What would Australia be like without Mr Santamaria's "Movement"

ozidude1968

Banned
What if it was reality in Australia? Would Australia still support the West? Would it just mean that the Australian Labour Party could have beat the Liberals in the late 1950's or 1960's?
 

Cook

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Stronger Communist influence and in some cases control of trade unions in Australia, which is what Bob Santamaria’s ‘Groupers’ were fighting would have just further damaged the Labor Party’s electoral chances, not to mention further damaging Australian industry.

Bob was campaigning for the rights of workers, particularly the rights of Catholic workers to equality and saw the Communists as a threat to worker’s rights.

Doc Evatt’s attack on the ‘Groupers’ and expulsion of them from the Labor Party have more to do with his shortcomings as a leader and his own confrontationist attitude. The Party at the time, as at all times for that matter, needed a deft hand at the helm with the ability to resolve conflicts between the factions, not Doc Evatt and his ‘with us or against us’ attitude.

It wasn’t the first time Evatt’s attitude was damaging to the interests of the nation, during WW2 Curtin in what must have been one of his worst ever decisions had made Evatt his foreign minister. So for the period of Australia’s greatest danger, when we needed the closest co-operation of our allies, we had a man who revelled in causing fights within his own party handling our foreign relations. It was Evatt that sent the notorious ‘Singapore’ telegram to London under Curtin’s name while Curtin was in Perth recovering from a collapse from physical exhaustion.

Labor could have beaten Menzies and the Liberal Party in the 50s and 60s, but only with a different leader than Evatt and probably one that used Bob Santamaria’s supporters more, not less.

It would have been far better for Australia if there had been the regular change over of Federal governments roughly every eight to ten years rather than a Liberal government for 23 years.
 
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ozidude1968

Banned
Furthermore about the subject

There would NOT have been a longer period of conservative rule, the Australian Labour Party would have a found a way out of the problem of lack of support just look at the ALP today it found a solution to lack of support without the help Santamaria's supporters, given the membership then there would have been plenty of enthusiastic people well if there had been a 1950's equivalent of Julia Guillard perhaps, if not: Why not? Well just supposing that Australians had come to accept Evatt's views?
 
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Cook

Banned
I didn’t say Labor’s time in the wilderness would have been longer; the duration of Liberal government was extraordinary as it was and was only ended by Whitlam presenting Labor as a credible alternative government at the 1972 election.

Doc Evatt’s defeat at the ’54 election was due to his own poor qualities but rather than take responsibility for the defeat he blamed Bob Santamaria’s followers and expelled them from the Labor Party, splitting the party for more than ten years.

Ming’s (Bob Menzies) owed his success in the ’49 and '51 elections to the Communist Party’s infiltration of the militant Coal Miner’s Union and the prolonged miner’s strike of 1949, the strike was a show of force by the communists and their attempt to force the Labor government to submit to them on industrial relations. The miners, along with Warf workers were the highest payed and most militant workers in Australia throughout the 1940s, including the war years.

Had Ben Chifley not died in ’51 things may have been different. It would have been interesting for Australia if Ming the Merciless and Chifley had had a few more years as sparring partners. Chifley was a much more skilled tactician than Evatt and learned from his mistakes; with him at the helm Labor would have had a very good chance at regaining power in 1954. He certainly would not have split the party had he lost.
 
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ozidude1968

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In reply to what you said

Then Chifley would have needed to be on a strict diet to not die in 1951. That is just speculation but this thread, this forum is about speculation about history. Right?
 

Cook

Banned
It is but the idea is to make it credible alternative history. Your initial question was what if Bob Santamaria’s ‘Movement’ hadn’t existed, would Labor have beaten Menzies?

The straight up answer is no because Bob’s supporters didn’t cause the loss, Evatt’s leadership did.

Ben Chifley was 65 when he died by the way, which is about what was expected back then. (John Curtin died at 60)

The big problem for the Labor Party of the period was the ongoing militancy of the Unions throughout the 1940s, the Warfies and Coal Miners being the worst. It severely damaged the Labor Government’s credibility.


For a couple of interesting changes to the Australian political scene at that time that are easy to achieve, consider if Frank Forde had won either of his leadership battles, he lost by one vote to John Curtin and was deputy when Curtin died, becoming Australia’s shortest serving Prime Minister (7 days) before Chifley defeated him in the leadership ballot.
 
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ozidude1968

Banned
About your reply

I was simply asking what Australia would be like without Santamaria's "Movement". That's all.
 
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ozidude1968 said:
What would Australia be like without Mr Santamaria's "Movement"

Exactly which 'movement' are you talking about?

Let me address the actual historical details in as few words as possible:

Santamaria was officially only ever leader of the Catholic Rural Movement. Unofficially he was a major figure in the now infamous industrial activist Catholic Social Studies Movement in Victoria, but his influence was much weaker in the CSSMs of the other Australian archdioceses, to the point that he was barely ever welcome in the Sydney archdiocese, both before but most particularly after he became a political celebrity in 1954. However he did, as we would now say, 'network' with anti-communist officials in other states, particularly in the secular Industrial Groups (not to mention the actual ALP structure).

