AUSTRALIA'S GOVERNMENT
By CLIVE TURNBULL
MR. JOSEPH BENEDICT CHIFLEY, Prime Minister of Australia, left the country to attend the Prime Ministers' Conference in London confident that, on his homecoming, he would find an electorate still willing to return his Government to office at the general election to be held in the latter half of this year. A recent by-election in the Henty Division of Victoria gave him no reason to abandon this belief. A considerable latitude was possible in the interpretation of the vote ; it would not appear, however, that it showed the increased dissatisfaction with the Labour adminis- tration for which the Opposition had hoped. If Henty be a guide, the Government will be returned, although possibly with some reduction of its huge majority. (It has 49 of the 74 seats which carry a vote in the House of Representatives.)
The Prime Ministry of Mr. Chifley, so far as it has gone, will occupy no especially shining page in Australian history. Mr. Chifley has carried on ably the work of his predecessor, Mr. John Curtin, as leader of the Labour Party. That work has consisted largely of the policing, with very considerable success in most direc- tions, of the wartime controls which all sections of the community agreed to be necessary in principle, if they sometimes disputed about their form and operation. Some of these controls are now being relaxed ; others, it is also generally agreed, will have to be retained for a considerable time, among them food ration- ing, the measures taken to prevent inflation and the system of priorities in building. Although there has been some black market- ing, it can probably be claimed that the Australian controls have worked as well as those of most countries. The difficult business of demobilisation, which Mr. Chifley has also inherited, likewise appears to be proceeding with no more inconsistencies and re- criminations than in other belligerent. countries. In Imperial and foreign relations Mr. Chifley has also continued upon lines already laid down. Australia's food-rationing goes on, for instance, although the war is over, not because it is necessary to ensure an equitable distribution of food to Australians, but because it is desired to pro- vide a worthwhile export surplus for Britain.
The Chifley Government has not stopped doing anything which appeared to be good. When one looks for constructive policies, however, it is another matter. Put the question: "Given another three years, or six years, of Labour administration, what will the picture of Australia be?" and you will find no answer, however long you search the records of official speeches. For the Labour movement as a whole is divided. On the Left are the more militant of the trade unions on the Right the Australian Labour Party, the political wing of the organism. But the party itself has its sub- divisions—Fabian Socialists, of the old school ; the Irish and Roman Catholic elements, which have provided so many Australian Labour leaders and which, as a rule, are implacably opposed to Communist influences ; and a few politicians, usually at the tail-end of the Cabinet, more extreme than their cautious fellow-members but still within the party fold. The inevitable result is compromise- s compromise which makes the Australian Labour Party, although nominally pledged to Socialism, in effect, a Liberal party, just as the Australian Liberal Party, which constitutes the Opposition, is, in effect, a Conservative party. It is not unreasonable to say that the Australian Labour Party has attained and kept office in Aus- tralia because it has never attempted, or given any indication of its desire, to introduce Socialism. The only candidates seeking that end, the Communists, have been consistently rejected at the Federal elections.
Australian Labour invariably chooses a Parliamentary leader who can keep the balance between the warring elements of the party. The leader, in contrast to the sometimes wild utterances of his more irresponsible colleagues, presents a calm and ordered view. In course of time he comes to be known as "Honest Tom (or Jack, or
Bill) So-and-so" or "Good old So-and-so." If he survives he becomes an elder statesman, a little too conservative for those who
follow him. Mr. Chifley is almost perfectly fitted for the role.
He is in later middle-age, an experienced politician, an Australian of Irish descent. He is slow-spoken, genuinely modest and kindly.
He has an alert mind and a wide knowledge of the academic side of finance. His defect is a poor platform and radio voice. He has been a skilled manual worker—an engine-driver—and this is an asset in a party which will not tolerate "intellectuals" unless they be lawyers.
If you were to ask Mr. Chifley about Lis ideas for the future of Australia he would probably tell you that they depended upon the willingness of the people of Australia to give Australia's Central Government adequate powers to govern. That Govern- ment has already sought additional powers, now denied it under the constitution, to carry out post-war policies, and it has been rebuffed. At the forthcoming election it will again ask the people, by referendum, for an extension of powers. It wants certain powers in connection with social services. It also wants power for the organised marketing of primary products and over the terms and conditions of employment in industry, and both these matters are controversial. Hitherto the Australian people have rejected almost all proposals put to them by referendum, even those on which opposing party leaders were in agreement. An innate distrust of all politicians is manifeit in a refusal to permit them an extension of power, although that extension may be demonstrably in the public interest. The combination of this feeling and the highly vocal protests of "State-righters," who object to apy enlargement of Federal at the expense of State power, and of hostile interests has resulted in a determination to stick to the form and letter of the constitution which would, no doubt, have astounded its framers.
If there is no indication that Mr. Chifley's Government will not be returned to power, there is, equally, no indication that it will succeed in having its referendum carried. The position will then become what it might be permissible cynically to refer to as normal. The Government will carry on, doing nothing in particular, and suffering a slow and steady attrition of popularity under the burden of what have been until now, at any rate, the highest taxes in the English-speaking world, until it is replaced by the Liberal Opposi- tion. That the election will be vigorously contested by the Liberals (the old United Australia Party) there is no doubt. ‘Efforts are being made to present a strong team with a constructive policy. But an objective observer might consider the attempt too late. The Liberals have suffered so much from party rifts and from a decline in the quality (with a few notable exceptions) of their Parliamentary representation that they have come to stand, in the view of a majority of electors, for a policy of negation. To what degree recent attempts to overcome that feeling have succeeded the election will show.
Meanwhile, Australia, with a Federal Labour Government and Labour Governments in five of six States, appears to be consider- ably to the Right of Britain. Public utilities are only partly nationalised, and if the owners of collieries and breweries are alarmed at occasional threats of nationalisation their concern is not perceptible. Only the building trade, which eagerly advances the claims of private industry, unshackled by Government controls, to make good the huge' lag in Australian housing, appears to be genuinely agitated by fears of socialisation. The average Australian.
who finds that the millennium was not ushered in with VP-Day, has generally resigned himself to a continuance of high taxation and
of some forms of control. For all the rationing of food, shortage of clothing, high prices and the destruction of incentive inevitable under a crippling taxation schedule, he realises that he is well oft in comparison with most of the world. His dissatisfactions are those which he has been taught to bear as the accompaniments of war ; it would be irrational to visit them wholly upon the Govern- ment. The international outlook is confusing to him in the ex- treme; even the future of his own neighbouring regions in the Pacific is not clear. Some of these questions Mr. Chifley and other states- men, Imperial and international, may now be able to resolve for him.
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