It is the anniversary of the birthday of Sir Robert Gordon Menzies, Australia’s most important Prime Minister. The Australia he knew scarcely exists today, but even that is far better than the alternative.

Fifty-eight years after Menzies left office, few men in Australian history still inspire so much worship and vitriol. Radical university students and Labor stalwarts roar their hatred of his legacy, while paying tribute to it is mandatory in the Liberal Party that he founded.

The fight over the Menzies name and legacy is a reminder of just how monumental his life was to Australia and its politics.

Following the Coalition government’s defeat in 2022, there was great bickering about the direction that the Liberals needed to take to return to power.

Some called for a swing to the right in the wake of heightened immigration and the rise of Woke ideology, while others declared it was time to move back to the moderate centre. In the case of both factions, they claimed to speak for the legacy of Menzies, which is nothing new in Liberal politics.

From John Howard to Malcolm Turnbull to Peter Dutton, Liberal leaders have invoked Menzies’ name to legitimise their visions of the party and country. The conservative Howard saw Menzies as a lodestar for his government, while the moderate Turnbull asserted that Menzies was a man of the political centre.

Turnbull specifically invoked Menzies to refute the idea that the Liberals ought to be a more right-wing party. He noted that Menzies consciously chose the name ‘Liberal’ so the party could best represent the political centre.

What was the centre in Australian society and politics at the time?

Menzies governed in an era of consensus, where questions of Australian identity – such as republicanism or Australia Day protests – were marginal at best, unlike the contentious, fragmented culture wars of today. His leadership reflected the shared values of the middle-class he cultivated as his political base.

Although the Liberal leader by profession, Menzies was quite the Tory by inclination, being a social conservative and monarchist. He saw little contradiction in a healthy Australian identity that did not shy away from the inheritance of the British Empire.

Counter-cultural figures like Clive James fled to England (of all places) to escape the Anglophilic, conservative Australia governed by Menzies. When Turnbull stated that upholding the legacy of Menzies meant governing from the centre, what he meant was swimming with the tide of modern social progressivism, albeit a bit slower and less enthusiastically.

Would Menzies have made common cause with the faction of republican moderates in today’s Liberal Party? Almost certainly not.

Menzies never introduced sweeping socially conservative policies because there was no need for it then, as Australians agreed on a lot more when it came to how middle-class society should conduct itself. However, there are instances that provide clues about his willingness to use state power to protect Australian families and society.

In a 1951 referendum, his government came within a hair of voting to outlaw the Australian Communist Party at a time when the ideology threatened the free world. Menzies also oversaw the enforcement of the ban on the book Lady Chatterley’s Lover, deeming it a threat to public morality.

These are the instincts of a right-winger, not a doctrinaire liberal. However controversial, and even absurd it appears today, those actions reflected how seriously he took the threats to middle-class Australia.

It is strange that members of the Australian political right often run from being labelled as such. The left-wing publication Jacobin once published a piece, intended to be scathing, in 2021 when the Robert Menzies Institute was being established at the University of Melbourne.

In the piece, Menzies was hammered as a ‘right-wing’ figure, and that his legacy should be ‘condemned rather than celebrated’. A good rule of thumb is that almost anything Jacobin opposes should be regarded as sensible and praiseworthy.

The same can be said of Menzies’ most vociferous critics, namely Paul Keating, the man who appeared to make it his mission to destroy what Menzies built. What Keating set out to erase was middle-class Australia, rooted in tradition and the familiar norms of society, and oriented towards the Anglo-American world.

Considering that another one of Keating’s goals was to make Australia compete to be the best friend of the Chinese Communist Party, it is well that he failed to erase Menzies’ Australia. A worthy rebuke was the demolition of Keating’s government in 1996 by the Coalition led by John Howard, who never hesitated to praise and take inspiration from Menzies.

Nonetheless, even 11 years of Howard’s government did not turn Australia away from the tide of racial and sexual identity politics, or the rise of anti-Australian, ‘decolonise’ movements that attack the very idea that Australia’s existence makes the world a better place.

Menzies would not have tolerated ethnic violence, such as antisemitic radicals burning down synagogues or knocking down statues and declaring ‘the colony will fall’.

Australia Day itself has been attacked as an immoral holiday, and Labor governments in states like Victoria have all but abolished its celebration.

If only with the benefit of hindsight, it can be said that Menzies also contributed to these sad developments.

The problem with liberalism is that its progressive version prioritises liberating the individual from established culture and traditions, while its classical variant is almost entirely economic, and its proponents only speak of tradition and do little to uphold it.

Economic liberalism without cultural and social guardrails creates a society where everything is left to the market, with the national community steadily atomised and eroded.

Proof can be found in comparing the modern histories of Canada and Australia.

In Canada, our left-wing Liberal Party dominated much of the 20th Century, with a few respectable Conservative interludes. Menzies’ more classically liberal counterpart has led Australia’s Coalition governments for most of the country’s history since 1949, with just one lengthy Labor interruption under Bob Hawke and Keating.

Both countries are now mired in the same mess of Woke activism, diaspora politics, and a flagging national culture.

At the annual Sir Robert Menzies Lecture in Melbourne earlier this year, Dutton spoke the following:

‘Menzies was a learner … he learnt from his mistakes … he showed an “ability to keep on learning throughout his long second term” as Prime Minister from both his successes and shortfalls,’ said Dutton, to the gathered crowd.

Were Menzies to see the course that his country, and most other Anglo countries, would run after his death, would he have let it die a slow death? Considering how much Menzies loved Australia as a distinct place with a proud history, it is a safe bet that he would have used more than words to preserve it.