I was not taken with Howard’s bestselling autobiography, Lazarus Rising (2010), but here he maintains the distinctive Howard voice while proving himself to be a competent general historian and an engagingly readable author – a better writer than many of the Labor politicians published recently. Given this attainment, the automatic support of Liberal Party adherents and the following generated by the success of his earlier book, it is likely that his version of the Menzies story will ‘take’ in a way that professional historians can only envy. Is this ‘mission accomplished’?

The Menzies Era is not a product of original research. There are some interviews with informants, a winnowing of press archives and sparing use of Hansard, but the book draws primarily on an intelligent synthesis and shrewd analysis of selective secondary sources. What makes it work is the way in which this is complemented by Howard’s autobiographical reflections (as a young man influenced by the events he describes and later as a party activist) and by his ability to draw on his experience in politics and in high office to draw plausible inferences about the motives and judgements made by his protagonists. For readers not already versed in the events it covers, it will be persuasive.

While Menzies’ achievement is the bedrock, Howard is not writing a biography but a broader story of his place in and influence on postwar politics and their ongoing effects. Menzies’ resurrection of his own career and creation of the Liberal Party out of the wreckage of the United Australia Party in the 1940s is a remarkable story, not new, but succinctly recapitulated here. Howard argues that it issued in the most successful of all Australian political parties. The coalition governments between 1949 and 1972 were, he suggests, responsible for: security at a time of significant (Cold War) challenge; defeating the ‘socialism’ that Curtin and Chifley had threatened (and that dogged Britain until the Thatcher years); education (especially higher education) reform; increasing prosperity paired with economic stability; industrialisation; economic engagement with Asia; the emergence of Canberra as a true national capital; stable management of population growth through immigration; and (after Menzies’ retirement in 1966) the abolition of the White Australia policy and the increasing recognition of the need to treat Australia as a ‘national’ economy. The Howard mantra is that success in these efforts depended on the ability of Menzies and his colleagues to combine the liberal and the conservative elements within the party that Menzies had created. Naturally, he implies that the success of his own governments relied on maintaining that ability and adapting it to the different challenges of the 1990s and 2000s.

In order to endorse Menzies, Howard abandons Paul Kelly’s influential interpretation of ‘the Australian settlement’ (The End of Certainty, 1992) by conceding that industry protection and bipartisan commitment to tariffs, centralised wage fixing, progressive taxation, managed exchange rates, and Keynesian intervention survived so long because in the international conditions of the time they ‘seemed’ to work. Indeed, he acknowledges that in 1975, as the new minister for business and consumer affairs, he ‘brought in no new free trade broom’ – he would only later be converted by Liberal ‘drys’ such as John Hyde and Jim Carlton. Howard acknowledges, too, that Gough Whitlam’s scepticism about the ‘rent-seeking’ manufacturers, with his twenty-five per cent tariff reduction in 1973, was a strike against the old order. But the ALP at large remained ardently protectionist, and Whitlam’s ambitious and expensive policy program depended on the conditions that had prevailed during the long boom, which would unravel in the face of the economic shocks of the mid-1970s, destroying ‘the great assumption’ of Keynesian intervention (and the Whitlam government) in the process. This leads to a surprisingly fair-minded account of Whitlam’s reform of the Labor Party and of the style and flair that made him so attractive as an Opposition leader – only to be undercut by a now unrealistic program and his failures of management and process once in power.

Much of Howard’s presentation aligns with earlier accounts of this period, including those of the ‘left’ historians he claims have dominated the narrative, though on the evidence of his notes and bibliography he has not read them. One might overlook the valuable work of, say, Stuart Macintyre or Judith Brett as out of sympathy with Howard, yet even if one turns to those who could hardly be represented as left historians – A.W. Martin, W.J. Hudson, David Lowe, Geoffrey Bolton, Peter Edwards, David Horner, Nicholas Brown, for instance – there are grounds for doubting Howard’s interpretation of some issues, such as Menzies’ role in the Suez Crisis, the engagement in Vietnam, the role of ASIO in domestic politics, the actual authors of managed prosperity, Asia as an economic partner versus Asia as a threat, and so on. To take one example, a reading of Menzies’ performance in the Suez Crisis of 1956 in A.W. Martin’s magisterial Robert Menzies: A Life, Volume 2 (1999), or W.J. Hudson’s Blind Loyalty (1989) induces scepticism about the gloss Howard puts on those events: at best, he lacks nuance, at worst he wilfully misreads the evidence in Menzies’ favour. Thus one is reminded of the polemical intent of Howard’s project.

More significant, while Howard can argue convincingly for continuity between the Menzies government and his own on the importance of sustaining a coherent narrative, cabinet discipline, party management, and effective public communication, his great elision is in addressing the content of liberal philosophy. We are to assume that Menzies and Howard are of one mind. Howard might overcome the fact that Menzies (like his precursor, Alfred Deakin) was an ameliorative liberal, committed to individual rights and enterprise but ready to utilise state resources when other means of addressing disadvantage failed, as a concomitant of ‘the great assumption’ demolished by the economic collapse of the 1970s and rapid globalisation since. We need to be realists about the limits of state action now. It is less easy to overlook the disparity between Menzies’ equation of individual rights with responsibilities that entail a moral community of obligation and interdependence and Howard’s promotion of the self-interested individualism of personal choice at the cost of any such moral community. While this is a transition common to many of the Western polities since the 1980s, its champions (like Howard) should acknowledge the change they have wrought. For Howard to do so would be to recognise that he speaks for his own times, not for Menzies. The past is another country, not easily appropriated for contemporary purposes.