"The Menzies connection with education of course is well remembered. I think there were two great things that Sir Robert Menzies did for education. The one that would be best known in this gathering of course would be the extraordinary increase arising out of the Murray Committee Report in the late 1950s in the level of commonwealth provision for tertiary education. And it was through that support that university education came within the reach of hundreds of thousands of Australians who would otherwise have been denied through economic circumstances the opportunity of a university education.

The other great contribution that Menzies made to education was the way in which he ended one hundred years of discrimination against particularly Australian Catholics whose school system they had maintained without government support since Sir Henry Parkes inaugurated the free compulsory and secular education system in New South Wales and it was replicated around Australia in the 19th century. And that particular act which contributed so much to the breaking down of what were then still quite significant barriers and it led to the development of what is probably a wider variety of choice within primary and secondary education than is perhaps available in any other comparable country around the world."
Extract from a speech delivered by Prime Minister John Howard, at the Menzies Centre for Australia Studies, Kings College, London, 7 July 2000

MENZIES: "I've been told that I'm to move a switch here, and as usual when I move a switch nothing happens for a little while. It takes apparently a couple of minutes for the turbines to warm up to their work. And so I shall move the switch and then we'll wait to see whether it really is beginning."

NARRATOR: By the time the first dam, Guthega, was finished in 1955 Menzies was completely behind the project. Not only was it popular but he saw that the modern consumer society he hoped to promote would need the cheap electricity provided by the scheme.
Film Australia Ltd