On this day, 28 September 1946, the Australian people are asked three simultaneous referendum questions which seek to give the Federal Government the power to legislate on a wide range of social services, make laws for the organised marketing of primary products, and legislate on terms and conditions of industrial employment. Only the former is carried, and its success is in large part attributable to the support given to it by Robert Menzies and the Opposition.

Frequently throughout Australian political history the Labor Party has tried to expand the powers of the Federal Government to enable them to carry out the broad objectives of the Labor platform. Notably, one of those objectives has traditionally been the ‘socialist objective’, and this combined with liberal beliefs in subsidiarity and the benefits of diffusing power has generally meant that non-Labor parties have opposed the expansion of Commonwealth powers, with considerable success (though there have been a number of occasions where non-Labor governments were themselves the ones conducting a referendum and in these cases they often faced their own conservative backlash). Menzies himself was partly a follower of this tradition of anti-centralism, however he had a nuanced and pragmatic view that saw that there were certain specific areas in which Commonwealth involvement might produce positive outcomes.

The most expansive attempt to alter the Australian Constitution was the 1944 ‘Post-war Reconstruction and Democratic Rights’ referendum, which bundled together 14 separate powers into one question. Menzies was highly opposed to this, and indeed the campaign against it helped to reinvigorate the Opposition after the devastating 1943 election loss. Menzies was particularly against the method of bundling up questions in a take it or leave it fashion, which he felt was an insult to the intelligence of the electorate. Certain sweeteners, like the ability for the Federal Government to deal with the repatriation of soldiers (a power which Menzies argued the Government already had), were highly advertised in an attempt to get the public to agree to industrial powers which they had previously rejected and which were intimately associated with the socialist objective.

Other sweeteners involved enshrining rights to free speech and freedom of religion into the Constitution. Menzies was against this partial Bill of Rights as something that betrayed the Westminster tradition of parliamentary supremacy and which was inimical to true democracy. In a number of radio broadcasts he argued that Bills of Rights were an artefact of a time before democracy, and that in the long run only the people and a healthy culture could protect freedom:

‘We are apt to forget that the great historic documents which are associated with our freedom, such as Magna Charta and the Declaration of Right, all represented stages by which men passed from being slaves and subordinates to free men and civic equals. At a time when Kings were absolute rulers the liberty of the subject had to be from time to time demanded and occasionally fought for. But in due course all these battles ended, and with the coming of modern democracy the people became the source of power, the agency by which power was exercised, and the subject to which power was addressed. In other words, we are, again speaking in terms of substance, not only the ruled but the rulers. The man who is, in fact, his own master will scarcely need to have on the wall a list drawn up by himself of things which he must not do… In the last resort it will be found that the only real assurance of freedom of speech or of the press will be a real spirit of freedom in the minds of the people. But if the people at any time became so carried away as to seek to destroy these freedoms, which are of our life blood, no pretty little form of words in the Constitution which they themselves made would prevent them from doing it’.

The fourteen powers were decisively defeated on the back of such attacks, but when two years later the Chifley Government asked for individual powers in separate questions Menzies was far more open to the idea and constructive in his criticism. He was concerned that as originally worded the social services question might have given the government the ability to nationalise medical services and conscript doctors to work for them. He therefore moved a successful amendment explicitly proscribing ‘any form of civil conscription’, which helped to allay conservative fears of the consequences of the constitutional amendment and therefore played a significant role in its success. Menzies would ultimately be able to capitalise on this success, for many of his later reforms to tertiary education would be predicated on the social services power secured in 1946.

While the referendum question went the way Menzies had hoped, the other poll held that day did not, for 28 September was also the date of the 1946 election in which the new Liberal Party achieved a noticeable swing but was still a long way from threatening the Government which was then riding high on the back of post-war optimism. In many respects the referendum questions allowed the electorate to have its cake and eat it too, by electing Labor but forestalling any ability for it to enact socialism in the way its opponents threatened that it might. All that was to change with Chifley’s attempt to nationalise the banks, which made what George Reid had famously dubbed the ‘socialist tiger’ spring to life, and demonstrated that Menzies’s liberal vision for a state which combined individual initiative and free enterprise with a considerable social safety net was a clear alternative to Labor’s vision of a more expansive and controlling state.

Further Reading:

A.W. Martin, Robert Menzies, A Life Volume 2 1944-1978 (Melbourne University Press, 1999).

For Menzies’s views on why Australian referendums tend to fail see Robert Menzies, Central power in the Australian Commonwealth; an examination of the growth of Commonwealth power in the Australian Federation (London Cassell, 1967).