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Federation and Labour

By Stuart Macintyre

The labour movement's role in the 1897 Federal Convention and the subsequent referenda process has been largely forgotten.

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In New South Wales Labor ran candidates for all ten seats in the Federal Convention. Not one was elected. In South Australia Labor accepted four positions on the ticket with Kingston's liberals and all four were unsuccessful. Tasmania had no labour party but a Democratic League endorsed a group of candidates on the Labor platform, with no better result.

Only in Victoria, where William Trenwith accepted a place on the all-party ticket of the Age was there a successful labour candidate but Trenwith had broken with the Labor Party there in the previous year. The complete failure of the endorsed Labor candidates can be partly explained by the method of election on a state-wide basis, the low turnout and in New South Wales by the competition from a republican ticket as well as Cardinal Moran, whose candidacy introduced damaging sectarian animosities.

All the same, it was a chastening result. In the most recent colonial elections held in New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria, Labor had won a total of 122,000 votes (and in Queensland a further 28,000); their candidates for the Convention obtained barely half that number. John La Nauze has estimated that at this time Labor held 40 out of 360 seats in the lower houses of the colonial parliaments; in the Convention they would have a dubious one out of 50 delegates.

Shut out of its deliberations, they regarded it as an unrepresentative assembly of wealth and privilege. The lavish hospitality offered to delegates at Adelaide in the autumn of 1897, and then Sydney in the spring after some of them had travelled to London for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, particularly angered Bob Guthrie, a Labor parliamentarian in South Australia and a former seamen.

'It was a declaration of war against the working class', he thundered, for a constitution to be 'framed amid the fragrant smoke of the finest Havana cigars and the smell of the most savoury turkeys and ducks, and launched on its maiden trip in a sea of champagne'.

Backlash against Socialists

The adverse result in the Convention elections in New South Wales brought recriminations against the party's 'crude, ill-considered, bumptious manifesto', which turned into a backlash against the socialists.

Labor's Convention election manifesto was indeed crude - 'If you wish your children to grow up cursing you for your cowardice and apathy in neglecting to strike a blow for liberty and justice, vote for the Fat Man' - but it was scarcely socialist in its direct appeal to racial prejudice: 'If you want a piebald Australia, vote for the Conservatives'. Even so, the leaders of the Australian Workers' Union joined with leading parliamentarians to purge the party platform of socialist overtones.

In Victoria, on the other hand, the tide flowed in the other direction. Trenwith's apostasy increased the determination of the recently reformed United Labor Party to end its alliance with the Liberals. Hitherto the two parties had a common commitment to protectionism, but federation would remove the fiscal issue to federal politics and break up the longstanding Lib-Lab partnership. In late 1897 a new socialist weekly journal was established in Melbourne, Tocsin, to sound the alarm against the work of the Convention and the undemocratic constitution it was preparing.

Constitution Vote

That constitution was put to the people in New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria in June 1898. The Labor Party campaigned for a No vote in the three mainland states, and in Tasmania the Democratic League performed the same role. Criticism centred on the class bias of the functions allocated to the Commonwealth, the composition and powers of the Senate, the apparent power vested in the governor-general by codifying the conventions of a constitutional monarchy, and the difficulty of changing the constitution.

There was a clear Yes vote in South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria, and historians have usually treated the result there as a foregone conclusion. The contest in Victoria was perhaps keener than is generally appreciated. The leaders of the Labor party and the Trades Hall Council campaigned vigorously against the bill alongside H. B. Higgins, the advanced liberal who had returned from the Convention convinced of its defects. There were signs early in the campaign that Higgins' colleague Isaac Isaacs shared his concerns.

More ominously still, the Age newspaper entertained them. Deakin had to use all of his influence to bring David Syme round to recommend a Yes vote. For a time at least, a Lib-Lab alliance appeared likely to reform in opposition to federation. In the event Victorians voted in favour of the bill by 100,520 votes to 22,099, but that turnout was well under the norm for parliamentary elections and a minimum of 60,000 Yes votes had been set as a condition of acceptance. If the Age had continued its opposition to the proposal, then that requirement might have been more difficult to satisfy.

