franklin, Benjamin 118–19

Fraser, Allan 12

Free West Papua Movement (OPM) 162–3

Freeth, Gordon 170, 202

Fukuyama, Francis 163

Goddard, Martyn 75

Goodhart, Charles 43

Gorton, John 38, 39, 118–19, 203, 234

Government Printing Office, Kingston (Canberra) 200

Grace, Paul 115

Greenspan, Alan 236

Griffin, Walter Burley 194, 202; see also Canberra

Griffith, Samuel 206–7

Groupers (Labor Party faction) 2, 11–12, 22

Grundeman, Albert 7, 11

Guthrie, Rutherford 34

Hancock, WK 173

Hanlon, Ned 208, 209

Harvey, Ernest 44–5

Hasluck, Paul xvii, 185–9, 192, 196–7

Hawke government 237

Menzies era groundwork for Hawke economic reforms xv, 95–106

‘no new mines’ uranium policy 113

Hayden, Bill 215

Hayek, Friedrich 65

Hayes, Tom 2

Haylen, Leslie 173, 174, 175, 176, 177

Hazlehurst, Cameron 63

health policy 64–5

health system ‘contributory principle’ xiv, 64, 66, 67–70, 76–7

legislation 67–73, 75

liberalism and public health 65–6, 77

mental healthcare initiatives 73

ministers 66–7

Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme 73–7

Heikal, Mohamed 144

Henderson, Edwina 195

Henderson, Heather 183, 195–6

Henderson, Loy 146

Henty, Denham 169

Herde, Ken 196, 198

Heyes, Tasman 167

Higgins, G 268n34

High Court 80

BMA Case 75

income tax rulings 28, 33, 80

Pharmaceutical Benefits Case 74

High Flux Australian Reactor (HIFAR), Lucas Heights, New South Wales 107–9, 113, 114

higher education colleges and institutes (non-university) 78, 89–90, 94; see also university education

