by Donald Horne
Catholics have been peculiarly powerful in the party, overall providing at least 50 per cent of its leaders; in some of the State Tammany machines of the past there were sometimes very few Cabinet Ministers who were not Catholics. At the same time Communist influence in the unions (much stronger than in Britain) has added a much stronger communist influence to the party. Unions that are Communist-led have ‘captive’ Labor Party officials who are sent along as delegates to State Conferences and try to form dominant State machines. They are likely to find allies among radical and syndicalist union leaders who, for various motives, prefer to join the Communist-influenced than the Catholics. Often this is the choice.
Perhaps the extraordinary thing about the Australian Labor Party has not been so much that it is so subject to schism as that it has enjoyed periods of effective unity.
The long political success of Sir Robert Menzies can hardly be understood without first considering the multiple civil war that ravaged the Labour Movement during most of the period of his power. With its complicated involvement of Catholics – even to the extent of issues being referred to Rome – this story, even if told very briefly, gives something of the unique flavour of the Australian Labour Movement.
It is not the kind of story that really begins at any particular time (it grows out of Australian history) but if we begin arbitrarily in the mid-1940s we see that by 1945 Communists controlled most of the transport, fuel, power, heavy metal and engineering unions, four State Labor Councils and the ACTU Congress. Earlier they had even captured the New South Wales Labor Party (but they had quickly been expelled). They were about to embark on a policy of political strikes that was later to cause the Labor Federal Government to freeze their funds, gaol some of their leaders, order a raid on their headquarters and smash a coal strike by sending in the troops. This strike policy (as much as 2 000 000 working days lost in a year) was the Australian Communists’ contribution to Stalin’s policy of armed insurrection in Burma, Malaya, Indo-China, Indonesia and the Philippines. (The Australian Communists could not fight guerilla actions from the hills so they organized strikes on the coalfields.)
To this background of Communist adventurism a Melbourne law graduate, B.A. Santamaria, had persuaded the Catholic bishops to give moral and financial help to a body known informally as ‘The Movement’, a secret organization which would organize Catholics to fight Communism in the unions, in association with anti-Communist union leaders, not all of them Catholics. By 1946 the Labor Party had begun to form Industrial Groups to fight Communists (perhaps at the instigation of ‘The Movement’), and ‘The Movement’ worked with ‘The Groups’. The leaders of the Groups were not all Catholic but the mass membership was almost completely Movement-directed. In New South Wales and Victoria the Groups became a ‘party within a party’; they raised their own funds; a Group hierarchy corresponded to the Labor Party hierarchy; F.P. McManus and J.F. Kane, the leaders of the Victorian and New South Wales Groups, also became Assistant Secretaries of their State Labor Parties. Not until 1954 was the name Santamaria mentioned in the daily newspapers. The whole manoeuvre was carried out in complete secrecy – a decision that Santamaria himself considered a mistake, because of the extra suspicion it caused.
These tactics helped the Labor Party recapture the Labor Councils, the ACTU and some important unions. But the Movement became giddy with success; it began to operate outside the Labour Movement and by the early 1950s there was considerable community resentment against what looked like an outburst of Catholic ambition – although few outsiders knew what was really happening.
Within the Labor Party there was also fear that the Groups were running wild. The Groups had begun to operate in non-Communist unions and in Labor Party branches and it looked to some as if sooner or later they would take over the whole show. In particular the Australian Workers Union, a huge influence within the Labor Party, suspected the Groups. And the Movement’s attempt to make all Catholic Labor men ‘toe the line’ alienated some of the most powerful figures in the party. For several years one of the Movement’s main interests in Victoria seemed to be to strip the Catholic leaders Kennelly and Calwell of party power. There was also opposition from secretaries of non-Communist unions who were concerned for their jobs, from Masons and anti-Catholics, and, of course, from the Communists and the Communistic-influenced. In 1951 the South Australian State Executive disbanded the Groups in South Australia. The New South Wales and Victorian Groups – perhaps in a panic – then used their numbers in 1952 to take over their State Executives.
The Groups’ political policies, strongly reflecting Movement ideology, now became part of Labor Party debate. Whatever hard-headed empiricism it had displayed in office, to Labor the sudden emergence of so many new policies was an affront to its traditions. Joint consultation in industry, the relating of wages to productivity, incentive payments, decentralization, development of the North, increased migration, closer rural settlement, pro-Americanism, some anti-Britishism and a strong concern with foreign policy, defence and strategic planning – however admirable some of them were in themselves, policies like these were too much of a mouthful to be swallowed in one go. They required a whole new language in a Labor Party that was largely stuck with an older rhetoric.
However, despite all the tension within the party, the Groups still flourished until 1954, not least because Dr Evatt, the clouded and tragic figure who led the parliamentary Labor Party, was working with the Groupers. He asked Santamaria to help him write his 1954 election policy speech and said he would put Movement men in his Cabinet if he won. When Evatt lost the election (mainly because of astute use of defection to Australia of Petrov, the Russian spy-diplomat) Evatt seemed to lose all sense of balance. He decided that the Groups were among those who were out to ‘get’ him. According to his private secretary, he was determined to ‘get’ the Groupers before they got him. On 5 October 1954, he made the first of a series of denunciatory attacks on the Movement.
