Robert Menzies
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Sir Robert Gordon Menzies (20 December 1894 – 14 May 1978), Australian politician, was the twelfth and longest-serving Prime Minister of Australia serving eighteen and a half years. He had a rapid rise to power, but his first term as Prime Minister was a failure. He spent eight years in the wilderness before playing a crucial role in reshaping the Liberal Party and making a successful comeback, and he dominated Australian politics in the 1950s and early 1960s.
He was renowned as a brilliant speaker, both on the floor of Parliament and on the hustings. His imperious manner led to him being nicknamed "Ming" (the name of the evil emperor in the Flash Gordon serials) and his controversial role in the sale of scrap iron to Japan on the eve of World War Two earned him his other nickname, "Pig Iron Bob".
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Early life
Menzies was born in Jeparit, a small town in the Wimmera region of western Victoria, the son of a storekeeper and state Member of Parliament of Scottish descent. Menzies's uncle and father-in-law were also politicians. He was inordinately proud of his Highland ancestry -- his enduring nick-name, Ming, came from "Mingus," the Scots pronunciation of "Menzies," although it was also a reference to the evil emperor Ming The Merciless in the science fiction cartoon Flash Gordon.
Menzies was first educated at a one-room school, then later at private schools in Ballarat and Melbourne, and studied law at the University of Melbourne. He was a brilliant student. When he was 19 the First World War broke out. His family decided that his elder brothers would enlist. It was later stated that since the family has made enough of a sacrifice to the war with the enlistment of these brothers, Menzies should stay to finish his studies. This decision would later haunt Menzies's political career.
Menzies graduated in law from Melbourne in 1916 and was called to the Bar in 1918. He soon became one of Melbourne's leading lawyers and began to acquire a considerable fortune. In 1920 he married Pattie Leckie, the daughter of a federal MP, who was reputedly a moderating influence on him.
Rise to power
In 1928, Menzies gave up his lucrative law practice to enter state parliament as a member of the Victorian Legislative Council. His candidacy was nearly defeated when a group of ex-servicemen attacked him in the press for not having enlisted, but he survived this crisis. The following year he shifted to the Legislative Assembly, and was a minister in the conservative Victorian government from 1932 to 1934, and became Deputy Premier of Victoria in 1932.
He entered federal politics in 1934, representing the United Australia Party (UAP) in the upper-class Melbourne electorate of Kooyong. He was immediately appointed Attorney-General and Minister for Industry in the Lyons government, and soon became deputy leader of the UAP. He was seen as Lyons's natural successor and was accused of wanting to push Lyons out, a charge he denied. In 1938 he was given the nickname "Pig Iron Bob", the result of his industrial battle with waterside workers who refused to load scrap iron being sold to Japan. Under Menzies leadership Australia joined Britain and mobilised for war in Europe. In 1939, however, he resigned from the Cabinet in protest at what he saw as the government's inaction. Shortly afterwards, on 7 April 1939, Lyons died.
First term as Prime Minister
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On 26 April 1939, following a period during which the Country Party leader, Sir Earle Page, was caretaker Prime Minister, Menzies was elected Leader of the UAP and was sworn in as Prime Minister. But a crisis arose when Page refused to serve under him. In an extraordinary personal attack in the House, Page accused Menzies of cowardice for not having enlisted in the War, and of treachery to Lyons. Menzies then formed a minority government. When Page was deposed as Country Party leader a few months later, Menzies reformed the Coalition with Page's successor, Archie Cameron. (Menzies later forgave Page, but Pattie Menzies never spoke to him again.)
In September 1939, with Britain's declaration of war against Germany, Menzies found himself a wartime Prime Minister. He did his best to rally the country, but the bitter memories of the disillusionment which followed the First World War made this difficult, and the fact that Menzies had not served in that war undermined his credibility. At the 1940 election, the UAP was nearly defeated, and Menzies' government survived only thanks to the support of two independent MPs. The Labor Party, under John Curtin, refused Menzies's offer to form a war coalition.
