The Lucky Country

by Donald Horne

  Churches are traditionally said to be powerful pressure groups, but their strength, particularly that of the repressive ‘wowser’ vote, may be exaggerated. There is no doubt that they have influence but their influence may be based mainly on bluff. The fuss they made about gambling and drinking held up reform but on each occasion when State Governments edged in more liberal measures they got away with it. The Catholics do not join in this agitation. Bookmakers and hotelkeepers are often Catholics and to help finance their schools – one of the principal concerns of Catholic administration – Catholic parishes often organize local gambling of a community kind. The Catholics however have had periods when they put pressure on State Governments to increase censorship laws. The technique of the ‘carbon campaign’ in which activist Catholics write off more or less identical letters of protest has been used in their occasional repressive campaigns. Editors are likely to worry if they receive one letter of protest from a Catholic on a moral issue. Sir Garfield Barwick won an interesting victory in liberalizing the divorce laws; he moved firmly, explained his case expertly and ignored the Catholic opposition.

  The Returned Servicemen’s League is one of the most skilful pressure groups. With a quarter of a million members and many other non-RSL ex-servicemen, most of whom hope to get something out of the government at some stage of their lives, the RSL speaks to any government in the language of the ballot box. It deals with a sub-committee of ex-service members of Cabinet. It is the only pressure group that has formal access to Cabinet in this way. In fact it has better regular access to Cabinet than the Service chiefs. Its huge influence can only be understood to the background of ‘repatriation benefits’ in Australia. Under this system if any ex-serviceman develops a chronic disability the onus is on the Government to establish that his condition was not due to war service. Any ex-serviceman who develops tuberculosis, for example, can get a pension no matter how long after his war service he becomes infected. In August 1964 Labor politicians attacked the Government for not accepting cancer as a war complaint when it occurred in ex-servicemen (even forty-six years after their service had finished).

  The newspaper managements might be considered as a series of individual pressure groups. Between them the four big newspaper groups control eleven daily newspapers, five Sunday papers, the most important magazines, a number of radio stations and the larger part of the metropolitan TV stations. Unless it is on some matter affecting their industrial interests (and not always then) they rarely speak with one voice; but normally one individual in each major company sees himself possessed of the power to help make or break governments. This belief may be illusory, but he acts as if it is so and often makes close contact with one of the political leaders and sometimes helps in a party campaign. This intervention can come from the usual variety of motives that throws people into politics, ranging from pure policy to pure private gain. The fact that all the major newspaper companies have interests in television stations and that these stations exist on Federal Government licence has introduced a new relation between newspaper managements and governments.

  A huge outfit such as the Broken Hill Proprietary heavy industry complex plays such an important part in the prosperity of the nation that its senior officials of necessity develop regular relations with senior officials of government departments. As with the CSR, governments pay considerable heed to it, because its activities affect economic prosperity and therefore votes. Lesser firms do not necessarily get such sympathetic hearings.

  The Chamber of Manufactures is noisy and aggressive in public and pushes a lot of special barrows in private but it is probably the least influential pressure group with government officials. (The Chamber of Commerce is said to have a more subtle touch with the Departments.) The demands of the Arbitration Court, the Tariff Board and of private restrictive practices also bring manufacturers together in sub-groups. The most publicly temperamental of these is the motor trades group, which declared Menzies its enemy in 1940–41 when he quite sensibly restricted petrol usage because there was a war on, and again in 1960 when he cut back the economic boom. This latter occasion was marked by dramatic sackings and stand-downs that were interpreted as attempts at pressure and by most intensive private lobbying against Menzies, culminating in a group of Melbourne businessmen supporting Calwell in the 1961 election. Manufacturers also tried to put pressure on Menzies from within the Liberal Party. It may be of significance that the most desperate major pressure group in Australia is one that is dominated by firms that are overseas owned or overseas controlled.

