ANDREW GREENE: Conroy’s ‘nazi appeaser’ Menzies smear a convenient distraction
ANDREW GREENE: Curtin or Menzies: who’s your favourite wartime PM? Within the halls of Parliament, this is a question taken very, very seriously.
Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy is heading to Turkey for military talks this week, just days after deliberately igniting another round of the history wars by labelling former prime minister Robert Menzies a “nazi appeaser.”
The attack on the conservative wartime leader by the pugnacious member of Labor’s left-faction is not new but served as a convenient distraction from discussion of current problems within the Australian Defence Force.
For about a decade, Conroy has regularly levelled the accusation against Menzies, but on Thursday he chose the platform of the National Press Club to again make the claim about the Liberal Party’s founder and hero.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.“I’m very interested in disclosing what really happened before World War II and during World War II, where it’s a choice between John Curtin and nazi appeaser Robert Gordon Menzies,” Conroy said during his televised appearance.
Within an hour, the Coalition had condemned the minister’s remarks as a “baseless and grubby smear,” demanded he immediately apologise and then moved unsuccessfully in Parliament to censure him.
In response, the minister had plotted to table a September 1939 letter sent by Menzies in which the PM had written that he doubted Adolf Hitler wanted a first-class war and stated that “nobody really cares a damn about Poland as such.”
During his press club speech promoting the Government’s achievements on defence, Conroy had tried to make the case that Labor prime ministers such as Curtin had “always followed through with the big decisions and investment needed in this space”
Historians have long debated the various achievements and shortcomings of Australia’s wartime leaders, so Conroy’s late.st character assassination of Menzies predictably invited a re-examination of Curtin’s own record in office.
“As prime minister between 1939 and 1941, Menzies prepared Australia for war and did not hesitate to join the fight against the nazis on 3 September 1939, the same day the UK did so,” shadow defence minister James Paterson argued.
Coalition colleagues also pointed out that in 1938, in the shadows of WWII, the then-shadow Labor caucus had resolved: “No man must be sent out of Australia to participate in another war overseas”.
That year, then-opposition leader Curtin also argued: “Our view, based upon an acute realisation of all that has happened to Australia in the last 25 years, is that the wise policy for this dominion is that it should not be embroiled in the disputes of Europe.”
Over the weekend, the history wars continued to rage, with former Liberal treasurer Josh Frydenberg going online to re-share an essay he wrote in defence of Menzies in 2013 following a similar “baseless and tactless attack”.
“Menzies understood the true nature of the nazi threat, referring in his memoirs Afternoon Light, to the ‘sinister figure of Hitler’.”
“When it came to attributing responsibility for the war, Menzies made clear ‘the guilt was that of Germany alone’,” Mr Frydenberg argued in a piece written with fellow former Liberal minister David Kemp.
“And as for those individuals who seek to dishonestly misrepresent the Menzies legacy in this way, I say it reflects more on your ignorance of history and your desperate tactics to score a cheap political point.”
“Pat Conroy’s comments are beneath contempt,” former Liberal prime minister John Howard, who wrote a biography of Menzies, later told The Nightly in a brief but terse statement.
Finding the urge to join the battle over political legacies too hard to resist, Labor’s Patrick Gorman also took to social media on Sunday to praise John Curtin, the only Prime Minister to come from his own State of Western Australia.
On the anniversary of Curtin’s death on July 5, 1945, Gorman declared that the former Labor prime minister’s “legacy of courage, service and putting Australia first continues to inspire us today.”
“Eighty-one years on, we remember a leader who guided Australia through war, helped forge our independent place in the world, and dedicated his life to serving his nation,” he said.
Privately, senior Government figures are delighted at the days of debate generated by Pat Conroy’s “smear” on Menzies, saying it has allowed them to continue discussing defence policy — a policy area Labor feels increasingly happy to highlight.
Last week when questioned by The Nightly about growing concerns in defence industry over a lack of work and falling sustainment budgets, Pat Conroy insisted official figures showed otherwise.
He did however concede one point in the history wars — that he had been wrong to solely credit former Labor prime minister Andrew Fisher for founding the Royal Australian Navy in 1911.
Reluctantly the minister accepted that protectionist prime minister Alfred Deakin, who proceeded Fisher, could also lay claim to having helped establish a navy independent of Britain.
