Stop Asking What Menzies Would Do
His answers belong to another age. His method of rebuilding doesn’t.
I joined the Liberal Party in 1998. Back then Sir Robert Menzies had been dead for 20 years and was still the second most important man in every Liberal room, behind only then prime minister, John Howard.
As Howard’s tenure lengthened, the party kept a running countdown clock to each milestone. First, he overtook Malcolm Fraser as the second longest serving Liberal prime minister; then, late in 2004, he overtook Bob Hawke as the second longest serving prime minister outright. Both celebrations rested on the same word.
Second.
Second to whom never needed saying.
Howard’s ascent didn’t loosen Menzies’s grip on the party. It tightened it, and the better Howard did, the taller the founder seemed to grow. Howard even wrote the book on him, The Menzies Era. The rest of the party kept invoking the name as an answer in itself, and whenever the living hit trouble the same question returned, half in hope and half from habit.
What would Menzies do?
A few weeks ago, after the party devoted a strategy session to that question, I promised an answer. This is it.
On 2 August the Financial Review published a Redbridge/Accent survey of 1,001 voters. It put One Nation on 31 per cent of the primary vote, Labor on 29 and the Coalition third on 22. The gap at the top sits within the margin of error and other surveys have One Nation lower, so treat it as a snapshot as opposed to a forecast. What it captures, though, is detachment. One Nation and the Coalition together held 53 per cent. Ask voters where their preferences go now and the Coalition leads Labor 52 to 48. Apply the flows recorded in the 2025 election, when the One Nation vote was a fifth this size, and it’s a dead heat.
Australia has not run out of voters prepared to reject Labor. The Coalition has lost its claim to be their natural alternative.
The 53 per cent is not one bloc. One Nation polled 6.4 per cent in 2025, and much of a near-fivefold surge is protest, which means it’s contestable. Halve the headline number and the detachment it measures is still the largest strategic fact in Australian politics today. Protest can harden into allegiance.
The same survey’s strongest net favourability belongs to John Howard at +22, nearly two decades out of office, against Albanese at −19, Hanson at −10 and Taylor at −6. The most popular figure the pollsters could find is long retired, and the most invoked authority has been dead for 48 years.
What the polling describes is a large anti-Labor, centre-right electorate without a centre-right organisation it can trust. Menzies inherited much the same problem.
The Man Who Failed First
Menzies led the Coalition to seven election wins and retired after more than 16 uninterrupted years as prime minister. The useful story starts earlier, before the electoral successes.
His first prime ministership, leading the United Australia Party, ended in August 1941 when his own colleagues decided the war needed a different leader. Two years later the UAP went to the 1943 election under Billy Hughes and was all but obliterated. John Curtin’s Labor won 49 of the 74 House of Representatives seats while the UAP was cut down to 12 and lost every Senate seat it contested. A month after the election, the party handed the wreckage back to the man it had discarded two years earlier.
That’s the Menzies the modern Liberal Party should study.
From the opposition backbench in 1942 he began short Friday evening radio broadcasts. The best remembered, “The Forgotten People”, went to air on 22 May. It was not his first Friday broadcast. It was the twentieth. The term and the people it described coalesced over months of public debate, not out of a focus group.
Menzies described the salary-earner, the shopkeeper, the farmer, the professional and the small business owner. Not the rich, who could defend themselves, and not the organised working class, whose wages had the union movement behind them. Instead, the politically unorganised people in between. Their lives centred on what he called “homes material, homes human, and homes spiritual”. Ownership gave them independence. Education gave their children a ladder that did not depend on inherited wealth. Home ownership rose from around 53 per cent at the 1947 census to 71.4 per cent by 1966. Crediting one man with that would be hagiography. Ignoring that ownership was the moral centre of his politics would be worse. Government built the scaffolding and Australians climbed it.
He built an audience and refined an argument before he built a winning party, then moved quickly. Fourteen months after the trouncing, 80 delegates from 18 non-Labor parties and organisations met at his invitation in Canberra and took the Liberal name. Two months later, at Albury, they designed the machinery: elected state councils, a permanent research secretariat, guaranteed representation for women and, above all, a party that raised and controlled its own funds, answerable by design to its members rather than the patrons who had discredited the UAP. Within nine months of Albury the party counted 761 branches and 94,500 members, many of them new to party politics altogether, and was formally launched at Sydney Town Hall in August 1945.
It lost the 1946 election. Then it won in 1949.
The win was not organisation alone. Chifley handed him bank nationalisation and a coal strike, and the Cold War did some of the campaigning. Method did not manufacture those gifts. It meant a machine stood ready to catch them.
