ROBERT MENZIES AS CHRISTIAN JURIST

It’s great to be participating in this much delayed discussion of the book Australian Jurists and Christianity. One could say it has been a book of delays. I recall writing my own essay on Robert Menzies and sending it to editor Geoff Lindsay more than three years ago. But here we are, finally.

When Geoff asked if I would contribute a chapter on Robert Menzies as jurist and Christian, I jumped at the chance. So much of looking back on Robert Menzies is about his fine achievements as a politician. And, it will be a long time, if ever, that another politician will match his longevity as prime minister or erudite mind in the job.

Even Menzies’ remarkable performance as a young barrister in what has become labelled the Engineers Case, standing before the learned minds of Australia’s High Court on 24 May 1920, has faded in the wake of Menzies’ life as Australia’s longest serving prime minister.

On that day in May 1920, aged 25, Menzies showed off a capacity and temerity gained from resisting opponents from a young age. In his argument before Mr Justice Starke, Menzies tried to demonstrate the weaknesses that had developed over time in the law relating to state and federal powers in matters of industrial relations. For an hour or more, he argued complicated semantics in an attempt to prove his client – a State-run sawmill in Western Australia – was justified in bringing its employees under a federal award. To do this, he was attempting to argue that the function of such enterprises was of trading not government.

Listening, Mr Justice Starke had lost patience saying, “This argument is a lot of nonsense.” To which the determined young Menzies replied, “Sir, I quite agree.” This led to an adjournment and a rehearing weeks later, where the High Court found in favour of Menzies’ client, a decision which would make constitutional history. In his first appearance before the High Court, Menzies had shown a boldness which he later admitted the old Menzies would not have dared to display. He also, however, had sealed his reputation as a jurist.

In so much of his personal and professional life, the ways of the barrister defined Robert Menzies. From his quick-witted repartee – taking no prisoners – to his command of constitutional arguments, Menzies strode above his opponents. At times, a bit too far above them as his early political flaws demonstrated. He was most at ease among the legal alumini, whether at his office in the distinguished Selborne Chambers in Melbourne or as an honorary master at London’s Gray’s Inn where, in a dinner speech to honour Sir Winston Churchill in 1953, Menzies spoke of his being “a very humble servitor … in the great tradition of the law”. In his post-retirement book Afternoon Light: Some Memories of Men and Events, Menzies also admitted, “The practice of the law in court was and remains my first love.”

Born in December 1894, Robert Menzies was reared in a family of staunch Presbyterian faith. As a boy, in his grandmother’s care, punishments were meted out that required learning by heart long passages of the Bible – from which Heather Menzies deduced her father must have been quite naughty as he could quote at length from biblical texts.

In a speech in 1960, Menzies referred to himself as “an unblushing Presbyterian”. He belonged to an era in Australia that was inseparable from Christianity, certainly of the Sunday observance kind. His daughter Heather, however, is somewhat circumspect as to Menzies’ particular sense of Christian observance recalling that when at church at St Andrews in Canberra, her father’s chief absorption was working out how the Rev Hector Harrison was going to get from the beginning to the end of his sermon, such was his tendency to dart about as he preached.

Menzies and his family’s Presbyterian faith – unlike that of his immediate prime ministerial predecessor, Catholic Joe Lyons – was steeped in the God, King and country traditions of the UK, evolving as it had done from the Church of Scotland and the Acts of Union which created the Kingdom of Great Britain. It was a church of representative assemblies rather than the hierarchical style of ancient Catholicism. Representative government under British Westminster traditions was an article of faith for Robert Menzies, inspired not simply by Bible teachings but also from the evolving freedoms and rights granted to individuals and citizens under English law. For Menzies, Christianity and the law were thus bound together under the English Crown.

For more years than he was Prime Minister, Menzies’ life was centred on the law – as a barrister, Attorney General – both state and federal – and as writer of essays on constitutional law. Constitutional law became a personal fascination for Menzies and underpinned much of his perspective as a political leader. Lecturing at the University of Virginia in 1967, he told his audience:
I propose to speak not as a lawyer addressing his betters in the academic field but as a lawyer-politician who had the chief responsibility for the National Government in its dealings with the States for almost thirty per cent of the life of the Commonwealth of Australia.

As a federalist and a lawyer, Menzies’ approach to reform was of the evolutionary kind rather than revolutionary sort. He saw the constant tension between State authority and federal authority as a healthy tension. It protected rights and enabled argument and good governance to prevail. Menzies’ trust in the British Westminster system and British law making and its history made his faith strong in his belief in the traditions of Gray’s Inn, of the founding fathers of the Australian Constitution and of – as he put it in one of his speeches – the “great English-speaking alliance around the world” which he saw as “the greatest contribution that the English genius has made so far in the history of the world”.

These pillars of Menzies’ life as barrister, politician and ordinary citizen represented not only the secular world but emanated from the Judeo-Christian foundations on which those institutions were built. In a radio broadcast in 1946 on “Christianity and Communism”, Menzies argued that Christianity was a faith of love while Communism was one of hate, opining, “For all Christians the Cross, after nineteen hundred years, remains the symbol of the freely accepted sacrifice for others.”.

For Menzies, that Judeo-Christian influence underpinned the values his world passed on to future generations. In a radio broadcast in February 1943, Menzies considered the importance of education, from pre-school to university, education to produce critical minds in a democratic society. He spoke of the need in the post-war world to spend “far more millions … than we have ever dreamed of spending” on education. He then added that he feared church schools would not be able to continue without some State assistance in such circumstances.

Menzies’ support for church schools was unequivocal. He praised those parents who paid to have their children educated in non-government schools as people “who believe that education divorced from religion not only is incomplete but may actually be dangerous”. Within two decades, his own government would begin Australia’s financial support for non-government schools.

Menzies regarded his strengthening of the university system as his enduring legacy. He set up the Murray Inquiry into universities which led in time to the Commonwealth taking over full responsibility for universities and advanced education. In November 1963, Menzies also announced grants for the construction of science blocks in non-government schools and began the move towards significant state funding of what Menzies had once labelled “church” schools.

In his professional achievements, his writings and speeches, Robert Menzies was a leader whose legalistic and political successes were underpinned by timeless principles guiding Western democracies, at the apex of which he believed was the Westminster system with its political and legal freedoms linked to fundamental Christian traditions.