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Clip description
The clip shows this Liberal Party cinema advertisement, for the 10 December 1949 federal election, in its entirety. The ad is a no-holds-barred attack on the Chifley government as ‘a Canberra dictatorship’ and ‘irresponsible socialists’. It presents the Liberal Party alternative as a 'safeguard against tyranny’ and a party ‘dedicated to the freedom of the Australian people’.
Curator’s notes
The ad uses the image of Parliament House (now Old Parliament House – the seat of national government from 1927 to 1988) to denote democracy and individual liberty. It then suggests, by way of an array of indictments, that these very attributes of Australian society are under threat from the incumbent ‘socialist’ Labor government.
Robert Menzies had made his famous ‘The Forgotten People’ speech on 22 May 1942. In it he defined and venerated a section of the community (in his words, ‘in the political and economic sense, the middle class’) as neglected and undervalued by the state and, more specifically, disadvantaged by socialism. The 1949 election came around seven years after the speech and four years after the end of the Second World War. By then the nation’s economic prosperity had grown substantially and, along with it, the number of Australians inclined to recognise themselves as Menzies’s ‘forgotten people’.
Professor Judith Brett, a political historian at La Trobe University and contributor to the ABC Radio National Hindsight series 'An Attitude of Mind and Faith’, makes the point that, after the war, what had been a ‘rather stark contrast between two blocks of experience – middle class and working class – start(ed) to get blurred’ and that the term middle class became ‘more fluid’ and ‘more available to people to identify with’.
This ad is aimed squarely at the ‘forgotten people’, menacing them with the threat of communism. While Menzies had denounced the international movement in his 1942 speech, by 1949 the banning of communism had moved to the core of the Liberal election platform. Menzies’s own hatred and fear of communism, galvanised during his postwar overseas visits, was genuine. He embraced western Cold War philosophy and sought to convey it passionately to the electorate. While the ad falls short of calling the Chifley government communist, it makes little or no distinction between communism and specific socialist policies of Chifley. When the ad talks about ‘every worthwhile Australian’ wanting to ‘bank his earnings where he wishes to bank them’, it’s a direct reference to Chifley’s attempt (albeit thwarted) to nationalise the banking system.
Stylistically The House that You Built is interesting and noticeably more sophisticated than the federal election Liberal Party Cinema Advertisement: The Golden Age (1946). In one section of The House that You Built, the technique of spinning headlines zooming towards the camera over static images – commonly used in montages within Hollywood narrative films at the time – has been inverted. The images, rather than the headlines, are spinning – denoting the chaos and disrupted governance of which the ad accuses the incumbent ALP government.
