This article appeared in the Australian on December 10th, 2024.

Seventeen years of continuous government and seven consecutive election victories: it’s a record that would be unthinkable today, as the nation marks 75 years on Tuesday since the election of the Robert Menzies government and Australia’s longest-serving prime minister.
Yet what remains of Menzies’ legacy today?

The 1949 election is one that stands out in the memory of Australia’s second longest-serving prime minister, John Howard, for personal reasons. “I remember Menzies being elected in 1949,” he said.

“One of the things he promised to do was to abolish petrol rationing. My father owned a petrol service station in Dulwich Hill in Sydney and we were obviously very supportive of that in my family. My parents were very strong Liberal supporters, we were at the pictures that day and the picture place put a notice on the screen saying ‘LCP (Liberal Country Party) takes early lead’.

“It was obvious then that we had gotten off to a good start.”

The comparisons between Mr Howard and Menzies were often and loud in the former’s career; the first and second longest-serving prime ministers in Australian history, both with backgrounds in law, both the most prominent Liberals of their time.

It’s a comparison Mr Howard says he never paid much attention to. “We obviously had a lot in common,” he said. “The other thing we had very much in common that I’m disappointed you haven’t mentioned was a passionate love for the cricket.”

Unlike other political parties founded in response to seismic events like the Nationalists with World War I or the United Australia Party with the Great Depression, Menzies founded the Liberal Party in 1944 to embody a set of values.

Current party leader Peter Dutton told The Australian it was Menzies’s values, along with his ability to learn from his mistakes, that contributed towards his success and longevity. “Menzies was a brilliant leader because he was characterised by a sense of balance and perspective,” Mr Dutton said.

“He learnt from the failures of his short first prime ministership, to become the longest-serving leader of our country in his second prime ministership that was so pivotal to Australia’s prosperity.

“He was a great Australian statesman who believed in the greatness of middle Australia.

“He remembered ‘the forgotten people’ and gave them a voice.”

The Forgotten People was a series of 105 radio broadcasts made during World War II where Menzies developed and shared his political philosophy with the Australian people.

Zachary Gorman, a historian for the Robert Menzies Institute at the University of Melbourne, says the Forgotten People broadcasts were “unlike anything” any other Australian political figure had ever developed.

Dr Gorman believes Menzies’ legacy lies in that which we take most for granted. “So much of modern Australia is shaped by Menzies,” he said. “It’s almost that Menzies’s influence is strongest in those things … we take for granted. The victory of capitalism and that market economy, the rise in home ownership. Other things that may be less obvious for a Liberal figure is that Menzies is the key figure in the evolution of university education in Australia.

“The key watershed moment [of Menzies’s career] is obviously the ’49 election itself. People really underestimate the real contrasting nature of the electoral programs that were put to the Australian people in 1949. It was probably our most ideological election.”

It was this political philosophy Mr Howard believes became an assumed part of the values of the Liberal Party. “We weren’t constantly referring back to [the Forgotten People broadcasts] but they certainly permeated. They talk about these eternally relevant topics of home ownership, the emotional stability a stable family life provided, the difference between a lifter and leaner, the person who contributed versus the person who expected to be supported.

“They were values that passed into the furniture as far as the Liberal Party was concerned.”

But what would Menzies make of the Liberal Party today?

Chief executive of the Robert Menzies Institute Georgina Downer said she believed “Sir Robert would be proud that the Liberal Party has been so successful since he retired from politics in 1966”.

“I think he would look at the success of the Howard government and then the Abbott and Morrison governments as a continuation of that success,” said the daughter of another former Liberal Party leader, Alexander Downer. “He would also recognise that parties are not static, they have to evolve with the nation.

“The values may be the same, but the challenges for managing a whole range of individuals as well as regional differences change with time; so too the manner in which those challenges are faced must equally change with time.”