When will poor old Robert Menzies be left to rest in peace? Time and time and time again this crusty old conservative is brought back to life as a more liberal Liberal than John Howard. Former Victorian Liberal politician Robert Dean gives the argument yet another run in (where else?) The Age this morning.

As with previous such accounts, there are some strange views of what happened in the past:

His passion for equality of opportunity was nowhere more evident than his belief in free education. He called for a 10-fold increase in university entrants.

While the Menzies government did provide scholarships to some university students, it did not introduce free university education, which came with Whitlam’s government in 1974. I’m not sure that he called for a 10-fold increase in university students, but it certainly didn’t happen during his term. Numbers actually fell in the early Menzies years, and eventually peaked at about 20% of current numbers.

And in criticising the government over Iraq, Dean says: Continue reading “Menzies exhumed again” →