The Lucky Country

by Donald Horne

  In judging statesmen one can take a reasonable view and judge a man by the possible, by the extent to which he associates himself with the likely and perhaps guides it, reforms where he can, crystallizes ideas and images, galvanizes the bureaucracy and seizes events and incidents to make policy out of them. By this modest view of statecraft one can say that for sixteen years Menzies saw few of the potentialities of the age; that his reactions were most usually those of an old-fashioned man guided by the vanishing standards of an earlier, more rural community. In some ways at times he had seemed to reflect not even the standards of his own generation, but of the one before him. Perhaps when he was a young man making his way in the world those he admired most were the Australian politicians who cherished the English connection. These were the real provincials: Melbourne gentlemen who adopted what they took to be the standards of the far-distant metropolis. Throughout his long career Menzies stressed ‘loyalty’, by which he did not seem to mean loyalty to Australia but to the British connection, and to the Monarch (when he was not referring to loyalty to himself). He seemed always to have associated himself with ‘loyalty’ and the Labor Party with ‘disloyalty’; even when the Curtin Government was defending Australia against the Japanese, in some of his speeches Menzies seemed to be doubting its ‘loyalty’, by which he meant not its conduct of a war to save the Australian nation, but its attitude to the United Kingdom. If this interpretation is true it means that throughout a period in which Australia was in need of orientation towards Asia and towards technology it was governed by a man who had deeply absorbed the provincial standards of Melbourne at the beginning of the century.

  The Age of Menzies

  It was the habit of Menzies’ apologists to give him credit for anything they liked about what had happened in Australia since 1949; even when they could not demonstrate his connection with it; even when he did not take credit for it; or even when it was something that he would wish had not happened. But they didn’t keep to the rules of this game: they were not prepared to blame him for anything they did not like about what had happened in Australia since 1949. For these things more often than not, they blamed ‘The People’.

  According to his supporters, Menzies was to be credited with Australia’s ‘industrial revolution’ and rapid economic growth. (As will be seen later, this was even given as an excuse for his failures in rearmament.) In considering this defence of Menzies one does not even have to consider the relation of his policies to events. The alleged events did not happen. It is ridiculous to claim that an ‘industrial revolution’ started in the early 1950s and false to claim rapid economic growth for Australia since then.

  The ‘industrial revolution’ began in Australia in the nineteenth century, sooner than it did in most parts of the world. Australia ‘took off’ not all that long after it was founded. In one of the more specific tests, the foundation of heavy industry in Australia was laid as long ago as the beginning of the twentieth century. After that, from the beginning of the First World War to the Depression manufacturing production went up by 70 per cent; and in the 1930s, despite the Depression, it more than doubled. The most significant impetus was given during the Second World War when Australians engaged in splendid improvisation: they quickly produced a whole armaments industry, providing the weapons and vehicles of war. When the war ended, in another spectacular improvisation, and with encouragement from the Chifley Labor Government, Australian and foreign-owned companies turned the skills, machines and factories that had been thrown up during the war into private manufacturing industry. The process of increasing the proportion of consumer goods that are manufactured in Australia was already in operation when Menzies took over. Even the establishment of Australian factories in which foreign manufacturers make motor cars for Australians (a key piece of evidence for the ‘industrial revolution’ claim) was first encouraged by the Chifley Government. (Menzies’ indifference killed L.J. Hartnett’s attempt to start an Australian-owned car manufacturing firm.)

  Despite all the rhetoric about ‘Australia Unlimited’, Australian economic growth since 1949 has been comparatively low. Australia’s comparative affluence – its prosperity compared with that of other countries – is declining. It would be more accurate to say of Menzies’ Australia that it was during his Prime Ministership that Australia became a comparatively less prosperous country.

  In general social reform, few claims are made for Menzies, and, other than the health services scheme, since 1949 there have been no new concepts in social welfare. However it was in his almost perverse neglect of the Defence forces that Menzies was curiously vulnerable. He did not pretend to be a social reformer, a welfare state-ist or an economic planner; he did claim to be a realist in the conduct of foreign affairs, and a patriot. Yet there was no coherent Australian defence force – only some bits and pieces of a defence force. Only about 6000 soldiers could be put into battle at once, but there were no assault craft to take them to a battle area, not enough transport aircraft to fly in even one battalion, no effective air strike force to give them support; there was no effective Fleet Air Arm (nor for that matter, an effective navy; the navy became mainly an anti-submarine force); and on the mainland the radar and ground-to-air guided weapon defence system was quite inadequate. In the early 1960s expenditure on defence ran as low as 2.7 per cent of GNP, lower than any prosperous country except New Zealand. Pressures from his own colleagues – and from the Americans – finally rushed Menzies into a defence expansion which brought this figure up to about 5 per cent.

