Prime Ministers: from Lyons to Howard forms a complete circle

I was 16 when Joe Lyons died in office. He was a distant figure. I never met him. With every Prime Minister since, I have had some personal contact.

The 33 years from Lyons' death to Whitlam's advent brought great changes, which, despite the Cold War, at least promised some remedies to the economic and social miseries and political afflictions of the inter-war period.

By the late 1960s, changes were so great that economic and social policies and, consequently, party-political programs, needed major adaptations. Those adaptations were never satisfactorily made. Vietnam ended and the Soviet Union collapsed. The trend accelerated towards globalisation, along with territorial fragmentation resulting especially from the end of colonial and communist empires. Political, economic and social instability, together with abdication of responsibility by governments in the name of freedom and "free-market" efficiency, tended to diminish disciplines and intensify violence, wars and terrorism.

Against this world background, who were the most effective Australian Prime Ministers over the whole period from 1939 to 2003?

We must first consider the Prime Ministers during what was, at least until recently, fairly regarded as the most challenging period in Australia's history, that of the Pacific War and postwar reconstruction.

After barely weeks in office, the untried John Curtin faced the threat of imminent Japanese invasion with a competence that, in retrospect, seems remarkable. Panic was never far away among ordinary Australians during the months after Pearl Harbor. I recall joining a group of fellow university students to plan how we would wage guerilla warfare when - not if - the Japanese landed. Somehow Curtin and his team held the country steady and led us safely through those turbulent and terrifying months. It was not the politicians but "a handful of brave kids" who, on the Kokoda Track and at Milne Bay, turned the invader back; but somehow Curtin managed to get the "brave kids" in place and to arm, feed and supply them, however poorly, so that they could inflict the first defeats on the seemingly "invincible" Japanese army.

Inevitably, Curtin made mistakes in his conduct of the war, his handling of the home front and his dealings with the Americans - and British - but overall he managed an unprecedented, complex situation surprisingly well. To keep Macarthur on side, he was sometimes unfair to Australian generals, in particular Clowes at Milne Bay and Allen in the advance back to Kokoda, but, pragmatically, he saw that as a price that had to be paid.

The war hastened Curtin's death and brought to power - characteristically to a room at the Hotel Kurrajong instead of the PM's Lodge - the man who probably ranks as our finest political leader of the past 60 years. Ben Chifley came to power without seeking it or deriving any personal benefit from it. Intelligent and decisive, he had, above all, a personal integrity rarely seen among his successors.

As an imaginative though unschooled political economist on the Royal Commission on Money and Banking in the mid-1930s, as Curtin's Treasurer and in re-ordering our economic and social environment after the war, it was Chifley who led Australia into one of our periods of most dramatic national growth and stability between 1945 and 1970.

Chifley was defeated in December 1949, partly because of concern over his policy to nationalise the banks and, as some saw it, his too fierce determination to safeguard his economic and social revolution; and largely by an Opposition leader who lured electors with his promise to abolish petrol rationing and unsettled them with lurid references to Hayek's Road to Serfdom.

Menzies, who had not distinguished himself between 1939 and 1941, retained power after 1949 through a deep split in the Labor Party and such good fortune as the Petrov defection. However, he could claim a measure of greatness because, despite all the portents, he preserved the essence of Chifley's revolution. He was also the first of three postwar Prime Ministers who were personally impressive both at home and when they ventured overseas.
Even so, Menzies diminished himself by his sometimes nauseating attachment to the British monarchy and, indeed, to everything British and especially Scottish, and he diminished his country by such episodes as his performance during the Suez crisis of the mid-1950s. In his last days in office, he nourished allegations that he was racist by declining to go to or be represented at a Commonwealth Conference to discuss Rhodesia after UDI.

Nevertheless, he was a man of fine physical presence and good though rather superficial intellect. I was at our Embassy in Bonn when he made the first postwar visit by an Australian Prime Minister to (West) Germany. President Heuss and Chancellor Adenauer were both men of distinction with whom Menzies, unlike many of his successors in similar circumstances, could deal on better than equal terms. As always, he spoke well both publicly and privately. Incidentally, he arrived in Bonn by everyday train, in a standard compartment, with a mere couple of officials. He was confident, at ease and modest in his personal demands.

Menzies was the last Australian Prime Minister with any real claim to greatness. That has to be set in the context that Prime Ministers from 1945 to 1970 enjoyed a favourable economic and social environment deriving from Chifley's policies of high and stable rates of growth, full employment and strong external relations. The three Prime Ministers who followed Menzies were borne along by this benevolent environment and, in some ways, the four or five years after Menzies' retirement were a culmination of this golden era. But Holt, Gorton and McMahon did little to enhance the blessings of those years. At best, they could claim, until the early 1970s, to have done little actively to demolish the structure that Chifley created and Menzies managed to safeguard.

I was at the United Nations General Assembly in 1967 when I heard of Holt's disappearance. At a previous UNGA I attended, in 1963, Kennedy was assassinated. During a later UNGA, in 1970, Nasser died. Even for his fellow Australians, Holt's demise was, politically, by far the least momentous of the three events.
Gorton "did it his way" but with only confused ideas of where he was going. Like several Prime Ministers, he was unfortunate in his selection of aides. His successor had been Treasurer and then Foreign Minister in Gorton Cabinets. In the latter role, I found McMahon often friendly and amusing and at other times volatile to the point of hysteria. Much of the time, he was tense and highly suspicious of everyone - he accused me once of "betraying" him to Gorton - and, on occasion, his speeches and performance overseas could be embarrassing.