Hiley, Tom 212

history, Menzies on 63

Hogan, Ned 19

Holford, William 196, 197

Holt, Harold 34, 39, 118, 234

and Aboriginal Affairs 182

on decimal currency 200–1

immigration policy xvii, 165, 166, 168, 172, 173

northern development 216

nuclear policy 118

Treasurer 61, 101–2

Hoover, Herbert 144, 148

Horne, Donald 219, 220, 228, 233

Horsfall, Jack 27

Howard, John 16, 27, 152, 160, 231–2, 233, 236

Howard government 77, 113

Hudson, William 142

Hughes, Billy ix, 154

Hughes, Wilfrid Kent 194–5

Hulme, Alan 177, 212

immigration policy xvii, 165–78, 237

import licensing 95–6, 100–3, 106

income tax (uniform taxation) xiii, 28, 30–41, 80, 208–9

Commonwealth payments to states 28, 30–1, 32, 34–6, 40, 80

High Court challenges 28, 33

introduction of 28

Menzies on 31, 32, 35–7, 38, 39, 40

state taxing powers 28, 31–6, 38, 80

incrementalism x, xi, xvii, xix, 30, 114–15, 165–73, 175, 178, 233, 235

Indigenous Australians

activism 181–2, 189

assimilation policy 181, 182, 187–8

Commonwealth involvement in Aboriginal affairs 185–92

Commonwealth powers in Aboriginal affairs 181–2

emigration rights 169

Hasluck policymaking 185–9, 192

impact of nuclear tests 108, 117

Menzies’s attitude to 182–5

Menzies government initiatives xvii–xviii, 182

state responsibility 180–1

voting rights 182

Wentworth policymaking and advocacy 189–92

Indonesia

Dutch rule (Dutch East Indies) 155–7

instability 151–4

and West New Guinea dispute xvi–xvii, 154–64

Industrial Atomic Energy Policy Committee 269n42

intergovernmental bodies 37–8

International Geophysical Year of 1957 (IGY) 124–5, 127, 130

international relations see Cold War

Irian Jaya 162–3; see also West New Guinea dispute

iron ore exports 96, 103–4, 106

Japan

exports to 100, 104–5, 106

reconciliation with 97

trade agreement with xv, 95, 97–8, 99–100, 103, 106, 238

Japanese companies 103, 104, 105

Jervis Bay nuclear reactor (proposed) 107, 118–19

Joint Coal Board 104

Joint Intelligence Committee (Australia) 124, 125

Jones, Barry 23

Jones, Howard P 160–1

Joske, Percy 69

Keating, Paul x, xv, 237

Kelly, Bert 39

Kelly, Paul, on Menzies xix, 231–9

Kemp, David 39, 179

Kennan, George 160

Kennedy, John Fitzgerald 160–1, 164

Kennelly, Patrick 20

Killen, James 15, 214

Kings Avenue Bridge, Canberra 199

Korean War 110, 112, 152–3, 238

Labor Party see Australian Labor Party; Australian Labor Party splits

Lake Burley Griffin, Canberra xviii, 195, 197, 198, 199, 201–2, 204

land rights 181–2, 189–90

Lee Kuan Yew 37

Lees, Meg 113

Leeser, Julian 192

Liberal Party

electoral performance 25–6, 120, 232; see also elections (federal); Menzies government (1949–66)

on federalism 35

ideology 236, 238–9

on uniform taxation 34, 35

see also Bolte, Henry; Howard government; McMahon government; Menzies government (1949–66)

liberalism and public health 65–6, 77

Lingiari, Vincent 181–2

Lovegrove, Dinny 22

Lucas Heights nuclear reactors xv–xvi, 107–9, 113, 114

Lyons government xiv, 47, 103

Machiavelli, Niccolò 26, 217–18, 220

Macmillan, Harold 37, 115, 138, 146, 149, 150

on South Africa’s racial policies 179

and West New Guinea dispute 159, 161–2, 164

Manhattan Project 108, 118

Mannix, Daniel 20

Martin, Allan 28, 42, 87, 90, 92, 117, 142, 180, 183, 184, 231

Martin, Leslie, and Martin Report 90

Mathews, Race 23

Mawson, Douglas 123, 129

McBride, Philip 146, 194

McCallum, John 195

McClelland, James 116

McClelland Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia 116–17

McClure-Smith, Hugh 140

McDonald, John 32

McEwen, John (Jack) 95, 96, 98, 99, 101–2, 179, 212, 238

McGregor, Craig 220

McGregor, Russell 187–8

McMahon, William 34, 71, 119

McMahon Act (USA) 108, 109–10

McMahon government 119, 189

McManus, Frank 2, 22

Meaney, Neville 173

medical benefits schemes see health policy

Melbourne electoral malapportionment 18

Melbourne Trades Hall 17, 18, 21, 22

Melleuish, Greg 79

mental healthcare initiatives 64, 73

Menzies, Harry 98

Menzies, Pattie 70, 195, 203

Menzies, Robert 30

on aged persons’ homes 71–3

anti-communism 4–5, 123, 125, 153, 236

approach to health system see health policy

attitude to Indigenous Australians 182–5

‘blind loyalty’ to Britain 135–6, 139, 142–3, 150, 163

Bolte and 27–8, 30, 38–9

Burkean beliefs xi, xiii, xviii

Canberra’s champion 193–204

characteristics 218–19, 220, 228, 233, 235

commemoration in Canberra 204

correspondence with Eisenhower xvi, 147–8, 150

critiques of 218–20, 228–9, 233, 234–5

on the Dutch 156

economic and social conditions

faced xviii–xix, 5–6, 220–30

education 79

Eisenhower and xvi, 144–8, 150

electoral success 120, 232; see also elections (federal)

on Evatt 3

federalism 28–30, 36–40

on his own ‘lasting achievements’ 78, 90, 94

on history 63

incrementalism xix, 30, 114–15, 233, 235

interest in universities 78, 83–4, 90–4, 237–8; see also university education

keys to success xix, 234–5

legacy 231–2

longest-serving Prime Minister ix, 1, 120

on McMahon 269n62

on progress xi

retirement 78, 203

rivalry with Evatt 3–14

on separation of commercial and central banking functions of Commonwealth Bank 50–60, 62, 63

on uniform taxation 31, 32, 35–7, 38, 39, 40

values 235

Menzies government (1939–41) 208

Menzies government (1949–66)