The organisation was built fast, trust was earned slower.
The Method
Nobody can know which policies a man born in 1894 would take to an election in 2026. He never met the internet, artificial intelligence, compulsory superannuation, a floated dollar or an economy in which a modest house can cost many times a household’s income.
Nor can the 1950s be imported wholesale. Menzies supported the White Australia policy. He tried to ban the Communist Party. His economic management was hardly flawless, as the 1951 horror budget and the credit squeeze that nearly ended his government in 1961 attest, alongside tariff walls, regulated finance and centralised wage-setting no modern Liberal would restore.
The exercise is more translation than impersonation. What transfers is not a set of positions, but a sequence. Face the failure instead of treating the electorate’s verdict as an administrative error. Find the people organised politics has stopped seeing. Speak directly to them in public, at length, over and over, before there is a campaign to run. Build an organisation into an institution capable of carrying the argument beyond one leader and one election. Absorb a defeat. Keep fighting until trust catches up with the work.
The policy tests are straightforward, mine rather than his, but drawn from his sequence. Does a proposal broaden household’s ownership and independence? Does it add real capacity or subsidise demand? Does growth arrive with the homes, infrastructure and services to carry it? One check settles most of the rest. Is government building capacity, or administering scarcity? Every argument that follows should be read against them.
The Forgotten People Have Changed
The forgotten people of 2026 do not look like the radio audience of 1942. Many were born overseas. Some own detached houses on the urban fringe. Some rent near the city or share a house well into adulthood because no amount of number crunching will let them leave. Some drive utes to building sites. Others wear scrubs in hospitals, run suburban restaurants, work on farms, care for ageing parents or sit up late doing the books for a business secured against the family home. They work, save and pay tax, earning too much to qualify for assistance and nowhere near enough to absorb every increase in rates, power, insurance, groceries and rent. What joins them is not ancestry or an income band. It’s the experience of doing everything Australia asked of them and discovering the ladder has been pulled up.
Look at how the system sees such a household. A union may represent the employee at work and an industry body the business. Services Australia sees an eligibility category; the bank, a mortgage; the school, the children; the insurer, a risk. The casual, the carer and the pensioner renting in retirement live the same squeeze from different vantage points. Nobody at the table answers for all of it at once.
The household, as a whole, has no lobby.
Labor knows how to govern through organised constituencies. One Nation speaks for people who feel ignored by every institution, and on immigration, the issue its surge is built on, nobody is within a bull’s roar of it. The Coalition’s job is to govern for the people in between, and to connect what each rival owns only a piece of.
The Account We Owe
A Menzian reconstruction cannot begin with a catalogue of everybody else’s failures without looking at our own. It has to start where Menzies started, and after 28 years as a member, staffer and campaign apparatchik, I am not writing about somebody else’s party.
We governed for nine years after Howard and left too much unresolved. We preached home ownership while the path into it narrowed on our watch. We promised migration control without building the machinery that ties the intake to the country’s capacity to absorb it. We cycled through energy positions while prices ended the decade higher and investment waited. We warned about debt while letting temporary programs quietly become permanent. We presided over stalled productivity and accepted Australia’s drift towards a higher-tax, higher-spending economy with too little productive investment. Inside the party, we treated branch members as campaign labour, candidates as products launched on election eve, and policy as an afterthought. We grew complacent about our campaign infrastructure and market research programs, and I watched too many state divisions devolve into factional fiefdoms.
Some of that was inherited. None of it is excused by pointing elsewhere. Menzies’s authority in this story comes from failure faced in full. A party that invokes his recovery while refusing its own reckoning has learned only half the lesson.
Rebuild the Machine
The Liberal Party remembers that Menzies founded it and forgets how it came to be. He did not rename the UAP, commission a new logo and wait to be rewarded. He brought 18 organisations into one room and built structures designed to outlive their founders. The institution came before the victory because there was no other way to keep an idea alive long enough to earn trust.
Strictly speaking, Menzies didn’t rebuild anything. He let the UAP die and started fresh. The difference is that the UAP was beyond saving, a patrons’ party with nothing underneath it once the patrons walked away. The Liberal Party is not at the point of no return yet, though it’s closer than anyone inside it should be comfortable admitting.
I have worked close enough with the campaign machinery to know the temptation. When branch and division structures, candidates and policy work have thinned, a campaign is asked to impersonate all three.