In 1941 Menzies spent months in Britain discussing war strategy with Winston Churchill and other leaders, while his position at home deteriorated. When he came home, he found he had lost all support, and was forced to resign, first, on 28 August, as Prime Minister, and then as UAP leader. The Country Party leader, Arthur Fadden, became Prime Minister. Menzies was very bitter about what he saw as this betrayal by his colleagues, and almost left politics.
Return to power
Labor came to power later in October 1941 under John Curtin, following the defeat of the Fadden government in Parliament. In 1943 Curtin won a huge election victory. During 1944 Menzies held a series of meetings to discuss forming a new anti-Labor party to replace the moribund UAP. This was the Liberal Party, which was launched in early 1945 with Menzies as leader. But Labor was firmly entrenched in power and in 1946 Curtin's successor, Ben Chifley, was comfortably re-elected. Comments that "we can't win with Menzies" began to circulate in the conservative press.
Over the next few years, however, the anti-communist atmosphere of the early Cold War began to erode Labor's support. In 1947, Chifley announced in a 42-word statement to the Australian media that he intended to nationalise Australia's private banks, arousing intense middle-class opposition which Menzies successfully exploited. In 1949 a bitter coal-strike, engineered by the Communist Party, also played into Menzies's hands. In December 1949 he won a smashing election victory and again became Prime Minister.
Second term as Prime Minister
One of Menzies's first moves was to cancel Chifley's intended bank nationalisation plans. The ALP retained control of the Senate, however, and made Menzies's life very difficult. In 1951 Menzies introduced legislation to ban the Communist Party, hoping that the Senate would reject it and give him an excuse for a double dissolution election, but Labor let the bill pass: it was later ruled unconstitutional by the High Court. But when the Senate rejected his banking bill, he called a double dissolution and won control of both Houses.
Later in 1951 Menzies decided to hold a referendum to change the Constitution to permit him to ban the Communist Party. The new Labor leader, Dr H V Evatt, campaigned against the referendum on civil liberties grounds, and it was narrowly defeated. This was one of Menzies's few electoral miscalculations. He sent Australian troops to the Korean War and maintained a close alliance with the United States.
Economic conditions, however, deteriorated, and Evatt was confident of winning the 1954 elections. Shortly before the elections, Menzies announced that a Soviet diplomat in Australia Vladimir Petrov, had defected, and that there was evidence of a Soviet spy ring in Australia, including members of Evatt's staff. This Cold War scare enabled Menzies to win the election. Labor accused Menzies of arranging Petrov's defection, but this has since been disproved. He had simply taken advantage of it.
The aftermath of the 1954 election caused a split in the Labor Party, and Menzies was comfortably re-elected over Evatt in 1955 and 1958. By this time the post-war economic boom was in full swing, fuelled by massive immigration and the growth in housing and manufacturing that this produced. Prices for Australia's agricultural exports were also high, ensuring rising incomes. Labor's rather old-fashioned socialist rhetoric was no match for Menzies and his promise of stability and prosperity for all.
Labor's new leader, Arthur Calwell, gave Menzies a scare after an ill-judged squeeze on credit -- an effort to restrain inflation -- caused a rise in unemployment. At the 1961 election Menzies was returned with a majority of only two seats. But Menzies was able to exploit Labor's divisions over the Cold War and the American alliance, and win an increased majority in 1963. An incident in which Calwell was photographed standing outside a South Canberra hotel whilst ALP members were determining policy inside at an ALP Federal conference also contributed to the 1963 victory. It led to an image of "36 faceless men" of the ALP federal executive deciding on ALP policy without the party leaders participating (the standard ALP practice at the time) that was again successfully taken advantage of by Menzies. This was the first "television election," and Menzies, although nearly 70, proved a master of the new medium. He was knighted in the same year.
