When bombed in England bluff Bob Menzies
Gave way to paranoiac frenzies;
And other news like this to gladden
The unbombed soul of Artie Fadden…
This fragment by the anarchist poet Oliver Somerville conveys something of the contemptuous attitude of the defeatist Left to Prime Minister Menzies’s doomed mission to wartime England in 1941 to plead for the strengthening of Singapore. Menzies failed and resigned as Prime Minister soon afterwards. (He did not become PM again until December 1949.) Fortunately we now have a better — and splendid — account of those desperate days in Anne Henderson’s Menzies at War, launched on 1 July at the Sydney Institute by Barry O’Farrell in his first public engagement since he resigned as Premier of NSW in April. The packed hall applauded him vociferously.
One of Henderson’s themes is an examination of the preposterous story that Menzies’s real ambition in 1941 was to topple Churchill and become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The Canberra historian David Day wrote a book about it 1986. No scholar of British politics and no British politician took it seriously. (The Sydney Morning Herald did!) William Shawcross called the idea ‘absurd’ and Lord Carrington agreed: ‘That’s the most absurd story I’ve heard for a very long time.’ Yet as recently as 2008 the ABC screened a docudrama on the same theme. In her book Henderson totally dismisses the idea. There were many critics of Churchill’s authoritarianism but there is zero evidence that Menzies hoped to supplant him. For his part Churchill rightly scorned all such idle rumours as bruits de malveillance.
Henderson is equally dismissive of leftist historians who present Menzies as obsessively anti-communist. He was Prime Minister at the time of the Hitler–Stalin pact when the Communist party was doing everything in its power, from strikes to show business, to undermine the war against Hitler. The treatment of this theme is the weakest part of A.W. Martin’s otherwise magisterial biography of Menzies. Henderson has the advantage of being able to draw on more recent works such as Mark Aarons’s Family File, Hal Colebatch’s Australia’s Secret War and Our Unswerving Loyalty by David Lovell and Kevin Windle, based on Moscow archives.
One of the bonuses in Henderson’s Menzies at War is its publication for the first time of Menzies’s account dated 1 September 1941 of his resignation as Prime Minister on 27 August 1941. It is an amazing document, plain-spoken and stylish, objective and detailed. It is also clearly the statement of a wounded leader who has given up his leadership but has no intention of giving up the battle. As he walked from the party room around midnight on that fateful night, he tearfully quoted to his private secretary from the old Scottish ballad: Ile lay mee down and bleed a while / And then Ile rise and fight againe. Incidentally he told the party room that while he had a high regard for Labor’s leader John Curtin he felt that many of Curtin’s most active followers were only ‘very dubiously British’.
Bishop Forsyth of South Sydney scored a hit in his recent talk to the Centre for Independent Studies on threats to freedom from the aggressively secular culture of contemporary Australia. He was commenting on press reports that the federal government’s proposed liberalising of the Keating/Lavarch restrictions of 1994 on freedom of speech (especially 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act) had stymied the NSW government’s proposals to do the opposite and to toughen corresponding state law to make it easier to prosecute ‘free speech’ offenders. The former premier Barry O’Farrell had complained that there had been no successful prosecutions of ‘hate speech’ in New South Wales. He wanted to see a few. But the Baird state government is moving slowly and waiting to see the result of federal 18C deliberations. This delay has angered ‘reformers’. The president of the Council for Civil Liberties found the state government’s response to be ‘terribly unsatisfactory’. He too wants a few prosecutions. Bishop Forsyth recalled the time not so long back when the CCL made its name ridiculing prosecutions of political radicals. It then stood firmly for free speech. But nowadays it wants to fine or jail moral conservatives and religious believers who practise free speech. It calls this civil liberty.
We are all Catholics now, said Jeremy Sammut (a self-described lapsed Catholic) addressing the same CIS forum. We are all involved — not only Catholics bound to resist proposed laws to compel priests to solemnise gay ‘marriages’ but anyone threatened by 18C. When the Federation fathers adopted section 116 of the Constitution they imagined they were establishing freedom of religion in Australia. They would be appalled by what is being done to the churches today in the name of human rights. Sammut calls the struggle over 18C ‘the freedom wars’.
A couple of weeks ago I quoted Dyson Heydon, formerly of the High Court, on the danger to democracy from the spreading influence of international conventions and institutions on domestic laws. Almost immediately the UN World Heritage Committee overruled the decision of the Commonwealth government, the Tasmanian government and the Tasmanian electorate to delist some 74,000 hectares of degraded forest and plantation timber from Tasmania’s World Heritage Area. It took the Committee ten minutes. So much for democracy. Yet the World Heritage Committee has only advisory authority. In the circumstances of this case the Australian and Tasmanian governments should reject its ‘advice’.