  The influence of unions in the Labor Party machine is of greater significance than the influence of businessmen in the Liberal Party. Union leaders pretty well own the State Labor machines and when Labor Governments are in power in the States the unions put enormous pressure on them. Union influence on the Federal Labor Party is much more diffuse. So few men (only two from each State) are on the Federal Executive or even the biennial Federal conferences (six from each State) that normally they simply vote State tickets; they represent the machines of each State. They exercise influence more as party bosses than as union leaders. To add complication, Labor politicians, including party leaders, must also pay attention to the party bosses of their own States as well as to the Federal Executive majority. This means that the policies they must pay attention to may be in conflict.

  What’s in it for him?

  To those who are used to nations where much political debate is carried on in terms that hide special interest and which usually is concerned with areas of more or less general interest Australia seems a crude kind of place. The crudity was never clearer than in the ugliness of self-interested agitation against Menzies during his wartime Prime Ministership. In addition to the quite legitimate criticism of administrative sluggishness and extremely uninspired leadership, special interests conducted agitations of a kind that are rare in wartime. Import restrictions were attacked by importers, petrol restrictions by motor car interests; there were a lot of strikes and the wheat farmers were out for a bigger cut. The kind of intellectual and emotional effort needed to develop a wartime psychology seemed to be beyond Menzies’ or the nation’s capacity. Some of the outbursts in 1960 and 1961 against efforts to correct the boom also reached a crudity that seemed to suggest that a generation later there was still an inability to smother special interest in politically powerful generalizations. It was true that Menzies was particularly inept at doing this. But it is also perhaps a reflection of the general intellectual and conceptual climate in Australia, and of its parochialism and lack of imagination.

  It may be that what really drives most men into politics is the craving for excitement or status (or, if they haven’t got much money – money); that their policies are most often the product of faction rather than coherent belief; that it is a necessary feature of political activity, once power is achieved, that it is essentially absurd, that it can usually not achieve its public aspirations, except by accident; that even ‘believers’, when exposed to this inner hollowness of power, necessarily become cynical and fraudulent, determined first on the preservation of their own power, with policy as an optional ‘extra’; that the best one can hope for is that they will apply whatever values they have wherever they can, whenever the accidents let them. I do not know whether these are the inner secrets of politics or not. (Nor – yet – does anyone else.) But it is certainly the belief of many Australians that politics is essentially a fraudulent activity engaged in by self-seeking crooks. Even public rhetoric amongst Australian politicians is extremely dour, pragmatic and short range; in private they often excuse their participation in politics by boasting of their cynicism. It is as if it would be unmanly and un-Australian for a politician to confess to a serious interest in public affairs.

  The public emptiness of Australian politics comes from its lack of intellectual strength. Not only, as in the United States, are intellectuals normally deprived of access to top policy decisions, when elsewhere in the modern world they have con
siderable influence on political events; they also lack the enormous range of opportunity, available in the United States, for at least being hangers-on to those who decide top policy, ghosting speeches, testing opinions, and so forth. Australian politics does without these frills; if intellectuals wish to walk down the corridors of power in Australia they must leave their intellectuality at home. As in business, to pretend to some stupidity is safest. However there is some reason for believing that some intellectualization of issues in Australia now would not only interest people’s imaginations in the problems they must face: it might even win votes.

  In both political parties, during the Age of Menzies there was an archaic flavour in political affairs, a sense that much of this might have been happening at some earlier period in history. Even for Australia the deadness was remarkable. Politicians seemed pompous and out of touch. They seemed to be conducting a political debate that they had read about in an old book. There was little sign of a breakthrough that could, in a contemporary idiom, dramatize Australia’s new challenges. Politicians did not project the symbols of modern life. This may be partly because men of the Menzies–Calwell generation became virtually exiles in their own century; and partly because the distrust both parties have for intellectuals cuts them off from much analysis of what the world and Australia are now supposed to be about. Australian politicians – especially the old and powerful – do not keep up with their reading.

