What would Robert Menzies think of today’s Liberal party as it celebrates 80 years since its founding in 1944?
His first reaction would be pleasure that it was still here. After all, in 1944 there had already been three versions of Australia’s major non-Labor party since 1909 when the first Liberal party was formed: Alfred Deakin’s Commonwealth Liberal party; the Nationalists, formed when Billy Hughes defected from Labor over conscription; and the United Australia party, formed during the Depression. This last had collapsed at the 1943 election into a proliferation of splinter and state-based parties.
When Menzies retired in January 1966 after 16 years at the country’s helm, the Liberal party seemed stable and with an ensured future but Menzies knew that political circumstances can change fast. He would see the victory of the teals in once blue-ribbon Liberal seats and wonder if they heralded an electoral realignment.
He would notice that Victoria was no longer the jewel in the Liberal party’s crown, that there was currently no Victorian in federal parliament of prime ministerial calibre, and that the state party was in disarray. Alfred Deakin, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Menzies himself and then Malcolm Fraser were all Victorians. This trend was broken by John Howard and since then our Liberal prime ministers have been Sydneysiders – Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison. None of Victoria’s recent prime ministerial possibilities – Andrew Peacock in the 1980s, Peter Costello in the 2000s, and Josh Frydenberg in 2022 – were realised.
Frydenberg’s loss of his old seat of Kooyong to an independent woman would be the most troubling to Menzies. Back in Menzies’ day, professional people with a tertiary education were more likely to vote Liberal than Labor, and so were women.
Not any longer. The tertiary educated are now more likely to vote for either Labor or the Greens, as are women. The shift of the Coalition’s support base to poorer, less educated people living in the regions and outer suburbs would shock him, as would the transformation of Labor from the party of the working class into the party of professionals. He would find it hard to reconcile Peter Dutton’s reported strategy of abandoning city electorates for the outer suburbs and regions with his memory of the party’s original base in the homes and small businesses of the mid-century “moral middle class”. He would note, though, that Dutton is from Queensland, where the Liberal party has joined with the Nationals (called the Country party in his day) to form the LNP.
On policies, the one that would most distress him, I think, is the transformation of universities into corporations with business plans that have slowly degraded a liberal education in favour of vocational and professional training. Menzies regarded the expansion of Australia’s university system during the 1950s and 1960s as one of his greatest achievements. To him the primary purpose of an undergraduate education was to enlarge the mind and the spirit, and he would be angered and saddened by the hostility Liberal politicians have shown towards the humanities.
Menzies’ library, housed at the University of Melbourne, reveals a man who valued books and reading, history, biography, poetry and fiction. His tastes were conservative but he valued the traditional humanities and would have been appalled that a Liberal government doubled the cost of doing arts in order to steer young people into more job-relevant degrees.
He would be appalled too at what has happened to housing affordability and unlikely to have a great deal of sympathy for property investors and their tax breaks. Homes, as he called them in his speech to the “Forgotten People”, were for living in and raising a family, not an asset to build wealth. When Menzies retired as prime minister after 16 years living in The Lodge, he and Pattie, although they had previously owned a home, were no longer homeowners and his friends did a whip around to buy them somewhere to live.
The weakness of the current federal Liberal party’s policies would also trouble him, and the relentless negativity of its parliamentarians, always attacking and blocking Labor’s initiatives. When the Liberal party was formed, Australia was in the middle of a war and led by a popular and effective prime minister and government. To establish the credibility of the Liberal party as a party of government, the new party needed policies to challenge Labor’s approach to postwar planning and a philosophy to give coherence to these policies.
The purpose of a political party, Menzies believed, was not just to occupy the government benches but to serve the national interest, so he was always open to bipartisan cooperation. He would notice the absence of bipartisanship in the current opposition and wonder how many of its members were more focused on party political advantage than the national interest.
Judith Brett is a political historian and biographer, and an emeritus professor of politics at La Trobe University
