Australian
Screen

Clip description

The clip shows this Liberal Party cinema advertisement, for the 28 September 1946 federal election, in its entirety. The ad presents the post-Second World War period as potentially a time of great possibility for the Australian people. It argues that the current government has instead made it a time of lost opportunity.

Curator’s notes

This cinema ad supports the claims by Dr Sally Young of the University of Melbourne in her 2003 paper Scare Campaigns: Negative Political Advertising in Australia. Young points out that while there’s a perception that negative political campaigning is a new phenomenon in Australia, ‘the use of hard-hitting, negative discourse in political advertising has a long history’. In all probability this ad was produced in response to the ALP’s parallel campaign, which positively promoted its record of performance during the Second World War under Curtin and in the postwar year under Chifley. The party’s campaign is exemplified by ALP Cinema Advertisement: In the Wake of the Storm (1946).

The Liberal Party commercial begins with a voice-over extolling Australia’s potential, positive and nationalist in tone and common to documentary newsreels of the day. It’s quickly interrupted by voice-overs of ‘ordinary’ men and women, complaining that they haven’t seen the benefits they believe they’re due – benefits they fought and made sacrifices during the Second World War to attain.

While the intent was probably to suggest a stifling of the rights and enterprise of individuals (a philosophical cornerstone of Menzies’s newly defined liberalism), instead the ad comes across as a bit of a whinge. Results of the 1946 election would suggest that the Australian people, at a time when the war had not long ended and when there were still 250,000 Australian defence personnel yet to be repatriated, were not yet ready to hear such talk.