On this day, 22 September 1951, Australia votes on a constitutional amendment that would allow the Federal Government to make laws on communists and communism, giving effect to a ban of the Communist Party that had been overturned by the High Court. The referendum is narrowly defeated, with ‘yes’ receiving 49.44% of the vote while prevailing in Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania. The attempt to ban the Communist Party remains one of the most controversial policies of the Menzies era and many people credit the referendum result with helping to maintain the integrity of our liberal democracy.

Robert Menzies had initially banned the Communist Party in 1940, at a time when the party openly opposed the war effort and when the Soviet Union on friendly terms with Nazi Germany, both countries having participated in the invasion of Poland. Suspensions of civil liberties like this were fairly common during both World Wars, necessitated by the dire circumstances of the time. The ban was subsequently lifted largely because of Hitler’s launch of Operation Barbarossa, which pitted Germany against the USSR and thus made the latter a British ally.

This change of policy was implemented by the Curtin Government, but it won the acquiescence of Menzies who refused to join in a Country Party call for a ban at both the 1943 and 1946 elections. At the time, Menzies justified his stance by arguing that an outlawed party would go underground and also that to declare any system of political thought illegal was a negation of freedom. In line with his liberalism, in peacetime, Menzies was inclined to support free speech even for opinions that he detested and considered dangerous.

In March 1948, in the context of a successful communist coup in Czechoslovakia and a Queensland Railway strike which was thought to be communist inspired, the Liberal Party adopted the banning policy. Menzies changed his position on the grounds that the Cold War was a real war and that the Communist Party threatened to act as a fifth column within Australia in the very likely scenario that the democratic West went to war with the USSR. These circumstances had only become more real by the time the Communist Party Dissolution Bill was introduced in 1950, with the Korean War bringing heat to the Cold War and raising the threat of Chinese communist aggression.

The attack on free speech was a betrayal of Menzies’s liberalism made in order to protect liberalism and democracy from what was seen as their greatest threat. This was a moral and philosophical dilemma which Menzies himself identified. At the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in January 1951 he said that Western Governments needed to figure out:

‘How to reconcile necessary and legitimate opposition to subversive or aggressive movements with the broad tolerance of all kinds of thought, even the most radical, which was one of the most valuable traditions of the Commonwealth way of life and its great source of spiritual strength. It was all too easy to discover, that in attempting to repress subversion or aggression, one had in fact been suppressing freedom of thought.’

Arguably, Menzies failed to reconcile these imperatives. His Communist Party Dissolution Bill gave the Government arbitrary powers to declare someone a communist, thereby barring them from public service and union positions, and reversed the onus of proof for the accused. This reversal of the onus of proof was justified on the grounds that if it were not reversed security officers would have to reveal themselves and their leads, and it had a precedent in Labor’s 1947 Defence Projects Bill.

The Dissolution Bill passed the Parliament as a severely divided Labor Party reluctantly allowed it through, fearful of the electoral implications of being seen as soft on communism. It was overturned by the High Court because the Dissolution Act relied on the defence power, and the Court found that contrary to Menzies’s urging, the Cold War did not legally constitute a war.

Opinion polls initially showed an overwhelming 80% support for both the communist ban and the referendum that would allow it. However, over the course of the referendum campaign fears were raised over the unintended consequences of the sweeping powers, and many Liberal Party members joined the ‘no’ case on philosophical grounds. In the end Australians lived up to their history of displaying innate conservatism when it comes to changing a highly successful constitution, although the result itself was extremely close.

The result was initially a blow for Menzies, but the communist issue remained a vote winner with the electorate and he would recover well because of this. Arguably, it was Menzies’s means rather than his ends that the Australian people had rejected. The Dissolution Act, High Court case, and referendum had raised extreme divisions within the Labor Party, as well as placing Opposition Leader H.V. Evatt in a position where he appeared to many people to be a communist apologist. This would ultimately precipitate the Labor split and Menzies’s record streak of election wins.

For Menzies, the referendum result was arguably a blessing in disguise. His reputation for liberalism was saved from what would have been its ultimate stain. However one feels about the referendum, the episode must be judged within the context of its time. The threats identified did not eventuate, but that does not mean they were any less real, and what now seems unthinkable, then seemed utterly necessary to almost half of all Australians.

Further Reading:

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

Communist Party Dissolution Act, available at the Museum of Australian Democracy http://static.moadoph.gov.au/ophgovau/media/images/apmc/docs/82-Communist-Party-ban.pdf

‘Remembering the 1951 Referendum on the Banning of the Communist Party’, Australian Historical Studies, Volume 44, Issue 1, 2013 (A special edition with multiple articles dedicated to the topic).