Evatt’s attacks released the opposition towards the Movement and the Groupers that had been gathering for several years. All the bitterness and ruthlessness of politics came on to public show. Evatt emerged from his battle of telephone calls, press statements, telegrams, attacks and counter-attacks and called on the Federal Executive for support. By seven votes to five the Federal Executive dissolved the Group-dominated Victorian Executive.* The Federal Conference due in Hobart in January was postponed until after a special Victorian conference in February had sacked the Victorian delegates already appointed to the Federal Conference and appointed new delegates who would vote the other way. (To get the kind of conference it wanted the Federal Executive had ruled that delegates to the Victorian conference need not be Labor Party members and that unions disaffiliated from the Labor Party could reaffiliate with no questions asked. Kennelly and other Victorian ‘moderates’ who had asked for Federal intervention expected that they would dominate the conference but the ‘leftists’ beat them to it.) The Hobart Conference that followed then disbanded the Groups. A walkout of Grouper politicians in Victoria defeated the Cain Labor Government, and, frightened by this, the Federal Executive moved more cautiously in New South Wales. It later dismissed the Executive, prohibited the holding of that year’s State conference and appointed a ‘Caretaker Executive’ of thirty-two, but included twelve former Groupers. The New South Wales Labor Government survived, but the split vote defeated Labor Governments in Queensland and Western Australia as well as Victoria and defeated Evatt in Federal elections in 1955 and 1958, and Calwell in 1961 and 1963.
This long, dismaying history of chaos and bitterness has produced many versions of what it was all supposed to be about, in which one side judged another’s motives by the effects of its actions. However in this kind of warfare once men are engaged in action it is not their motives, but the demands of action that tend to make their decisions for them, and the effects of the decisions are not predictable. The Movement’s greatest mistakes seem to have been its excessive secrec
y and its hounding of non-Movement Catholics and other anti-communist Labor men who did not belong to the Movement. And its political policies were too precise and rigid; they were an affront to the muddle of politics with its ceaseless shifts, expediencies, and compromise. Brilliant oganization went into the Groups; as an anti-Communist operation they were of world class; but as a political manoeuvre they attempted too much in a too doctrinaire way. Of its opponents, the collaborators with the Communists are beneath contempt; the others have often been too cautious or too moved by old hatreds. To clean up the mess a Gaitskell was needed but in the Australian Labor Party it would be hard for a Gaitskell even to win pre-selection. To discuss the Labor Party over this period of disorder without discussing it in terms of its inner power struggle can be completely misleading. (This is why so much nonsense is written about it.) In losing a significant part of its Catholic support the Party was fractured.
After the split Communists regained control in some unions; ‘unity tickets’ between ALP men and Communists were revived; the ACTU developed a Communist-influenced tone; and at successive Party conferences foreign policy resolutions were written into the party platform that, in Asian terms, were of a neutralist kind. A 1930s kind of United Front atmosphere flourished in Victoria and for a time the Victorian Executive seemed to lead the party; their opponents laid low and concentrated on the power they enjoyed in their own States. The party seemed to drift away from prevailing community values. In New South Wales, where a right-wing Labor Party held parliamentary power until 1965, party membership dropped from 37 000 to 20 000. In Victoria it dropped from 28 000 to 5000. The embittered right wing made several forays; but it was still losing. One of its problems was that the ordinary right winger was used to compromise and ‘deals’; the more doctrinaire left wing remained implacable.
All had not been lost of the Movement. The bitter debate within the Catholic Church in Australia was, in 1957, referred to the Commission of Cardinals in Rome. As a result, official connection between the Church and the Movement was broken; the Movement itself had broken into several fragments, the strongest of which became the National Civic Council, a lay body, with Santamaria as secretary. The Australian bishops were divided into three groups: some supported the National Civic Council; others dissociated themselves from it (although they sometimes kept their own version of the Movement going in their dioceses in opposition to the NCC); others tried to stay neutral. NCC Groups continued to operate, strongly in Victoria, less effectively in other states, and they still controlled some unions. The expelled Labor Party men and those who resigned from the party formed the breakaway Democratic Labor Party, which began to contest parliamentary elections, leaving the unions to the NCC. It was strongest in Victoria but nationally, as a veto party, its voting strength and propaganda were often credited with keeping Menzies in power. The DLP was still dominated by the NCC and the remnants of the Movement. There were some tensions within it between the minority who would have liked to build it into a broadly based political party and the majority who continued to see it as a temporary guerilla operation designed to modify Labor policy, gain re-entry into the Labor Party, and perhaps later gain control of it.
The reality of Labor’s Power Men was the arithmetic of party struggle, the manoeuvre of party position. This situation revealed how stupid men can become when they calculate too narrowly. There was no more cynical politician in the world than an Australia Labor ‘fixer’ out to ‘get the numbers’ in a party squabble. But in the broader horizons of the Australian people his cynicism and assurance disappeared: he didn’t know how to ‘get the numbers’ in this broader field.
