It’s 50 years since the ‘Great Labor Schism’. It’s appropriate and it was certainly inevitable that a book should be published to recall the event and its aftermath. This book is it: a collection of contributed essays capably compiled and edited by three academics with a strong background in Labor history.
The ALP has a rich and interesting past. Its True Believers are fascinated by it and spend far more time contemplating the history than considering whether the party has either the organisation, or ideas, to face up to an uncertain future. Labor historians have a captive audience. The party wonders what to do next.
In just over a century of its history the Labor Party has had three splits, all of which have tumbled it out of office. The split of 1955, which had its epicentre in Victoria, helped keep the party out of office federally for 17 years and out of office in Victoria for 27 years. These are the numbers, which made it ‘great’.
That the Great Labor Schism occurred at all was because of the Cold War in which the ideological conflicts taking place in Europe washed over into the Australian political debate. Essentially it was a debate about the influence of Soviet communism, internationally and domestically, and the Australian Communist Party’s involvement in the affairs of trade unions.
Fifty years on there seems, for what it’s worth, to be a tentative consensus among historians that the whole thing was a ghastly mistake. It shouldn’t have happened, and if cooler heads had prevailed, the problems would have been resolved. Victoria was the sticking point, largely because of personalities.
In the other eastern states the fracture lines were relatively insignificant. Certainly they led to the establishment of state-based Democratic Labor Parties, but unlike Victoria these had little influence on electoral outcomes in either the state or federal arena. In New South Wales the Church hierarchy and the Catholic-led state Labor Government showed little enthusiasm for a split. As one cleric of right-wing persuasion is recorded as saying: his bishop (Bishop Carroll) was right—history showed that breakaway parties never lasted. ‘They were not worth two bob.’ So in New South Wales Catholics generally stayed with the ALP, and the DLP vote never exceeded 3.1 per cent, compared with more than 12 per cent in Victoria.
In Queensland the split didn’t occur until nearly two years after Victoria and it was more about a power