None of this is mysterious, and most of it is unglamorous. Preselect candidates who have built things, employed people, served communities and led organisations outside politics, and preselect them early, because a candidate chosen two years out becomes a local figure while one parachuted in after an election is called stays an anonymous face in brochures and social media ads. Research belongs on a permanent footing, producing a road map for campaigning and for governing, not a panic purchase in an election year. The donor base should be rebuilt on high volume and low value, thousands of small contributions, so the party answers to ordinary Australians instead of a few benefactors and branch stackers. Policy and campaign infrastructure must be properly resourced, so Australians know who we are and what we stand for before the writs are issued. The membership base must be engaged and able to contribute between elections, because a card-carrying member useful only every few years at a polling booth will rightly conclude the party is not useful to them.
Menzies used radio because it was intimate, regular and unfiltered. The modern equivalent is a disciplined weekly program of serious national addresses – led by the leader but shared across a credible front bench – delivered in full and then adapted for every platform rather than conceived in fragments. Housing one week, immigration the next, then energy, tax, education, defence and small business, a handful of propositions repeated until the punters can recite them back.
Ultimately, a party that wants to speak for the unorganised must first organise itself.
An election due in 2028 makes the six-year recovery from the 1943 defeat look positively glacial. That reads history backwards, though. The organising was fast, and it moves faster still in 2026. The years that followed were spent proving the party, its policies and people deserved to govern. What technology cannot compress is the repetition that earns trust.
A Home-Owning Country
The first argument is a home, because every other pressure eventually walks through its front door.
Another grant is not the answer, nor should it be. A grant aimed at a fixed stock of homes lets 20 buyers bid a little more for the same 19 properties. It changes who wins the auction or sale, never how many families lose it. Announced targets without delivery mechanisms belong in the same garbage bin.
A national home-building pact should instead pay states and councils for homes completed and connected to roads, water, sewerage, power and transport.
Money when keys are handed over, not when promises are made.
No single government owns the problem. The Commonwealth controls the money. The states run the planning system and release the land. Councils set the zoning and grant the approvals. A pact has to join those responsibilities rather than pretend one government can order supply into existence. The Coalition’s proposed $5 billion Housing Infrastructure Fund recognises the bottleneck and should run as exactly this kind of pact.
Payment for completion invites gaming, with states claiming credit for homes already in the pipeline, so a serious pact starts from an independently verified baseline, counts only additional homes, publishes completions and connections monthly, and claws the money back where the enabling works never arrive. In return, states release serviced land, allow sensible density around existing transport and enforce approval deadlines.
A stake in the country isn’t a Hills Hoist or a quarter-acre block like it was in the Menzies era. Today it comes as a townhouse, a terrace or an apartment. The form also changes with the city or town. The principle does not. Measure the policy in homes completed and rents easing.
Sensible Immigration
The Coalition will not recover by whispering about immigration, and it can’t recover by accepting the premise that Australian belonging is a matter of ancestry rather than citizenship.
The party has already promised to cap net overseas migration at the number of new homes completed. The instinct is right but the instrument is too blunt. A dwelling is not a person, housing isn’t the only thing that runs short, and migrants build a fair share of the homes the cap would count, so the cap can throttle the very number it waits on. Net overseas migration is an outcome anyway, the balance of arrivals and departures, not a number a minister sets with one decision.
The better instrument is a population budget. Alongside every federal budget, publish the planned permanent program, expected temporary arrivals and forecast net overseas migration. Beside them, a capacity dashboard. Completed homes, rental vacancies, school places, hospital capacity, water, transport, energy and genuine labour shortages. This is not an automatic guillotine. Forecasts move, and new arrivals staff the wards and fill the shortages as well as joining the queues, so count both sides of the ledger. When demand exceeds funded supply, the government must tighten the settings it controls, build the capacity, or explain how the shortfall will be repaired. When Australia builds, the settings can expand. Publish the settings as decisions the government must defend, not forecasts it can quietly revise or ignore.
The permanent program is the most direct lever, set by cabinet each year. Most of the recent surge came through temporary flows. Since late 2024 the government has been squeezing the student queue by ministerial direction, a workaround adopted after its caps failed to pass the parliament. A population budget that excluded them would be an accounting trick, so the settings must reach the temporary programs too. Identify every setting government can change, publish the expected effect of each, and start with legislated caps on new student visas.
None of this is an anti-migrant program. Migrants pay the same rents, sit in the same traffic, wait in the same emergency departments and send their kids to the same schools. A program the country can actually house is the pro-migrant position.