The other two postwar Prime Ministers who impressed overseas were Whitlam and Fraser. Both travelled in grand style. Neither was modest in his personal demands. Like Menzies, Whitlam gave a pleasing impression of good fellowship. Fraser cut a more reserved and formidable figure.

Whitlam was both one of our more visionary Prime Ministers and very much an activist. He wanted things done right this minute, which often meant he reflected insufficiently on the consequences. His appreciation of the Australian dollar in December 1972 illustrated his penchant to act hastily. It also illustrated his uncertain grasp of economics and the changed economic and social environment of the 1970s, which almost inevitably made Whitlam's a government not unlike Scullin's at the onset of the Great Depression.
Post-Whitlam, it has been downhill all the way. Fraser restored some conventional, though transitory stability; and he has won more applause as Australia's Jimmy-Carter-in-retirement than he did in office.

The former trade-union boss, Bob Hawke, and Jack Lang's protégé, Paul Keating, destroyed what was left of our postwar achievement and joined the slapstick politicians in the Reagan/Thatcher mould to lead us into ill-considered "free-market" anarchy and substantial abdication of governmental responsibility.
That brings us to Howard, on whom a disillusioned electorate has had to rely since 1996 because there is no plausible alternative. Never a man of much vision or style, more a man designed to be an FAQ country solicitor than a man to determine his country's destiny, he has now lost even his earlier reputation for honesty. Perhaps the best we can say of him is that he's a sort of Joe Lyons of our time.

So we're back where I was aged 16. Howard told us before the 1996 election that his aim was to make us "comfortable." Few would now claim he has made us any more comfortable than Lyons did in the 1930s. He has few original ideas and, like Lyons, holds on to power thanks to a poor Opposition, and a capacity to grab at expedient good fortune. He trots, doglike, behind his American masters as, before 1939, Australian Prime Ministers left foreign policy to their British betters and much of Australia's economic and social fate to the Bank of England. He wins elections by such crowd-pleasing expedients as denying refugees the right to clamber on to an Australian life-raft.

Like Joe Lyons, he has a pathetic Opposition which has lost its way but which, even more sadly, is not even racked by the clash of political philosophies and social forces that characterised the '30s. Even Carmen Lawrence, though she laments her Party's timidity and lack of principle, gives only limited articulation to what she wants Labor to do. She is no Ben Chifley. After Whitlam departed, the light on the hill that guided Curtin and Chifley as well as some of the wilder men of the '30s and '40s like Eddie Ward and Jack Lang, lost its brilliance to flutter like a candle in the wind and now has long since been completely extinguished.

Does it matter?

Yes, it does. The past 30 years have brought us high and chronic unemployment, low real public and private investment and low growth. Our industry has been gutted by migrating overseas, our farms left to rot, their environment neglected. Homelessness is high, poverty widespread, inequality an ever-growing curse. Even for our daily consumer needs, we live largely on money borrowed from abroad. Our trade and payments are never in balance and never will be, so long as we persist in "fighting inflation" with hikes in interest rates. Our dollar which, near the start of Whitlam's bumpy "reign" 30 years ago, was worth more than its United States counterpart, now struggles to stay above 50 cents - and the greenback itself is propped up largely by mystic supports.

Would a Chifley have made any difference, had he been with us during those 30 years and, more precisely, if he was with us now? We can be sure he would battle for full employment. He would keep interest rates low and real public and private investment high. If the Holden was one of his achievements, what might be the equivalent now? He would battle against drought and, more generally, to enhance our water resources and, as a countryman himself, to help "the man on the land" - and those who make up healthy rural communities. He would keep the banks in their place, requiring that, for their privileges, they deploy our resources at home for the growth, stability and welfare of us all. He would give decisive leadership. Yes, he would sometimes be wrong but always fair to the everyday Australian and the battler, always decent and always honest.

His foreign policy would be robust; (but he would not make ill-advised threats to launch pre-emptive strikes, in hypothetical situations, against terrorists in otherwise friendly territory). He would be a reliable friend but not a grovelling retainer to the mighty, whether across the Pacific or elsewhere. He would restore effectiveness to a foreign service that, within his government, Evatt created from almost nothing after 1941. At the same time, he would know that, in the end, power depends not on the size of our foreign-affairs and defence budget but on the economic and social strength that sustains it.

Is there now a Chifley lurking somewhere in the Labor Party or even among the Liberals or lesser political groups? Frank Crean was not the brightest of Whitlam's stars; but he held robustly to beliefs that his son seems entirely to have lost. More widely, the visionary spirit of the fathers has been lost with their sons and grandsons and there seems little promise from the generation to come. Will it take another Great Depression and another world war to produce another Chifley? As we ask that question, we must also ask whether another Great Depression and, if it comes, another world war will put at risk the very survival of all of us - the rare and hallowed Chifleys along with the rest?

If all we have to look forward to is a longer line of Joe Lyons - and if other world "leaders" continue to be no better - then Australia's destiny, and that of our friends, probably lies somewhere between dismal and catastrophic. Survival may not be the reward of those who cannot match their leadership to the majesty of the achievement of which humanity is now capable. It is that achievement - already majestic in so many ways - that, without wise leadership, may, paradoxically, destroy us all.