1951 budget 5–6

Aboriginal affairs initiatives 182; see also Indigenous Australians

Antarctic Treaty 121–32

defining feature of 40

DLP election preferences 2, 25

incrementalism x, xi, xvii, xix, 30, 114–15, 165–73, 175, 178, 233, 235

Menzies as education minister 82, 90

nuclear weapons testing joint project with UK 108, 110, 111, 115–16, 119–20; see also nuclear technology

phases 232–3

plan to re-locate public servants from Melbourne to Canberra 194–5, 197

policies see foreign policy; health policy; immigration policy; national security; university education

Queensland swing against (1961 election) 205–16

Suez Canal nationalisation see Suez Crisis

uniform income tax see income tax (uniform taxation)

voter trust in xi, 120

and West New Guinea see West New Guinea dispute

military commitments see armed forces

Mills, RC 81

Mills Review 83, 84, 85

mining operations

coal mining and exports xv, 96, 103, 104–5

iron ore exports 96, 103–4, 106

mining boom xv, 96, 103–6

in Queensland 210

uranium exploration and processing 107, 109–10, 111, 113–14

Mitsubishi 105

Monaro Mall, Canberra 199–200

Monash University 87

Moore, Lyle 34

Morrison, Scott 120

the Movement see Catholic Social Studies Movement (the Movement)

Muir, Barry 39

Mulvaney, John 190

Murphy, Lionel 119, 269n65

Murray, Keith 85, 86

Murray, Robert 21

Murray Report and government response xiv, 78, 85–9, 92, 93–4, 237–8

Nasser, Gamal Abdel 133, 134, 135, 136–50

National Capital Development Commission (NCDC) xviii, 193–204

National Carillon, Canberra 200

National Civic Council 2; see also Catholic Social Studies Movement (the Movement); Democratic Labor Party (DLP)

national development 237

National Health Act 1953 64, 66, 67–70, 77

National Health Act 1959 67, 75

National Health Service (UK) 69

National Library of Australia xviii, 202–3

national security 37, 110, 117, 238; see also Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO); foreign policy; military commitments; nuclear technology

national service 110–11, 119

Nethercote, John 231

the Netherlands, and West New Guinea dispute 151–2, 154–64

Neville, AO 278n12

New South Wales

coal industry 103, 104, 105

Commonwealth payments to 35

Menzies’s distaste for 30

New South Wales Labor contrasted with Victorian Labor 21–2

Nicklin, Frank 211–12, 213–14

Norman, Montagu 44–5

Northern Territory xviii, 186

uranium discoveries 107, 111, 113, 114

Welfare Ordinance 1953 182, 186–9

nuclear colonialism 108

nuclear technology xv–xvi, 107–20, 268n13

anti-nuclear movement 112–13

AUKUS agreement xv–xvi, 120

British weapons tests in Australia 108, 110, 111, 115–16

nuclear weapons treaties 115–16, 118

Oliphant, Marcus 118

open economy xv, 95–106

Open Pool Australian Lightwater Reactor (OPAL), Lucas Heights, New South Wales 113

Operation Hurricane 111

Operation Plowshare (Atoms for Peace project) 268n34

Oppenheimer, J Robert 112

Ormonde, Jim 12

O’Sullivan, Fergan 7

Ottawa Agreement 97–8, 103, 106

Overall, John 198–9

Page, Earle xiv, 66, 67–70, 104

Patterson, George 98–9

Pearson, Lester 145

People’s Republic of China see China

Perrett, Chris 98

Petrov affair xi–xii, xvi, 6, 125

Evatt’s conspiracy beliefs 6, 10, 13 and outcome of 1954 election 6–8

Petrov Royal Commission (1954–55) 3, 6, 7–8, 10–11, 13, 118

Pharmaceutical Benefits Act 1944 73–4

Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme 60, 67, 73–7

Philp, Robert 207

Pincus, JJ 29

Playford, Thomas 39

Plimsoll, James 148

Polar Committee (Australia and UK) 123–4

Political Labor Council 17

Porter, Charles 211

Porter, Robert 185

prime ministership see Menzies government (1939–41); Menzies government (1949–66)

