The Liberals have not betrayed the Menzies legacy

Robert Manne calls Howard's Prime Ministership, "The barren years". In a sense, they were. Never have the artistic and academic communities produced such a volume of vapid, reactionary groupthink. Countless tomes of juvenile rants against Howard and Bush clutter the shelves at my trendy local bookstore. At left-wing talkfests, our self-appointed cultural elites engage in endless political “wankery”. Repeat some tedious "Bush is a moron" joke and it is taken as an indication of genius, so much so, that functional illiterates like Margo Kingston, can masquerade as intellectuals.

That the aspirational middle class still prefers to educate its children on Shakespeare rather than Margo is not a sign of intellectual primitivism, as our elites would have us believe. It is a sign that, while those increasingly disconnected elites flit from one fashionable obsession to the next: the "three Rs" of reconciliation, republic, refugees; ASIO laws; mindless pacifism, the aspirational middle class remains grounded in less ephemeral values. Its "three Rs" for education are the traditional ones, the "three Rs" most consistent with Menzies "intelligent ambition" and which provide a foundation for the higher learning that will equip the young to contribute to the nation's intellectual capital.

The homes spiritual belong to the aspirationals, not the elites.

In summary, Brett's accusation that the Liberal Party has betrayed the Menzies legacy is without foundation. Brett's need to add the qualifier "moral" to "middle class" demonstrates at least a subliminal awareness of this fact. To Menzies, the middle class required no such qualifying adjective. It was, by definition, moral, because it embodied a morality grounded in homes material, homes human and homes spiritual. Today, those homes are located in electorates like Aston, McMillan and Greenway. As we saw on October 9, their inhabitants are still voting Liberal.