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True Believers

Frank Bongiorno looks at the origins of the Australian Labor Party, which celebrated its centenary of Caucus this week.

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The week that has just passed was, in many respects, Labor's week in the Centenary of Federation celebrations. John Howard was still smarting as I listened to ABC Radio this morning, contrasting Ben Chifley's sincere but misguided vision of 'the light on the hill' with Kim Beazley's belief in nothing in particular. Perhaps we shouldn't have expected the Prime Minister to suspend his political point-scoring while the ALP, albeit ever so briefly, rained on what he undoubtedly hoped would be his parade.

Labor has been celebrating the Centenary of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party, which first met on 8 May 1901, in a stuffy room in the basement of Victoria's Parliament House in Spring Street. This commemoration coincides with the Centenary of the opening of the first Federal Parliament in that city's Exhibition Building.

The formation of the first Federal Labor Caucus in 1901 was the result of several decades of experimentation by Australian trade unions with various forms of political activity. Previously, unions had organised protest meetings, sent delegations to ministers, lobbied parliamentarians and occasionally even offered formal or informal support to parliamentary candidates from their own ranks. The best known of these was Charles Jardine Don, a Melbourne stonemason, who was elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly in 1859. Don claimed that he 'punched blue-stone by day and squatters by night', but he instead gained a reputation for sleeping in the chamber during the evening sittings of parliament.

So the idea of forming a parliamentary labour party did not happen overnight, even if its appearance on the late colonial scene did seem rather sudden and spectacular to many contemporaries. By the time of Federation, there were parliamentary labour parties in four colonies: New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia. Each was completely autonomous: only the most informal connections bound them. All were, to some extent, a product of the defeat of the unions in the maritime strike of 1890, which convinced many unionists that they needed to use more vigorous methods of influencing the political process than those they had employed previously. All sought to 'make an unmake social conditions' -- as George Black, a New South Wales Labor parliamentarian, had so memorably defined Labor's mission.

Yet they had not all been equally successful in this endeavour. In New South Wales, where Labor exploded on to the political scene in 1891 by winning 35 seats and the balance of power, the party quickly split over the issue of tariff protection. During the 1890s, however, NSW Labor was able to trade support in return for concessions and thus helped achieve some significant legislative reform. In Victoria, Labor acted as a kind of left-wing of the Liberal Party and in that role exercised some influence over the legislative program of various governments. The party in South Australia had been a supporter of the reformist regime of Charles Cameron Kingston, while in Queensland, Labor found itself a small and somewhat politically impotent minority in a parliament dominated by men hostile to its policies.

By the time of Federation, the labour parties had already introduced into Australian politics a new understanding of democracy, in which the caucus had a central role to play. The basic idea was that working-class electors were not only to have an opportunity to select candidates prior to elections and vote for Labor candidates at election time, but also a hand in making party policy between elections. Labor parliamentarians would be securely under the control of an extra-parliamentary organisation representative of the labour movement. Parliamentarians were to be delegates rather than representatives; their role was to act in accordance with the instructions given them by their masters, the party rank-and-file and the union movement. They would vote in accordance with the party platform and, on every question, as a majority of caucus decided. Laborites were importing into politics ideas of working-class solidarity associated with the union movement.

From a twenty-first century perspective, it's difficult to appreciate just how radical some of these ideas were at the time. In the politics of those days, parliamentarians were more commonly perceived as representatives who, once elected, should exercise their personal judgment when deciding how to vote. A wise politician would be mindful of what his constituency had to say, but he should not be dictated to. A statement by New South Wales Labor politician W.J. Ferguson gives a good indication of how Labor challenged this idea. 'The man who considered himself in advance of the people', said Ferguson, 'had his proper place outside the House as a propagandist agent. But in Parliament he should represent the opinions of the majority which elected him ... If a man was out of line with the majority, let him educate that majority to his own opinions, but let him not pretend to represent those with whom he was out of accord'.

This attitude to political representation attracted much criticism from those outside the movement, and from some within it. Labor politicians who, once elected, suddenly found the idea of accountability to an outside body onerous, now claimed that the enforcement of a pledge would produce 'a conscienceless and unprincipled party' -- as one of the earliest of Labor 'rats', Joseph Cook, once remarked.

The reality, of course, is that there has often been a large gap between Labor's theory of democracy and the actual behaviour of the Federal Caucus. Yet the theory remains a crucial reference point for everyone involved in the party, a code that cannot be transgressed without arousing the most intense passions among party members. Much else for which the true believers stood in 1901 is gone: but the ideal of labour democracy -- and, one would like to think, at least a modicum of its practice -- remains.

Frank Bongiorno is a contributor to John Faulkner and Stuart Macintyre (eds.), True Believers: The Story of the Parliamentary Labor Party, published by Allen & Unwin, and just launched in Melbourne. He does not benefit financially from sales of the book.

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  Issue 95 contents

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»	The Soapbox
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»	Trades Hall
»	Tool Shed

»	The Great May Day Debate
»	Questions for Macca
»	Qantas on Impulse
»	Compo: The Great Tradition

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