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Seventy-five years ago today, Robert Menzies made what was to become one of the most famous speeches in Australian political history.
In words that leap off the page — that sound so modern, and yet so much better than any contemporary political address — Menzies referred to what became known as Australia's "forgotten people".
They were forgotten, he said, because they were not rich enough to look after themselves, but nor did they receive the protection that trade unions gave to the working classes.
The speech helped shape not just the nation's political trajectory in the post-war years — it also remains a central creed of the Liberal Party.
Menzies in the shadows
In May of 1942, Menzies was in the political wilderness, languishing on the Opposition backbenches.
Nine months earlier, in August 1941, Menzies had resigned as war-time prime minister, because he had lost support of his parliamentary colleagues in the United Australian Party (the Liberal Party's successor).
At the time, the so-called experts had written his political obituary. Alan Reid, the leading Canberra press gallery journalist, reflected the prevailing wisdom when he observed:
And so Menzies disappeared into the shadows for all time. For there is no way back in Australian politics.
And yet Menzies bounced back from his crushing setback, helped create the Liberal Party in the mid-1940s, and won that party's leadership before returning to the prime ministership in 1949.
He won six more federal elections on the trot before retiring at a time of his choosing in 1966. His record as our nation's longest-serving prime minister is unlikely to ever be beaten.
Menzies' remarkable comeback can be traced to his "forgotten people" address.
His master's voice: Menzies on air
On May 22, 1942, Menzies delivered the first of his weekly broadcasts on Macquarie Radio. The essays covered an extensive range of national political issues — from problem drinking, to compulsory unionism, to taxation policy.
But it was his keynote address where Menzies really distinguished himself.
In it, the former (and future) prime minister did what all successful political leaders have all too often done: appeal to the middle ground — in this case, the forgotten middle class, who neither ran big business nor were members of labour unions.
Menzies specifically named "salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers" and the like.
"They are envied by those whose benefits are largely obtained by taxing them," Menzies said. "They are not rich enough to have individual power," he noted. In turn, he said, "they are taken for granted by each political party."
Menzies admonished a bishop who had wanted to divide society into two classes, by observing:
If we are to talk of classes, then the time has come to say something of the forgotten class — the middle class — those people who are constantly in danger of being ground between the upper and the nether millstones of the false war; the middle class who, properly regarded represent the backbone of this country.
And he declared:
I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the organised masses. It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race. The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole.
Through these talks, as John Howard later remarked, Menzies showed a political intellect that no one on his side could match.
His political resurrection had begun. As a result, Menzies helped shape Australia in the post-war years. The influence of his "Forgotten People" address is not spent, particularly in a federal Liberal government that is seeking to win the political middle ground.
Listen to Tom Switzer's interview about the Forgotten People address with Liberal historian John Nethercote and Robert Menzies' daughter Heather Henderson.
Topics: government-and-politics, liberals, 20th-century, history, community-and-society, australia
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