This fourth and final volume of the Robert Menzies Institute’s examination of the record and legacy of Australia’s longest-serving prime minister is also its lengthiest. No fewer than twenty-two chapters, gathered by editor Zachary Gorman, make a detailed appraisal impractical, so this review will focus mostly on those elements of the Menzies legacy that remain particularly relevant today.
It is hard to imagine a policy area more emblematic of the Menzies era than housing, dealt with here by David Furse-Roberts. Under Menzies’s prime ministership, home ownership in Australia rose from around 53 per cent to around 71 per cent, with the ratio of house prices to average household earnings meanwhile holding steady at around three-to-one.
Although the family (-owned) home was a central component of Menzies’s version of the virtuous life, old Labor struggled with the transition to higher ownership rates. A Chifley government minister could deride Menzies’s proposed support for increased home ownership as a promise to turn workers into “little capitalists.”
What is clear is that Menzies’s love affair with home ownership was based on the home as a place to live rather than a component of an investment portfolio. He would surely have been surprised to learn that in 2025, of the several federal MPs recording multiple property ownerships, equal top of the list was a backbench Labor senator (seven) and equal third was a Labor government minister (five). Not so “little” capitalists.
Menzies saw home ownership as reinforcing “the conservative instincts for security, stability, continuity and loyalty to people and place.” The political pay-off was obvious. Contrasted with today, a young Menzies-era voter was more likely to be married, in their own home and responsible for several children, and the male “breadwinner” probably had a steady, well-paying job — all favourable territory for supporting the political status quo. Furse-Roberts astutely observes that only under Gough Whitlam did the Labor Party adapt its electoral pitch to the property-owning reality.
Today’s Liberal Party has struggled to adapt to this century’s fall in home ownership rates — a failure that, along with cultural and related issues, surely helps explain the reluctance of sufficient of today’s thirty-something progressive voters to commence that previously well-trodden journey to conservatism. A Liberal voter with six properties gets one vote; six young voters (sans property) get six votes. If demography is electoral destiny, the consequences are less than promising for the party.
Perhaps Menzies’s most important decision as prime minister was to commit Australian troops (including conscripts) to the Vietnam war. Lucas McLennan’s chapter on the role of anti-communists in the consequential debate seeks to make up for what he sees as an over-emphasis on the activities of the (initially unsuccessful) antiwar movement.
McLennan cites Menzies’ parliamentary announcement of the troop commitment — “the formal request of the South Vietnamese government… in collaboration with the United States” — but omits the fact that Australia and the United States had to pressure a reluctant Saigon to make the “request.” The “request” had been requested, and the failure to acknowledge that seems curious at best.
McLennan mentions the involvement in the war of members of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization but makes no reference to the absence from the battlefield of Britain, France and Pakistan. He outlines the motivations of pro-war elements in Australia, with Catholic activist B.A. Santamaria assigned a key role. The domino theory features prominently, but it is not clear how fervently this was believed by the players in question. The need to be seen as a reliable US ally seems a more convincing motivator, although the two explanations are not mutually exclusive.
McLellan will court some controversy with his assertion that Australia’s diminished commitment by 1972 means “the view that the Vietnam war played a central role in the election of the Whitlam government is not a serious position.” On balance, this is not unreasonable, but 1972 did signal an end to the vulnerability on defence and foreign affairs that had plagued Labor in the 1950s and 1960s (with its crushing defeat in 1966 the best example). The failed Vietnam intervention, along with outdated views on the Chinese “threat,” had exposed conservative fallibility in this area; since then, it can be argued, defence and foreign policy have not been a decisive factor in any of federal Labor’s election defeats.
Menzies’s supporters might claim, however, that modern Labor’s endorsement of the American alliance indicates its acceptance of the Liberal founder’s emphasis on the need for “great and powerful friends.” An enduring legacy?
Another decisive Menzies policy initiative was “state aid” for non-government schools, an issue addressed by Anne Henderson. By 1963, the stars had aligned for the resolution of the age-old conflict over appropriate government assistance for (largely religious) non-government schools. The Labor Party’s split in 1955 had carved a mostly Catholic vote away from the party to the breakaway Democratic Labor Party; traditional Catholic–Protestant mutual hostility was waning; and many postwar immigrants were Catholics seeking a religious education for their children. As a bonus for Menzies, Labor was divided on the issue.
At the 1963 election, Menzies proposed federal government science grants for all schools, although Henderson doesn’t think the initiative played a critical role in the government’s return with an increased majority. With some understatement, she observes that, “incrementally, federal governments would increase funding for non-government schools over the coming decades…” As with the US alliance, Labor members’ views of state aid would probably now vary between opposed and lukewarm; but also as with the alliance, electoral reality is seen to require funding for private schools, with debate round the edges on the “needs” criterion. Another win for the Menzies legacy?
The role of Commonwealth (university) scholarships was touched on by Andrew Norton in the third volume of the series, and this volume includes both a more detailed outline of the scheme and some revealing interviews with some of the (ageing) cohort of scholarship-holders, all of them grateful for the opportunity provided and most of them conceding that without such an award they could never have attended university. This was not Whitlam-style mass free tertiary education, but it was consistent with Menzies’s view that the best and the brightest were not only to be found in families able to afford full fees.
On universities more generally, Lyndon Megarrity (in a chapter on liberal education) notes how “Menzies’s liberal ideals influenced his ultimate generosity towards the university sector.” His consistent commitment to the humanities would render him an oddity today, both in his party and more broadly, as would his complementary view that fostering intellectual development was a defining role of universities.
On the lighter side, Selwyn Cornish’s chapter on the adoption of decimal currency suggests that while Menzies was initially inclined to support a proposal to name the new unit the “royal,” he had no qualms about siding with public opinion, which favoured the dollar. Whatever the nomenclature, post-1965 school students had much to be grateful for, liberated forever from the burden of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing in pounds, shillings and pence (not to forget the pesky halfpenny).
A recurring theme in this and preceding volumes has been the intellectual element in Menzies’s political outlook and policy agenda. This is revisited in the final chapter by Charles Richardson, which examines leadership, factions and philosophy. One of Richardson’s several interesting points is that Menzies — party founder and longest-serving prime minister — was, like John Howard, the second-longest-serving prime minister, “forged in the fires of opposition.” Perhaps the current Liberal Party turmoil is part of a leadership training program?
All four of these volumes are beautifully put together and well-edited, but the pedant in me cites two factual errors in this final volume to confirm that those overseeing the project are human: the Dawson by-election is identified as occurring in 1967 (it was 1966) and Labor MP Les Haylen’s name is misspelt as Heylan.
Tiny blemishes aside, the series has made a significant contribution to scholarship on the Menzies era, encompassing well-known aspects and some less so. I suspect that it will be a long time before future scholars face the challenge of assessing a prime ministerial record of such longevity and consequence. •
The Menzies Legacy: Ideals, Change, Procession, 1960s and Beyond
Edited by Zachary Gorman | Melbourne University Press | $50 | 392 pages
