Australian Labor Party

Archbishop Mannix was Australia’s most famous churchman, its most famous Irishman, one of its great troublemakers. As Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne from the First World War to the Nineteen-Sixties, he was a tribal leader and political figure as much as a spiritual leader.

A very public figure, equally loved and hated. But privately an enigma. The REAL Archbishop Mannix: from the sources, reveals Mannix through his own words, his own actions and the actions taken against him.”

Arriving in San Francisco in June 1920, on his way to Rome to call on the Pope, Mannix wasted no time in making inflammatory remarks about the English. Addressing the Catholic summer school at Plattsburg, New York, he said, “There is no use mincing words-Ireland is ruled by an alien Government. England was your enemy; she is your enemy today; she will be your enemy for all time.”

Following his arrest at sea on his way to Ireland, he said, “Since the Jutland battle, the British Navy has not scored a success comparable to the capture of the Archbishop of Melbourne, and not a single British sailor had lost his life. It has rendered the British Government the laughing stock of the world. I still claim the right to go to Ireland and intend to press the claim by any means in my power”.

On a visit to the workers at Broken Hill in 1922, Mannix said, “Let the Church approve no social order … in which there is a great discrepancy between the luxury and wealth of a privileged few, and the wretchedness and material indigence of the many" and earlier, " The work before the Catholic Laborites is to capture the Labor machine.”

He strongly held the view that, “When a man becomes a priest he does not cease to be a citizen, he has a right to his own opinions like other citizens.”

There is an underrepresentation of women in Australian politics-media commentators, political scientists and politicians themselves acknowledge this. Major party pre-selections are one of the factors contributing to this underrepresentation. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the non-Labor coalition of the Liberal Party of Australia and The Nationals (the Coalition) differ in their approach of the matter of gender when undertaking the pre-selection of candidates for federal elections. This essay discusses the importance of gender representation in parliament, the three major parties approaches to gender representation in politics, including a brief history women's participation in the parties and the impact of these policy approaches on the gender balance of the federal Parliament, beginning with the ALP followed by the Coalition parties

This work engages in a Critical Discourse Analysis of the legitimatory discourse of the governing Australian Labor Party in relation to the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory policy 2012. The policy effectively prolonged central provisions of the Northern Territory Emergency Response 2007 and can be perceived as neocolonial intervention directed at the incorporation of Black Australians into the Australian nation-state. The analysis focuses on speeches by members of the Labor party, delivered in the context of the parliamentary debates on the SFP. Four recurring discourses have been identified and investigated according to their ideological content and their legitimising function. While a discourse of listening can be perceived as genuine commitment to take the views of Black Australians seriously, discourses of learning/progress and caring/vulnerability are rather ambivalent. The discourse of agency, which is identified based on an analysis of transitivity – the power position which is ascribed to individuals or groups based on the semantic and grammatical structure of a text –, overshadows the other discourses and strips Black Australians of their ability to change and deal with their social problems themselves. Positive transformation is rendered possible exclusively through contact with white Australians’ social and cultural forms, which can be seen as the central legitimising argument by the speakers. This perception that outside intervention is the only solution, however, must be considered as serious hindrance to the policy aim of empowering Black Australians in general, and vulnerable Black Australians in particular.

Tidak ada yang tahu secara pasti kapan berdirinya Partai Buruh di Australia. Namun jika dilihat dari aktivitasnya, partai ini diperkirakan muncul pada tahun 1891 di Barcaldine, Queensland. Saat itu beberapa buruh sering berkumpul disana untuk membahas terkait masalah perpolitikan namun kiprah Partai Buruh belum terlihat nyata dan kurang begitu berhasil di Queensland.

Why do we always assume it was the New Right that was at the centre of constructing neoliberalism? How might corporatism have advanced neoliberalism? And, more controversially, were the trade unions only victims of neoliberal change, or did they play a more contradictory role? In How Labour Built Neoliberalism, Elizabeth Humphrys examines the role of the Labor Party and trade unions in constructing neoliberalism in Australia, and the implications of this for understanding neoliberalism’s global advance. These questions are central to understanding the present condition of the labour movement and its prospects for the future.

The Australian Labor Party has long been an enigma for socialists. On the one hand it is a party which was formed by and is still strongly influenced by the trade unions and obtains its votes predominantly from workers. Yet the whole experience of Labor in government, at both state and federal level, over the last few decades confirms that the ALP is just as committed to maintaining the rule of capital as the Liberals, and just as committed to the politics of neo-liberalism. Nonetheless despite all the betrayals and compromises, despite the outright attacks ALP governments have launched on workers, the majority of workers still, albeit grudgingly, look to Labor as their party.
How are socialists to understand and orient to this phenomenon of Laborism?