Of course this leads us to the salient but often overlooked fact that the Movement and the Groupers were, while closely intertwined, actually distinct entities.

The Movement and the Groupers began when in the late thirties/early forties Santamaria collaborated with three important figures in Victorian labour politics. They were; deputy leader of the state parliamentary ALP, Bert Cremean; secular union leaders Dinny Lovegrove and Vic Stout. They all wanted Santamaria, who at the time was Archbishop Daniel Mannix' non-clerical administrative assistant, to throw the weight of Catholic Action behind their plans to create anti-communist cells to organise in individual union elections. These cells were to be called Industrial Groups. This he did, using the Catholic-community based Movement to compliment these three leaders' labour-movement based 'Grouper' structure.

By the end of the forties the Industrial Groups had used their growing influence to take control of the state Labor Party organisation, which at the time was elected by a union-dominated conference. So the Groupers became the political Labor establishment, with Lovegrove taking the role of party secretary and Santamaria's Movement colleague Frank McManus taking the role of party president.

Yet the problem with having dedicated anti-communist leaders in charge of the state ALP would soon became evident, even to their wartime allies in the party's moderate wing. The Grouper/Movement majority on the party executive had marginalised the old guard of party professionals, such as state parliamentary leader and sometime premier John Cain, but most particularly former state secretaries Pat Kennelly and Arthur Calwell. These men were not Leftists, and had originally approved of the Groupers fighting Communists in the unions, but they otherwise believed in running the ALP in the style of a pragmatic urban machine, much like Tamanny Hall in the US Democratic Party.

By the beginning of the fifties it was becoming obvious that the wartime surge in Communist activism was dying out, and that there would be neither a Communist takeover of the existing ALP-aligned union movement, nor would there emerge a standalone Marxist union movement as existed in many European democracies. It was at this point that Kennelly fell out with the Groupers/Movement, and decided to move towards creating an anti-anti-communist alliance compromised of other moderates and, most significantly, with those union Leftwingers who had always opposed attacks on CPA influence in their organisations.

By the middle of the decade this push against the Groupers/Movement faction was gaining steam, with Trades Hall president Stout defecting to the broad alliance, leaving behind his onetime crusade against the Reds. Kennelly had earlier lost a bitter state parliamentary preselection battle to a Movement candidate, yet had rebounded to win a spot on the ALP's senate ticket. Now in Canberra he had a perch from which to create a new power base, and with federal party leader H.V. Evatt he had found a willing factional ally to help him defeat his opponents back home in Melbourne...

Now I'll address the popular misconceptions about how significant B.A. Santamaria was in the Australia-wide union movement and Labor Party, in as few words as possible:

In late 1954 Dr Evatt imagined his leadership was under seige from a national Rightwing factional alliance of some sort. He focussed his fear and anger on the Victorian Grouper/Movement establishment. Yet instead of criticising party officials Lovegrove and McManus, he took a more lateral approach--he went after the section of that establishment contained with the ostensibly non-partisan Catholic Action community.

Quite publicly he released a tirade against the non-party member Santamaria's very own publication, 'News Weekly'. This glorified parish newsletter was very much a propaganda organ of the Grouper/Movement elite, yet it was also quite detached from the traditional labour political arena, being essentially an amateur ideological hate tract when it came to denouncing communists, their fellow travellers, and anyone who wasn't quick enough to distance themselves from either tendency. It was easily denounced as a sinister, conspiratorial force. A force that was parasitising 'real Labor values'.

Evatt and his newfound ally Senator Kennelly had found the perfect method of compelling the national party to intervene in the affairs of the Victorian party. Using the polemical skills of respected Canberra press gallery correspondent Alan Reid they successfully created the impression that Santamaria was more influencial within the Victorian party establishment than he actually was, and that moreover this influence was just as baleful as any attempted Communist takeover of the party organisation.

Santamaria was successfully portrayed as the éminence grise of the entire sitting Labor Right establishment in Victoria.

I won't go into detail about the state and federal party conferences of Febuary and March of 1955, but suffice to say that during this period the militant anti-communist establishments in each state branch of the Australian Labor Party began to fall victim to the claim that they themselves were nothing but pawns of the sinister Melbournian Santamaria. It was true that the anti-communist strategies he had helped write were influential, and had been adopted in other states, most particularly in NSW, where the local Rightwing elite had remodelled themselves as Groupers soon after the rise of their allies south of the border. But it was not true that Santamaria was any kind of paramount leader of anti-communism throughout the national party. His realm had always been Victoria, and his travels outside that state had always been at the sufferance of local officials in either Church or labour community. And the level of respect he received always varied from state to state.

Yet... In 1955 the majority of the Victorian Right establishment found themselves outside the party, with their remaining loyal MPs forced to sit as 'rats' after having chosen to be expelled by the newly reformed state and federal party machines.

It was in this environment that B.A. Santamaria actually did start to become the leader of his very own political labour movement, as almost all the new third party MPs lost their seats that year in the Victorian and federal elections, while there were few unions willing to affiliate with the new party, therefore depriving it of any skilled working class secretariat to draw talent from.

