On this day, 15 September 1934, Robert Menzies is elected to the Federal seat of Kooyong at a general election which sees the United Australia Party (UAP) led by Prime Minister Joseph Lyons comfortably returned to office, albeit now having to form a Coalition with the Country Party. Menzies took the place of retiring member John Latham, the former Leader of the Nationalist Opposition who had graciously stepped aside to allow Joseph Lyons to become the face of the United Australia Party and who had subsequently served as Lyons’s Attorney General.

Menzies was gifted the blue-ribbon seat because he was seen as the rising star within the UAP and its predecessor the Nationalists. He had been elected to the Victorian Parliament in 1928, quickly establishing himself as a leading figure in the Legislative Assembly. He was involved behind the scenes in bringing Labor’s Joseph Lyons over to lead the new United Australia Party in the Federal Parliament. When that party won the 1932 Victorian State election Menzies became Attorney General and Minister for Railways, an office in which he led a considerable reforming program. He was seen as the obvious candidate to be the next Victorian Premier after Stanley Argyle, had he remained in State politics.

It was the double-barreled nature of Latham’s vacancy which attracted Menzies to enter the Federal arena. He had previously rejected the idea of standing for other Federal seats like Alfred Deakin’s old constituency of Ballarat, but Latham’s retirement offered up not just the tremendous safety of Kooyong where Menzies already lived but also the prospect of becoming Federal Attorney General. As a young barrister Menzies had won landmark cases at the High Court, and Lyons directly offered him the Attorney General portfolio in an attempt to lure him into Federal politics and to lend strength to the Federal Cabinet.

Wary of what long stints in Canberra would do to his family life and legal business (this was a period in which Federal politicians were not well remunerated), Menzies initially refused the offer. However, his wife Pattie changed Menzies’s mind, encouraging him to join the Parliament in which he could ‘do the most work for the country’. Lyons may also have offered Menzies the chance to succeed him in the near future, but this is less clear, and like John Howard and Peter Costello 70 years later, would become a matter of controversy. Menzies commented that ‘Canberra is not attractive, either personally or professionally, for obvious reasons, but I feel that the Commonwealth Parliament must still attract the services of men who are interested in public affairs if the Federal system is to continue effectively’.

Menzies was officially offered the UAP nomination for Kooyong by a convention representing its 24 branches of the UAP, Australian Women’s Nationalist League, and the Young Nationalists. He won the seat with 61.7% of the primary vote, but such was the overwhelming UAP support in Kooyong that this actually represented a significant swing from what Latham had achieved during Lyons’s 1931 landslide. Menzies would go on to win the seat another eleven times, and the secure powerbase it provided undoubtedly helped him to focus on big picture issues in a manner which he could not have done had he been subject to greater electoral dangers. This is exemplified by the fact that from 1949 Menzies no longer even owned a house in his electorate, selling up to move permanently to the Lodge in Canberra. Menzies’s hesitation about entering Federal Parliament proved accurate in one respect, his legal business did falter such that on his retirement he had to rely on well-wishers to buy him a new home in Malvern. He accepted the gift on the condition that after he passed away the house would be sold and the proceeds given to schools associated with his family.

Further Reading:

A.W. Martin, Robert Menzies, A Life: Volume 1 1894-1943 (Melbourne University Press, 1993).

Troy Bramston, Robert Menzies: The Art of Politics (Scribe Publications, 2019).