In the 1970s, the leader of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and future Prime Minister of Australia, Robert J. Hawke, was an informer of the United States of America. Using diplomatic cables from official archives, this article shows that Hawke gifted information about the Australian Government, the Australian Labor Party and the labour movement, fueling the intelligence gathering efforts of the foreign power. In turn, the relationship influenced the development of Australian policy, including the abandonment of Keynesianism and embrace of neoliberalism. His discreet actions – discussed in detail for the first time – were not unusual among elites in the post-war period. However, he was especially entrenched in the practice. Many people in politics, the bureaucracy and news media were similarly providing useful information. This paper will also show through historiography and memoir that the act of informing by elites began in the 1940s, when the United States became Australia’s key strategic ally.

The use of the Broadmeadows army camp to accommodate homeless and jobless single men was one of a number of fledgling, unemployment relief measures implemented by the Victorian Hogan State Labor government during the earliest and darkest days of the Great Depression.  For some residents, being shunted off to a camp at Melbourne’s furthest edge was simply a case of being out of sight and out of mind, and was starkly symbolic of the failure of the capitalist system during Australia's greatest economic downturn.  Others accepted it as 'a necessity under the circumstances', a staging point for upcountry relief works, a brief interlude between a return to paid work or even an escape from the drudgery of daily life or the squalid city shelters. 

The Broadmeadows camp represented a short hiatus for its various players.  In attempting to understand the life of the camp, a number of themes emerged.  One theme is the relationship between the camp and the protest movement during the Depression.  Another is the camp as a sectional microcosm of the unemployed and a third theme is the camp as a relief and welfare measure.

This Master's dissertation explores the context in which the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security, 1974-1977 came to be. The Whitlam government wanted to reform the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) so as to depoliticise it and make it more effective in combating genuine threats to the state, including global terrorism. In early 1973 the Government's reform was stalled as a result of the Attorney-General's raid on ASIO offices. The Prime Minister announced in late 1973 that an inquiry into ASIO would arise at some point. The Australian Labor Party took the idea of a judicial inquiry into Australia's intelligence and security apparatus to the 1974 election. Within weeks of returning to office the Whitlam government decided to launch the Royal Commission. The Royal Commission's terms of reference ensured that an intelligence apparatus would continue to be available to the Commonwealth. Labor had decided to keep ASIO prior to the 1972 election. This was despite it experiencing two decades of ASIO's ideological partisanship, which had consequences for Labor. Such a decision was not inconsistent with its history, having been an anti-communist party from the 1920s and responsible for ASIO's creation in 1949. The decision to erect the Royal Commission was also widely supported by major Australian newspapers. When the Royal Commission finished in 1977 a lasting bipartisan consensus on ASIO was emerging.

A communist revolution was afoot, Catholics had also gathered to the fray along with the unemployed and were about to seize the key townships of the Wimmera and Mallee in the north-west of Victoria, Australia.  A communist Red Army was expected to sweep northwards onto the Murray River border town of Mildura from Bendigo, Maryborough and Ballarat.  In small towns along the way, it was anticipated that local Catholics would rise as a Fifth Column in support of the Reds.  It was during the dark days of the Great Depression and the League of National Safety (LNS) aka the White Army began swearing-in all reputable citizens, bar the Catholics.

Tensions in Australia were running very high in early March 1931and unemployment had grown to alarming levels.  The Labor Party was self-destructing over what do about the Depression and Joseph Lyons would soon quit the party on 13 March, after voting against Ted Theodore’s bill to print money for relief works.  Meanwhile, NSW Labor Premier, Jack Lang, was preaching ‘repudiation’ on outstanding government loans to Great Britain with his ‘rabid’ supporter, Eddie Ward, winning the Federal seat of East Sydney at a by-election on 7 March - after which ‘Lang Labor’ MPs were no longer welcome in the Labor caucus - Labor thus officially splitting in two.  Meantime, the various citizens’ leagues, comprising many tens of thousands and regional secessionists, such as the Riverina Movement, advocating ‘sound finance’ and anti-repudiation were mushrooming. 

It was within this context that the strange episode of early March 1931 occurred.  According to some the White Army had 30,000 members in Victoria and that they had ready access to the armouries of the army reserve.  Nation-wide there were up to 100,000 members in so-called ‘fascist’ groups and on that day in March in western Victoria, as some Australians ‘contemplated civil war, other patriots such as Sir John Monash, were also stirred to action’ to ensure that ‘fascists’ dampened their ardour. 

