On 17 November, The Hon George Brandis KC delivered the opening keynote address at the Robert Menzies Institute’s Second Annual Conference.

Let me begin by acknowledging the work of the Robert Menzies Institute, and in particular its Director Georgina Downer, in perpetuating the legacy of the statesman it describes as “Australia’s greatest Prime Minister.”

Was Menzies our greatest Prime Minister?  Of course, the greatness of historical figures is a subjective judgment, and when the figure is a political leader, inevitably a largely partisan one as well:  few Labor voters would call Menzies our greatest Prime Minister, just as few Liberals would award that accolade to such Labor heroes as, say, Gough Whitlam or Paul Keating.

There are some objective metrics, the most obvious being longevity.  On that score, as we all know, Menzies wins hands down:  18 years, 163 days, across two terms as Prime Minister:  the first brief and unsuccessful, the second – slightly more than 16 years – by far the longest of any holder of the office.  To put that length of service into historical perspective, by the time he retired on Australia Day 1966, Menzies had been Prime Minister for slightly more than a quarter of the entire history to date of the Australian Commonwealth.  He was one of only five Prime Ministers – the others being Cook (very briefly), Fisher, Hughes and Chifley – to have led the nation during both peace and world war.  By the time he left office, he was the senior statesman of The Commonwealth – in an era when The Commonwealth meant much more than it does today.

Of course, longevity is not the test of greatness.  However it does tell us at least two important things.  First, no political leader in a democratic system remains in office for such a long time without winning a lot of elections, and on the measure of electoral victories alone, Menzies was certainly Australia’s most successful politician.[i][1]   His score – one loss (1946), seven wins (at every election between 1949 and 1963) – would be the envy of any sporting team, let alone any political leader.  As a result of his stupendous electoral success, his time in government exceeded that of all but one other political leader[2] in a comparable Parliamentary democracy in the twentieth century.  And in non-Westminster democracies as well:  he was in office longer than any American President, French President, German Chancellor, Indian Prime Minister or Japanese Prime Minister of the last century.  Only dictators who do not have to seek a periodic electoral mandate – and only a small number of them – led their nations for longer.

Secondly, the perspective which longevity gives enables us to get a better sense of a political leader, for the simple reason that the longer their time in office, the greater opportunity they have to shape the direction of the nation.  On the other side of the coin, since politics is a uniquely hazardous occupation, the longer a leader serves, the better we are able to judge how they handle themselves during times when the political waters become choppy.

In the case of the long postwar Menzies Government, its longevity coincided with a period of stability and economic prosperity unmatched in Australia’s history.  Perhaps “coincided” is the wrong word, because there was unquestionably a causal relationship between policy and prosperity.

Before I turn to the actual achievements of the Menzies governments, let me say something about the man himself.  Because, in his prime, he seemed the very embodiment of the Australian “establishment”, it is often forgotten how humble Menzies’ origins were:  the classic scholarship boy, who came to Melbourne from the tiny rural town of Jeparit.  In fact, it is arguable that his background was more modest than that of any other Liberal Prime Minister, and of some Labor ones as well – Whitlam’s father, for instance, was the Commonwealth Crown Solicitor.

Menzies enjoyed a brilliant career as a law student – he studied in the very room, then the Law Faculty library, where we meet today – which culminated in the Supreme Court Prize for 1918, which was (and still is) awarded to the most outstanding law graduate of the year.  His exceptional intellectual ability produced early success at his chosen calling, the Bar.  Famously, in 1920, at the age of just 25, without a senior counsel to lead him and facing the cream of Australia’s most senior barristers, he won the Engineer’s case[3] – by far the most important constitutional decision of the High Court in the first half of the twentieth century.  (This was the case that decided that, in interpreting the Constitution, the Commonwealth heads of legislative power in s. 51 should be given their full meaning, free of implied limitations on their scope upon which earlier High Courts, with more sensitivity to the rights of the States, had insisted.  It led to a significant rebalancing of the federation towards the central government.)

After his victory in Engineers, Menzies’ career at the Bar was made, and in the 1920s and early 1930s he appeared in many of the most important cases in the Supreme Court of Victoria, the High Court and the Privy Council.  The leader of the Victorian Bar in those years, Owen Dixon KC, chose him as his preferred junior and made him his protégé.  Dixon is said to have despaired at Menzies’ decision to abandon the Bar for politics (although, as his diaries reveal, that did not stop him feasting on the juicy political gossip which the young Menzies would share with him in his chambers).  When, in 1952, Menzies appointed Dixon as Chief Justice of the High Court, it was not lost on any intelligent observer that this was an office which Menzies, had he not chosen the political path, may well himself have filled.

