The Big Fella, page 24
This treatment of his government’s legislation gave Lang a great opportunity to improve his standing in the Labor Party, and hence helped him to outmanoeuvre his various opponents at vital stages of Party conflict. But the Council’s restrictions did limit whatever ideas of social reform Lang had absorbed, and may have retained, from his early days of penury in the slums of Sydney. On the other hand, he had practically no notion of economic reform—unemployment remained around 9 to 10 per cent throughout his premiership. And his attachment to States’ rights aggravated the problem, although the Federal Bruce–Page government was also bereft of ideas in this vital area of national development.
Lang’s Widows’ Pensions Act was essentially merely an extension of the current relief system administered by the Child Welfare and Education Departments. It provided that widows receiving £78 or more per year and those without children were not eligible. Other widows with children were to get a pension of 1 pound ($2), and 10 shillings ($1) per week for each child under 14. Bavin pointed out that Lang had to limit his election promise to the hard financial facts, and said, ‘I can say confidently on behalf of all members on this side of the House that we fully share the spirit in which the Premier has introduced this bill’.496
Family endowment had a token place in the National Party’s platform. The main issue was the method of financing a suitable scheme.
Holman’s bill in 1919 had proposed restrictions on wages, and failed. Greg McGirr’s flawed 1921 plans envisaged revenue sources, which Lang as treasurer disliked, and came to nothing. Lang has given a brief, confusing and basically deceitful, account of the history and details of his own 1927 Child Endowment Act.497 It is just possible that the question was so complicated politically, financially and industrially in the middle 1920s that he did not fully understand it. But he grasped at least two of its important aspects: the trade unions, while not opposed to the concept by any means, were determined that endowment should not be financed in a way that would reduce wages—hence Lang arranged for Baddeley to introduce the bill on 8 February 1927, a month before he left for overseas: and Lang appreciated the great emotional appeal of the measure, and how he could use it for Party and electoral purposes.
After much haggling with the Legislative Council the bill was enacted in March 1927. But by then it was a weak reed, offering 5 shillings (50 cents) per week for a restricted group of children. By 30 June 1928 only 48 000 claims (out of 712 000 eligible children) had been received, of which only 28 000 had been granted. Fran Jelley, following a perceptive analysis of the subject, is right to conclude:
The passing of the Act was to assist in the process of wage restraint and Lang was to cloud the real issues in later years by writing of it as a great victory for women and children. An examination of the evidence at hand reveals just how empty such claims really were.498
Lang was far from being a significant social reformer, and his deficiencies as a leader and his attachment to orthodox methods of financing prevented him from making the most of a cabinet that contained several men of great talent and zeal for social improvement. Yet there is reason to acknowledge the important pioneering aspect of the fact that he and his cabinet were prepared to legislate for reform, and so open up a fruitful area of parliamentary debate, at a time when Australia was groping for a modern welfare policy. The conservative Parties would not have done that. The New South Wales Acts exerted some influence on the national discussion that was going on, retarded generally by the Federal government but highlighted by the royal commission finally approved by a premiers’ conference in June 1927 into ‘child endowment or family allowances’.499
The Lang government’s industrial legislation was of greater practical importance than its social measures. The 1925 initiatives went to the heart of Labor Party activity, as well as community politics. Even here Lang found his will to reform circumscribed by his personal limitations as well as intractable constitutional and political circumstances. But he skilfully turned all these problems to his own advantage as Party leader. The industrialists demanded a continuation of the early reforms, but he was unable to deliver more. Yet, out of the general political and Party confusion, which to a large extent he either created or worsened, he emerged as the great Labor man who could virtually dictate the form in which the Party prepared to fight the 1927 general election, finally fixed for 8 October.
R. A. King, who was also assistant secretary of the Labor Council and a convinced Langite in 1927, was made returning officer for the ballots for Labor candidates. He was a fair-minded official with many friends among unionists and parliamentarians. He probably contributed to Lang’s decision to ‘pardon’ McKell and hence help him to win preselection for Redfern.500 But Lang had some scores to pay off and he made sure that Mutch, Cann, Evatt and Murphy were not pre-selected. When they then said they would run as Independent Labor candidates they were expelled.501 Heffron, a Langite unionist, was the official candidate in Botany, but Mutch beat him. Evatt also won Balmain. Of other caucus members, Minahan opposed Lang in Auburn and lost; Alldis and William Holdsworth lost pre-selection; O’Halloran and R.J. Greig retired—both returned as Labor MLAs in 1941 The only MLAs, other than ministers, who had opposed Lang and who retained their seat endorsements were Connell, Cahill, C. A. Kelly, K. O. Hoad and J. A. Clark.502
Of Lang’s first cabinet, apart from McKell, Mutch and Cann, McTiernan retired, became MHR for Parkes in 1929, and was appointed (with Evatt) to the High Court in 1930; Baddeley, Dunn, Lazzarini and M. M. Flannery retained their seats; Fitzgerald lost pre-selection, but won Albury in 1930. Loughlin, Goodin and Gillies were defeated by non-Labor candidates.
