A Little History of the Australian Labor Party

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INTRODUCTION

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) is a special kind of political organisation. Variously described as progressive, social democratic and centre-left, Labor is defined by its relationship with the union movement. The party was founded by working-class unionists, and unions continue to occupy a formal place in its structure as affiliated bodies.

Most of the world manages to get by without such a party. Indeed, there are a handful of affluent, developed countries that do not boast any major party calling itself ‘labor’, ‘social democratic’ or ‘socialist’ – the United States is the most significant of them. So does it matter whether a country has a Labor party or not? And would Australia today be a different kind of place if it did not have one of the world’s oldest Labor parties, one that in 2011 can count 120 years of history since its birth?

‘What if?’ questions do not easily lend themselves to resolution. Nonetheless, one recent commentator bravely suggested that if the United States had, like Australia, developed a Labor party, it is very:

likely that business interests would have had less influence over public policy, that income and wealth would have been more equally distributed, that trade unions would have been stronger, and that a more comprehensive welfare state would have developed.¹

Yet comparative analysis of this type – even when, as in this case, it stresses Labor’s influence on national life – can still underestimate the significance of the Labor Party in Australia. From its very foundation, the ALP was never simply concerned with the power of business, the distribution of wealth, the rights of trade unions, or the number and scale of social welfare payments. Of course it was greatly concerned with these things, and it regarded improving the material lives of working people as one of its fundamental aims. ‘My program! Ten bob a day!’, a worker is supposed to have told a visiting Frenchman at the end of the 19th century when asked about his political program.² Perhaps this man had his tongue slightly in his cheek – the labour movement’s aspirations were never quite so narrow.

Later commentators, taking their cue from the title of a book by a distinguished historian of the New South Wales (NSW) ALP, have said that Labor’s mission was to ‘civilise capitalism’.³ Unquestionably, most Laborites believed that their party would create a more civilised society than what had resulted from free markets. But Labor’s early supporters also understood the party to be a means by which the ‘dispossessed’ – or at least some of them – could themselves wield power.⁴ Labor would, for the first time, allow workers to claim full citizenship, to participate in and actively shape Australia’s precocious democracy. Some thought they were helping to create a special type of democracy – a socialist one. Other Laborites rejected such suggestions as utopian fantasy.

From the early years to the present, the ALP has attracted critics from both the Left and the Right who have contested its claim to speak for the common people. It has also attracted friendly internal critics – members, activists and loyal supporters – who’ve felt part of the Labor tribe, yet also questioned how well the party was performing in its self-appointed mission. This kind of questioning has been more insistent in the last quarter of a century or so, as many of the foundations on which the party was built – cohesive local communities, massive and widespread deprivation, traditional blue-collar industries, a large rural workforce, strong trade unionism and working-class identity – steadily eroded. The result has been an almost perpetual sense of crisis, along with a recognition of the need to rethink some longstanding assumptions about the character, structure and purpose of the party.

These debates are not always well informed by public knowledge of the past. A great deal of discussion within and about the ALP is carried on as if the issues at stake were being explored for the first time, instead of being – as they often are – variations on old themes. Much journalism focuses on a clash of personalities, with little sense of the ways in which individual and group behaviour is shaped and often constrained by the party itself: by its structures, rules, culture and traditions. The increasingly fashionable genre of ‘memoir’ – one of the principal means by which many Australians gain access to the political past – tends to inflate the subject’s own importance while missing broader context.⁵ Finally, there are voters today too young to have any real recollection of either the Hawke or Keating Labor governments, and for whom the passions aroused by the Whitlam dismissal are not even a dim memory. Watson, Fisher, Hughes, Scullin, Curtin and Chifley belong to ancient history, if their names are recognised at all outside the Canberra suburbs named in their honour.

Labor has been, and remains, the most written about of the Australian parties. Still, for many Australians, the century-plus achievements of Labor are barely perceptible. That a nation knows so little about its oldest continuing political party, the first of its type to form state or federal government anywhere in the world, arguably diminishes us as a people. And putting aside partisanship, we could say precisely the same things about Labor’s various rivals: Australia’s historical amnesia is a matter for national rather than merely party political regret. In this spirit, we hope that this book – the first generalist account to appear in nearly two decades – will help Labor Party members and supporters, outside critics, students of history and politics, and journalists tasked with explaining the everyday theatre of Australian public life, understand the manifold ways in which today’s ALP is the product of a rich history. Like the journalist Warren Denning in 1937, we believe that ‘[t]he fortunes of a great political organisation such as the Labor Party are important to all sections of the Australian people, whatever may be their personal political sympathies’.⁶ Political parties remain central to the functioning of our democracy; and, despite periodic rumours of its demise, Labor appears likely to be around for a very long time yet. Accordingly, an understanding of its history seems a prerequisite for a fully informed and engaged citizenship.

1 POLITICAL BIRTH: ORIGINS TO 1913

‘To make the world a better place’: the great Labor crusade

Billy Hughes didn’t expect to have to fight an election in 1895. Having won the waterfront seat of Lang for the Labor Party the previous year, he’d run up debts and was unprepared for another contest so soon after the last. But as a result of the Legislative Council’s obstruction of the NSW Free Trade government’s reform program, Premier George Reid called an early election.

Hughes’s most faithful supporters were also caught off guard. Three of them – giant Irish migrants he first encountered while they were working as wharfies but who now cut sugarcane in the colony’s north – made the arduous journey back to the capital as soon as they heard the news. After listening to a Hughes campaign speech, two of the men quietly slipped away; the third approached the Labor parliamentarian.

