RIGHT-WING LABOUR
By CLIVE TURNBULL Melbourne.
WITH the Federal General Election over and the return of the Chifley Government with a large but reduced majority— the expected result—Australians have time to speculate on the prob- able results of another three years of Right Wing Labour rule. Normally one of the chief issues for consideration should have been the virtual one-man creation of an Australian foreign policy by the extremely energetic Minister for External Affairs, Dr. Evatt. But, difficult as it might have been normally to overcome the Australian public indifference to foreign policy, it is at present impossible, for an industrial ferment which began to rise immediately after the elec- tion occupies the attention of citizens to the almost total exclusion of other issues (except, of course, racing and the Test Matches). It is not surprising that the average citizen's attention is so occupied. He may have found himself without transport to his work because of strikes of railway and tramway workers ; without gas because of the refusal of dockers to unload coal, if unloading coal means travel- ling to the docks in special vehicles ; and he may have looked with some apprehension on suggestions to block the delivery of petrol and to do other things which will radically affect his daily life. Likewise he may find his means of earning a living affected by a dispute in the metal trades which threatens to have repercussions throughout industry.
These strikes are not unexpected. They stem, in part, from the war when transport workers and others worked exceedingly long hours in difficult conditions. The war is over, but the difficulties continue. They will continue, the transport unions urge, until con- ditions in these public utilities are made sufficiently attractive to bring in enough new workers to make excessive overtime (among other things) unnecessary. Beyond these immediate causes is a more general and fundamental dissatisfaction with the basic wage, which many people of differing shades of opinion feel to be inadequate, and a widespread union demand for a 40-hour working week. The slow progress of official investigations into these questions is not acceptable to the militant unions who are demanding legislative action now. In their view the time has come for the big post-war showdown-.-a campaign seen, at any rate by some of those active in it, as not only a drive for the redress of old grievances, but as an opportunity for consolidating some wartime gains and for securing some bargaining-points against another international economic depression. By a resort to direct action the unions seek to force the hand of the Government which they have just elected and to 'gain, by Parliamentary or executive act, advantages that they have not yet been able to gain otherwise. The pegging of wages is a constant grievance. The Federal Government points with pride to its achievement in the limitation of inflation by price and wage controls ; it is reluctant to take any steps which will create an upward spiral of costs. Nevertheless certain inescapable facts have to be faced—among them the drift from basic trades, such as trans- port and foundry work, in which the rewards are regarded as in- adequate compared with those of other, often easier, occupations.
In the minds of many unionists the memories of the depression of the early 'thirties are strong. Some of those who tramped the streets to earn pennies for their children's bread and saw their furniture tossed into the streets in the evictions ot the time are now union leaders and bitter men. This aspect of Australia • should be remembered by people who see films such as "The Overlanders," which represent only a romantic fraction of Australian life—a life as strange to the great industrial cities of Australia as it no doubt is to Manchester oc Cardiff. The fundamental dichotomy of the• Australian Labour movement becomes clear at such times as this. The Government rests with the Right Wing—the Australian Labour Party, the political organisation which is supported at election times by the Right Wing unions, now, with perhaps only one exception, small craft unions, and, faute de mieux, by the Left Wing unions which are large, powerful and highly organised, often with Com- munist leadership.
Mr. Chifley, Prime Minister of the Commonwealth, and Mr. Cain, Premier of Victoria, scene of the transport strikes, are typical Right Wing representatives of the political machine and would pass in many countries as Liberals. They are orthodox Parliamentarians, believers in constitutional processes and, it would appear, sometimes in the virtues of delay. Mr. Chifley's pipe-smoking non-communi- cativeness in periods of what some people might consider national crisis recalls a similar celebrated reticence in the career of Lord Baldwin. But if Mr. Chifley and the Right Wing are patient and cautious, the Left Wing is neither. Although the membership of the Australian Communist Party is small—it has been put at 20,000— its influence, exercised through Communist union secretaries and otherwise, is much greater. A large number of unionists who support Labour at the polls are nevertheless impatient with Labour's policy. A former non-Labour Government lost a famous Federal election because of its proposal to abolish the Arbitration Court ; now the Left Wing itself would wish the Court abolished, relying for the improvement of conditions on direct action—on such trials of strength between the unions and the employers (in some cases the State) as are now occurring in Victoria. For Parliamentary action the Left Wing would substitute the pitched industrial battles of the Marxist class war.
The Australian political situation has changed profoundly since the Labour splits of a generation ago. At that time no widely- accepted political philosophy of the "working class" existed in Australia. The political division was broadly between wage-earners and some salary-earners (Labour) and employers and higher salary- earners (non- or anti-Labour). Ideologically inarticulate, the Labour Party included a few Socialists, but, for the most part, was mdde up at people who looked hopefully, if vaguely, to a gradual reform. With the 'thirties—the depression and post-depression years—the Marxist philosophy began to gain ground. It was propagated by the ardent minority of the Communist Party, and its influence is marked throughout the militant unions—as a temper of mind, perhaps, rather than as a deliberate and knowledgeable acceptance of Marxian Com- munism. Against this, the political Right Wing has no positive philosophy of its own to offer ; in such case it tends to become more and more a vehicle of the beliefs of those Roman Catholic anti-Com- munist members who are strong in the political organisation, in the Parliamentary party, and in Labour Ministries ; in the Scullin Ministry nine of the thirteen members were Roman Catholics, although it was rightly pointed out that these gentlemen were elected by a non-Catholic majority "not because they were Catholics but because they were able and worthy of confidence." In Australia, where there are racial memories of sectarian bitterness, it is consi- dered bad taste to refer to these matters. But, although it would be wrong to over-simplify the issue, as some people have done, as -"Moscow versus the Vatican," it would be foolish to deny that the implications have been observed.
It is significant that the most eager praise and the most bitter criticism of the strictures of Australian representatives on the claims and policies of Soviet Russia come from their own nominal sup- porters in the Labour movement. Australia is in the interesting political stage at which the most intensive ideological warfare is being conducted not between the Labour and anti-Labour parties but within the Labour movement itself. Thus the present strikes are "strikes against the Government." One does not wish here to try to make any estimate of the respective strengths of the Right Wing elements on the one hand and of Communists, " fellow-travellers " and militants generally on the other, or to suggest that the situation is ripe for any dramatic change. The majority of strikers will pro- bably be well satisfied—for a time—with a partial satisfaction of their claims, and would repudiate any suggestion of political faith other than orthodox Labour principle, whatever that may be. The point to be remembered is that there is now in existence a body of people —the Communists—who, whatever the acceptability of their pre- misses, have a close-knit political philosophy to oppose to the inchoate aspirations of traditional Labour and a zeal in marked contrast to the lethargy which marks the Labour political machine between elections.
Their success is not to be measured at the polls, where their vote is still negligible, but in the increasing tendency of Left Wing unionism to pursue its own policies without regard to, or even in spite of, the views of its nominal political representatives.
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