THE MENZIES ASCENDENCY BOOK LAUNCH – MICHAEL KIRBY

In 2025, the Robert Menzies Institute published the third volume in its Menzies series – titled The Menzies Ascendency – Fortune, Stability, Progress 1954–1961. The Sydney launch took place at The Sydney Institute on Monday 3 February. The book was launched by former High Court judge The Hon Michael Kirby and The Australian’s Paul Kelly. They were introduced by Robert Menzies Institute director Georgina Downer, with follow up speeches by editor Zachary Gorman and contributor to the volume Anne Henderson.

 THE MENZIES ASCENDENCY BOOK LAUNCH

MICHAEL KIRBY

I start with a sincere acknowledgment of the First Nations’ Peoples. One thing you learn, if you are a Justice of the High Court, or maybe if you’re just a lawyer or citizen, is that a lot of the disadvantages and problems that have arisen in our history, in respect of the First Nations’ Peoples, have arisen out of Law. It is therefore a special obligation of lawyers to reflect upon this and do what they can in their lives to amend.

I thank Georgina Downer for briefly describing my life. Those who want a fuller description of my links with Robert Gordon Menzies will just have to buy this book and read the foreword.

This book is written with magnificent chapters of very readable prose. Not too long.  Written on a whole range of very important issues. The Labor split.  Federalism.  The Reserve Bank. National Health schemes. Higher education.  The origins of the open economy.  The atomic age. Antarctica.  Sewers.  Our neighbours.  Immigration policy.  New Australians. Aboriginals.  Canberra.  The close-run election in 1961. And the question, was Menzies simply lucky that he lasted so very long as Prime Minister? But if, like me, you had been born – in my case – in 1939 (which was the year John Howard was also born) or if, like the great Geoffrey Blainey, you were born in 1930 and are still functioning, or  if you were born like Gus Nossal in the early 1930s or like John Curtin, you were Prime Minister in 1939, then you have seen a remarkable period in Australia’s history.  A very great part of my youthful life was under the prime ministership of Robert Gordon Menzies.

I grew up first knowing Menzies not through any personal encounter or even through seeing his image very much. A few photos in the newspapers squeezed into a news reel, along with Hopalong Cassidy and other serials in the local movie house – the Ritz at Concord West. More likely listening to the mesmerising programs on the Australian Broadcasting Commission of the parliamentary broadcasts. Listening to him, “The Right Honourable, the Prime Minister (Mr Menzies).” Everybody who lived through that era will have listened to, and will have appreciated, Menzies the mighty orator.

There’s a marvellous passage in Paul Kelly’s Afterward, at the end of this book, in which he states – quoting Clyde Cameron, Labor minister in the Whitlam Government – that Menzies, according to Cameron, was there when he entered Parliament.  He was the only person who looked like a Prime Minister.  Who sounded like a Prime Minister.  And who had the bearing of a Prime Minister. On the cover of this book, which we now launch, is a rather endearing photograph of Menzies. It shows him in a typical double-breasted suit at the Parthenon in Athens.  For years I wore double-breasted suits in an attempt to show, against all the evidence, that I was actually quite a conservative sort of a person.  Menzies in this cover photograph has one finger very tellingly placed into a pocket. It is the sort of action of a person who is personally basically rather shy. He has put his finger awkwardly in his pocket. Have a look at it later.  You will see a man who was very considerable and who has served our country far longer than anyone else, even far longer than John Howard. He served our country as Prime Minister. It is a record that has never been even approached.  It is a record that is very unlikely, indeed virtually impossible in the media context of today, to happen again.

My first significant encounter with this great man was when I moved from the North Strathfield public school to the Summer Hill OC [Opportunity class] class in the public school system of New South Wales. At that time – the end of 1949 – my fifth year at primary school, Mr Menzies, as Leader of the Opposition, was facing the people in an election, which he won. In fact, he won handsomely. In that election, we had a school fete at the end of the year. And I took it upon myself to get my mother, whom I think was secretly quite enthusiastic for Mr Menzies, to make some toffees. I consumed a large number of the toffees myself.  But those that were left over I took to the Summer Hill OC class and sold them. Allegedly for the benefit of the Liberal Party of Australia. I don’t know whether I ever passed on the money that I thereby procured from fellow students. But if I didn’t, I’ll send an IOU to the Liberal Party to be called up when in due course it’s needed.

After that event, I went through another period of engagement with Menzies. It was mentioned by Georgina. This arose out our family’s engagement with Jack Simpson. He had fought in Gallipoli.  He was an original Anzac. He had won the Military Medal, which is a very high decoration for courage in the face of the enemy. He had won several medals, which were presented to him at Buckingham Palace by King George V. But in the 1920s – alarmed, hurt, distressed by the neglect of veterans – he threw away his medals. Jack became a communist. It was not an irrational thing to do at that time. Jack came to Australia, though he had been recruited to the Anzacs from New Zealand. His name there was Flynn, Maurice Flynn. Recently, my family, have made contact with the Flynn family.  They didn’t know entirely about his subsequent career in Australia. He changed his name allegedly because he didn’t want to harm the Flynn family, who were pious Catholic citizens of New Zealand (or British subjects as we all were in those days). As a communist, Jack Simpson rose very quickly in the ranks of the Communist Party.  This was possibly because he had skills in accounting.  Those skills were soon put to use when he was elected the national treasurer of the Communist Party of Australia.

