It's Back To The Ming Dynasty

by Norman Abjorensen - Canberra Times

Prime Minister John Howard is growing ever more to resemble his hero, Robert Menzies. Not that he will ever draw close to the 18 years in office of his revered predecessor, but the Howard of today is looking increasingly like the Menzies of the 1960s a man seemingly out of step with the times and inhabiting a world about which he understands less and less.

Menzies simply stayed too long at the helm. By the time he retired at the start of 1966 he was 71, weary and with health concerns. Yet it was more the mindset than the physical manifestations of age that marked out Menzies as a man out of time: he simply could not relate to the present other than to view it through a prism of the past, and a distant and fast receding past at that.

Even though the greatest political triumphs of Menzies were notched up in the post-war era when he ruled unchallenged from 1949 to 1966, after a less than successful stint in The Lodge from 1939 to 1941, he was essentially a man of the pre-war years in both outlook and intellectual proclivity. He was a man of the Empire, a devotee of the monarchy, and one for whom the English-speaking white man ruled the world through an inherent superiority.

The post-war years of rapid decolonisation, the abandonment of Empire and the inevitable slackening of the imperial bond in Australia were, in their totality, an affront to his core beliefs. That he could be used so cynically by the larger powers in trying to mediate in the Suez crisis of 1956 demonstrated not so much his international stature as his willingness to argue the imperial case in a world that was hastening to shrug off the colonial shackles.

By contrast, the British Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan, was under no such illusion about policy directions, as his famous "winds of change" speech delivered to a shocked South African parliament in 1960. It was a defining moment in the struggle for black nationalism in Africa and the independence movement across the continent, and also signalled a shift in attitude towards the Apartheid regime in South Africa.

For all his good points and they were many, especially in his commitment to education Robert Menzies could not adjust to the changing realities and his relations with many post-colonial leaders, India's Nehru for example, were strained.

It was not so much that Menzies was racist, but that his sense of a natural hierarchy was disturbed by the sudden elevation of newly independent peoples to the international stage.

His cast-iron attitudes were even a cause of mirth (discreet, of course) among his cabinet colleagues, with the man anointed to succeed him, Harold Holt, making a mildly mocking comment in a letter about Menzies showing off his archaic uniform that went with his new ceremonial position of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.

These were the valued accoutrements of a man of another world and slightly embarrassing to those with a more modern outlook.

In the case of Howard, we have a man who has built his political reputation on a canny reading of the public mind. His social attitudes have always been less than progressive, but rather than serve as an electoral handicap they have resonated in an electorate sometimes bewildered by the speed and extent of change.

In the idealised world of Howard, there are no homosexuals, women stay at home and tend house, Aborigines stay out of political sight, workers are deferential and authority is never questioned. It is the world of a sitcom set, circa 1957.

Such a complex issue as climate change somehow did not register on the prime ministerial radar until very late in the day (and then only for self-serving political reasons), its having been dismissed as a fringe cause of the far left and of interest to only a few zealots.

Wrong. The weight of evidence and its saturation coverage in the media have driven home to many average Australians the precarious reality we are all facing; suddenly, Howard's attempted U-turn has hit a wall of disbelief, and he appears unusually fazed by it.

Just as Menzies never understood the concerns of a rising generation (and nor did his party until it was too late), Howard has miscalculated the attitudes of middle Australia, hitherto his unquestioned heartland. He simply failed to see the change coming.

So, too, has his desperate attempt to create a political issue out of indigenous suffering in the Northern Territory been met with criticism and accusations of cynicism.

Finally, his adherence to a hard-line policy of industrial relations has seriously misunderstood the ambivalence so many Australians feel towards employers.

Well might he try to legislate change, but attitudes a long time in their formation and deeply ingrained in the national psyche are not discarded overnight, whatever is on the statute books.

He might not be parading around in an absurd uniform, but Howard is starting to look just as anachronistic as the man he so much admires.


Norman Abjorensen teaches politics at the Australian National University.