Lang was confident that he would win the elections. And he campaigned in his usual efficient and strenuous style in both country and city. He gave his policy speech in two parts on 29 August and 7 September, promising amendments to industrial legislation, increased public works, closer settlement, better marketing of primary produce, more widows’ pensions and extensions to family endowment. To improve his chances he had ended Saturday morning work for public servants, giving them a five-day week, and had brought New South Wales back into the Loan Council—thereby facilitating a grant for roads in the State. Unlike 1925, this time he clearly promised to abolish the Legislative Council.503
Bavin also campaigned well, although he was no match for Lang in electioneering. And the National and Country Parties’ organizations had improved considerably now that they had severed their sectarian and temperance ties. Moreover, sensing victory, in late 1926 they had worked out an electoral agreement, which was finalized in May 1927, providing that, wherever possible, they would not compete against each other.504
The remarkable democratic resilience of the Labor Party in New South Wales was shown by the election results. In 1900-16 Holman’s flair and organizing skill had capped the original social, industrial and political significance of the Trades and Labor Council in the city and the notable work of the AWU in the country by consolidating a firm foundation of electoral support. From 1915 the Miners’ Federation, despite some tremors associated with the ‘red’ question, had extended Labor’s voting strength in the regions around Newcastle, Wollongong and Lithgow. Not even the almost continuous political and constitutional convulsions surrounding the Lang government’s term of office could seriously diminish that general popular approval. Of course, Lang’s great campaigning resources, his populist image in the Party, and his ability to make his policies on widows’ pensions and family endowment appear more attractive than they really were, played a part in ensuring that Labor Party members and sympathizers went to the polls—at a time when voting was not compulsory.505
Labor lost the elections, taking forty of the ninety seats with 42.99 per cent; counting independent Labor, the seats held were forty-two, with 45.61 per cent (518 072 votes). Lang won the new seat of Auburn. The National Party won thirty-three seats (thirty-five counting independent Nationalists) and the Country Party won thirteen seats: their total votes were 568 074, with 50.03 per cent. The incidence of proportional voting and multi-member electorates at the 1925 elections make comparison difficult with the 1927 poll. But the swing against Labor was about 3 per cent.
In spite of his defeat, Lang could justifiably claim that, as in the Warringah by-election, he had received sufficient backing from voters to vindicate his peculiar position as Labor leader.506 And he now had a compliant caucus, with eleven new members, all Langites, including an influential Trades Hall supporter, D. Clyne, president of the Storemen and Packers’ Union. Twenty-two of the MLAs had city seats, eighteen (including five from the Newcastle area) held country seats. Only Clyne was a major trade unionist. Six were ex-miners; the teachers had dropped to two, Dunn and Connell. Two barristers had gone, but another, Joseph Lamaro, had been elected. Twenty-seven of the forty caucus members were Catholics.
Lang, unopposed, remained leader at the Party meeting on 18 October. As a reward for his diligent and successful ministerial work, as well as his mining connection, Baddeley won the deputy leadership over James McGirr by twenty-two votes to sixteen.507
Connell’s election as chairman of caucus expressed the complex mixture of critical awareness and solidarity that had always marked the MLAs as a whole, although threatened and dormant at times. It was harder for a leader to dominate caucus consistently than any other part of the Labor structure. Individuality and informed scrutiny of performance were endemic there. Lang had certainly intimidated most of the old parliamentarians; and virtually all of the new members owed their success to him. But he had not completely extinguished the spark of collective independence.
Connell, a Methodist, was one of the Party’s ‘intelligentsia’, scorned by Lang. In turn, Connell, while polite and circumspect, had not hidden his aversion to Lang’s churlishness. Connell had been a radical schoolteacher who, when in Broken Hill in 1909, had offended some powerful mine-owners. He was also a real hero, though he would never admit to it. In World War I he had risen from lieutenant to major, was wounded twice, won the MC and bar and the DSO, and was mentioned twice in dispatches. His war injuries and candour had inhibited his parliamentary career, but he was very popular in Newcastle and much respected within and outside the labour movement.508
Lang wanted Gosling, one of his most faithful acolytes, as chairman. But Connell defeated him by twenty to seventeen (Keegan polled one). In no sense was the result even a minor revolt against Lang, but it indicated that despite ‘the hymn of hate’ chanted against him by the press and his other assorted enemies, Lang was no Mussolini, least of all a Stalin. On 3 December 1927 Lang’s son, John Keith, a bank clerk aged 23, died after an appendicectomy at Parkes, leaving a wife and a one-week-old son.
After some hard bargaining, in which the Country Party demanded five portfolios and settled for four, Bavin formed a coalition ministry on 18 October 1927. Buttenshaw was deputy premier and Bruxner minister for local government. But, apart from Bavin, probably the most capable and, from Lang’s point of view, certainly the most significant member of the cabinet was B. S. B. Stevens, who became assistant treasurer (he took over the full office from Bavin on 16 April 1929). Dr Richard Arthur, a well-known conservative social reformer, was made minister for public health.