  Parties, like human beings, need some ‘philosophy’, some sense of purpose and identity to keep up their interest in their environment so that they can react to events in a contemporary way. In both parties in Australia a contemporary sense of identity has been lost. That is why a whole younger generation of Australians of the kind who normally might now be revitalizing political life are more likely to despise the whole set-up.

  8. THE AGE OF MENZIES

  The great survivor

  With his record reign of sixteen years as Australia’s Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies became one of those people after whom one might name an ‘Age’ – until time passes and later generations forget why any of it mattered. What follows is an attempt to estimate Menzies’ importance in the eyes of history. This is how things looked at the time of writing although this estimate might yet prove to be wrong.

  It was a feature of Menzies’ long rule that little of what he did seems to matter much. His great talent was to preside over events and look as if he knew what they were all about. His few active interventions proved mainly failures. He was a determined survivor – and even here he was really helped by the split in the Labor Party. It was a feature of his rule that most of the things in which he seemed to believe when he regained office in 1949 did not happen. His general posture in 1949 was one of ‘free enterprise’, support of British policies, anti-Communism, an interest in defence.* In his period of rule he had to adopt many of the mechanisms of planning, if in a piecemeal way; the American alliance was strengthened and the British connection was weakened; externally he followed policies opposed to the expansion of Communist regimes in Asia, but, after a false start (when he seemed to be making political capital out of it), there was less practical concern with domestic Communists than there was under Chifley; the proportion of national income spent on defence declined during most of his rule.

  The positive characteristics of his ‘Age’ – the spread of affluence, the considerable relaxation in social styles, the increase in national self-assurance, the continued migration programme, the beginning of an interest in Asia and the growing tolerance of Asians resident in Australia, the demands of technology, the increasing power of overseas investment in Australia, were none of them the kind of thing that Menzies has ‘stood for’ and some of them are the opposite of what he said he hoped for before he came to power. When even Menzies appeared to be losing belief in the British connection (from the time of the Common Market crisis) it is doubtful if he believed in anything anymore – except in himself. His attitude became largely nostalgic; he regretted much of what he saw of Australia in the 1960s. However he stayed in power.

  He seemed to believe that only he could run Australia. He presided over meetings, gave martinis to visitors, got in and out of planes, watched papers pass across his table, made speeches. He shared his power with a small group of Ministers and a small group among the heads of Government departments. With the exception of John McEwen he had most of his Ministers bluffed. Most of the men who came into power with him in 1949 went (he helped some of the more independent-minded ones go), and the new men lay in his shade; most of them hesitated to decide anything themselves and Menzies himself was not usually a quick decision maker; things piled up and, in the nature of things, some of them disappeared. With policy-making slowing down and sometimes stopping, the permanent heads of the government departments got on with the job of administering their departments in a way that would not cause trouble. It was one of the ironies of political life that in the 1940s some of these men were the instruments of Labor’s new deal in the government bureaucracy; but they became attached to Menzies and increasingly he regarded them, rather than his Ministers, as his agents in running the nation.

  Within his party he soon cut off from power or silenced all those who disagreed with him; he regarded them as mere time-wasters. His private conviction was that disagreement was mere ‘grizzling’, an expression of ‘ignorance’. Party meetings were stage managed so that opposition was not often expressed, and when it was expressed it was often made to look foolish. Of course, he showed charm and guile in maintaining support. He could use the ‘old boy’ technique effectively. (‘There is much substance in what you say, old boy.’) And in a political party that contains many ex-officers he knew how to appeal to a sense of obedience and how to isolate the ‘disloyal’. He treated all disagreement as serious and from time to time did not hesitate to suggest he would resign if part of one of his few plans was criticized. (Menzies himself was disloyal to Lyons and Hughes when they were his party leaders.) In personal encounter he could prove charming and much more subtly witty than his public performance might suggest. In public he was usually a ham. He revealed different sides of himself to different people but it seemed to be only among his family that he relaxed; with his colleagues he maintained an atmosphere of aloofness and a little mystery. He would unbend a little here, a little there, thereby fooling scores of otherwise sceptical and hard-headed men throughout Australia. They were delighted with a ration of condescension.