One large recent survey suggests voters already hold both positions. The DemosAU poll of 2,694 voters found 61 per cent want immigration substantially reduced while the same electorate rejects a monocultural Australia by 51 per cent to 25. Voters can want a smaller intake and a generous country at once, and the bargain is already written down, in the values statement signed at the visa stage and the citizenship pledge. Temporary arrival isn’t permanent settlement, and permanent residence isn’t citizenship. The expectations run that whole pathway, and we must demand they’re met without exception. One law, freedom of worship and conscience, competent English to participate fully in civic life, allegiance to Australia’s democratic institutions. Citizenship without an ethnic hierarchy.
A serious Coalition can own the legitimate concern and leave the prejudice homeless.
Build What Lasts
A rebate can lower the bill this quarter. It can’t generate electricity, build a house or lift productivity. Consumption is not investment. The everyday costs of government should be paid out of everyday revenue across the cycle, with borrowing kept for emergencies and for investments that expand what the country can produce. As a rule, borrow to build rather than to make an unreformed cost temporarily less visible.
The labels alone don’t settle it. Hospital maintenance and teaching are productive while plenty of capital spending is waste with a brass plaque on it, so the harder test is whether the benefit outlasts the debt, whether an independent assessment appropriate to the proposal has tested the return, and whether a credible plan exists to service it. Relief in a sudden shock passes. Compensation dressed up as reform never does.
So what should the borrowing build? Menzies didn’t govern as though national development would emerge from a lower company tax rate. His governments supported universities, roads, housing finance, immigration, industry and the Snowy scheme inherited from Chifley. The common thread was capacity. A country can’t redistribute what it has stopped building.
The modern version begins with energy, with three tests applied to the whole system. Cost, reliability and emissions. Renewables and storage where they are cheapest. Gas where industry needs it and the system needs firming. Existing generation, including coal, retained until actual replacement capacity exists, not until a media release says it will.
The Coalition is right to promise repeal of the nuclear ban, and I would go a step further than that. The case against nuclear is not imaginary. Cost, construction time, waste and a grid evolving fast without it. That is exactly why the test belongs to the private sector rather than the public purse, and why the flawed publicly financed policy taken to the last election confused repealing a ban with choosing reactors.
AUKUS is developing some relevant nuclear stewardship, regulatory and technical capacity, although civilian power would still require its own safety, waste, planning, liability and commercial framework. Writing those unglamorous rules is the government’s job. Then let private capital test the commercial case. If it won’t build nuclear without taxpayers carrying the commercial risk, that’s the market answering, and a party with no theology accepts it. No technology gets an exemption, either for or against.
Next comes a short list of vulnerabilities where Australia needs assured access, chosen at the intersection of sovereign risk and market failure. That is why the power market gets a level playing field and this list gets public money. Fuel security after all but two of our refineries were allowed to close. Repair of the subsea cables the economy hangs on, with no ship of our own to task. The timing signal we borrow from other countries’ satellites. Munitions we could not replace at the rate a conflict consumes them. Power and fibre for the artificial intelligence and data centre build-out now arriving.
Make it a finite program, funded and measured over ten years, each entry published, contested and capable of ending when the case fails, because strategic is not a magic word that turns protection into policy. Government does not need to own the factory. It does need to make sure the road, port, grid connection, skills and rulebook exist, with private enterprise competing to deliver the rest.
The education pipeline belongs inside the same program – laboratories, technical training and scholarships tied to the houses, energy systems, ships, submarines and factories it requires. Education should again be the ladder by which ability and effort outrun inherited wealth.
A month ago I asked what today’s political class is building that will outlast it. This should be the answer from the Coalition.
Two Opponents, Two Different Cases
The Coalition faces two opponents, Labor for government and One Nation for disaffected centre-right voters. Each requires a different approach, and each deserves its strongest case first.
Labor’s strongest case is real. It treats cost of living as a social problem. Voters credit it for its investment in bulk billing and urgent care, and it keeps housing, health and education front and centre. Those are household realities, and the Coalition has to contest them. The charge against Labor isn’t that it cares too much. Nor is it Labor’s expansion of the public service. It’s that it confuses paying for something with delivering it, manages shortages instead of fixing them, and governs for organised interests with the rest of us footing the bill.
The first half of that charge is the delivery record. Labor rebates the power bill. The Coalition must lower the underlying cost. Labor announces a housing target. The Coalition must hand over keys. The largest contrast sits underneath all the others. Labor distributes the proceeds of the economy Australia has. The Coalition must build the economy Australia needs next.
The second half needs proof, and June delivered a fresh exhibit. Labor and the Greens legislated a carve-out of section 354 of the Fair Work Act, passed on 30 June and in force from 7 July, so the Commonwealth can preference businesses whose employees are covered by an enterprise agreement, including a union-covered one, through grants and procurement. The law permits that discrimination, it doesn’t require it. The government’s case is that its purchasing power may legitimately favour well-bargained workplaces, and the power sits unused for now, waiting on the Secure Australian Jobs Code still being written.
