Australia’s longest-serving prime minister mastered the mechanics of politics such that he reached an artfulness and unparalleled command. Major accomplishments include the establishment of the Liberal Party, sustained prosperity and the demise of sectarianism, and reorienting Australia toward the Pacific region; while he stumbled on the Suez Canal and Vietnam and stayed too long in office, losing touch with his cabinet and eventually voters. Like de Gaulle, he should have left sooner, in 1963. His distinctive crafted entailed deep understanding of government institutions (e.g., the Westminster system and the common law), policy guided by conviction (e.g., the goodness of family, home, and community), party management and alliance with the Country Party, astute retail politics aimed at winning respect (not popularity), and persuasion by logic, reason, emotion.

Menzies, becoming at 25 a nationally regarded lawyer through defeating HV Evatt in the Engineers case, which applied federal law to state jurisdictions, turned to politics to erase family dishonor stemming from his not enlisting for World War I service. Flashing to Attorney General and then PM, he supported appeasement (as Curtin favored conciliating Japan) but snapped to Britain’s defense. He visited London four times in three years before losing control of the United Australia Party, giving rise to reputation for British obsequiousness: The

Sydney Morning Herald

editorialized his brilliance tarnished by lack of public understanding. (Bramston dismisses David Day’s claim he wished to replace Churchill.)

Menzies learned from his first-term mistakes and modified his public persona. He opposed Labor selectively and did not insist on undoing Curtin and Chifley’s great innovations – though he profitably contested nationalizing banking – believing it a mistake to contest settled issues, and that a PM first gained stature in parliament before winning voters. Over 1942-44, he gave weekly radio broadcasts touting the virtue of liberalism and famously the ‘forgotten people’, foreshadowing Reagan’s General Electric touring. Having established the Liberal Party by painstaking campaign and then formal convention, he resigned as party leader in 1947 to invite rivals: by 1949 he was a credible alternate to the wartime’s statist socialism. As PM, he left ministers to run their portfolios, provided they were masters of their briefs, seeing himself as primes inter pares, albeit with a naturally commanding presence. LP’s statism governed by budget policy and managing credit rather than bureaucracy. Menzies continued Calwell’s postwar immigration program (which he thought the unions wouldn’t have accepted if originating on the right). Abroad, despite deep sympathies with Britain he pursued Australia’s national interests by building closer ties with the US. He knew virtually all the West’s key players; Nixon regarded him highly. Menzies’ political philosophy was interpreted differently by Fraser, Howard, Abbott, and others (p. 115).

See also Robert Menzies,

Afternoon Light