There had been a considerable build-up to the much-heralded ‘Unemployed Day’ on 6 March 1931 and there were expectations that violence would occur, largely as a result of claims by communists that there would be disturbances in the streets in support of their demands.  Consequently, big crowds gathered on the footpaths to watch the various marches, if not participate in them.  But nothing happened - there was no uprising, there wasn't a revolution, the nuns did not hand out .303s to the rebels.

Fears of Langism and rumours about a Bolshevik takeover had abounded in some circles and in January 1931 and there was even talk of communists planning to launch the revolution by blacking out the city with an attack on power plants. In reality, the 6 March episode was a dreadful disaster for the LNS.  The authorities concluded that the panic protective measures were grotesquely unnecessary, while the apparent childish belief in the existence of a moving and devouring Red Army on the part of men regarded as sane and solid seemed beyond belief. Further, the whole story appeared to be the result of hysteria on the part of certain ex-military types aided no doubt by some individuals who were endeavouring to seek the limelight.

The LNS was essentially a ‘defensivist’, Protestant, ‘King and Country’ organisation.  It was not a ‘fascist’ or even ‘proto-fascist’ organisation in the mould of the Nazis, Mussolini’s Blackshirts or even the New Guard and saw itself as a defender of democracy and the existing Constitution but it did have authoritarian tendencies, was sectarian and possessed anti-democratic features.  Like similar organisations elsewhere in Australia, it was short-lived and its feverish, overreactive and embarrassing performance during the events of 1931 ensured that its credibility was quickly found wanting amongst many of the ‘reliable’ and ‘solid’ citizens it had sought to attract in the first place.

The high drama surrounding the perceived threats of Bolshevism and Langist ‘repudiation’ soon dissipated with the changes in government both Federally and in NSW and after the first shock waves of the Great Depression subsided; not least due to much better governmental responses in providing assistance for the unemployed.  Finally, the military authorities stepped in to ensure that no serving officers could have any involvement in these so-called secret armies, including measures to ensure that the army reserve did not become a base for LNS activities.  In other words, Australia’s extremely stable democratic institutions and instincts remained both rock solid and capable of dealing with even the most debilitating and destabilising impacts of the Great Depression.  The likelihood of a fascist takeover had about the same chance as a communist one – Buckley’s and none!

Beginning in the late 1950s what was to become the Church of Scien- tology in Australia had become a topic of public concern. In response to a highly critical report issued by an official Board of Inquiry in the State of Victoria, held over the course of 1963-1964 under the auspices of Kevin Victor Anderson Q.C., state governments in Victoria (1965), Western Australia (1968) and South Australia (1969) passed legislation to restrict the activities of Scientologists. This legislation proved controversial and largely ineffective and was eventually repealed in all three state jurisdictions. This article provides a preliminary account of the circumstances that occasioned the original Board of Inquiry and the background and parliamen- tary debates surrounding each piece of legislation. Utilizing archival documents and public records this article examines how this controversial legislation passed into law and how Scientology initially responded to attempts to curtail its activi- ties. The article concludes with a brief account of the circumstances surrounding the repeals of the legislation in Western Australia (1973), South Australia (1974) and finally in Victoria (1982).

This is an extended version of a paper delivered to the Labour and Anzac Conference at the National Archives of Australia, 21-22 September 2012. The paper was published in a revised form in Labour History, no. 106, (May 2014), and is also uploaded on this site.

On Monday 3 August 1914, the government of Joseph Cook authorised a cable to London offering an expeditionary force. The leaders of the Labor Party voiced no criticism. This article explores the background to Labor’s acquiescence. In the context of a looming federal election, a number of factors came into play. As the international crisis opened, Liberals alleged that Labor would jeopardise Australia’s security. Labor had been prominent in supporting Irish Home Rule in 1914, inviting charges of disloyalty. Andrew Fisher had been hurt politically by such charges in the recent past. The Labor leaders Fisher and Pearce were also aware that they had authorised planning for an expeditionary force when in office, 1910–13. Since the Boer War, Labor had retreated from suggestions that Australia might shun an imperial war. Instead, in fear of Asia, Labor preached absolute loyalty to Britain and the internationalist spirit remained weak in Labor’s ranks.

