basic wage demands and the forty-hour week
which the trade unions had fought for. Chifley did
not hesitate to take tough measures against unions
that went on strike. The most serious of these
stoppages was the miners’ strike in the summer of
- With the country threatened with paralysis,
troops were sent in to reopen the coal mines and
the miners were forced back, winning only some
of their claims. The general influence of commu-
nists in the trade union movement receded,
though it was strongest among the miners after
the unsuccessful 1949 strike, but obsession with a
non-existent communist threat remained a feature
of Australian politics for years to come.
In December 1949 Australians felt secure
enough to vote the Labor government out of
office. Robert Menzies, who had led the Liberal–
Country Party opposition, promised prosperity
and a better life free of bureaucratic control. Like
the Conservatives in Britain in 1945, where the
tactic had misfired, he now warned against totali-
tarian socialism. There was no such danger of
course, but the electorate was ready for a swing of
the pendulum. Menzies, who soon became one of
the best-known politicians on the world stage, had
founded the Liberal Party and rebuilt the opposi-
tion during the war. He was a moderate conserva-
tive, appealing for consensus, an Australian version
perhaps of Stanley Baldwin, a middle-of-the-
roader with a common touch, standing for decency
and family values and fulminating against commu-
nism and trade unions, especially when they went
on strike. Later his staunch support of British roy-
alty and his deference to and affection for the
young Queen Elizabeth II appeared to reinforce
the old traditional Britishness and dependence of
Australia. But behind the avuncular image lurked a
shrewd politician.
His government made no great changes from
Labor’s previous policies. Some welfare provisions
were improved; more was done to pay for health
care, in the teeth of the suspicious medical pro-
fession. Although Australia was in no danger of
being subverted by communism, Menzies
attempted to stir up feelings against the small
Communist Party and in 1950 legislated to
outlaw it and seize its assets. It is to the credit of
the Australian High Court’s sense of democratic
values that it struck this measure down by a
majority decision; the Australian people them-
selves rejected it, but only by a tiny margin, when
in 1951 Menzies campaigned to outlaw the party
in a national referendum.
Menzies dominated Australian politics in the
1950s and 1960s. These were the golden years of
expansion and continuous improvement in the
standard of living. More than 2 million immi-
grants were successfully absorbed. The black spot
was the continued neglect of Aborigine interests.
They had little share in Australia’s boom. As far as
white Australia was concerned there seemed no
need to take risks by turning to Labor, whose poli-
cies were no more hostile to the capitalist basis of
the Australian economy than the Menzies-led
government. The Liberal–Country Party coalition
was therefore able to stay in office for most of the
three decades up to the 1980s. Prosperity had
eroded working-class support. Condemned to
almost virtual opposition Labor became faction-
alised. Can parliamentary democracy really survive
in such conditions? Reassuringly it did. Labor did
win power in a number of state governments. In
1966 Menzies retired after serving continuously as
prime minister for sixteen years. His one enduring
domestic achievement, apart from presiding prag-
matically over Australia’s years of prosperity, was
the giving of government support for school and
university education, which greatly expanded. The
timing of his departure was well judged, as more
difficult economic times lay ahead, and a new
generation of Australians prepared to face them.
Most Australians remained resolutely anti-
communist, but the challenge from the younger
generation, which swept the Western world in
the mid-1960s, did not entirely pass Australia by.
The Vietnam War gave the discontent a focus.
Demonstrations were mounted against the
support that successive governments gave to the
US from 1966 to 1971 under Harold Holt, John
Gorton and William McMahon, the three prime
ministers who followed Menzies. They were pre-
cursors of a shift in Australian political loyalties
after twenty-three years of Liberal–Country Party
domination. Industrial disputes became more fre-
quent. The Labor Party drew new hope from
these conditions, which many Australians blamed
1
THE PROSPEROUS PACIFIC RIM II 669
