Politics & Power Quote by Lionel K. Murphy

Murphy’s line lands like a courtroom cross-examination: you don’t need to argue theory when you can expose inconsistency. In one sentence he frames the Menzies Government as ideologically selective - willing to endorse “planning” when it happens offshore, yet suddenly allergic to the same idea at home. The word “virtue” is doing quiet but pointed work. Murphy isn’t merely asking for a technocratic blueprint; he’s treating planning as a moral stance, a sign of seriousness about national purpose.

The specific intent is political: to box a conservative government into admitting that its anti-planning posture is less principle than performance. Postwar Australia was awash in development language - reconstruction, modernization, the promise of managed growth. Internationally, Western governments increasingly participated in aid and development schemes, selling them as pragmatic, humanitarian, and strategically necessary in the Cold War. Murphy uses that international posture as a mirror, forcing the government to look at itself and see what it refuses to acknowledge domestically: that markets alone don’t build dams, universities, housing, or equitable opportunity.

The subtext is sharper: planning is acceptable when it’s paternalistic, exercised over “other nations,” but suspect when it would empower Australians through coordinated public investment. Murphy, later known as a reform-minded jurist, is already signaling a broader critique of national complacency: Australia can imagine the future for others, but not for itself. The sting is that the government’s imagination is intact - it’s just politically rationed.