Africa has traditionally been marginal to the Australian foreign policy agenda, aside from British colonial and Commonwealth ties and later efforts to end minority rule in southern Africa. Yet a resources boom, strong economic growth, increasing democratisation and reformed governance institutions have created new international interests in engaging with Africa and made it difficult for aspiring global players like Australia to ignore the continent’s opportunities and challenges. Under Labor (2007-13), Canberra pursued substantial “new engagement” with this “new Africa”, enhancing political and diplomatic relations, supporting major Australian commercial interests and quadrupling the Africa aid budget. Following the election of the Abbott Coalition government in September 2013, the article argues that while commercial opportunities and some specific security and humanitarian concerns will keep the Coalition interested in Africa, the enhanced level of engagement with the continent pursued under Labor is unlikely to be sustained.

From 1916 to 1923, a faction based in the Central Branch of the Australian Workers Union (AWU) was the dominant extra-parliamentary force within the NSW Labor Party. This thesis will examine how and why this faction lost control of the NSW Labor Party in the 1920s. I will argue that the AWU faction lost control of the party in two key stages. In 1923, the faction's authoritarianism caused it to lose its NSW Labor Conference and Executive majorities. By 1926, the faction had regained much of its former influence. The following year, however, the NSW Labor Party adopted a new set of rules (dubbed the "Red Rules‟) that ensured that the AWU faction could never again dominate the party. The faction's best chance of defeating the new rules lay in delaying the 1927 NSW Labor Conference. When this failed, it sought to portray the new rules as a communist conspiracy. I will argue that this propaganda campaign was unsuccessful because it was alarmist and dishonest.

Non-Anglo-ethnic branch member recruitment is a relatively new phenomenon in the Victorian ALP, possibly dating from the 1970's. Branch stacking is not. Branch stacking is popularly regarded as an evil, and the party will takes steps to reduce that activity of branch stackers after every media exposure. The practice can be reduced, but it can never be eliminated while the party allows for mass membership participation in party affairs. Ironically some people see branch stacking having benefits to the party and to its factions, as well as to certain ethnic individuals. The party needs to manage the practice if it is not to suffer electoral damage.

During the decade 1965-1975, a cultural revolution took place in Australia. The future was seeded with movements and ideas that changed Australian society and culture, and enlarged the space for democratic action. This book, edited by Beverley Symons and Rowan Cahill, themselves activists during the period, brings together the candid, at times vulnerable, recollections of thirty-nine participants in the events of the decade.

Kevin Rudd's political ascendancy moved celebrity personae and celebrity media closer to the central terrain of Australian politics. This tended to diminish the authority of political journalists, and presented a directed challenge to the power of bureaucrats and activists in the Australian Labor Party. Rudd's engagement with celebrity culture, and his instantiation of 'audience democracy' can be understood in the context of Australia's 'post-broadcast democracy', the competitive, co-adaptive dynamic between political actors and journalists, and the increasing celebritisation of contemporary culture. In responding to Rudd's strategies, political journalists resorted to the 'scourging' tactics familiar from celebrity journalism. Rudd's brief Prime Ministership raises questions about the future of politics and journalism in celebritising, post-broadcast democracies, that have global ramifications.

This article examines the extent to which the Australian Labor Party (ALP) engaged in a process of policy transfer, learning from the UK Labour Party, when it reformed its federal leadership selection process in 2013. Bringing together insights from both the public policy and party organisations literature, the article develops an empirical framework for identifying instances of policy transfer (or contagion effects) that consists of three criteria: intention, motivation and implementation, which can examined through various types of empirical data (including interviews, documentary, and network analysis). Applying this framework to the ALP reforms, the article concludes that while it is possible to see evidence of a general shift to a similar, more inclusive selection process, policy transfer is more difficult to substantiate. There were clear differences in the specifics of how the process would work, and a temporal disjoint between when actors sought information about UK practices and when the reforms actually occurred.

Frank Crean was effectively shadow treasurer for a decade or more before becoming treasurer. But soon after achieving the post he was facing the most turbulent global economic conditions since the depression as the quadrupling of oil prices saw the emergence of stagflation in almost all advanced economies. Crean was a decent man and technically competent but not politically strong enough for the challenge.

Chifley was a ‘true believer’ in the Labor Party and in the role that government could play in stabilising the economy and keeping unemployment low. He was an active treasurer, initially working well with Prime Minister Curtin and then serving as both Prime Minister and Treasurer himself. He managed the war economy competently and achieved a smooth transition to a peacetime economy, although he allowed inflationary pressures to build up in the post-war years. Among his economic reforms were increased welfare payments, uniform income taxation and developing central banking powers (through direct controls rather than market mechanisms) for the Commonwealth Bank.

