Our True Heroes

by Kevin Rudd - The Australian

Somewhere deep in the Adelaide Hills on Saturday night, Alexander Downer must have been playing battleships in his bathtub when he suddenly came up with a seriously cunning plan. Namely, to reinvent Australian post-war political history and argue that Labor under John Curtin was not the real defender of Australian liberty.

Lo and behold, it was the conservatives all along, including decent chaps such as Alex, who did the hard yards on this score. The really dastardly thing was that it has all been kept a secret during the past half century or so. And it has taken until now for Alexander, all by himself, to reveal this to the Australian public.
The reality is Downer is driven by the political ambition to become treasurer and deputy leader of the Liberal Party as soon as possible. He has decided to add to his political repertoire by creating what he would regard as a really big new idea to launch a pathetic, foreign policy equivalent to John Howard's culture wars.

However, like most small men in search of a big idea, this one is also derivative; derivative of the US neo-conservatives' rolling diatribe against the Democrats in the latter's approach to the world today.

The other minor problem with the Downer thesis is that it is factually incorrect. Downer asserts that "as late as the Munich crisis of September 1938 that Curtin ... failed to acknowledge the threat posed by Nazism".

Interesting observation. Guess who said the following on September 12, 1938, at the Camberwell Hall? "I want to warn you against any easy falling into habits, to which we are susceptible of saying that dictators are bound to be wrong and democracies bound to be right. Australians through the past week have passed through many moments of anxiety, but that anxiety has been dramatically lessened by the intervention of the British prime minister [Neville Chamberlain]."

Answer? Robert Gordon Menzies. Not Curtin. In fact, Menzies went further to defend Chamberlain's actions in Munich when he said that he fully supported the policy of the Chamberlain government, which desired "to maintain peace by negotiation" with Germany. In other words, full support for Chamberlain's policy of appeasement. Indeed, Menzies earlier had described Hitler as "a man of ideas, many of them good ones".

The historical record doesn't stop there. Once war had broken out following the German invasion of Poland, it is revealed in John Lukac's recent study Five Days in London, Chamberlain criticised the posture taken by Stanley Bruce, Australia's high commissioner in London, on behalf of the Menzies government when, following the fall of France, Bruce spoke to Chamberlain about the need to talk terms with Adolf Hitler, possibly through Benito Mussolini.

Later in the war, when things got really serious for Australia following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Curtin's national leadership, as opposed to Menzies' subservience to the British, was dramatically played out in a cable between Canberra and London over the return of the Australian 7th Division from the Middle East.

Winston Churchill demanded the 7th Division be diverted to Burma. Curtin demanded they return to Australia. Menzies, together with the conservative members of the Australian Advisory War Council and backed by Earle Page, who was then in London as Australia's ministerial representative in the imperial war cabinet, backed Churchill. Curtin won. The result was that the 7th Division was not slaughtered in Burma but instead returned home so it could fight and win the critical battle on the Kokoda Track. Kokoda, together with the Coral Sea, effectively saved Australia from invasion.

So much for Downer's pathetic argument that Curtin began the long Labor tradition of wringing its hands of a little Australia incapable of playing anything more than a minor role. I would have thought that saving Australia from territorial invasion represented something more than a minor role.

Labor led Australia through the bulk of World War I and World War II; Labor took Australia into the 1991 Gulf War; Labor brought the Cambodian civil war to a close through its efforts to conclude the Cambodian peace settlement; not to mention other foreign policy achievements in recent times, such as the creation of APEC.

Where were Downer's heroic conservatives while Chamberlain was appeasing Hitler? Where have they been since? When did they attack Augusto Pinochet? When did they call for Nelson Mandela's release? When did they denounce Hansonism on our own shores? And what are they doing about the Burmese military regime's systemic human rights abuses?

Downer's fatuous arguments in his Page lecture are all about his desire for personal political advancement. They are also about a desperate diversion strategy from a series of foreign policy failures, including the collapse of his much-vaunted $800 million Papua New Guinea program, the rolling civil war in Iraq, the lack of regional preparedness in the continuing war on terrorism and his monumental disinterest in the fate of people such as Vivian Young.

For these reasons, Downer's most recent attempt to rewrite Australian history should be greeted with the collective yawn and intellectual contempt that it deserves. Measured against the shadows cast by former foreign ministers such as H.V. Evatt, Gareth Evans, Richard Casey and even Percy Spender, Downer will barely leave a mark on this country's history.

History will record Downer as Australia's longest serving but least significant foreign minister.


Kevin Rudd is Labor spokesman for foreign affairs and international security.