1955 Federal Election
H.V. Evatt meets with Vyacheslav Molotov in London in 1942. Image from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s ‘Australia–Russia 70th anniversary of diplomatic relations photographic exhibition’.
On this day, 10 December 1955, the Menzies Government wins a fourth term and extends its majority on the sixth anniversary of the 1949 election. Only 18 months have passed since Australians last went to the polls in late May 1954, with an early election justified on the grounds of bringing into line the House and Senate election cycles. However, it is clear to all observers that this is a convenient pretext, and that the Prime Minister’s real motivation is to take advantage of the Opposition’s disarray following the Great Labor Split.
Events had proceeded frantically and dramatically. Labor narrowly lost the 1954 election, partly because of the Petrov Affair which broke during the campaign and revealed a Soviet spy ring in Australia. Opposition Leader H.V. Evatt became convinced that the Petrov Affair was a conspiracy designed to rob him of office, particularly after several of his staffers were revealed to have communist links and he decided to defend them before the Royal Commission into Soviet Espionage in Australia, which had been established in the wake of the Petrov revelations. It was in this state of paranoia that Evatt denounced the anti-Communist ‘Groupers’, who had been trying to combat the influence of communism in the trade union movement, for allegedly sabotaging Labor’s 1954 election campaign, causing his party to split.
When the Royal Commission finally released its report, Evatt sensationally told the House of Representatives that he had written to the Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov who informed him that the documents on which the report was based had been fabricated. On this basis, Evatt called for an international commission featuring USSR representation to ‘settle the dispute once and for all’. This move is now famous as one of the most ill-judged decisions in Australian political history. Evatt had not informed his party of what he was about to do, and when he made his speech the House of Representatives went into an uproar, with members of the Coalition actively laughing and ‘hooting’.
Evatt was taking the word of Australia’s Cold War enemy over the detailed inquiries of ASIO and the highly respected royal commissioners, and consequently his credibility as a mainstream Australian politician was instantly ruined. As Menzies described it ‘the Leader of the Opposition has, from first to last in this matter, for his own purposes, and in his own interests and with the enthusiastic support of every Communist in Australia, sought to discredit the judiciary, to subvert the authority of the security organisation, to cry down decent and patriotic Australians and to build up a Communist fifth column’.
On the same day that Evatt had given his sensational speech, Menzies wrote to the Governor-General requesting an early election to realign House and Senate polls thrown out of sync by the 1951 double dissolution, and also to give the Government a mandate for a new economic policy aimed at bringing Australia’s overseas payments and receipts into balance. Menzies’s letter was in all likelihood sent before Evatt spoke that evening, it was intended to capitalise on the split and the commission’s report rather than the Molotov letter, which was simply the serendipitous cherry on top for the Prime Minister.
Raucous scenes continued in the House of Representatives for another week before Menzies made public that he had advised the Governor General to dissolve it, with members of the Anti-Communist Labor Party practically exchanging in screaming matches with their former colleagues. Newspapers worried about a dirty and brawling election campaign, but in the end things proved remarkably quiet, likely because the result seemed a forgone conclusion.
Evatt promised pension increases, automatic basic wage adjustments, new taxes on company profits and the withdrawal of Australian troops from Malaya. Menzies campaigned on his record, the strong economy, and rising living standards, leaving it to the Anti-Communist Labor Party to throw the mud for him.
The poll saw the latter party vanish from the House of Representatives, but it won the balance of power in the Senate, and its preferences helped the Coalition increase its majority from 7 seats to 28. Evatt’s inability to cope with the disappointment of 1954 ruined Labor for the rest of the decade, and led many, even admirers, to question if his sanity was deteriorating.
Further Reading:
A.W. Martin, Robert Menzies, A Life Volume 2 1944-1978 (Melbourne University Press, 1999).
Troy Bramston, Robert Menzies: The Art of Politics (Scribe, 2019).
Robert Menzies, Policy Speech 1955, Museum of Australian Democracy, available at https://electionspeeches.moadoph.gov.au/speeches/1955-robert-menzies