Previous Coalition governments pulled procurement levers of their own through building industry codes. The tool is familiar, the direction reversed. The drafting is careful whereas the incentive is not. If you want an edge competing for public work, secure the government’s preferred kind of industrial agreement. That’s organised power amplified with the taxes paid by households that have no seat at the table. It’s the imbalance Menzies named in 1942, translated into procurement law in 2026.
Against One Nation, begin with respect for the voters and honesty about the diagnosis. Pauline noticed the forgotten people while the major parties were busy fussing about themselves, and despite the wobble that followed her Press Club call for a monoculture, nothing yet suggests 31 per cent is the high-water mark of her support. In May her party won the Farrer by-election that followed Sussan Ley’s resignation after she was rolled as Leader of the Opposition. David Farley became the first candidate ever elected to the House of Representatives under the One Nation banner, in the electorate that includes Albury of all places, where Menzies designed the machine in December 1944. The Liberal primary vote fell to 12 per cent. Calling those voters stupid, racist or duped would only confirm what they suspect about the political establishment.
One Nation is right about a few things. Population growth has outrun capacity. Governments have too often placed organised interests ahead of ordinary households. Too many institutions have grown remote from the people they serve.
Then apply a governing test that’s complementary to the policy test I’ve already outlined. What will it cost, what legislation implements it, who administers it, and what does it do to jobs, investment, alliances and cohesion? Redbridge’s Tony Barry has put it plainly, “grievance mobilises more reliably than policy”. In nearly 30 years, One Nation has never formed government, run a department or had any program tested through a budget. One Nation is an effective alarm. But the country can’t be governed by its smoke detector.
The Coalition must not try to out-Pauline Pauline either. It should make One Nation unnecessary by fixing what its voters are angry about without importing what most Australians reject. Angus Taylor is right to rule out a formal coalition, and the boundary needs stating more plainly than the party managed after Farrer, when shadow treasurer Tim Wilson, asked directly on Insiders the next morning, took a day and a correction to arrive at “never, ever, ever”.
The boundary isn’t complicated. No joint platform, no policy veto, no ministries. Pauline has already said she will give a Coalition government confidence and supply, while refusing to join it. Accept support freely given, never pay for it with the program, and if that ever becomes the price of government, the answer is opposition. In the Fin’s poll, 53 per cent chose the Coalition or One Nation. The Coalition might be comforted by the potential, but it holds no right to any of those votes. It has to win them.
Menzies wrote a version of this playbook. The Democratic Labor Party was a splinter of his opponents whose preferences reached him almost for free, while One Nation competes for the Coalition’s own base. In Farrer, Coalition preferences flowed heavily to One Nation, though Farley’s primary lead and the Nationals’ preferences had already secured the seat before any Liberal preferences were needed. The discipline still transfers.
Menzies banked the flow and competed for the voters instead of dealing with the leaders. His 1963 offer of public funding for science facilities in all secondary schools, government and non-government alike, answered a genuine grievance among Catholic families and gave those voters a reason to move towards him, not merely preference him. The Goulburn strike, when the town’s Catholic schools shut for a week and marched their students to the state schools, was one catalyst among several. Compete for the voters and never surrender the program.
The Answer
So, what would Menzies do?
We cannot pull his answers out of the archive and declare the work complete. They belonged to his time. His method does not.
He would begin with failure and tell the truth about it. He would find the people organised politics no longer sees whole, speak directly to them, and build an organisation into an institution capable of carrying those arguments beyond one leader and one election. He would turn grievance into ownership, education, productive capacity and a stake in the country. He would organise fast and understand that trust returns slowly.
Former supporters owe the Liberal Party nothing. They do not owe it a vote because their parents gave it one, because One Nation frightens the political class or because Menzies won seven elections before they were born. The party owes them an account of its failures and a reason to believe it can build again.
For nearly 30 years I’ve watched the Liberal Party keep Menzies magnificently alive. The federal secretariat I’ve worked for and the party’s think tank both bear his name, the anniversaries are marked, and the name is dropped whenever the present becomes uncomfortable. None of that is the inheritance. The inheritance is a leader who failed, learned, found the people politics had stopped seeing, gathered the fragments into an institution and campaigned until the country moved.
The party has spent a generation measuring its leaders against Menzies. The harder discipline is measuring itself against his work.
What would Menzies do?
He would stop asking. And start building.