Pringle, John Douglas 218–19, 220, 228

progress, Menzies on xi, 79, 233

Progressive Political League 17

prosperity xix, 224–30, 236; see also economic and social conditions

public health see health policy

Queensland

1961 federal election 205, 213–15

1963 and 1966 federal elections 215, 233

coal mining and exports 105, 212

Commonwealth payments to 35, 212, 213

Commonwealth–Queensland

relationship 208–12, 215–16

impact of inflation reduction

measures 213–14

major projects 212, 216

‘neglect’ perception xviii, 205–8, 211–13, 214, 216

New State movement 207–8

Queensland Labor 206, 208, 211, 214–15

Rae, Wally 212

Raggatt, HG 268n34

Reid, Alan 2–3, 8–9, 102

Reserve Bank of Australia

creation of xiii, 42, 60–3

opposition to import licensing 101

prior central banking arrangements see Commonwealth Bank of Australia

Roosevelt, Franklin D 109

Roskam, John 29

Rowse, AL 63

Royal Australian Mint, Deakin (Canberra) 200–1

Royal Australian Regiment 110

Royal Commissions

British nuclear tests in Australia 116–17

on espionage (Petrov Royal Commission) 3, 6, 7–8, 10–11, 13, 118

on monetary and banking systems 47–8

Ruddock, Philip 191

Rum Jungle, Northern Territory 107, 111, 114

Rusk, Dean 118

Russell Defence complex, Canberra 198, 203

Russia 127, 131; see also Soviet Union

Ryan, TJ 207–8

Rylah, Arthur 36

Santamaria, BA xii, 1–2, 7, 8–9, 12, 19–20, 23, 220

Santamaria’s Movement see Catholic Social Studies Movement (the Movement)

savings banks see Commonwealth Savings Bank

Scanlan, Alan 27

Schedvin, CB 42, 61–2, 97

scholarships xiv, 84, 89, 93; see also university education

Scullin government 46

sectarianism 11–12, 39, 211; see also Australian Labor Party splits

Sharman, Campbell 28–9

Shute, Neville 112

Simpson, James 105

Smith, Forgan 208

Smith, Ian 27

Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme 39, 110, 209–10, 237

social conditions see economic and social conditions

social welfare see Aged Persons Homes Act 1954; health policy

South Africa 179, 185

South Australia, Commonwealth payments to 36, 212

South-East Asia regional instability x, 109, 110, 117, 118, 151–4, 158, 238

Soviet Union x–xi, xvi, 4, 5, 108, 110, 152

Antarctica and 122–7, 131

Australian diplomatic ties suspended 125, 131

nuclear test ban treaty 115

nuclear weapons 109–10, 111

see also Petrov affair

Spender, Percy 151, 152, 157–9, 164, 238

Spooner, William 71, 105

Stafford, Alf 183, 192

Stanner, WEH 190

state governments

Commonwealth assistance for mental patient accommodation 73

income tax powers 28, 31–6, 38, 80; see also income tax (uniform taxation)

responsibility for Indigenous Australians 180–1

see also names of states

state–federal relations see Commonwealth government role; Commonwealth powers; constitutional law

Stevens, Bertram 221

Stoller Report on mental health facilities and needs 73

Stout, Vic 21

Stuart, Nevil 104, 105

Suez Crisis xvi, 133–50

Australian perceptions of US role in Egypt 139–42

Australia’s support for UK 134–9

Menzies and Eisenhower xvi, 144–8, 150

Menzies’s mission to Cairo 133, 139, 142–4

Sukarno 151, 154, 156, 158, 160–1

Tange, Arthur 147

Tariff Board 101

Tasmania, Commonwealth payments to 36

Tatz, Colin 191

taxation see income tax (uniform taxation)

Taylor, Jim 27

tertiary education see higher education colleges and institutes (nonuniversity); university education

