The Pivot of Power

Australian Prime Ministers and Political Leadership, 1949-2016

Paul Strangio, Paul 't Hart, James Walter

• Publisher: Miegunyah Press Digital
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780522868753
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The prime ministership remains the main prize in Australian politics, but it is a precarious one. Leadership turnover in recent years has seen more prime ministers rise and fall than at any time since the decade after federation. What explains this volatility? The Pivot of Power is the second volume in a unique blend of collective biography and institutional history that shows the skills, limitations and passions of incumbents are only part of the story. The ways in which prime ministers thrive and fail are influenced by the resources at their command, the evolving nature of the parties they lead, the daunting public expectations they face under a relentless media gaze, and the challenges that history throws at them. Recent changes in these areas have had a destabilising effect and made the role of prime minister more onerous than ever.After decades of strong national leadership, the office has rarely seemed quite so confounding as it does for its contemporary holders. The Pivot of Power explains how this has come about. And its rich account of prime-ministerial fortune since the mid-twentieth century yields historical lessons for overcoming the current malaise.

1

THE POLITICS OF CONSOLIDATION: ROBERT MENZIES

ON 4 APRIL 1960, Time Magazine announced to its international readership that ‘things are looking up down-under’: Australia was emerging ‘out of the dreaming’.¹ Its cover image was a modernist version of iconography, a portrait by William Dobell of Robert Menzies, who had then been prime minister for just over ten years. The backhanded misappropriation of an Indigenous concept in the article’s title might now be read as indicative of the era, but its purpose was clear: Australia had shrugged off its colonial origins and was being applauded as an enterprising modern economy with a vibrant lifestyle. And its arrival on the world stage owed everything to the leadership of Robert Menzies. He had become the longest-serving Australian prime minister (and would continue for another six years). And he had travelled a long way since his ignominious resignation after his first term as prime minister nearly twenty years earlier. In doing so, he had already had a profound influence on public life.

Robert Menzies’ long tenure as prime minister in the mid twentieth century (1949–66) has ensured that his performance has been revisited by both critics and champions ever since. He has become a foundational figure in the way the role has subsequently been understood. Even trenchant opponents acknowledged the iconic status he came to occupy: ‘He looked like a PM, he behaved like a PM and he had the presence of a PM’.² The drama of his first brief, tumultuous term (1939–41) and the bitter intra-party conflict that precipitated his resignation have rightly been seen as forcing him to reconsider how power should be exercised. The steps he took to regain office reveal the lessons he had drawn from that searing experience. His behaviour would have to be modified: impatience curbed, arrogance reined in and openness to others practised. The Country Party—commonly a partner in non-Labor coalitions—had refused to serve under Menzies during most of his first term, and would have to be appeased. The failure of the United Australia Party (UAP) demanded significant organisational change and attention to the values for which the leading anti–Labor Party stood. This in turn required close attention to how the seemingly successful centralisation of Commonwealth powers under John Curtin and Ben Chifley could be challenged.

It would take Menzies eight years—from 1941 to 1949—to accomplish these goals and regain the prime ministership. His achievement provides one of the outstanding examples of opposition leadership in Australian politics. So successful was it that the great liberal pioneer Alfred Deakin has been overshadowed, and the most competent pre–World War II conservative prime minister, Stanley Bruce, is largely forgotten. Menzies has come to be seen as the authentic voice of Australian liberalism. He is rightly acknowledged as the founder of the Liberal Party. No-one recalls its first manifestation (1909–17), nor the circumstances that caused it to be rebadged as the Nationalist Party and then the UAP, for Menzies effectively remade the party in the 1940s. Successors such as John Howard (Liberal prime minister from 1996 to 2007) have asserted that their purpose was to prosecute Menzies’ agenda in a new age.³ Only John Curtin’s rescue of the shattered Labor Party after James Scullin’s 1931 defeat, and Gough Whitlam’s fight (1967–72) to develop a policy program, reform his party and bring it back into contention after twenty-three years in the wilderness, can match Menzies’ initiative. And only Curtin and Menzies could be said to have managed the transition to office in a manner that saw their primary objectives substantially realised. In each case, what was developed in opposition formed the bedrock for what was done in office.

