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February 6, 2025
Damien – thank you very much for that introduction and for the kind invitation to launch the book today.
You have done a fine job in assembling this impressive collection of essays.
To Georgina Downer, thank you for your outstanding leadership of the Menzies Institute.
To Heather Henderson, it is an honour that you have joined us here today.
To my parliamentary colleagues – too many to mention. It is a testament to the Menzies Institute and the authors that you have given up time on a busy sitting day to be here.
But it also says something very good, and unique about our party, that you have prioritised being here for a discussion about ideas.
After all, the Liberal Party is unique in Australian politics in that we are founded on and remain dedicated to a philosophy: liberalism.
The Labor Party was unashamedly founded to fight for a class.
The National Party was proudly founded to fight for the regions.
The Greens were founded to fight for the environmental movement.
As far as I can tell the Teals were founded to fight for themselves.
But the purpose of the Liberal Party to this day and since our inception was to fight for an idea.
And we will only remain relevant and at our best if our elected representatives continue to engage with those ideas.
One thing we could learn from other political movements though, especially on the left, is how to steward our history.
They’ve successfully mythologised objective political failures, like Gough Whitlam, into heroic and romantic historic figures.
Too often, we’ve neglected ours.
The Menzies Institute could never be accused of that.
It has filled a critical gap in the marketplace of ideas for the promotion and interrogation of our history through the lens of our founder, Robert Menzies.
And in this volume they do so brilliantly though the eyes of young Australians.
The Menzies Early Career Network was established to give young people a deeper and non-superficial understanding of our longest serving Prime Minister and Australian history.
This work is a testament to a substantive engagement with Menzies. The chapters are scholarly and thoroughly researched.
Nor is it a hagiography.
The authors critically evaluate Menzies’ decisions in office and legacy against the historical context, his own professed values as well as our contemporary perspective.
I admit to being shocked to read Patrick Irwin’s chapter retelling the story of the House of Representatives decision in 1955, on Menzies motion, to jail two men for contempt.
Their crime? Defaming the Labor member for Reid, Charles Morgan.
In Menzies’ view so serious were their character attacks that it amounted to a breach of parliamentary privilege because of the potential for it to intervene in Morgan’s ability to discharge his duties.
To put it mildly, this is an expansive view of parliamentary privilege, and a severe punishment for defamation.
Irwin grapples with how we can reconcile this event with the Menzies we know and admire, one of our most principled and effective advocates for freedom of speech.
Other critical chapters include Priscilla Spalding’s on how aspiration and a thriving middle class was central to Menzies’ vision for the Australian dream.
Georgia Lowden’s chapter on home ownership has the most contemporary relevance as we are in grave danger today of abandoning Menzies’ legacy of “transforming Australia into a property-owning democracy.”
As Lowden explains, for Menzies, home ownership was not just economic policy. Owning a home was “central to both individual and societal wellbeing, transcending class and material wealth, and determining ‘the health of society as a whole.’”
She goes on to explain “that by owning property, individuals would have a stake in the stability and future of the nation, fostering a sense of responsibility and investment in the community.”
Of the many critical tasks of a Dutton Coalition government, should we have the honour after the next election, restoring the hope of home ownership to a generation of young Australians will be among the most important.
Perhaps the most tragic chapter is Jacob Carson’s.
He is highly critical of the decision of the Morrison government to increase the cost of studying humanities at university in order to reduce the cost of more vocational courses like teaching, nursing and engineering.
Carson stridently argues that this was a betrayal of Menzies’s ardent belief in a liberal education.
There is no question, Robert Menzies was a true believer in the virtues of a classical humanities education, which he believed would enrich society in ways that could not be strictly measured in material terms.
I feel confident in saying, however, that were Menzies alive today, he would be more than a little aghast at what our universities have become.
Long before the higher education reforms of the Morrison government, almost all Australian universities have given up the pretence they are interested in a genuinely classical education, as Carson recognises.
Even when I was at university, it was incredibly difficult to enrol in subjects that would teach any aspects of the Western canon, unless it was through a modern and highly critical lens.
They certainly do not see themselves as custodians of the great works and traditions of Western Civilisation.
As Carson recounts, so many of our universities fought pitched battles to reject the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, which found a particularly hostile reception at our sandstone universities.
Indeed, Ramsay does its best work sending Australians overseas to universities which still think the ideas that underpin our society are worth teaching.
It says a lot that a deceased philanthropist was required to fund such an enterprise.
It also speaks volumes that entirely new institutions like Campion College in Australia and the University of Austin in the United States are springing up to compete with them, as many believe our elite institutions are unreformable.
Australian university leaders have also done very little to ensure a diversity of views among their academics in humanities departments.
As Carson writes, “against this backdrop of open hostility towards conservative ideals, it is little wonder that Liberal politicians today tend to have a diminished view of the humanities.”
Robert Menzies governed at the outbreak of the Cold War, and the chapters on defence and national security are more applicable today than we might have hoped.
Orlando Throsby writes on Menzies’ most enduring foreign policy achievement, securing the ANZUS alliance with the United States.
While Throsby rightly recognises John Curtin’s critical decision to recall Australian troops from the Mediterranean theatre to defend our interests in the Pacific alongside the United States, it was Menzies who formalised our most important defence alliance in the treaty in 1951.
As Throsby argues, AUKUS is the modern extension of ANZUS, and is similarly born out of strategic necessity.
Just as Australia and its allies feared the spread of Communism in Asia the 1950s, our region today is defined by a profound geopolitical contest. And we have sought out likeminded partners to secure our interests.
Jesse Seeberg-Gordon revisits a fascinating historical moment in 1964, when the Menzies government explored the possibility of cooperation with the Soviet Union to check the rise of Mao’s China.
As Seeberg-Gordon explains, “by 1959 Mao had decided China no longer needed the Sino-Soviet alliance” and in that same year, formal relations between Australia and the Soviet union were restored following a Petrov-induced hiatus.
Following false starts under his predecessor Garfield Barwick, freshly appointed Foreign Minister Paul Hasluck visited Moscow in October 1964.
Seeberg-Gordon chronicles Hasluck’s pitch: “decolonisation in southeast Asia was providing China with the opportunity to exploit these new states, he claimed, and the ‘new imperialism of China’ threatened the emergence of ‘a single great dominant power in Asia.’” With the “annexation of Tibet, border clashes with India” and designs on Taiwan key case studies.
Alas, Hasluck’s appeal fell on deaf ears in the Kremlin, probably not helped by the inauspicious toppling of Khrushchev just weeks before his arrival.
For a country which had recently attempted to ban the Soviet-sponsored Communist Party, and had just fought a bloody war against a Soviet proxy, North Korea, this was a remarkable attempted feat of foreign policy realism.
Of course it was less than a decade later that Richard Nixon deployed the same strategy successfully, but in reverse, normalising American relations with the PRC in order to leverage the Soviet Union.
While the direct practical lessons of this event might be limited today – Vladimir Putin is hardly a prospective ally in balancing power in the Indo-Pacific – it does reveal an underappreciated ambition in the foreign policy vision of the Menzies government.
And as Seeberg-Gordon argues, it undermines the “traditional wisdom…that a truly independent Australian foreign policy did not emerge until the early 1970s, particularly under the Whitlam government.”
Like many of the chapters of this book, it is a reminder that Liberals must engage seriously and substantively with our own history, rather than leave it to our political opponents to define it on their own terms.
It is a great credit to the Menzies Institute and your young authors that Finding Menzies does so in such a thoughtful and considered way.
Thank you.
ENDS
