A committed Christian (he was brought up and baptised in the Church of Christ),[4]: p.24  and member of Moral Rearmament, Beazley was prominent on the right-wing of the Labor Party during the ideological battles of the 1950s and 1960s.

[5] According to an article by C. J. Coventry, Beazley had been an informer for the U.S..[6] After the defeat of the Whitlam government in 1975, Beazley was elected to the Labor front bench, but resigned when it was revealed that Gough Whitlam and Bill Hartley, with the ALP national secretary, David Combe, had been seeking money from the Iraqi Ba'ath Party to pay for the party's election campaign.

[5] His memoirs were published posthumously in February 2009[4] with a foreword by his son Kim Christian Beazley who himself had a distinguished career as a Labor politician and party leader.

Beazley married Betty Judge, a fellow teacher, union official and an athlete (she was Australian women's 880 yards champion), on 7 February 1948, at Claremont.

They had two sons, including Rhodes Scholar, Deputy Prime Minister and Governor of Western Australia Kim Christian Beazley, and one daughter.