  Producing this figure does not tell the most significant part of the story. Sweden spends less than 5 per cent of its GNP on defence and has what may be the fourth or fifth best air force in the world. The Swedes use their brains in their approach to defence problems: they have simplified their super-structure, worked out policies that suit their own needs and designed most of their own equipment. Menzies ran five ministries to the Swedes’ one; he seemed to lack the intellectual capacity to think about defence coherently; and his rule seriously threatened to destroy the morale of the men who were supposed to run Australia’s defence forces. Whatever sense of initiative and desire for achievement they had possessed became eroded; their status was that of courtiers to Canberra officials. Throughout Menzies’ period of office Defence Ministers were peculiarly weak. Menzies’ Cabinets would muck around with a series of attempts to work out a relation between the Defence chiefs and Cabinet, but none of them would work. What happened was that the services were still administered piecemeal, mainly by civilian officials. Despite his conservatism, Menzies was an unmilitary man: he would avoid direct contact with his service leaders – unless, in effect, they turned into civilians. For most of his rule the accountants in the Treasury set a (low) ceiling figure and told the service departments that this was all they could spend: there was no coherent planning from the needs of the situation; just annual improvising. This is now changing.

  The emaciation of the defence forces soon left Australian diplomacy with an impossible task. In itself, diplomacy cannot achieve much, unless there is a capacity for propaganda and bluff – and one certainly did not find this in Canberra. Even then, some show of strength may be needed to convince allies that one is at least trying. As Professor B.B. Beddie has said: ‘While officially we undertook a major defence effort in order to secure and carry influence in our alliances, in reality we relied upon our alliances to relax our defence effort.’ It should be remembered that in gross terms – without even worrying about dividing GNP by population – Australia is by far the wealthiest nation in South-East Asia. If its leaders had the brains to develop a defence force of the quality of the Swedes’ it would have by far the best defence force in South-East Asia. In strategic terms it would be a power in South-East Asia; this would provide a base for stronger diplomatic action.

  Put down baldly, what Australian policy was under Menzies in facing the new power situation in Asia was this: Menzies entered into a number of commitments and then made no attem
pt to meet them. He bluffed – and those who were aware of it hoped that if his bluff was called the United States would slip some good cards into his hand.

  One of the things a democratic political leader is supposed to do is to apply his values and ideologies to policy-making and then to try to interest people in what he is doing. Menzies had obsolete and irrelevant values and ideologies. His view of the world did not give him a real feel for the problems of the age and of Australia. Unable to formulate the right issues, he did not formulate any issues; or he formulated issues in the wrong way. For instance, when he sent an Australian battalion to South Vietnam he did not try to excite people’s imaginations as to why this was necessary; he despatched the battalion off-hand, as if they were assassins sent off secretly into the night by a great prince to do his dirty work for him. After this action such rhetoric as he finally summoned for the occasion was mainly undergraduate Union Night polemic, directed against his critics. To his supporters – on the evidence, most of the people in Australia – he did not address himself in a straightforward and meaningful way. In his attitudes to Asia (which never really caught his attention) Menzies has been a giant obstruction to a natural trend. He has held things up. Spender, Casey, and Barwick, his first three External Affairs Ministers, all realized how Australians should reorientate their thinking to the fact that their island adjoins Asia; they tried to interest Australians in this. Menzies frustrated their efforts – his eyes were on London.

  Menzies’ lack of feel for contemporary problems and lack of interest in dramatizing them applied beyond Asia. He probably had the same contempt for business activity as for Asia yet in this field, as in foreign policy, a political leader can – by making speeches, dramatizing issues and displaying styles – affect changes in attitude that may be more profound than changes attempted by legislative action. No one could legislate Australian businessmen into more contemporary approaches; it might be possible to talk them into it. What Menzies should have told the Australian people was what they wanted to hear: that the elites who, in various fields, run the country’s affairs should all smarten themselves up. As it was, one of the characteristics of the Age of Menzies was a running down of enthusiasm, a deadening of approach to problems, a retreat.

  In a review in Quadrant of the first edition of The Lucky Country Irving Kristol said: ‘In a democracy, if there is good democratic leadership, the people are capable of creating better than they know – and of truly appreciating this supra-popular creation. Without Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, the American democracy would not only be far poorer in its self-definition than it is today – it would be blissfully unaware of its poverty. With them, and others like them, one can discern a promise and a potentiality that is becoming (one hopes) an integral part of American democratic life.’

  This view of the role of a democratic political leader opposes everything Menzies has stood for.

  After Menzies

  Nothing befitted Menzies better than his going. Perplexed by a changing world offering strange problems to which he could not be bothered offering a solution, he modestly slipped out of office, as satisfied with the Lord Wardenship of the Cinque Ports as a head clerk who goes into retirement carrying an engraved gold watch as a token of the firm’s esteem. He left his litter behind him but he spared his successors advice as to what they should do with it.

