BARRY JONES. HOWARD: I think there's a lot in the criticism, the sort of thing that you get from Germaine Greer and from - not from Barry Humphries

Transcription

1 BARRY JONES HOWARD: I think there's a lot in the criticism, the sort of thing that you get from Germaine Greer and from - not from Barry Humphries

2 but from Clive James, say that in the 1950s there was a kind of a super caution, an over caution and you can understand why it was that people wanted to really get out. I mean it has to be said in Menzies' favour that in some ways he wasn't - his mind wasn't closed to new ideas but he didn't respond too strongly to them. JONES: When you think of the way in which we sometimes have tickets on ourselves to say we're, you know, we're courageous and we're capable of coming up with great new ideas and so on, it was really a bit stultifying in a way and I think when I look back on that I can see why it was that so many of my contemporaries went away to study. I didn't. I mean I really only had a long association with - overseas universities in post-retirement when I spent a bit of time at Cambridge but I can see now why they wanted desperately to get away. HOWARD: It was a period, of course, of extraordinary immigration. In 70% of the jobs created in the 1950s were filled by migrants. JONES: Oh, that was absolutely HOWARD: And I acknowledge that the mass migration program was started by Calwell, I acknowledge that in the book but it was

3 continued and expanded by Menzies. JONES: Well it was one of those important moments in Australian history where you had an agreement, when you had consensus between the two major parties. And now you can find that there are issues like dare I mention the T word, taxation, where both sides are too timid to say well, we may have to adjust the tax base generally. They won't say it. JONES: I think on foreign policy and on social policy I think he was weak. He was weak on White Australia, he was weak on Aborigines, he was certainly weak on women's issues. HOWARD: Barry, what's your personal recollection of Bob Menzies? I know you met him on a couple of occasions but tell me about him. JONES: I met him on quite a few occasions. First of all because he was such an extraordinary political leader and a great orator and so on, I often went to hear him if he was performing in Melbourne. I went to a number of the launches of their policies, not to heckle him, you understand, but just to listen.

4 And then later on he lived fairly close to where I lived and I had run into Dame Pattie in the supermarket and she'd say Why don't you come around and have a cup of coffee and talk to him. Because I think in the last years of his life I think he was bored, I think he was isolated and he really liked to talk and we did a - when I was doing a radio talkback program in the days when talkback was sort of respectable, back in 1968 I did a long interview with him where he wanted a bit of advanced notice about what I was going to talk about and he wrote out what he thought were the turning points of his life and so on and really quite a thoughtful contribution to his autobiographical material. But then later on I'd go around and talk to him and I remember after Harold Holt's death, for example, he was very sour about what was happening to the Liberal Party because he saw the Liberal Party leadership as imploding. He felt that - he felt that Harold Holt on reflection, Harold Holt had been a mistake, he shouldn't have been the successor, But it's also partly because you can see that somebody like Harold Holt who we tend to forget, you see when Holt came in, Holt brought around tremendous number of changes. You see, aborigines, white Australia, the role of women in the public service and so on

5 because there was a backlog of social change that needed to be done and wasn't. And then, you see, he was very contemptuous of Gorton, loathed McMahon, loathed McMahon, thought McMahon was treacherous and so on. Thought Malcolm Fraser was really the hope of the side but he was one - I was one of a number of people who he confided in that in his last years that he didn't vote Liberal anymore, he voted DLP in the last two or three elections. HOWARD: Let me ask you about the 1951 referendum to ban the Communist Party which visited division on both sides. What was your view and what impact did that referendum have on future events in the Labor Party? JONES: Well, I was as a 19-year-old I was very heavily involved in the campaign and in fact funnily enough I was never attracted myself to the Communist Party. I had contemporaries who were. But I remember one of my friends who was in the Communist Party gave me some of his papers to hide and I hid them under a loose floorboard at home. I remember that because they thought oh, if the referendum gets

6 through then suddenly, you know, police will be coming and looking but they won't look at my place because I probably may not have an ASIO record but they'd look at his. I think the - this is when Evatt was absolutely at his best. I mean Evatt in many ways was not particularly good in the House, pretty bad in the House, completely outfoxed by Menzies but there was enough of that appeal that he did to the kind of small L liberal pluralist view including, one understands, at least one person in the Howard household. HOWARD: Yeah, my mother voted no. Dad voted yes. The only time they ever voted different because they were both rusted on Liberals. JONES: And it's thought, it's thought that Archbishop Mannix voted no in Victoria, that Santamaria voted yes, of course, but even Dr Mannix is thought to have voted no. You know, that there are a lot of people who said look, this is not a good, not a good precedent. It's not a good precedent. If you've got an objection to somebody, well, you take - you find an appropriate piece of legislation and you act according to the rule of law. Ultimately Menzies' defeat in the referendum actually helped him in the long term so that he lost the battle but he won the war because