In New South Wales it was this stipulation that defeated the federalists. New South Wales voted in favour of the bill by 71,595 to 66,228, but the requirement of 80,000 Yes votes was not satisfied and the proposal to join the Commonwealth was defeated. The outcome is usually attributed to the equivocations of the premier, George Reid, and certainly Barton and Deakin blamed him. But Reid merely voiced his misgivings and without the advocates of a No vote his heavy hints would have caused little damage. Bede Nairn argues convincingly that 'The Labor campaign was certainly a large factor in the Bill's defeat in New South Wales'. He goes further, however, in his argument that both Reid and the Labor Party were the saviours of federation. We may accept Nairn's contention that Reid encouraged the defeat of the 1898 referendum in order to negotiate concessions from the smaller, outlying states that strengthened the House of Representatives over the Senate and gave New South Wales the federal capital.

With these and other concessions, Reid was ready to go to a second referendum, but without a majority in the Assembly and in the face of an intransigent Council, he was dependent upon Labor support. It was Chris Watson, the first Labor prime minister, who kept Reid in office, ensured the passage of his enabling legislation through the lower house and arranged for Labor nominees to secure its acceptance by the upper house. Labor duly campaigned against the revised Federal Bill in the ensuing referendum and saw it easily carried. This was indeed an act of chivalry.

Meanwhile Queensland and eventually Western Australia were drawn into the imminent federal union. Here the labour movement displayed a greater ambivalence. Some sections, especially in Queensland, shared the misgivings about the shortcomings of the Commonwealth Constitution. When the premier of that colony brought in enabling legislation for a referendum on the Federal bill, Labor proposed an amendment that every white adult male should exercise the vote. Billy Higgs, who had shifted from Sydney with the reputation of an ardent republican nationalist, broke ranks to save the plebiscite. He and others were persuaded by the prospect that a Commonwealth government would be less conservative than their own, which would certainly not be difficult, and similar considerations operated in the West. In both these colonies, also, the outlying regions contained a high proportion of immigrants, drawn from other colonies by mineral discoveries, who chafed at their neglect by the provincial �lites of Brisbane and Perth. 'Separation for federation' was a popular slogan on the goldfields.

Federal Labor Established

Already there were preparations for Labor to enter Commonwealth politics. In September 1899, while the Queensland voters were still at the polls and before Western Australians were given the opportunity to vote on federation, a meeting of the intercolonial labour parties was called. It met at the Sydney Trades Hall on 24 January 1900, recommended establishment a Federal Labor Party and settled a platform on which candidates could stand for the federal parliament. The choice of candidates and direction of the election campaign that was conducted in the early months of 1901 were determined by the five state labour parties (Tasmania still did not have one), each operating under its own name according to its particular political orientation. Most, but not all, of the leading figures in the colonial labour parties ran for the Commonwealth parliament; they had clearly decided it would be the principal arena.

Before the, however, there was a reminder that they were outsiders at the feast. The Inauguration of the Commonwealth in Sydney on 1 January was the occasion of elaborate ceremony. The imperial pageantry, the presence of warships from the Royal Navy in the Harbour, the great march of troops from England, Scotland and India - all emphasised the nature of the occasion. The procession from the Domain to Centennial Park was organised in reverse order of precedence: the most lowly came first, the Governor-General last. So at the head of the parade came the trade unions: thirty mounted shearers in bush clothes, followed by ten silver miners from Broken Hill with hammers and drills, ten coal miners from Newcastle and Bulli with lamps and picks, ten wharf labourers with cargo hooks, ten glass blowers, ten plasters and so on through the trades. This was indeed an imperial triumph of the Roman kind, with the victors displaying their barbarian captives.

Labor and Parliament

Most contemporary observers were astonished at the result achieved by the Labor Party in the first federal elections. The election campaign was dominated by the contest between the government party led by Barton, which was generally known as Protectionist, and the opposition Freetraders led by George Reid. The Protectionists won 32 seats in the House of Representatives, the Freetraders 27 and Labor 16. In the Senate there were 17 Freetraders, 11 Protectionists and eight Labor members. In both houses, therefore, Labor held the balance of power.