Theodore, EG 46

Thiess Brothers 105

Thiess/Peabody/Mitsui 105

This Atomic Age—and You! (Bowker) 112

Thorby, HVC 101

Townley, Athol 173

trade agreements xv, 95, 97–100, 103, 106, 238

trade unionists 2, 17, 18, 21, 23, 110

trading banks 42, 44, 45–8, 62

agitation for separation of CBA commercial and central banking functions 48–60, 63

Commonwealth Trading Bank 51–63

deposits 48, 62

Treasury 60, 87, 89, 101, 103, 201, 225, 228

Truman administration (USA) 109, 153

trust xi, 120

Umetsu, Hiro 154, 159

Unaipon, David 180

uniform income tax see income tax (uniform taxation)

United Kingdom

Bank of England 43, 44–6, 47 gift of National Carillon, Canberra 200

nuclear test ban treaty 115–16

nuclear tests in Australia 108, 110, 111, 115–16

nuclear weapons from USA 115

Ottawa Agreement 97–8, 103, 106

Polar Committee (Australia and UK) 123–4

Prime Ministers during Menzies governance 232

spy scandals and US distrust of 109, 110

Suez Crisis xvi, 133–50

trade agreement with Australia xv, 95, 97–8, 210

trade volume with Australia 106

and West New Guinea dispute 159, 160, 161–2, 163

United Nations 4–5, 162

Limited Test Ban Treaty 115–16

negotiations over Suez 146, 148, 149

Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 118

and West New Guinea dispute 159, 160, 162

United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, Baruch Plan 111

United States 111

Antarctica policy 123–4

ANZUS Treaty (1951) 118, 238

distrust of UK 109, 110

embargo on sharing intelligence with Australia 110

facilities in Australia 118, 238

nuclear relationship with UK re-established 115

nuclear test ban treaty 115

nuclear weapons policy (McMahon Act) 108, 109–10, 111

Presidents during Menzies governance 232

Suez Crisis role 133–50

and West New Guinea dispute 159–62, 163

Universities Commission 80–1, 83

university education xiv–xv, 78–94

Australian Universities Commission 88–90, 93, 94

Commonwealth funding 80–5, 87–8, 90–1, 92

Commonwealth Scholarships xiv, 84, 89, 93

Murray Report and government response xiv, 78, 85–9, 92, 93–4, 237–8

see also higher education colleges and institutes (non-university)

University Grants Committee 86, 88; see also Australian Universities Commission (AUC)

University of Melbourne 79, 80, 90

uranium exploration and processing 107, 109–10, 111, 113–14

USSR see Soviet Union

Utah Construction and Mining Company 105

Victoria

attempts to restore state income tax powers 28, 31–6, 38

Bolte government see Bolte, Henry

Cain (John Jnr) Labor government 24

Cain (John Snr) Labor government 2, 19, 21, 22

Commonwealth payments to 30–1, 32–5, 36, 38

electoral history 16–17, 24–6

electoral malapportionment 18

favoured by Menzies 30

Victorian Labor xii–xiii

1955 Labor split and its aftermath 2, 16, 19–26

antecedents 17

constituency 17–18

contrasted with New South Wales Labor 21–2

culture 19, 21–2, 23

electoral performance 16–17, 24, 25

federal intervention 24, 25

MPs targeted by the Movement 20–1

reform group (‘Participants’) 23–4

weakness 16, 17–19, 25–6

Victorian Liberal Party report on uniform taxation 34–5

Vietnam War 110, 117, 119, 158

Ward, Eddie 9, 174

Watt, Alan 141–2

Wave Hill walk-off 182, 189

Wentworth, William Charles (Bill) xvii, 189–92

West, Katherine 30

West New Guinea dispute xvi–xvii, 151–64

Westerman, Alan 99, 102

Western Australia

Commonwealth payments to 36, 212, 213

wheat trade xv, 95, 97, 98–9, 103, 105

White Australia Policy xvii, 165–78, 179

Whitington, Don 101

Whitlam, Gough 23–4, 215, 233, 237

Whitlam government 24, 40, 83, 119–20, 165

Whitwell, Greg 103

Woolcott, Richard 126

Woomera Rocket Range 110