So, the election has come and gone. It turned out to be a real Seinfeld election, a show about nothing. When the most catastrophic policy-making in the nation's history, the great Covid bungle (or crime, depending on where you stand in relation to Hanlon's Razor and conspiracy thinking), and perhaps the biggest issues Australia has ever needed to address (like lost rights, freedoms traduced, flawed governance, executive overreach, federalism abandoned, police brutality, and the house arrest of citizens, to name just a few) are simply parked. The outcome is two tedious, largely disengaged political parties having a Wag-the-Dog election campaign and squabbling over policy tidbits and woke ephemera. The punditocracy has been busy, of course, trying to draw conclusions and extract meaning. Much of this is self-serving, needless to say. Some of its musings are decidedly odd, and others utterly misplaced. One Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist thought that the Liberals' "move to the right" over recent decades required explanation. Using the terms "Liberal" and "right" in the one sentence suggests that something in this journalist's head isn't quite right. Whatever planet she is on, it isn't the one that I inhabit.

This chapter assesses the health of political polling in Australia during the period of 2013-2016 and identifies major movements in voting intentions in this period. It finds that most national polls for two-party preferred voting intentions are reliable however there are systematic underestimations of Labor primary voting intentions and overestimations of Greens voting intentions. Seat-specific polling is comparatively lower quality in contrast to national polling. Most movements in voting intentions in the period studied occurred long before the election campaign exposing the popular media narratives of a "Mediscare" and "Greenslide" as unsubstantiated on the available evidence.

The chapter was published on the 11th April 2018 in the book: Double Disillusion: The 2016 Australian Federal Election by ANU Press and was edited by: Anika Gauja, Peter Chen, Jennifer Curtin, & Juliet Pietsch. The full book is available here: https://press.anu.edu.au/node/4149/download

This chapter can be downloaded for free from ANU Press here: http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n4149/pdf/ch06.pdf

This article examines the durability of neoliberalism in the face of crisis by analysing the Building the Education Revolution (BER), a key part of the Australian Labor Government’s stimulus measures in response to the global financial crisis in 2009. The fiscal stimulus measures enacted by governments in the aftermath of the crisis led many commentators to herald the end of neoliberalism. By examining the design of the BER, however, this article finds that one of the key policy tools of neoliberalism – the outsourcing of public sector capacity – was extended through such stimulus programs. The article argues that a materialist analysis of neoliberalism is better able to understand this phenomenon than the recent tendency to analyse neoliberalism in ideational terms.

's last appearance on the public stage occurred with his mending of fences with his old partner in micro-economic reform, the late Bob Hawke. And his moving eulogy at Hawke's memorial service in June 2019. What did Mr Keating do next? It was certainly a surprise. Those still shaking their heads at the endless bromance between the Premiers of New South Wales and Victoria were given a clue to its origins this week, when Keating re-emerged, at least in print, with the publicising of a private conversation between the former Prime Minister and the Premier of MelDanistan. It was Keating who apparently cajoled Andrews into some across-the-Murray collaboration with Dominic Perrottet. Keating said that Andrews might find a willing partner in order to "do things". By which he meant seeking governance reforms. If so, good on them all, you might say, if what they are seeking is itself worthwhile. But the partnership is still peculiar, and for many on the right, an utterly distasteful development.

And so, the election analyses continue. Many valid points have been made, about why the ALP won, why the Coalition lost, why the Greens did so well, why the so-called "teals" emerged, why the Liberal moderates were shown the exit door, why Western Australia turned on the Government, and so on. Bob Day of the Australian Family Party (and formerly of Family First), suggested three reasons for the abandonment of the Liberals (the Nationals didn't lose any seats, as per other recent elections). He called them "family, faith and freedom". But there is another story about the election of 2022, the post-Covid election. It is the phenomenally low voter turnout. To use the most overused phrase of our time, it was, indeed, "unprecedented". Well, since compulsory voting was introduced down under in 1924. As Adam Piggott at Pushing Rubber Downhill and XYZ points out: The media is comprehensively ignoring this subject, but even a cursory examination of the stats released by the Australian Electoral Commission reveals that over 30% of registered voters boycotted the 2022 federal election.

, and now Dominic Perrottet. Under the Liberals, four premiers and counting. All up, 8 premiers in 16 years. A truly fine bunch. Can anyone think of anything remotely significant and lastingly consequential that ANY of them achieved? Then there are the opposition leaders who never made it