  He was a great actor. He could amuse with his imitations and clowning but he showed little interest in seeking the company of his intellectual equals; in his off-duty moments he seemed to prefer company in which his remained the superior intellect. He was lazy in his reading and – despite the projection of an image of learning and culture – the truth is that he was not particularly well-read, as little interested in things of the spirit as his fellow countrymen, and in so far as he did have intellectual or artistic interests they were extremely provincial and old hat. He was essentially arrogant, although courageous, with a scorn for most other men (perhaps all other men). He used his power to little purpose.

  John Pringle hit it on the head in Australian Accent when he described Menzies as a politician rather than an administrator, a man who enjoyed the battle of politics, loved making speeches, but often confused speech-making with the implementation of policy; who was lazy and complacent in power, preferring an easy shot to a hard one; ‘a supremely skilful politician – ruthless, adroit, cunning – whose special device is to pose always as a statesman’. This did not particularly fool the Australians. There was a period in the late 1940s and early 1950s when Menzies seemed to believe in what he was doing, and it may be that at that stage, in his defence of ‘liberalism’, he was really saying what he thought. But for the most part ordinary Australians have held him in little regard: his elevation to the Order of the Thistle was treated as ludicrous; he was widely considered old-fashioned and had always been considered insincere. In personal im
age, where Menzies really scored was against the even greater decrepitude in image of his opponent, Arthur Calwell. Time and again one heard young Australians say that they had no regard for Menzies but that Calwell with his ancient Labor rhetoric seemed even more antediluvian – some relic of Early Man.

  The people’s distrust of Menzies seemed to be reciprocated. He did not open his heart or address the Australians as if they were trustworthy human beings. In his first disastrous term as Prime Minister when he almost lost the wartime election in 1940, he did not seem to respect the people sufficiently to dramatize the war for them, and seize their imagination by making demands. It was as if he just wanted to run the whole show without bothering to get anyone’s confidence; he even failed to get the confidence of his party and in 1941 they ‘did him in’, forcing his resignation, after public brawling that had lasted for some months. He made the same mistake in 1961 when, at a time of economic recession, he insulted the people by standing on his records; only Santamaria saved the election for him. And although the decision to call an election in 1963 was his own it was only after a lot of pressure was put on him (by NSW party bosses) that he condescended to show enough interest in the people to gain their votes by promising them something. The truth was that he was a master of adroitness in the political infighting in his party – he cleaned the board – but as a public man fighting for office he was helped more by luck than good management. (Perhaps he was a true Australian in this!) He capitalized on the reaction against Labor’s post-war austerity quite skilfully in 1949 and 1951; after that the Labor Party gave him election after election by being stupid – and in 1954 by being unlucky.

  Menzies’ lack of interest in doing anything much with the power that the Labor Party thrust on him would not have mattered if, as is the case with some politicians of his temper, he had concerned himself not only with the thrill of battle and the delights of office but had also used the talents of able men so that they could exploit events in successful administration. He seemed to prefer to frustrate talent, to surround himself with a firebreak of mediocrity. In this he was of his generation. He was a country boy who made his way in the world with nothing but his own talents to guide him; in his particular environment his talents were exceptional; he was a State Minister before he was thirty; and Prime Minister (in 1939) at forty-four. (He made his first trip overseas at the age of thirty-nine.) Men of this kind and of this generation in Australia rarely respected anyone except themselves. The last thing they would do would be to look for others like themselves; they wouldn’t trust them. In Menzies’ case the bitterness of his humiliation by his own party in 1941 (which was largely his own fault) seemed to make him decide that it was better to survive than to govern well.