Returning to the ‘party of Menzies’ is returning to fascistic reaction

The ongoing crisis and faction fighting in the Liberal Party have included repeated calls for the party to get back to what it was like under the reign of its longest serving leader, Bob Menzies. The Menzies years of the 1950s and 1960s are portrayed as enlightened ones of progress and national unity ruled over by a broad-church Liberal Party in which small l liberals and conservatives worked together in harmony for the collective good.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The Menzies years were reactionary, dominated by Cold War authoritarianism, union bashing, red scares, murderous wars from Korea to Malaya to Vietnam and, of course, record profits for the bosses.

As prime minister during this era of white picket fences, sexual prudery and fawning over royalty and everything British, it can be tempting to dismiss Robert Gordon Menzies—who revelled in the titles of Knight of the Thistle and Warden of the Cinque Ports and paraded his devotion to the queen, declaring: “I only saw her passing by, but I shall love her ’til I die”—as a pompous fuddy-duddy.

But that would be to underestimate seriously the man who had been an admirer of Adolph Hitler in the 1930s. Menzies was a hardened class warrior for the Australian capitalist class who advanced their interests with relentless determination for sixteen long years as prime minister from the end of 1949 to January 1966. That’s why John Howard, who presided over another vicious Liberal government that sought to transform society in the interests of the rich and powerful, so admires Menzies.

Menzies came to office with two key aims. First, to take advantage of growing Cold War hysteria to launch a concerted attack on workers’ living standards and union organisation, the aim of which was to ensure that the capitalist class were the chief beneficiaries of the emerging postwar boom. That meant savage repression of the left.

Second, to militarise Australian society in preparation for a new world war. Menzies openly advocated a nuclear strike on Russia and sought to develop Australia’s very own atomic bomb.

Just as Howard and subsequent Liberal prime ministers built on Labor’s attacks on workers, Menzies built on the anti-worker policies of the Chifley Labor government before him.

The immediate postwar years had brought a sharp swing to the left. Capitalism was seen to have failed. Workers had been seared by the horrors of the Great Depression, fascism and war, and were determined not to let that happen again. They demanded the 40-hour week, full employment, higher wages and improved social services, and aggressively went on strike to back up those demands, with some significant victories initially.

However, after a series of bitterly fought strikes, the Chifley Labor government, backed by the top union leaders, gradually wore workers down. In the late 1940s, Chifley resorted to repression, most notoriously using troops to break the 1949 coal strike.

It was this union-bashing legacy that Menzies built on with harsh anti-union laws and the attempt to ban the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). The CPA led many of the militant unions and was the overwhelmingly dominant force on the left throughout the Menzies years.

Menzies’ 1951 horror budget savaged living standards and slashed jobs in the public service by 8 percent. There was a massive redistribution of wealth to the bosses. Workers’ share of gross national product fell dramatically.

CPA leaders were jailed and their offices raided by police. Legislation was passed (with ALP support) to ban the CPA. Menzies drew up plans to establish concentration camps to intern dissidents. In NSW alone, 45,000 people were listed to be interned.

Along with attacks on living standards and democratic rights came preparations for war. Conscription was introduced, and between 1950 and 1953 the size of the armed forces was expanded from 58,000 to 147,000. Australian troops were sent to fight in Korea, Malaya and, later, Vietnam.

Menzies encouraged the British to test nuclear weapons at Maralinga in South Australia, with terrible consequences for the indigenous inhabitants, in the hope that this would enable Australia to get its own nuclear weapons. On foreign policy, Menzies was a pillar of reaction, providing undying support for the apartheid regime in South Africa.

But despite some important victories, it was no cake walk for Menzies. At every step there was resistance.

The postwar vision of a new, more peaceful and fair social order still held broad appeal. By 1953, Menzies was extremely unpopular. There were sharp swings to Labor in by-elections.

So while workers were on the back foot industrially, Menzies was never able to establish a McCarthyite regime as severe as in the US—where the left in the unions was smashed.

Menzies’ 1951 referendum to ban the Communist Party was narrowly defeated after a massive campaign by the Communists, left unions and civil liberties supporters. Indeed, the CPA, after declining in the late 1940s, grew from 6,000 members in 1952 to 8,000 in 1955, despite its Stalinist politics.

But as the horrors of Stalinism in Russia were increasingly revealed, there was growing disillusionment within CPA ranks, particularly after Russian tanks crushed the 1956 workers’ revolution in Hungary. This severely weakened its ability to lead working-class resistance to Menzies.

There was every possibility that a genuine Marxist party committed to workers’ control could have at least held its ground during the difficult early years of the Menzies government and then grown steadily in the wake of the right-wing Democratic Labor Party (DLP) split from the ALP. This would have put it in a position to play a decisive role when the political situation improved in the 1960s.

Despite the Cold War anti-Russian hysteria, opinion polls at the height of the Korean War showed 73 percent opposition to the use of nuclear weapons. By 1954, polls showed half the population opposed nuclear testing at Maralinga.

1953 was the real turning point in terms of the postwar boom. From then on, the economy surged forward. It was the most prosperous period in Australian history, with economic growth exceeding 5 percent per year for more than 15 years.

Boom conditions led to a rise in home ownership. Workers for the first time got refrigerators, washing machines and eventually TVs. Most workers withdrew from active political involvement, and, after 1956, the level of strike action fell markedly. This led many on the left to write off the working class as a force for social change. Workers were dismissed as bought off, and most intellectuals blamed the dull conformity of Australia in the 1950s and early ’60s on the masses. The problem in their eyes was not the capitalist class and the Menzies government, which in order to ensure an orderly flow of profits was imposing rigid censorship to prop up authoritarian family values. No, the problem for the oh-so-enlightened liberal intelligentsia was rather the mums and dads in the suburbs who were obsessed with their new refrigerator or getting lino on the floor rather than the higher values of life.

But the Protestant wowserism that Australia was notorious for in these years was a predominately middle-class phenomenon. And below the surface, forces were at work that were laying the basis for a revival in working-class struggle that was to explode at the end of the 1960s.

Mass upheavals don’t burst onto the scene from nowhere. They have their origins in long-term economic and social developments. At the time it can be difficult to recognise the developing ferment, but in retrospect the signs of what was to come were there.

The long postwar boom, even at its height, eliminated neither the working class nor the structural features of capitalism that impelled it to resist. There is no doubting the strident anti-Communism of the Cold War years, but underneath there were deep tensions—tensions that sharply intensified over the course of the 1960s.