Australian Prime Ministers

Robert Menzies retired as prime minister more than fifty-three years ago and died in 1978, yet he remains not just a dominant figure in Australian political history but a strong influence on modern political affairs. As Zachary Gorman, editor of this latest book on Menzies, argues, ‘it has become almost a cliché to say that he built or at least shaped and moulded modern Australia’. He created the Liberal Party that has governed Australia for fifty of the past seventy-three years, and modern Liberal politicians still draw on Menzies’ ideals.

Gough Whitlam’s 1972 policy speech, delivered before a crowd of thousands at the Blacktown Civic Centre in a scene that bore a closer resemblance to a pop concert than to a political campaign, is seen as the ultimate articulation of the Whitlam Labor government’s radical program for change. If its chief political architect was Whitlam, its amanuensis was Graham Freudenberg. With Whitlam’s election as leader of the Australian Labor Party in 1967, Freudenberg eagerly joined his staff as press secretary, a position he had previously and less happily held with Arthur Calwell, who was leader from 1960 to 1967.

This is a tale of good guys and bad guys. The bad guys (mostly called Whitlam, Hawke, or Keating) are zealous lackeys of two ogres called Centralised Wage Fixing and Political correctness. They are often helped by other guys (frequently called Peacock, Elliott, and Bjelke-Petersen) who pretend to be good but aren’t.

There have been two major cycles in Australian political rhetoric since the war. The first occurred during the postwar reconstruction period, from 1943 until 1949, when contest over a new social order impelled an unusually clear articulation of philosophy and policies by the contenders for influence – represented in public debate by Curtin and Chifley on one hand, and Menzies on the other. The eventual ascendance of Menzies and the dominant ideas that emerged from that debate informed our political life for the next two decades. Not until the late 1960s, when the Liberal-Country Party coalition’s grasp of events slipped, and when the new problems of the modem world economic system and Australia’s precarious place within it dislodged the assumptions engendered in the 1940s, did the debate about the nature of our policy gain a new edge.