Power within the Labor machine can become a satisfaction in itself; activists are more concerned with keeping their position in the machine than with winning elections. In this way they can enjoy a feeling of importance and exercise power and at the same time preserve their emotional security (their ‘integrity’) by never testing their ‘policies’. The extreme conservatism of some of their spokesmen can make them appear way-out. Thus when a spokesman says that capitalism is an enemy of equal rank to Communism, to many younger people he simply appears insane. To them to talk about ‘capitalism’ and ‘Communism’ is oldies’ talk, some word trick.
Whatever the emotional involvement of the minority of the ‘leftists’ who put the Labor Party out of action, the view of most men in the Labor Party was not ‘socialist’. Australia was the country of socialisme sans doctrine and probably most (not all) Labor men, if they obtain power, would pay as little attention to the ideologues of ‘socialism’ as, in power, Menzies paid to the ideologues of ‘free enterprise’. It might be that the view of most men in the Labor Party is nothing much at all: they simply want place and power. Under other circumstances this could be a good thing. Skilful opportunists, stimulated by events and fed good ideas, can become great reformers.
After leading his party into its eighth successive defeat, Arthur Calwell retired. His successor, Mr Gough Whitlam, a generation younger than Calwell, gave some promise for the future. He seemed to understand that not only the Labor Party, but Australia as a whole, needed a psychological reorientation, a new tone and style to make it adaptable in the modern world. The problem was whether he could re-create a party with a sense of legitimacy about it, something that looked like a real alternative government. The fundamentalists were dying off, but it remained to be seen if he could manipulate the leftists off the centre of the stage.
The four-party system: ‘tensions’ of the Coalition
The Liberal Party was created by Menzies in the 1940s and had life in it until it – or perhaps Menzies – had grown too used to power. Some of the life it sang with now seems corny – ‘hundred per cent freedom of enterprise’, ‘the socialist is merely a Communist without guts’ and so forth. But there was more to it than this now unacceptable rhetoric. It was also an expression of an Australian’s desire to be left to himself, to enjoy life as he chose to enjoy it, and the feeling that there was nothing wrong with this. It represented a liberation from the post-war puritanism and touches of megalomania of the Labor Party and the confusion of economic planning with mere wartime regulation. In the same way the Labor Party’s earlier impetus towards welfare and planning had represented a desire to avoid the dreary horrors of the 1930s and to be more expert and up-to-date. But no new enthusiasm reoriented the Liberal Party in a contemporary direction. All that was left in the older men were the impossible dreams of 1949 and a sense of betrayal. (If any political outfit keeps up old ideas too long it is bound to have a sense of betrayal: political ideals never work out in detail; they simply point in a direction. If the party changes its direction it necessarily disappoints some of its supporters, although others accept the change.)
Of these ideals the belief in ‘free enterprise’ remained a principal obsession. As in the way with politics, this was partly obsessive ideology, partly a racket. To the Australian manufacturer ‘free enterprise’ meant that the government should help him make money without destroying his illusion of control over his firm or – more reasonably – without mucking him about in too much detail. They were really supporters of a partly planned economy in which governments laid down the guidelines and businessmen filled in the details; but few of them recognized this, or admitted it. Considering the notorious lack of enterprise in Australian businessmen, their reliance on overseas innovation and government support, it was a tribute to the power of ideology that their beliefs went so strongly against their economic interests. Perhaps it was part of the guilt of most Australian elites: they are not really very good according to the standards they have read about but they have a profound need to believe that they are. However this may be, businessmen try to be a powerful influence in the Liberal Party and their narrowness of view, their mixture of obsolescent ideology and keen self-interest, is one of the things wrong with it. They are interested in very little except their myth of ‘free enterprise’.
The entire East–West confrontation, for
instance, for some of them seemed to be a matter of the Australian Communists following strike policies; when the Communists went easy on strikes many of the businessmen lost interest. What the party needs is a body such as the Conservative Central Office that is encouraged to work out new images of the times and to keep the party up-to-date, thereby interesting its leaders in the new. This kind of job requires intellectuals and, for reasons that are partly the fault of the Liberal Party and partly of the intellectuals, few intellectuals would now be seen dead inside the Liberal Party. It has to make do mainly with those it attracted ten to fifteen years ago. There is a party apparatus – with more than a hundred paid staff – but many of them are now time servers (there are exceptions) and in any case Menzies’ great shadow starved initiative or recognition. The party machine did not matter much under Menzies.
The party has greater active support among young people than the Labor Party. (Some Labor Party branches have no young members.) Its ‘Young Liberal’ branches are sometimes mainly an excuse for having a good time but some of them show a lively interest in politics that is not evident elsewhere in the party. There are great potential tensions within the Liberal Party between the enthusiastic young and the timid old men, sometimes on policy (the immigration laws are an example), even more fundamentally on style and approaches to life. Young Liberals sometimes have a mildly social–radical flavour: they would like Australia to be more with-it in administrative style; they would like to modernize Australia. Perhaps they represent the ‘westernizing influence’ in Australian politics.