In every subsequent federal election until 1913, furthermore, Labor increased its numbers in the House of Representatives. For a time Federal Labor was content to keep the Protectionists in office as the less conservative of the older parties, on the basis of support in return for concessions. When those concessions were insufficient, as proved the case with the government's industrial arbitration bill in 1904, then they crossed the floor. Deakin's resignation was designed to teach Labor a lesson. By making these neophytes assume the responsibilities of government, he would show them that it was they who were dependent on him. 'To say we were astonished at finding ourselves in office', Billy Hughes confessed, 'describes our feeling very mildly'. But Deakin's subsequent and precipitate removal of Hughes and his colleagues from office increased their determination to supplant him. Under Watson Labor did revert to support in return for concessions from Deakin's Liberal Protectionists, but in 1907 he gave way to Fisher and Labor won a majority in its own right by 1910.

National Politics Realigned

By this time Labor's success had forced a realignment of national politics. The Australian Labor Party, with its tight organisational form of conference, caucus and pledge, achieved a disciplined coherence the older political parties were unable to match. It was a federal party, composed of state branches that for some time would remain the locus of decision-making. As yet there was no Federal Executive but there was a Federal Conference and an effective mechanism for determining the Federal platform of the Party.

Through its affiliated unions and local branches the Labor Party was an effective campaigning organisation. The older Protectionists and Freetraders came together nationally in 1909 as a single non-Labor parliamentary party to resist their powerful rival, but outside the Commonwealth parliament they remained far less coherent.

Encouraged by its early success, Labor hoped for some time that it could rework the form of the Commonwealth along the lines it had proposed during the 1890s. Some of its goals were accomplished. The Franchise Act of 1902 did give all white men and women over the age of 21 the right to vote. The Immigration Restriction Act secured the White Australia policy. Other concerns turned out to be groundless. The plank in the 1900 Platform calling for citizen-initiated referenda had been premised on the groundless expectation that Labor would have little influence in the federal parliament, and was soon dropped. So too was the demand for a unicameral parliament since it became apparent that the Senate operated on party lines and strengthened the Labor Caucus - though motions for abolition of the Senate were brought to Federal Conferences and that of 1915 revived the object of removing state upper houses. Republicanism was soon a dead letter. That left the persistent and unanticipated desire to expand the powers of the Commonwealth, especially over industrial relations, prices, wages and monopolies, in which repeated referenda failed. There was a gradual accretion of power to the Commonwealth but centralism remained a chimera that was finally discarded after a final Whitlamite flourish.

Federation's Consequences

Federation had far-reaching consequences for the Australian working class. By creating a national market, it bound the wage-earners into a common labour market. Through Deakin's New Protection, a federal mechanism was established for maintaining national living standards by tariff protection, industrial arbitration and the judicial determination of a fair and reasonable wage. Industrial militants contested this regimen, socialists such as Brian Fitzpatrick lamented its debilitating effects, but the Labor Party and the most powerful unions embraced the national sentiment.

The labour movement had contested federation not out of a lack of national ardour but because its nationalism was radical and democratic. Once the Commonwealth was established, that nationalism flourished. Among the objects the Australian Labor Party achieved was the formation of a citizen army. Leading federal politicians were vociferous in support of compulsory military training; a Labor prime minister welcomed the delivery from Britain of the flagship of the Royal Australian Navy. Such fervent patriotism led in 1914 to Andrew Fisher's promise of the last man and the last shilling, to Gallipoli, the Western Front, rampant militarism, the conscription crisis and a Split that kept Labor out of office for fifteen years. It was indeed the curtain's fall on wide-eyed expectation.

Professor Stuart Macintyre, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne. This is an edited extract from Professor Macintyre's contribution to a new collection of essays, Working Life and Federation, 1890-1914, edited by Mark Hearn and Greg Patmore and published by Pluto Press in May 2001. The full article with footnotes can be found in the book.

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»	HIH Workers Win Severance Guarantee
»	Abbott Runs From OEA Failure
»	Angry Musos Aim Riffs at Della
»	Second Prize In The Arnott�s Sell-Out
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»	Political Economy Courses at Sydney University
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