  When Harold Holt replaced him as Prime Minister there was almost at once a greater recognition of what was important to Australia. One of Holt’s first acts was to announce some slight changes in the immigration policy, changes that were perhaps more important because of the promptness with which they were made than their substance, but which, by redefinition, have at least allowed greater administrative discretion. Holt went to Vietnam, and to other countries in South-East and East Asia, dramatizing by his presence there what it now meant to be an Australian. He announced that, so far as Vietnam was concerned, Australia went ‘all the way with L.B.J.’ and followed up the startlingly successful visit of President Johnson to Australia with the visit of Premier Ky. Later he visited Cambodia (then neutralist), throwing light on one of the little-known subtleties of Australian policy, that Australia is friendly with nations that hold themselves differently. In the rhetoric of Australian foreign policy he added the idea of social revolution to that of stability: Australia saw Asia not only in terms of a Communist threat but of the necessity for its peoples to break their way through to the material progress and freedoms that Australians themselves enjoy.

  Holt surprised his own followers with the boldness of some of his decisions and he fought an election on the Vietnam War with a courage that even some of his critics recognized. But he seemed slow to start that bonfire of Menzies-ism that his success would have allowed: his government continued to show many of the characteristics of its predecessors. The contradictions in Holt lessened his effect on Australians’ imaginations. In Parliament he could still show the pettiness of an old parliamentary windbag, with only his little touches of spite enlivening the tedium of his long, disorganized speeches. Yet there was something in him – idealism, opportunism, or both – that made him seize on Australia’s relations with Asia as one of the central lines in government policy. Unlike Menzies, his political sensitivity was contemporary, feeling out towards what now mattered, liking it for that reason, and exploiting it for political purposes. Unfortunately he conveyed this sense of what mattered with the words of a mayor opening a new child-minding centre, delivered with the indestructible grin of an old tap dancer.

  However there was hope in his very opportunism, combined with what did seem to be his belief that there was nothing to be ashamed of in being an Australian, and perhaps his hope that Australia’s neighbours might some day enjoy some of Australia’s privileges. One got the impression that, unlike Menzies in his period of decline, Holt was at least still interested in his job.

  9. FORMING OPINIONS

  Censors

  Throughout the century, where other democracies have censored badly, Australia has censored worse. It has always been out of the mainstream and, in the liberalization of its censorship on questions of sex, it is still behind other democracies. The sudden liberalizations of elsewhere have been reflected only in part in Australia. In 1965 an edition of The Trial of Lady Chatterley, banned for import, was set up and separately printed in Australia. The Federal Government accommodated itself to this challenge and lifted the ban. Shortly after, it lifted the bans on Lolita, Borstal Boy and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Perhaps it was afraid that someone would print Australian editions of these, too. This new method of defiance gave considerable hope to those Australian intellectuals who had been deriding their country’s censorship for some years. They looked around for new ways of making an ass of the law.

  None of this banning greatly impedes the reading of books. It is the regular thing for anyone with the slightest interest in books to smuggle banned books into the country when returning from abroad and to pass them around. What disgusts is the joy with which politicians can associate themselves with book banning; this regular reminder of a troglodyte past affronts those who consider politicians to be poor judges of what is of human value.

  Film censorship has become less prudish about sex, but more concerned about violence. In re-censoring old movies for showing on television all kinds of phrases and episodes that have some relation to sex are now restored; but other phrases or episodes that have some relation to violence are cut out. New movies are censored with a light hand, but cuts are still more prudish than in most democracies.

  In the mid-1950s, as a result of Church pressure, mainly Catholic, new censorship laws against popular reading matter were introduced. Licensing systems were set up in some States, censorship boards in others. Except for the Queensland Literature Board of Review, which proceeded to make a fool of itself with great haste and a lavish hand, nothing much happened after that. The Queensland Board, which claimed to be defending ‘the civilization of the West’ and to be protecting
youth against ‘the fiery darts of the wicked’ appeared at first to have almost completely arbitrary powers of banning without giving reasons. However a number of court actions inhibited its activities. It is of interest that intellectuals – who almost universally oppose censorship of the kind of books that they themselves want to read – hardly ever deplore the censorship of ordinary people’s reading matter, and sometimes even support it.

  Schools

  Australia’s economic growth is impeded not only by lack of research and boldness at the top but by a shortage of trained technicians in the middle range and of skilled workers in the lower-middle range. The statistics tell some of the story. Although Australia is one of the most prosperous countries in the world it runs very badly in percentage of GNP spent on education, and since its forward education programmes were scrappy and behind those of many other countries it fell behind in the race to produce the technocrats. There is little planning to train a new kind of person as part of the process of economic development. There is mainly belated scrambling around the mounting slope of crisis. In some secondary schools only half the teachers are university trained. Comparative figures suggest an unusually high wastage of talent. The shortage of technicians is even more serious than the shortage of graduates. Sometimes engineers, for instance, spend only a third of their time on work at a professional level. The rest is spent doing work that could be done by technicians. In the universities the student/staff ratios are too high. The proportion of students who take higher degrees is proportionately small compared with other industrialized nations.