If Pat Conroy, the Labor left Defence Industry minister, wants to call Robert Menzies a Nazi appeaser, he might want to remember something. 

Menzies - Australia's longest serving prime minister and founder of the Liberal party - was the leader who took Australia into the war against Nazi Germany and raised an expeditionary force to fight overseas.

Meanwhile, Curtin’s Labor opposed sending Australian expeditionary forces overseas. 

Trying to turn Menzies' private letter to former prime minister Stanley Bruce, in which he wrote, days after World War II broke out in 1939, 'nobody really gives a damn about Poland', into proof of Nazi appeasement is historically stupid. 

But that's what Conroy said at the National Press Club this week. 

'I’m very interested in disclosing what really happened before World War II and during World War II, where it was a choice between John Curtin and Nazi-appeaser Robert Gordon Menzies,' he said. 

Like much of the political class in the shadow of the First World War, Menzies was trying to find any way to avoid another catastrophic European war. 

But when the moment came, he declared Australia at war with Germany and sent troops. That is not appeasement. It is the opposite.

If Conroy wants to play this stupid game, then let’s play it properly. 

John Curtin, Labor’s great wartime hero, openly defended White Australia in the middle of the war. 

He argued that the racial character of the country had to be protected and that Australians would not surrender that policy under pressure from Asia or anyone else. 

Does that mean Curtin should now be reduced to an unreconstructed racist rather than remembered as a great wartime prime minister? 

Of course not. That would be cheap, selective and historically illiterate. 

Which is exactly why calling Menzies a Nazi appeaser - because he privately hoped to avoid another catastrophic European war - is such idiocy. 

Menzies declared war on Nazi Germany and raised troops to fight overseas. Curtin defended White Australia.

History is complicated. Conroy apparently isn't.