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PREPAREDNESS, 1938-3 9 HE Accession of Mr Menzies to the Prime Ministership at the End of April 1939, Following the Death of Mr

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PREPAREDNESS, 1938-3 9 HE Accession of Mr Menzies to the Prime Ministership at the End of April 1939, Following the Death of Mr CHAPTER 3 PREPAREDNESS, 1938-3 9 1-A CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT, APRIL 193 9 HE accession of Mr Menzies to the Prime Ministership at the end of TApril 1939, following the death of Mr Lyons, affords a convenient point at which to turn from a consideration of developments in the perio d between the two wars to a consideration of more urgent preparations fo r the waging of war. Although war was still four months away and although the Menzies Government came to power through causes unrelated to war , the course of events made war its major preoccupation . This Government , shaped not in the normal course of electioneering but from the chances of human mortality, had laid upon it the duty of mobilising a nation fo r war and undertaking the unaccustomed tasks of wartime administratio n throughout the greater part of its life . To a large extent it inherited th e policy of the Lyons Government, in which its leading members had hel d office, and its activities in preparation for war were continuous from measures initiated under Lyons . Yet, at the same time, a greater directness and purposefulness and a clearer consciousness of the impending event i s discernible after Menzies takes office. The contrast between the new and the old Prime Minister was dramatic . Menzies was younger, more brilliant and more acutely aware of the state of the world than Lyons . It would be wrong to both men, however, t o imagine that Menzies had been called by the nation as a strong leader i n a time of peril . It was quite otherwise. Menzies had a disputed succession and he took over the leadership of an unhappy party. These facts, as well as the fact of impending war, set him two major problems of statesmanship and it was necessary for him to wrestle with both . The Lyons Government at the beginning of 1939 had showed signs o f having outlived the reasons for its creation . It was an emergency govern- ment which had lasted longer than the emergency and about twice as long as most governments formed in more stable conditions manage to last . It was formed to assist recovery but had continued in office after recover y had been achieved . It was a government whose unusual political character had grown out of the fears prompted by an economic depression and it was now required to give reassurance in face of fears of an entirely differen t kind. The tributes paid to Lyons after his death bear testimony to his upright- ness, his understanding, patience, forbearance and tolerance . He was calle d "an average Australian" as a tribute to his humane and manly qualitie s and "one of the most honourable, straightforward, large-hearted men wh o ever took part in Australian political life" . His associates said he ha d no dazzling gifts but great political capacity and shrewdness . Hughes said "Few leaders have had to face more delicate or more complex situations 110 PREPAREDNES S in Parliament or in the party rooms. Certainly none has handled them with greater success". Curtin spoke of his political aptitude but praised mos t highly his qualities as a man, finding him remarkable not because of hi s attainments so much as because "throughout his years he remained a man in whom the simplicities of life were never in any way distorted".1 By the qualities of his personal character and political shrewdness and a simple Australian patriotism he had held a government together for seve n years and had given stability and confidence during a period of recover y from great difficulty but men, and not only ambitious men, were askin g whether the qualities he had were those needed at a time when the natio n had to stop looking backwards to the depression and look forward to mee t an even greater danger from the outside world . Lyons was not an imagina- tive man or an originator of ideas . It was said of him that he had no strong political views of his own, but he would loyally and zealously advance the agreed policy of his Cabinet. Inasmuch as men look to find in others the sort of virtues they have in themselves he would prize suc h loyalty and zeal in his colleagues rather than force and originality. Although the death of Lyons was unexpected by the public, the Prim e Minister and a few of those most closely associated with him had know n for at least six months before his death that he had not long to live. He had also known that war was coming and, apart from the limit on his life, that he himself would not make a good wartime Prime Minister. His heart was not in war. He was in all things a man of peace . If war came , so he confided to one of his intimates early in 1939, he would hope to b e able to resign. His uncertainty about his own tenure and about a successo r would appear to be indicated by the feelers he put out shortly before hi s death for an all-party "national government" . Among those who knew nothing about the Prime Minister's health— and the seriousness of his condition appears to have been known only t o a few—there was also considerable speculation about how long he coul d continue to hold his Ministry together and what political possibilities woul d be left open if he failed to do so. There was a real prospect, heightene d by Curtin's steady progress in his task of unifying and solidifying Labour , that at the 1940 general elections a Lyons Ministry would be defeated and , partly in anticipation of that election and partly because of the strain among Government supporters, there had been some turning over of ideas about the reshaping of the non-Labour forces and consequently som e stirring-up of personal ambitions . The senior member next to Lyons was Page, who had accumulate d nearly twelve years of Cabinet experience and had been coadjutor to tw o Prime Ministers . He had drawn very close to Lyons . As medical adviser and friend, as well as colleague, he probably shared more of the privat e hopes and forebodings of Lyons than anyone else in the Ministry . But Page was leader of the Country Party—the weaker member of the coalitio n 1 See in particular the obituary notice in The Round Table, Vol XXIX 1938-39, pp. 622-623 ; the contributed notice by B . S . B. Stevens in The Australian Quarterly, Vol XI, No. 2, p . 5, and the speeches in Commonwealth Debates, Vol 159, pp . 6-8 . A CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT 11 1 —and could have no chance of the Prime Ministership unless the United Australia Party was irreconcilably divided over its own leadership an d failed to find a successor to Lyons . The Deputy Leader of the United Australia Party until shortly before the death of Lyons was Menzies, who had entered the Cabinet as Attorney- General in 1934 after transferring to Federal politics from Victorian Stat e politics. His friends had confidently predicted for some years that he woul d be Prime Minister but, at Canberra so far, his superior gifts had distin- guished him as a man whom it would be extremely difficult to out-riva l rather than as one whom it would be natural to follow . He himself appears to have become somewhat irked by the conditions within the part y and dismayed at the slowness of the Government. Eventually, in March 1939, he handed in his resignation to Lyons when, after elaborate prepara- tions, the Government's national insurance scheme was shelved. In a publi c statement he said that he must resign because he could not "honourabl y escape" the pledges he had given to introduce such a scheme . The Ministry had on other occasions revealed its internal dissensions and members had not always kept their personal disappointments and dis- comforts to themselves. The Opposition was able to taunt the Govern- ment with disintegration and point to the fact that eight former minister s who had left it for one reason or another were now sitting on the bac k benches. As recently as November 1938 the Leader of the Government i n the Senate had resigned because he thought that he was being eased ou t of the Cabinet,2 and a few days later another minister had resigned th e day after he had been sworn in because his seniority had been change d without his knowledge. The Opposition could play upon known difference s of opinion inside the U .A.P. and, in particular, they could find enoug h rumours and even a few public disputes to use in prying the coalition apart by alleging that Lyons was allowing the Government to be run by a minority of fifteen Country Party members . When Menzies resigned over the shelving of the national insurance scheme the Opposition reminded a number of other ministers and private members that they had been mad e to turn public somersaults, too, and that the "excuses offered by the Prime Minister for the abandonment of the original national insuranc e scheme are so transparent as to be ludicrous". They fed some members ' own dark thoughts by publicly commenting "it is now clear that Sir Earl e Page has been the element of disintegration in Federal Cabinet for a long time". This partisan use of the discontents of the Government partie s is not evidence concerning the subject matter of those discontents but doe s illustrate the political weaknesses into which those parties were falling .3 To some extent the pre-eminence of Lyons had been due to the fact that he alone was respected and acceptable among a group of persons who did not all respect and accept each other and originally had belonged to different parties .
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