The men had discussed the matter among themselves, their spokesman told him, and they had agreed to help the cash-strapped Hughes. The Irishman handed over a bankbook that contained their joint savings: £150, which was perhaps six months’ wages for three labouring men such as these. ‘If you get into Parliament you can pay us back when you’re able. If not, it doesn’t matter,’ he added. Blinded by tears and unable to speak, Hughes pressed the account book back into the hands of the man and ran for his tram.¹ He was re-elected with a whopping majority.

There were conditions in the Australian colonies – democracy, freedom of association, payment of parliamentarians, high levels of unionisation – that made a Labor Party possible. But whatever the veracity of Hughes’s account – and Billy’s stories were sometimes tall ones – Labor was ultimately created by the likes of these workers: dedicated believers in the cause who, as Hughes himself put it, ‘wanted to do something for others less fortunate than themselves, to make the world a better place for men and women and children to live in’.² Labor was also made by men such as Hughes, activists who combined driving personal ambition with an equally intense missionary fervour.

‘The horny-handed sons of toil’: the colonial union movement before 1890

Laborites have tended to value their history and traditions far more than have their political opponents. It has therefore been an enduring source of frustration that there is no birth certificate that would allow even the most careful genealogist to pinpoint the delivery of the Australian Labor Party. One version of Labor mythology has 3000 shearers forming the party under the ‘Tree of Knowledge’ in the central west Queensland town of Barcaldine, during a bitter pastoral strike in 1891; another, less heroic, counters that the first Labor saplings burst into life from the very different soil of working-class Balmain in Sydney during the same year. Whatever its validity, each story expresses something of the meaning of Labor in Australia: the party of the legendary bushman also belonged to his sturdy city cousin. The Sydney Trades and Labor Council (TLC) officially formed a Labor Party in March 1891 and unionists, socialists and other radical activists soon organised ‘Labor Electoral Leagues’ (LELs, now called local branches) across the colony. A few months later, the new party’s candidates contested their first general election, winning a surprising 35 of the 141 seats on offer in the lower house.

Blade shearers at ‘Eversleigh’ station in the New England region of northern New South Wales, probably in the 1890s. At this time, wool was Australia’s most valuable export and one of its major employers of labour. Shearers were central to the development of new unionism and fervent supporters of the early Labor Party. Walcha Photographic Studio, G. Hiams. (Courtesy of Historical Resources Collection, University of New England and Regional Archives, HRCP 1948)

Labor’s explosion onto the Australian political scene seemed sudden and was startling to leaders of the existing political groups, but the gestation of Labor-in-politics had been protracted. Following the advent of parliamentary democracy throughout eastern Australia in the 1850s, a long economic boom sparked by the gold rushes and a shortage of labour meant that workers enjoyed good wages and living standards by international standards. Unions representing more highly skilled workers emerged to ensure that their members did even better than ordinary toilers. Their basic strategy was to monopolise skilled labour; employers seeking workers knew that they could call at a union’s favourite hotel in order to pick up qualified workers for a job, but also realised that they would have to pay the union rate.

These craft unions therefore served the interests of the ‘fair’ employer while also helping their members find jobs. Moreover, at a time when the welfare state was non-existent, craft unions also acted as benefit societies that provided workers with a form of insurance. Members contributed to a fund on which they could draw in the event of accident, illness or unemployment, saving them from the indignity of dependence on charity; and in the event of death, a craftsman might avoid the ignominy of a pauper’s burial. These men were not merely interested in earning a ‘bob’. A fair wage would provide the means for a civilised existence, enabling working men to be something other than brutes or slaves. Beginning with the Melbourne stonemasons in the 1850s, craft unions campaigned successfully for the eight-hour day. In their desire to improve the lives of their members, these early unions foreshadowed the aims of the Labor Party that they would eventually help bring into being.

Australian workers were not only more prosperous than their British counterparts; as a result of the democratic franchise, they had considerably more political power. Working men usually gave their votes to ‘liberal’ parliamentary candidates, typically middle-class reformers who promised improvements such as the eight-hour day. A few working men were inspired to become parliamentarians. The stonemason and former Scottish Chartist Charles Jardine Don won election to the Victorian lower house in 1859, claiming to represent the ‘the horny-handed sons of toil’.³ The lack of a parliamentary salary, however, was a major problem, and Don had to continue his trade. Soon accusations were flying: he had become the tool of rich patrons, and he had a habit of sleeping in parliament during debate. Whatever the cause, the first experiment in labour representation in Victoria foundered. When other workers were occasionally elected, such as Angus Cameron to the four-member inner-city electorate of West Sydney in 1874, conflict followed. Initially paid by the TLC, this carpenter soon renounced his connection with it, explaining that he ‘deprecated class legislation’. This was the kind of comment that many a Labor renegade would advance in the years ahead: that whereas the party represented a particular class, he had been elected by the whole people and would act accordingly.⁴ While trades and labour councils emerged in the major cities and towns, in the absence of direct parliamentary representation, union politics was generally limited to staging protest meetings and lobbying governments.

Assisted by improvements in transport and communications during the 1870s, New South Wales’s economy began to change from pastoral to industrial; in Victoria, secondary industries such as manufacturing, stimulated by a protective tariff, expanded. The likelihood of becoming one’s own boss declined