7 what it indicated was to say the community's divided over attitudes to communism and the Labor Party's very deeply divided over attitudes to communism and he played on that over and over again for more than a decade. It was very effective. HOWARD: How easy did you think the split made it for Menzies or is that overestimated? JONES: I think it was absolutely central. It meant that in many ways he really didn't have to refine his message. A lot of the extraordinary things were going on in the big wide world outside and Menzies didn't really need to react to it. Look, Menzies had so many very fine qualities. I mean he was an extremely honest person. He kept his distance from the big end of town. I think the Liberal Party was pretty clean in a way, it wasn't, you know, subject to the kind of manipulation of lobbyists as it is now. HOWARD: Menzies had reason to be grateful to the DLP because of the outcome of the 1961 election, didn't he? JONES: You see when the Labor Party simply fell apart in 1955 it meant that the odd thing was how close Arthur Calwell came in And remember that that wasn't a Victorian phenomenon, I

8 didn't observe it and I wouldn't have thought it was going to happen. It was in seats like states like Queensland we had an extraordinary volatility - JONES: Oh, yes, but in Queensland, in particular, you know, Queensland's always been marked by these exceptional swings. Really far higher than the national. HOWARD: And hasn't lost the habit. JONES: Western Australia too up to a point. But Menzies, I think in that early period was a bit uncomfortable about that sense of dependence and I don't know whether you remember that wonderful television series that dramatised, that dramatised of what happened when the Labor split took place and it had, it had a remarkable scene where the Menzies figure was talking to Santamaria and he said to him I want to thank you, Mr Santamaria, for your contribution in helping the Liberal Party to win. And in it the character says well, he said, I have no particular feeling for the Liberal Party, he said, what I want is a Labor Party, a pure and reformed Labor Party, that's what I want more than anything else. And I happened to meet Santamaria years later and I

9 was talking to him, I think, on a television program and I said off camera, I said, You saw that television series and he said, Yes, of course. And I said, How accurate was it? And a smile, he said, Pretty close to the truth. HOWARD: How disorganised and chaotic was the Labor Party in the '50s after the split? JONES: It wasn't so much it was disorganised and chaotic but it meant that once the split had taken place and you had what was a significant proportion, by no means total, but the withdrawal of what you might think was the Catholic Right, the traditional Catholic working class Right and socially somewhat to the Right, when they'd effectively it meant that the centre of gravity in the party inevitably moved towards the left so it meant that left-leaning unions were in a very dominant position and it meant that you had what we'd have to call a democratic centralism. So it meant that you had very tight organisation in which you had extreme resistance to people who had a dissident point of view and ultimately there was the development of a group of people called the Participants and the Participants were the Whitlamites, the Whitlam supporters in the party and this was a time when Whitlam was

10 absolutely anathema to the Victorian left and if he'd come to a Victorian conference he'd be booed. But this group included a lot of people that you'd know and remember, people like John Button and Michael Duffy and me and Dick McGarvey who was later the governor of Victoria and Xavier Connor who was a judge at the Federal Court, Alistair Nicholson, so we weren't a bad little group. We were a faction that wasn't a faction and we fought as hard as we could for the Whitlamite cause which we saw as really opening up the party. But of course it didn't happen until 1970 and once you had federal intervention. HOWARD: The 1950s and '60s were periods of enormous change. Surely Menzies at the very least created the climate for that great change. JONES: Oh, very much, very much. He did. But I don't think I've ever said this to you before but one of the things he said to me that stuck in my mind, one of the last conversations that he had, he said he thought there were three things that he really wanted to be remembered for and the three things he wanted to be remembered

11 for were the expansion of universities, he was very, very strong about that. Oh, and incidentally, he was also very keen on maintaining the role of the humanities. Now there are a lot of people who aren't very keen on that but to him, he wasn't very widely read in philosophy but he saw the idea if you use the university as something that helps you understand who you are, where you are, your place in the world, well, that's very important and it's not just a matter of saying yes, but you can get a job that enables you to go out and make a lot of money. He was not particularly sympathetic to that point of view so he's very keen on universities. The second thing was the expansion and the development of Canberra. He was entranced by the idea of Canberra as a great national capital, the centre of where wonderful things were going on. He wanted institutions to be drawn into Canberra. And the third thing, perhaps the most important thing of all, was he was - he wanted to break down that sectarian divide between Catholic and Protestant, something that you and I are remember so well from our childhood and indeed adolescence. And he was a very strong opponent, as he said, of sectarianism.

12 very curious when you think, very curious when you think that Menzies was really part of that Protestant, that Presbyterian, Scottish tradition that was so important with our prime ministers in an earlier era. If you reflect, you see, if you think of George Reid, Andrew Fisher, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Menzies himself, McEwen, Fraser, what do they all have in common? It's that Protestant - it's that Scottish Presbyterian tradition. That has disappeared. It's disappeared. Now, for reasons I don't completely understand, it's a very interesting sociological phenomenon, Catholics who used to be at the outside on the wings, as it were, in numbers are now very significant as a group. I don't completely understand why it's happened. You might have some ideas on that, but it's - I find it extremely interesting. I mean when you reflect that the last time there was a contest for the leadership of the Liberal Party you had three candidates, you had Abbott, Hockey and Turnbull. Two of them cradle Catholics and one a convert. That could never have happened under Menzies.