National Service Group

John Curtin, Billy Hughes & Robert Menzies. Image from the National Library of Australia.

On this day, 31 March 1943, Robert Menzies and 16 other members of the UAP sign a statement announcing that they had formed the ‘National Service Group’ – a splinter group within the UAP which amounted to one of the first steps in the political realignment that would produce the Liberal Party of Australia.

The point at issue was a hangover of World War One’s conscription debate, which had not been over conscription per se but over the sending of Australian conscripts to fight overseas. Because the conscription issue had split the Labor Party and so many of its members had been involved in the vote ‘No’ campaign, this remained an ideological sticking point for the ALP.

As it stood at the beginning of 1942, Australia’s conscript militia could only be used in the direct defence of Australian territories (which included New Guinea), and not in the wider Asia-Pacific theatre of war. This restriction contrasted strongly with the fate of American conscript G.I.s, who were being sent to fight and die all over the Pacific, in order to defeat an enemy that was arguably a more pressing danger to Australia than it was to the United States. This discrepancy became a major political embarrassment for the Australian Government to which American Commander Douglas Macarthur repeatedly drew attention.

In order to placate American sentiment, in November 1942 Prime Minister John Curtin asked a special ALP Federal Conference to extend the area in which the militia could be asked to serve. This led to the Defence (Citizen Military Forces) Bill, which pushed for a tokenistic change where the area of action would be extended northward to a line that fell below Singapore, and eastward to a line the fell short of New Zealand.

The Opposition was highly divided over the Bill. They were almost universal in believing that the extension was inadequate, but they did not want to move an amendment to the Bill for fear that hard line anti-conscriptionists within the ALP would use this as a chance to wreck the Bill entirely.

Menzies initially looked likely to accept this back-down, but when the Bill came before the House he felt compelled to condemn it as ‘the greatest anti-climax in modern political history…this is a world war, and no limit can be set in the duty of Australia in relation to it’. Examining a map, Menzies concluded that the Bill would only affect service in Timor, Amboina, and Dutch New Guinea. Menzies was joined in his position of open hostility by Percy Spender and Archie Cameron.

In the aftermath of the acrimonious debate, UAP leader Billy Hughes called a party meeting in an attempt to silence the dissent from within his own ranks. Menzies resisted the urge to call for a spill of positions immediately, instead opting to form the National Service Group and lobby for a change in UAP policy from within. The signed statement of 31 March condemned the government for its failure to give maximum support to the Allies, its failure to curb strikes, and for prioritising the extension of social services over spending on the war effort. The main change the NSG wanted for the UAP was for the Opposition to act as an Opposition, and properly challenge the increasingly socialistic agenda of the government in the Parliament.

Several days later Menzies issued a manifesto which appealed to his ‘forgotten people’:

‘We must abandon the suicidal policy of wiping out the middle class. Why should they who have no unions, who draw fixed salaries or modest incomes, who get no cost of living adjustments, whose taxes have doubled and redoubled, who have few capital resources such as the rich have and no drilled and disciplined political party to serve their ends, be required at a time like this to dig into their pockets in order that the waterside workers should be paid amazing wages, or dissipate their heard-earned savings so that somebody else should get a bigger free pension’.

Partly as a result of Menzies’s agitation, Arthur Fadden, who as Country Party leader was still acting as head of the Opposition rather than Hughes, moved a no-confidence motion against the government for introducing ‘socialist’ schemes without a mandate from the Australian people, talking in class war terms at a time when national unity was needed, and pushing the notorious lie about the ‘Brisbane line’ where the previous government was falsely accused of planning to abandon northern Australia.

The government survived the ensuing division by just one vote and Curtin asked the Governor General to dissolve Parliament. The 1943 election would prove to be a blood-bath for the Opposition, but it gave non-Labor a clean slate on which to rebuild.

Further Reading:

A.W. Martin, Robert Menzies, A Life: Volume 1 1894-1943 (Melbourne University Press, 1993).

David Kemp, A Liberal State: How Australians chose Liberalism over Socialism, 1926-1966 (Melbourne University Press, 2021).