The conservatives lost no time in reviewing the most public of the Lang government’s appointments. On 27 October they decided to prepare legislation to get rid of Kay. They also terminated Treble’s promotion, and asked the Public Service Board to review the salary of the position of commissioner of child endowment and advertise it. The government also dismissed seven inspectors appointed under the Early Closing Act.509
On 8 November Governor de Chair accepted his ministers’ advice to appoint five new MLCs, including S. L. Cole of the Employers’ Association and Lt-Colonel T. A. J. Playfair, DSO. These additions made a total of 101 MLCs.
8
Relative Tranquillity
One of the most remarkable aspects of the results of the October 1927 State elections in New South Wales was the fact that the Labor Party was not decimated. Indeed, to have polled 42.99 per cent (not counting the independent Labor candidates), after contesting eighty-three seats out of ninety, was an impressive performance, given the upheavals in the Party which surged to a series of crises as the Lang ministry disintegrated in May 1927. Virtually every move of the government from its formation in 1925 and the activities of the Party’s non-parliamentary section had been subjected to the closest scrutiny of the press throughout the State. Nearly all the newspapers were anti-Labor, some of them almost rabidly so, so that their exposure of the Party was intended to prejudice the public against it, with a main theme being the social and political dangers of its ‘redness’. The constant fire of criticism had had some effect, but not nearly as destructive as at first sight it should have.510
The main reason for the comparative failure of the propaganda was that it was party political, and was perceived as such. Lang’s first cabinet was the fifth the Labor Party had formed since its foundation in 1891. The National Party, even more so the Country Party, did not have such a distinguished or lengthy history. Of course, as the 1920s representatives of conservative interests, they could trace their development back to the 1890s; but theirs was a murky ancestry, highlighted by changes of names and incoherence in policy. Holman was not only the greatest of the Labor premiers, he was also the founder of the National Party. Ley had been at various times a Nationalist and Progressive; likewise Bavin: the emergence of the Country Party from the Progressives had been messy—not all country voters were happy with the links, however tenuous, that remained with city financial groups.
The Labor Party had lost the elections but not its constituency, and this fact obviously had national implications. The number of its voters ebbed and flowed with the democratic tide, but still covered virtually the entire State, even if more clearly located in ‘industrial’ city seats and mining country electorates. But Labor wins included the ‘middle-class’ suburban seats of Canterbury, Hurstville and Oatley as well as the inner-city seats of Glebe, King, Phillip and Redfern; and the ‘ordinary’ country seats of Bathurst, Cootamundra and Goulburn as well as the mining seats. The electoral loss was chiefly the result of Labor’s disunity observed in Lang’s failure to keep his cabinet intact. But the Party was not seen by the community as revolutionary and un-Australian; nor Lang as a subverter of the Constitution and a tool of the ‘reds’, however defined.
Why had a substantial minority of voters retained their confidence in the Party and its leader in view of the skill, persistence, magnitude and malignity of conservative publicity?
To attempt to answer this question provides light not only on the durability of the Labor Party and the success of Lang’s populism, but also on the socially dangerous element of irrationality in the conservatives’ perception of the Party: an element that had a paradoxical affinity with the Communists’ assessment of the ALP. Of course, the conservatives were a very much larger and more dispersed group than the Communists. It was the extreme margin of the former who sought to traduce Labor; whereas the Communists were a small sect, all of whose members held the Labor Party in contempt as a result of their special, not to say mystical, insights. But the conservative fringe was influential, located in powerful recesses of public persuasion. Its fear of Labor’s threat to pockets of privilege stimulated spurious analyses that had effects on currents of thought in Australia which were supplemented by overseas antidemocratic sources basically similar to those supplying inspiration to the local Communists. Lang several times noted the rapport between some types of Nationalist thought and Fascism. The framework of political surveillance erected by the Bruce-Page government had already institutionalized this contagious disposition in a system headed by an eminently respectable man, attorney-general (Sir) John Latham.511
The Australian society could tolerate, and at the same time remain ultimately invulnerable to, extremism from both the left and the right. But the latter’s fringe group had an advantage in its innate ability to merge its authoritarianism with the symbols of national democracy, including elusive respectability and country, and obvious King and flag. Thus the seeds of subversion being sown calculatingly in the 1920s by the right had greater potential danger to political and social stability than those scattered promiscuously by the left. The conservative sowers revelled in attacks on Lang and the Labor Party, but their efforts were rightly and astutely judged by the voters as attempts to further the ends of the Country Party, and especially the National Party. The anti-democratic aspects associated with their campaign were accordingly nullified in 1927. It is possible that some among the conservatives’ sowers of discord, like a few of their Communist counterparts, were merely exhibiting their enthusiasm; and, if so, this applied particularly to the journalists among them. But, in any case, their failure revealed starkly the strength of the national democratic instinct, the democratic base of the Labor Party and the ingrained democratic sensibility of Lang, demagogic and populist warts notwithstanding.
