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Herbert Vere Evatt and British Justice: the Communist Party Referendum of 1951

Associate Professor Frank Bongiorno, School of History, ANU

Through his role in the early United Nations, Herbert Vere Evatt is often credited with having advanced the cause of international human rights. But in his 1951 campaign against the Menzies Government’s attempt to ban the Communist Party, Evatt articulated an alternative understanding of the roots of liberty, one centred on the role of British justice in checking ‘tyranny’ and ‘totalitarianism’.

This conception of freedom had long competed in Evatt’s thought with a belief in the need for an unfettered executive to achieve desirable social and economic goals. Although inconsistent in defence of liberty across his career, Evatt succeeded in this campaign because his case harmonised with contemporary understandings of freedom and its enemies in a postwar British-Australian community.

Associate Professor Frank Bongiorno is an Australian labour, political and cultural historian. Prior to joining the Australian National University, he has held lecturing positions at King’s College London, the University of New England and Griffith University. He has also been an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the ANU, a Smuts Visiting Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge, and a Mellon Visiting Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Please direct enquiries to Kynan.Gentry@anu.edu.au