In 1965 Menzies made the fateful decision to commit Australian troops to the Vietnam War, and also to reintroduce conscription. These moves were initially popular, but quickly became a huge problem for his successors, Holt and Gorton. Despite his pragmatic acceptance of the new power balance in the Pacific after WWII and his strong support for the American alliance, he publicly professed continued admiration for links with Britain, exemplified by his admiration for Queen Elizabeth II, and famously described himself as "British to the bootstraps". In 1954 extraordinary crowds came to see and cheer her. Over the decade, Australia's ardour for Britain and the monarchy faded somewhat, but Menzies' had not. She toured again in 1963. At a function, Menzies quoted Elizabethan (Elizabeth I, that is) poet Barnabe Googe, "I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die."
Retirement and posterity
Menzies retired in January 1966, and was succeeded as Liberal Party leader and Prime Minister by his former Treasurer, Harold Holt. After his retirement the Queen granted him the honorific title Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, an antique royal title which caused much amusement in republican circles. He toured the United States giving lectures, and published two volumes of memoirs. His retirement was spoiled, however, when he suffered strokes in 1968 and 1971. Thereafter he faded from public view, and in old age became very embittered towards his former colleagues. He died in Melbourne in 1978 and was accorded a state funeral.
Menzies was Prime Minister for a total of 18 years, 5 months and 12 days, by far the longest term of any Australian Prime Minister, and during his second term he dominated Australian politics as no-one else has ever done. He managed to live down the failures of his first term in office, and to rebuild the conservative side of politics from the depths of 1943. These were great political achievements. He also did much to develop higher education in Australia, and made the development of Canberra one of his pet projects.
Critics say that Menzies's success was mainly due to the good luck of the long post-war boom and his manipulation of the anti-communist fears of the Cold War years, both of which he exploited with great skill. He was also crucially aided by the crippling dissent within the Labor Party in the 1950s and early Sixties and especially by the catastrophic ALP-DLP split of 1954. But his reputation among conservatives is untarnished, and he remains one of the Liberal Party's greatest heroes. Several books have been filled with anecdotes about him and with his many witty remarks.
See also
- First Menzies Ministry
- Second Menzies Ministry
- Third Menzies Ministry
- Fourth Menzies Ministry
- Fifth Menzies Ministry
- Sixth Menzies Ministry
- Seventh Menzies Ministry
- Eighth Menzies Ministry
- Ninth Menzies Ministry
- Tenth Menzies Ministry
Further reading
- Alan Martin, Robert Menzies: A Life, two volumes, Melbourne University Press, 1993 and 1999 (this competent but uninspiring official biography was delayed for many years by the unco-operative attitude of Dame Pattie Menzies.)
- Judith Brett, Robert Menzies' Forgotten People, Macmillan, 1992 (a sharply critical psychological study)
External links
- Robert Menzies (http://primeministers.naa.gov.au/meetpm.asp?pmId=12) - Australia's Prime Ministers / National Archives of Australia
- The Menzies Foundation (http://www.menziesfoundation.org.au/)
- Robert Menzies College (http://www.mq.edu.au/rmc/)
- The Menzies Virtual Museum (http://www.menziesvirtualmuseum.org.au/)
- The Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, London (http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/menzies/)
- The Liberal Party's Robert Menzies website (http://www.liberals.net/sirrobertmenzies.htm)
- The Legacy of Sir Robert Menzies (http://www.nla.gov.au/events/menzies.html) / National Library of Australia
| Preceded by: Earle Page | Prime Minister of Australia 1939–1941 | Succeeded by: Arthur Fadden |
| Preceded by: Arthur Fadden | Leader of the Opposition 1943-1949 | Succeeded by: Ben Chifley |
| Preceded by: Richard Casey | Treasurer of Australia 1940–1941 | Succeeded by: Percy Spender |
| Preceded by: Sir Winston Churchill | Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports 1966–1978 | Succeeded by: Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother |