JUDITH BRETT HOWARD: Bob Menzies' most famous speech, I guess, is not a speech, it's the Forgotten People broadcasts. To what extent was the Forgotten People broadcast as much a plea by him not to be forgotten as it was an appeal to middle Australia? BRETT: It was given in the middle of the war so most people had other things on their mind. I think it is partly the radio series that he was that that was part of - was him trying to keep 1
himself in the public eye so I think that's right. But I think it's also shows him out of office for the time of the war thinking about what is it that I'm in politics for. So it's got a sort of personal importance which projects forward the values that he was going to represent in the 1950s. But at that time he's given it he doesn't know he's going to be prime minister in the 1950s. HOWARD: You have written that it was, along with the other broadcasts in that same series, it was very much a way of reaching into people's homes at a time when radio was a way, for example, that you could reach women and interest them in politics in a manner that hadn't otherwise been possible. BRETT: Yes, and I think Menzies was a very good communicator and he was quick to see the role that radio could play in being more intimate than the public meetings, which a lot of women wouldn't go to, you know. They were rowdy, there might be a bit of fisty cuffs up the back, you know, and so this was a way Menzies could actually talk to people who didn't see themselves as political and wouldn't necessarily go along to a public meeting. HOWARD: Because this probably helped in a party political sense in that there was a certain aggressive masculinity about aspects of the labour movement, the trade union movement that was dominated by men. BRETT: Yes. HOWARD: And women often felt excluded and of course at that time there were a much smaller number of women in the paid work force. BRETT: That's right. And so in that speech Menzies makes the home the centre of people's lives and it was the centre for most 2
women's lives, that that's where they worked, that's where they felt their contribution to Australia was being made, in the looking after of their husbands and the raising of their children. HOWARD: He placed an enormous emphasis on the centrality of the home... BRETT: Yes. HOWARD:... of family life and what the home meant in terms of emotional, even spiritual stability. What do you think he would think of an Australia where more and more people think it's too hard to buy your first home? BRETT: I think he'd be pretty appalled by what's happening now but I think it's the affordability crisis which he would find quite disturbing because I think it is very hard for a lot of young people to buy their first home, particularly in the capital cities. I mean the national if we look at it nationally it's confused, because there's lots of places in the country where it's actually quite cheap to buy a house. But I think Menzies would find this quite disturbing and the idea and I think the entry of so many investors into the housing market would disturb him too because yes, there were homes material, you know, they were something that people saved for and paid off but they were they did that because they were homes human, as he said, they were the basis of family life and so, for investors, they're just homes material. So I think this emergence of a rentier class and a class of people who may end up renting for their whole lives he would find pretty disturbing. HOWARD: I got the impression reading the Forgotten People broadcast and a lot of the other broadcasts in that series that he was somebody who saw the home and the stability of the home as giving the individual Australian an identity and an 3
independence from pressure groups. It helped to enhance the individual personality. You weren't part of some vast force on either side. The most important thing of your life was the home and that gave you a certain independence? BRETT: Everybody's in a lot of different roles. They go to work and they're at home and they're a mother and a father and a son and, you know, and I think what I saw Menzies as doing is saying yes, you participate in the economy, but actually the things that really matter to you are your home and your family and the things that happen in your non work life. Whereas the Labor Party was a party that was based much more around seeing people in terms of the role in the economy and focussing on the issues of the workplace with, you know, good working conditions and wages and so it was like there was two different ways in which the person could think about themselves. And I think particularly during the war when people had had to put off a lot of their private aspirations for marriage and for family life or for even getting a short of job they were interested in rather than being part of the manpower planning, that this appeal to people's private home based life was very powerful because that's when the war was over that's what people, a lot of people wanted. HOWARD: Because with his heavy focus on the home it was a way of taking class out of the political debate, wasn't it? BRETT: Well, it was a way of saying to people when you come to the ballot box, don't think about work and the relations of the economy, think about the relations of the home, and that's why it appealed to women so much. So it was like trying to say class is not that relevant, that that's how I see. I mean I think the other thing that I found really interesting about 4
that speech was that there's a lot of imagery in which it which points back to Menzies' own childhood, reading Robbie Burns and the Cotter s Saturday night. And Menzies, it's a low point in Menzies' life. He's lost the prime ministership, he s sidelined during a war and it's like he's going back into his own family to draw sustenance to keep himself in the political game. HOWARD: Looking at him, his personality, to what extent do you think his setbacks and the adversities of the early 40s mellowed and hardened and tempered him to make him a far better handler of men and women when he came back? BRETT: Well I think they helped him kerb his tongue because he was scornful of people often. You know, there's a story - somebody would say to him well, "Bob, you know, your problem is you don t suffer fools gladly" and he said "What do you think I'm doing now?" You know, then lost the, you know, that somebody was trying to HOWARD: That's another vote lost. BRETT: Another vote lost from a backbench. So he was a very clever, very able man and he did he rose through the Bar very quickly and he had very few setbacks until that period of 1940 41. So I think it did mellow him and made him perhaps try a little harder. And he's getting older too. HOWARD: Do you think that Menzies over reacted to the threat of Communism in the early 1950s? BRETT: That's a hard question, John. Do I think he overreacted? I think it's very hard to I think in history you have to put yourself back into the position where you don't know what's going to happen. And you know, he got he gets pilloried for having under reacted to the threat of fascism in the 1930s 5
because people didn't know the Second World War was coming and then he gets it for having over-reacted in the early 50s. It seems to me, you know, he'd lived through the First World War, that in the late 1930s you can understand why the idea of another world war is sort of unthinkable and why people try hard for appeasement. So I don't judge him too harshly at all in the early '50s, I don't think. I think he, when he comes back and thinks there may be a third world war, I think that that's probably a genuine fear. HOWARD: Menzies throughout his life placed enormous emphasis on the value of education. BRETT: That's right. HOWARD: The moniker of the education prime minister is flung around a lot but in many ways Menzies was an education prime minister, wasn't he, the things he did with universities and State aid and the like? BRETT: Yes, but I think Menzies came from a lower middle class family and it was only through scholarships that he could get a secondary education. People probably don't realise that until the '20s there was no you had to pay if you were to go beyond Year 8. And so Menzies was very aware that a lot of very bright, young people were of his generation didn't get an education and I think it's something that he really passionately believed in. BRETT: I think Menzies was a good prime minister for the '50s but I don't think he was such a good prime minister in the '60s because I don't think he prepared Australia well for a lot of the changes. He was still imaginatively in the pre world, pre war period, I think, I think he moved on from the Edwardian period 6
of his youth but, I think around issues of race which were becoming really important in the '60s and continued to be important, Menzies still really subscribed to a sort of social Darwinist, racialist hierarchy. I don't think he ever really appreciated the good things about Aboriginal culture and society. He saw it very much in terms of its impoverished technology, as did most people, you know, Australians of his generation, I mean this is not something particular to him. But attitudes to race really shifted after the Second World War and I think Australian politics was they became much more fought over in Australian politics than I think they needed to be if the Liberal Party had have been able to embrace those changes in a less partisan way which I think they would have been able to do if Menzies had gone earlier. HOWARD: You think he should have retired much earlier? BRETT: Yeah, I think he should have retired maybe '61, '62 and given the party another election because they probably would have won the next election with a new Liberal prime minister and it would have meant that the party wouldn't have become, it wouldn't have become so defensive about the changes that then happened under Whitlam and in a way that Whitlam and Labor get credit for, the ending of the White Australia policy. HOWARD: So Holt gets most of the credit for ending the White Australia policy. He gets most of the credit. BRETT: But not in the popular imagination he doesn't. HOWARD: That's just because our opponents have been superior propagandists, isn't it? BRETT: No, see I think it's because I think it's because the 7
energy for change of the '60s, the Liberal Party was somehow seen as blocking it. So I don't think it's because I mean its politics is about HOWARD: No greater of blocker of change in the White Australian policy than Arthur Calwell? BRETT: Exactly. That's why it's ironic, it seems to me, that Labor ended up getting the credit for that. But see I think it's because politics is also about symbolic work and Whitlam did the symbolic work on the ending of the White Australia policy and also on the saying to Australia you've got to think about yourselves now as a non British country. We've got all of these people who have come from Europe. So the way in which he brought a sort of a more multicultural, we didn't use that word then, but he did open the polity out to particularly people from the Mediterranean and I think that it's really ironic that a lot of these things are things which would have been part of the Liberal Party tradition. But Labor got credit for it. 8