No other Australian Prime Minister enjoyed such an illustrious career before they entered Parliament, and no other Prime Minister – or political leader – comes close to Menzies intellectually.  The claim is sometimes made that H V Evatt was his equal or better, though those who make that claim are not in a position to judge.  When I was young, I was befriended by Sir John Kerr, who knew both men very well – was, indeed, at one time Evatt’s protégé – and I remember asking him about the two.  He told me, quite emphatically, that there was no doubt that Menzies was the better lawyer and had the better mind.[4]

So it is surely an aspect of Menzies’ claim to greatness that he was – I would submit, by a very wide margin – the most talented Australian ever to have occupied the position of Prime Minister.  His talents were not just as one of the most – arguably the most – brilliant barristers of his generation.  His erudition beyond the law, the massive range of his reading and scholarship, particularly in literature and history – which the thousands of volumes of Menzies’ personal library, of which this Institute is the custodian, bespeak – is evidence of that (although it is possible that his intellectual breadth in fields beyond the law was matched by Alfred Deakin).

One little-known fact about Menzies – as is evident from his library – was his devotion to poetry.  He was actually himself given to the occasional composition of verse, but it must be said that it seldom rose above the level of witty doggerel, often delivered in after-dinner speeches to his beloved Savage Club.   And we have it from Heather Henderson’s memoir of her father that, the evening before he was to give a major speech, it was his habit to read not government briefing papers, but poetry – to get the rhythms running through his mind, the better to find the right cadence on the morrow.

All of that being said, neither precocious professional accomplishment as a barrister, nor a mind deeply steeped in history and well-furnished with the best literature, are enough of themselves to make a great Prime Minister – or even a good one.  For that, the ultimate and really the only test is what is achieved in the furnace of politics.  And on that score alone, Menzies’ claim to greatness is, in my view, secure.

As we know, he single-handedly fashioned the Liberal Party from the wreckage of non-Labor politics in the early 1940s, and led it for 21 years, all but the first five of them in government.  In doing so, he created Australia’s most successful political party:  an “election winning machine”, as my former colleague Christopher Pyne once described it, with 19 victories out of 30 elections, including 7 of the last 10.  No other Australian political leader has ever done what Menzies did:  built, effectively from the ground up, the structure of one side of politics.

Great though the creation of the Liberal Party was as a purely political achievement, it was essentially a mechanistic one.  It is to what he achieved in government – the legacy he left – that one ultimately must look in appraising Menzies’ political career.  Although the focus of this conference is on the period between 1943 and 1954, for the purposes of this keynote I want to take a longer view, of the whole period of the Menzies governments, but concentrate in particular on the importance of the election of 1949.

There are many signal achievements, the exploration of some of which are the subject of detailed discussion in the papers we will enjoy over the coming days.  Let me mention just a few of the big ones:  the ANZUS Treaty of 1951, one of the world’s longest-enduring alliances and the bedrock of Australian security for more than 70 years; the development of Canberra as a great capital city, a project in which he took particular pride, most of which took place during his tenure and with his guidance; the Colombo Plan, one of the most important diplomatic achievements of the 1950s and beyond, which was  foundational to our engagement with our Asian neighbours in the post-colonial world; and the significant expansion of Australian universities, following the Murray Report of 1957.   Menzies’ passion for expanding educational opportunity is evident as well in the Commonwealth Scholarship scheme, which for the first time opened the doors of our universities, on a meritocratic and competitive basis, to working class and many more middle class kids (like Menzies himself); and – again in the field of education – the extension, from 1964, of Commonwealth funding (in the language of the time, “state aid”) to non-government schools, the vast majority of which were relatively poor Catholic schools.   This latter was more than merely a significant advance in education policy:  at a time when Australia was still significantly divided on religious and sectarian lines – and as someone who attended one such Catholic school in the 1960s, I remember it – it was a massive statement, coming from a political party at that time dominated by Protestants, of what we would today call “inclusion”.

Every Prime Minster (well, almost every Prime Minister) can point to a list of achievements.  Menzies’ achievements were on a scale and of a significance more lasting, more impressive, than most.  But there is something deeper, which I think is the real key to Menzies’ claim to greatness.  It is the kind of society he created in the years after the Second World War.  Some, though by no means all, subsequent governments made important changes – Whitlam’s extension of social democratic policies, Hawke and Keating’s internationalization of the economy, Howard’s reforms to the tax system – but there were adjustments of, and improvements to, the society Menzies created:  a property-owning democracy, undergirded by a social safety net, structured with ladders of opportunity, both aspirational and egalitarian.

There are some – particularly historians of the Left – who mock those years of peace and prosperity as a kind of lotus land of quiescence and unadventurous mediocrity.  Commentators like that no doubt prefer the excitement and drama of the Whitlam years.  But millions of everyday Australians thought otherwise; for them, the ability to buy a home, raise a family, enjoy a secure job, living in a peaceful community and a stable society, were far to be preferred to the political sturm und drang that excites the commentariat.

That predictable, prosperous society is what the postwar Menzies governments delivered, and it remains the bedrock of Australia today. It is captured in the modest but civilized vision which he had rhapsodized in his Forgotten People broadcasts in the early 1940s, when he spoke of homes material, homes human, and homes spiritual:

“[T]he real life of this nation is to be found … in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution. …  The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole.

