Martin Hayes

Unsurprisingly Labor’s Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy is not the first and will not be the last ALP figure to launch a baseless and tactless attack on Sir Robert Menzies accusing him of being a “Nazi appeaser“. Back in 2013 an otherwise decent and good man Labor MP Mike Kelly made a similar claim in an opinion piece in The Australian Jewish News. At the time former Howard government minister Dr David Kemp and I co-authored a reply which can be found below. In the piece we make clear that: Menzies understood the true nature of the Nazi threat, referring in his memoirs Afternoon Light, to the “sinister figure of Hitler”. When it came to attributing responsibility for the war, Menzies made clear “the guilt was that of Germany alone”. Following a four-day visit to Germany in July 1938 Menzies was shocked by the Nazis’ destruction of the liberal and democratic features of Germany, and by the apparent willingness of the German people to accept this. Far from unrealistically believing peace could be preserved, on his return he expressed his deep concern at the parochialism of the Australian states in resisting Commonwealth plans to prepare for war. He told the Constitutional Club of Sydney in October that: “Few people of the Commonwealth fully realised that the European crisis might involve hostilities in Australian waters – that war might be something that would come to Australia, and not merely something that was happening 12,000 miles away”. Throughout the period of his prime ministership, Menzies’ commitment to victory would remain steadfast, even during the darkest days of May 1940 when France was being overrun and senior colleagues like Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Australia’s high commissioner to Britain, contemplated defeat. Menzies worked to focus the British on the importance of the war in Asia and the Pacific. Like Churchill he understood the importance of America to the Allied war effort and made it a priority for Australia to have independent representation in Washington, appointing our first ambassador to the United States in 1940. Robert Menzies was the man who revived liberal thought and lifted the standards of Australian politics, and was the strongest opponent of socialist class-war rhetoric and the supporters of fascist ideas. Australians today should acknowledge an immense debt of gratitude to Menzies for his unfailing support for individual liberty at its moment of greatest challenge, for his opposition to those who were impressed by the overseas dictatorships of the ’30s, and to the national division, class war, isolationism and socialist utopianism being fostered from within the Labor Party at the time. And as for those individuals who seek to dishonestly misrepresent the Menzies legacy in this way, I say it reflects more on your ignorance of history and your desperate tactics to score a cheap political point. australianjewishnews.com/men…