In the 1940s Jack met my grandmother, Norma. She had divorced my father’s father, Victor Kirby. She was then unmarried; but she was working.  She worked right through the Great Depression.  She kept a great brood of sisters in funds during that time. She met Jack Simpson.  They had a romantic liaison, which subsequently led to their marriage in 1943. That was after Jack Simpson had been charged and convicted in Perth for being a communist.The battle against the communists in the mind of Robert Menzies did not begin with the referendum and the Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950-51. That battle began back at the very early days of the Second World War. At the time when the Soviet Union was not an ally of Australia, Britain and the other Allied countries, it was an enemy. Jack Simpson was arrested in Perth, where he was then living.  He was charged with breaches of the security legislation.  He was convicted and sent to prison.  He went to prison for his beliefs as a communist. However, after he was released, he came to New South Wales. He met my grandmother.  They married and they had a home, a modest home which is still there on the Princes Highway in Tempe. I think of them as I pass by from time to time.

I would go to their home quite regularly. I came to know Jack Simpson.  He was a most admirable man. He was a most principled person. He had a full set of the collected speeches of V Lenin.  They looked to be in pristine condition. I’m not sure that they had ever been opened. In fact, I was more interested in another book on the shelf there, which was The Decameron by [Giovanni] Boccaccio. But Jack Simpson was very kind to us. With my grandmother he was a little engaged in SP bookmaking.  That was mildly shocking to me because of my Protestant upbringing that condemned bookmaking, gambling and drink. They also drank a glass of beer, no doubt while listening to 2KY and the dog and horse races. But he was a very nice man, for all that.  A challenge to my pre-conceptions.

On one occasion, I helped Jack Simpson in the futile attempt to get L. L. Sharkey elected as a member in the federal parliament for the seat around Tempe. At that time, I was given a big pot of Clag glue.  My job, as a young helper, was to follow my uncle Jack (as I called him) with his banners for L. L. Sharkey – who was the General Secretary of the Communist Party – to put up the signs on lampposts. When my mother heard about this, she was outraged. I got the rounds of the kitchen, and I was told that I was never again to do anything like that. And I never did.

I didn’t get my ASIO file from that very late-night endeavour on my part to advance the cause of the Communist Party, modest though it was. I got to the notice of ASIO because Jack took my two brothers and me to the Sydney Taronga Park Zoo.  As all Sydney-siders know that is a place where you can see the glows of Sydney Harbour. It is a most beautiful and spectacular place. My first mention in that ASIO file, which citizens can now secure for a modest fee, records that Jack Simpson was seen at Taronga Park Zoo with two other young boys and me. The two other young boys were my brother Donald, who became a senior partner in a legal firm in Sydney. And my brother David, who became a barrister, a QC and later a Judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. It was small pickings for the anti-communist cause. Yet we made it into the ASIO files. It is a good thing that we can now all ask and get those files.  It is a healthy corrective against excesses of security and similar legislation.

Then came the Communist Party Dissolution Act.  It was actually an Act. It passed through the federal parliament.  It resulted in legislation which Menzies advanced as early as 1950.  It was promptly challenged in the courts. Menzies had one vote for him in the High Court of Australia. That of Sir John Latham, who had been a predecessor in the Liberal Party in the federal parliament and who held (in the words of the Lord Protector Cromwell) that “being comes before wellbeing”. That was the basic thought of Menzies on this issue. That it is no good worrying about wellbeing if you don’t “be”. Therefore, you have to do nasty things to communists because otherwise they will do nasty things to you.

Anyway, that was a theory behind the anti-communist legislation and Jack, as the national treasurer, had to protect the treasurer of the Communist Party.  And he did. He never for a moment believed that this court of judges sitting in faraway Melbourne would strike down the legislation. Yet by five votes to one (there was one judge who didn’t sit) they did strike down the legislation. This was a tremendous shock to Menzies because, apart from anything else, he had only just appointed two of the – or it might have been three – of the judges. Menzies then, when he lost the case in the High Court, took it to the people in a referendum. And entered into a mighty struggle between two titans, Menzies and Evatt. That contest is told so well in Anne Henderson’s Menzies Versus Evatt. But the people of Australia, by a small margin, voted not to confirm the legislation. And I agree with John Howard that, this was a very good thing that it was defeated.  But defeated it was.

In my student days, I eventually met Menzies. This is an advantage I have over Paul Kelly and therefore I request the opportunity to say something from this close proximity and observation. I was then a leading figure in student politics at Sydney University.  Sir Charles Bickerton Blackburn, a very ancient man (probably about the age I am now) decided that he would retire as Chancellor. A dinner was held in his honour where the chancellor was the host and the chair of the evening. Menzies turned up. What struck me was about him was that he was very large.  He was tall. He had very ruddy complexion, pale, for he was a Scot. And he was a person of a lot of dignity. Yet he was not supercilious to students.  He had been one himself long before.

Outside the Refectory at the University of Sydney Union, the students had set upon the burning of Menzie’s effigy on the lawn, the Refectory lawn. And Menzies was not in the slightest upset about this. He was a university man, and he knew how mischievous university students could be. He was not upset. He loved a circumstance where he could show his verbal skills, including against students. But none of the students including me, expressed thanks to him, for one of the marvellous achievements of his government in extending the opportunities for education to them – the Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme. That I think was a crowning glory of his government. Less crowning, in my humble opinion, were some other aspects which are dealt with in the chapters of the book – including his actions against the communists.

The book is not just a book of praise. It has information on so many of Menzies’s activities, which I mentioned at the outset.  It is well worth the read. Reading it makes me realise how skilfully, powerfully and effectively Menzies bested Evatt on the occasions when they had their contest.

Still, if you look at the world today and the world of human rights, that Evatt played such a very big part in trying to establish in the United Nations – without which the future of our species would be in grave doubt – then you would have to say that Evatt probably bested Menzies in the field of international law and international policy. Nevertheless in Australia, Menzies was the longest serving prime minister.  He was a very powerful figure. A figure with many great achievements for the good of the people of Australia. And I’m glad to be here to commend my foreword.  And to commend this book.  And to help and support Paul Kelly in launching it.