…

[O]ne of the best instincts in us induces us to have one little piece of earth with a house and a garden which is ours…

…

My home is where my wife and children are.  The instinct to be with them is the great instinct of civilized man; the instinct to give them a chance in life – to make them not leaners but lifters – is a noble instinct.”[5]

There have been echoes of that speech down the years on the Liberal side of politics:  in John Howard’s “white picket fence” view of Australia in the 1980s; in Joe Hockey’s 2014 Budget speech; in Scott Morrison’s “quiet Australians”.  And although the sentiments Menzies expresses are modest, indeed homely, they capture in a very practical way the essence of the liberal view of the relationship between the citizen and the state:  that the role of government is a limited one, as an enabler for individual and families.  For, as Menzies goes on to say:

“Human nature is at its greatest when it combines dependence upon God with independence of man. We offer no affront – on the contrary, we have the warmest human compassion – toward those whom fate has compelled to live upon the bounty of the State, when we say that the greatest element in a strong people is a fierce independence of spirit.  That is the only real freedom. … The moment a man seeks moral and intellectual refuge in the emotions of a crowd, he ceases to be a human being and becomes a cipher.”[6]

It is not the vision which is modest, but its view of the modest role of the state, and the proper limitations upon its power.  The corollary of a modest view of the state is a bold vision of an empowered, fiercely independent, self-reliant citizenry.

We have become so used to the idea of Australia as a prosperous, property-owning democracy, with comparatively high standards of living and an enviable quality of life, that it seems almost banal to recite it.  Yet it didn’t happen by accident.  It happened because of the policy choices which postwar governments made during the long years of prosperity and stability over which Menzies presided.

There was nothing inevitable about those choices.  In fact, if we consider the world as it would have looked at the time of the 1949 election, the most striking thing is that the values and policies on which Menzies based his campaign – the values of The Forgotten People speeches and the political platform of the Liberal Party – were so against the tide of the times.

The command economy of wartime was still fresh in people’s minds.  In the United Kingdom – which most Australians in those days still thought of as “the mother country”, and whose political example they tended to follow – the Atlee Government was busily giving effect to the Beveridge Report and building a New Jerusalem of expanded government and nationalized industries.  Its outlook was captured in the phrase popularized in those years:  “the man in Whitehall knows best”.[7]    Social democratic or socialist governments had recently been elected in France and elsewhere in western Europe, just as communism gripped eastern Europe and threatened Greece and Italy.  Even in the avowedly capitalist United States, the trend was towards bigger government, as the Truman Administration inherited and adopted the legacy of Roosevelt’s New Deal.  Almost uniquely in the democratic world, in Australia a government was elected which explicitly advocated free enterprise as the way of the future, opposed the nationalization (or further nationalization) of industries, and encouraged middle-class security primarily through property ownership rather than the welfare state.

This was not an embrace of laissez faire capitalism.  It would not be until that 1980s that Liberal Party leaders, notably John Howard, attracted by the examples of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, moved somewhat in the direction of significantly shrinking the role of the state and embracing “small government” as a rhetorical trope.  In the concluding sentences of the Forgotten People broadcast, Menzies was quite explicit about this issue:

“Individual enterprise must drive us forward.  That does not mean that we are to return to the old and selfish notions of laissez-faire.  The functions of the State will be much more than merely keeping the ring within which the competitors will fight.  Our social and industrial obligations will be increased.”[8]

Nevertheless, at the 1949 election, Menzies and his Liberal Party committed themselves, and his governments subsequently pursued, a liberal capitalist model, rather than a social democratic, welfarist model.  That was both profoundly at odds with the direction of most of the democracies at the time and, I would argue, the foundation of modern Australia’s prosperity.

Was Menzies Australia’s greatest Prime Minister?  I certainly think so, but, as I said at the beginning, that is inevitably a subjective and partisan judgment.  What I think can be said with somewhat less subjectivity and partisanship is that in those postwar years, he set the direction of Australia more powerfully than any other Prime Minister has done.  In doing so, he was the architect of modern Australia.

[1] At the national level.  A small number of State Premiers were in office for longer, including Sir Thomas    Playford in South Australia and Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen in Queensland.

[2] Canada’s William Mackenzie King, who served more than 21 years.

[3] Amalgamated Society of Engineers v Adelaide Steamship Co (1920) 28 CLR 129

[4] Private conversation in the mid-1980s. Interestingly, Evatt was one of the barristers who Menzies beat in the Engineers case.

[5] Menzies, The Forgotten People and Other Studies in Democracy (Sydney:  Angus & Robertson, 1944), Ch. 1.

[6]  Ibid.

[7]  First used by the Attlee Cabinet Minister Douglas Jay in his 1937 book The Socialist Case. What Jay actually wrote was:  “In the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.”  In the past couple of years, we have only to substitute “Spring Street” for “Whitehall” to capture the illiberal spirit of the times, although it would be inappropriate in more ways than one to describe Melbourne’s pandemic era policymakers as “gentlemen”.

[8]  op. cit. n. 5.