Even in in the democratic bastion of the United States, some socialist policies were popular enough to be discussed, if not always implemented, by the public. In many other nations socialists formed political parties advocating rights for workers and redistribution of wealth. Such was the case in Australia, where the social Labor party was one of the two main parties in the government, opposed by the United Australia Party (UAP), which by the the mid 1940s was as moribund as they get.

On this day, April 7, in 1945 Robert Menzies, the former prime minister and the leader of the opposition to the Labor party, founded his Liberal party to replace the UAP. Menzies knew the weakness of the anti-labor movement, being a former leader of the UAP himself. His goal was to unite the anti-labor opposition.

Menzies was a stirring orator, in the mold of Winston Churchill: out of all his legacies, he is perhaps best remembered for his famous “Forgotten People” address of 1942, where he praised the Australian middle class. “I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the organised masses,” he said. “It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised.”