Reinventing Australia’s Anti-Labor Politics

Menzies’ loss of office in 1941 was devastating. As he left the crucial party meeting in which his decision to resign was announced, he is said to have remarked to his private secretary, with tears in his eyes, that ‘I have been done … I’ll lie down and bleed awhile’. His biographer concluded that his spirit was broken.⁴ He retreated to the backbench, where he was to remain until 1943. Yet it was soon apparent that his ambition scarcely faltered. There were repeated efforts to find an alternative and influential public role, many of them involving attempts to return to England and the British War Cabinet (all blocked by Winston Churchill), and at least one proposal (a diversionary tactic initiated by Churchill) that he should succeed Richard Casey as ambassador to Washington. This was thwarted by John Curtin’s cabinet.⁵ Of more consequence was that within six months of relinquishing the prime ministership, Menzies commenced a series of radio broadcasts that would be the catalyst for, as he later reflected, ‘the revival of liberalism in Australia’.⁶ His intention was to establish unity of purpose within the fragmented remnant party that the UAP had become. Effective advocacy of a philosophy for the contemporary anti-Labor cause would restore public attention and see him become the voice of a new party.

‘The forgotten people’, one of Menzies’ radio broadcasts, delivered on 22 May 1942, has become a touchstone for the analysis of his appeal to a substantial Australian constituency.⁷ Regarded as ‘one of the few classic statements of the Australian Liberal philosophy’,⁸ it has been perceptively analysed by political historian Judith Brett, who draws our attention to the way it represented the opposition between socialism and individualism in a context where liberal values—if the ascendance of Curtin and Chifley continued—could possibly be eclipsed.⁹ Eschewing the ‘false class war’ that he associated with Labor’s politics, Menzies spoke for ‘the forgotten people’, those situated between wealthy elites and the organised labour movement. This group comprised, in his view, the backbone of the nation. Menzies skilfully created a moral category

whose members are defined by their political values, social attitudes and moral qualities as much as by their social and economic position … the logic of the speech is the members’ possession of these virtues as individuals rather than members of a class. As a moral category, the middle class has no material economic boundaries; anyone can belong to it through identifying with the values associated with it.¹⁰

Within this group, individual purpose was represented as anchored within the domestic context of the family and obligations to it. For Menzies, the patriotic instinct was rooted in the defence of hearth and home; the genesis of responsibility was to give one’s children ‘a chance in life’; the imperative behind community engagement was to be ‘lifters, not leaners’. Such ideas, grounded on ‘independence of spirit’, real life being lived away from the public sphere and a limited role for the state, were to be progressively elaborated throughout the 1940s.¹¹ While war continued and Curtin’s appeal for collective effort held sway, with the promise of a new world to be delivered through managed postwar reconstruction still resonating, Menzies’ ideals gained little traction. But he had planted a seed that would flourish once attention turned from the privations of war towards the prospects for peace.

The seed was nurtured not only by Menzies but also by progressive thinkers in business. They had been willing to work with Labor governments in the total war effort. Now they envisaged a postwar world in which the benefits achieved through business–government cooperation were to be sustained by transferring the initiative from the bureaucratic managers of the war economy to private sector leaders. Such views were disseminated in an influential pamphlet, Looking Forward, developed by an economist, CD Kemp, and published in 1944 by a pioneering think tank—the Victorian Branch of the Institute for Public Affairs (IPA)—of which he was then director. Individual rights were represented as sacrosanct. Keynesian economics and a role for the state were accepted, but ‘public works … should be regarded as a balancing factor rather than a permanent field of government activity’. Indeed, planning of the economy in which government maintained the initiative would lead to totalitarianism. In contrast, ‘efficiency … promoted under a system founded in competitive free enterprise … holds out to all participants … incentives to give of their best’.¹² Menzies was already closely engaged with Kemp and the Victorian IPA; their ideas would be fundamental to the program of the party he was now engaged in establishing. Menzies was dominant in crafting the policy platform for the anti-Labor cause in the election of 1943, and even more crucially in 1946 and 1949.

The work of institutional reform was pursued in concert with this development of the program for contemporary liberalism. One of the first steps was to ‘ginger up’ the opposition. An indicative instance illustrates the tactics Menzies adopted to insist that the UAP should act on its beliefs. The UAP had advocated that Australian conscripts should be deployed in all areas where the Japanese were to be fought. Yet despite divisions in party opinion, the leadership (including Menzies) agreed not to move an amendment of Curtin’s proposal to allow for only limited deployment of conscripted militia in the South-West Pacific. UAP leader Billy Hughes—expelled from the Labor Party for proposing conscription in 1916—gained satisfaction from seeing Curtin forced to adopt this measure. He thought in time compulsion would be extended to other theatres, but an amendment at this point would see the Bill abandoned or would provoke an unwanted election.¹³ When the Bill was debated, however, Menzies, with two colleagues, recanted. He argued that ‘this is a world war and … no limit can be set in the duty of Australia in relation to it’.¹⁴

They failed to alter the Bill, but their action triggered furious denunciation by Hughes, and some thought Menzies and his allies were damaged by their stand. But his sometime critic, media proprietor Keith Murdoch, believed Menzies ‘had gained in the hearts and minds of hundreds and thousands of people in the street’. The incident provoked Hughes to call the first party meeting since his assumption of party leadership (succeeding Menzies) over a year before. There was talk among Menzies’ friends of a spill of positions, which Menzies resisted: instead, he drafted a statement ‘of a very frank kind about the Government and our problems’ and persuaded sixteen UAP MPs to sign it. Calling themselves the ‘National Service Group’, these dissidents handed the statement to Hughes on 31 March 1943. Their intention vigorously to seek party reform was apparent.¹⁵

The 1943 election saw the UAP decisively defeated. In its wake, established support organisations disintegrated. The view that wholesale party reform was now imperative became widespread. When the parliamentary party met, despite Hughes’ efforts to forestall any immediate decision on leadership, his incompetence in meeting procedure led to chaos that was only quelled when Menzies suggested, with parliament to meet the following day, a leader must be chosen forthwith. He argued that ‘the continuation in office of our election leaders would lead to shouts of ridicule and that the public would never take us seriously again’.¹⁶ The meeting was unanimous in its support. In the ensuing contest, four candidates (including Menzies) stood; after he won half the votes on the first ballot, the rest dropped out and Menzies was elected. Remarkably, the devious octogenarian Hughes was not done: when he nominated as deputy, other contenders withdrew. The ‘Little Digger’ would retain some of the limelight, despite all. Press reception was cool: there were still doubts about Menzies, but he held the reins.

In October 1944, Menzies convened a unity conference of disparate non-labour organisations from all states with a core group of UAP MPs. There, as he recalled, ‘I faced a state of affairs in which I must dedicate myself to bringing fourteen organizations into one, under one banner, and with one body of ideas’.¹⁷ It was agreed to unite, to form one party, to be known as the Liberal Party of Australia. A second conference in December met to devise organisational principles, including that the party ‘would raise and control its own funds … free of any possibility of control from outside itself and would determine its own destiny’.¹⁸ In the following year, six state divisions were launched, a federal constitution was implemented, a federal council met and a federal executive was elected, 761 branches were formed with 94 500 members, and a federal secretariat was established. The Liberal Party of Australia was formally launched on 31 August 1945.¹⁹

The Liberal Party was now committed to Menzies’ leadership, largely rid of the ex-Labor element that had joined in the interwar years, and with a national organisation and a more coherent philosophy than the UAP had communicated. It was at last in a position to challenge the Labor government effectively, or so it was thought. Early frustrations and the loss of the 1946 election were to dash such optimistic assumptions. It proved hard to encourage a pan-Australian conception of the party and to overcome state-mindedness—rivalries and disputes with local organisations intent on protecting their turf continued to fester. There were also reverses in state elections.²⁰ Menzies travelled extensively and fought the hardest campaign of his life for the federal election, but Labor prime minister Ben Chifley was equally wide-ranging and active.

Menzies called for a contest not about details but over fundamental principles: free enterprise, and recognition that development was the result of initiative, risk-taking and ambition:

These things are not produced by Government Departments … They will be produced in the future as in the past by letting the citizen understand that there are still rewards for the courageous and the intelligent and the vigorous, and that the enterprise of the individual citizen is the essential foundation of the development of the State.²¹

His subtext was the threat of ‘socialist’ planning taking over everyday life. Chifley’s message, an appeal to allow his government, having successfully managed the war, now to manage the peace and to deliver on the postwar reconstruction that had been promised, still prevailed.

Menzies and his followers were devastated by the election outcome: ‘we may expect undisputed Socialist rule’, he said, ‘a steady weakening of the authority of the law, especially the industrial law, and continuing depression of individual initiative’.²² There was speculation about whether Menzies could retain the leadership, or even wanted to do so, and comment in a draft party executive report on the election about ‘a section of the people’ hostile to Menzies who would have nothing to do with the party because of this. Menzies excised that comment before the report was presented. Soon after, the parliamentary party unanimously re-elected him leader. Notwithstanding disappointment and internal criticism, he still appeared ‘the indisputable chief’.²³

Menzies would face further frustration within his party in 1947–48, but gradually the tide turned, partly because of the growing appeal of his message (augmented by a 20-month radio broadcasting campaign leading up to the 1949 election) and partly because of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prime Ministers of Australia: 1949–2016
• Introduction
• 1. The Politics of Consolidation: Robert Menzies
• 2. The Burden of Succession: Harold Holt, John Gorton and William McMahon
• 3. Harnessed by History: Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser
• 4. Agents of Change: Bob Hawke and Paul Keating
• 5. Speaking for the Mainstream: John Howard
• 6. Harbingers of Decline? Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott
• 7. From Pre-eminence to Paradox: the Australian Prime Ministership, 1949–2016
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Index