Over the next few years militant anti-communists in almost every state would be expelled from the ALP, or would leave voluntarily. Many of them would gravitate towards what was quickly becoming Santamaria's party. Some ex-ALP professionals who'd found themselves driven from the old party for their supposed inflexible Rightism would at first refuse to join what was now called the Democratic Labor Party, as they considered their first loyalty was to their state's working class politics; this was the case with some Rightwing unionists in NSW, and even moreso with anti-communist ex-MPs in Queensland. However, the Victorian was quickly becoming the only figure with a political base capable of running serious political campaigns in both union- and general-elections, thanks to his continued employment as senior lay figure in his Catholic archdiocese, and because of his superior media management skills. The fact that the new Victorian ALP establishment had moved to style itself as hard Left was of great benefit to Santamaria and his old allies/new followers, as it allowed them to portray themselves as both political martyrs as well as the only anti-communist section of the Victorian working class.

The only alternate base to the new Melbourne-centric DLP was amoung the ranks of the Groupers expelled from the Sydney machine, yet they faced the active hostility of their local archdiocese, not to mention a party which hadn't actually moved very much Leftwards in their absence, and in fact was still lead by a rump Rightwing establishment.

In summation: Was Santamaria the creator of the anti-communist push within Australian labour during the nineteen forties and fifties? Well, he could claim to have been one of the architects of this anti-communism, most certainly in Victoria. His influence elsewhere is at best uncertain, at worst negligible--at least before he became a celebrity in the latter Evatt years. At that point he did become a national anti-communist leader. Of sorts.

Did the original pre-1955 anti-communist push defeat the communists' attempt to take over the Australian union movement, and therefore preserve the ALP's base for democracry? This is very complicated. Robert Murray in his seminal work on the subject, The Split: Australian Labor in The Fifties, gives us a good summary of the unions that were wrestled from the control of communist office holders. Yet he doesn't go into much detail about the actual longterm health of the CPA in Australian unions, about how that particular movement was at a great disadvantage in the post-Depression and post-War eras. IMO the communists were beginning to weaken with each day that the country was no longer at war or in economic decline, aka the rest of their working lives for every man and women alive on Victory in the Pacific Day. This organisational decline would soon become a death spiral when Khrushchev gave his secret speech and the people's revolutions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia were crushed (oh, the irony of there being any 'communist question' whatsoever in Australian politics a mere eighteen months before Hungary.) Further irony is to be had by the fact the quite uniform CPA of the fifties would become the split-riven microparty Left of the sixties and seventies, before finally dying in the end years of the Cold War

What about the DLP's claim that the post-split ALP was unduly influenced by Communists? Certainly there was a broad Left alliance that included Communists in its ranks, and this alliance was the dominant force in the party between 1955 and the beginning of Whitlam's supremacy over the party. But the majority ideology of this alliance was fairly isolationist in the greater scheme of things, not internationalist, so therefore not really under any sort of capital 'C' Communist control. And within half a dozen years this political establishment had moved to replace anti-anti-communism with culture war issues as their guiding belief. Of course the culture war in question was distinctly anti-Catholic, so there was little reason for the Santamaria-ites to forego their ongoing massive retaliation against the traitorous pro-Moscow/pro-Peking dupes [sic] of the ALP...


ENDS BRIEF DISSERTATION.
 
Ming’s (Bob Menzies) owed his success in the ’49 and '51 elections to the Communist Party’s infiltration of the militant Coal Miner’s Union and the prolonged miner’s strike of 1949, the strike was a show of force by the communists and their attempt to force the Labor government to submit to them on industrial relations.

You accept the idea that the NSW miners' strike had nationwide implications? I thought that was a Leftwing phenomenon. Labor in NSW that year lost the two-party vote but still held 23 seats to the Coalition's 24.

The miners, along with Warf workers were the highest payed and most militant workers in Australia throughout the 1940s, including the war years.

The miners were pretty militant (too militant IMO), but I doubt they were among the highest paid workers in this country at that time. We're not talking about the fly-in, fly-out workers at today's multinational mines. 1949 pit coalmining is black lung territory. They weren't cashed up bogans.
 
What if it was reality in Australia? Would Australia still support the West? Would it just mean that the Australian Labour Party could have beat the Liberals in the late 1950's or 1960's?

Without Bob Santamaria's "Movement", the ALP would more than likely been elected in the 1960s. Without the expulsion of the Groupers and the loss of the Catholic rump, the ALP would not have faced the internal factional wrangling and internecine infighting that it did. Further, it would not have faced the DLP - the party who's entire raison de entre' was to keep the ALP out of government. The Coalition government was decidely on the nose during the early 1960s with most voters because of the Credit Squeeze of 1960.

Expulsion of the Groupers also allowed the Coalition to continually "kick the Communist can" throughout the 1950s and 1960s (and up until 1983 when it was finally laid to rest by Bob Hawke). By promoting fear, uncertainity and doubt about the possibility of Communist control of the ALP, the Coalition was able to scare voters away from considering them a viable alternative government. Santamaria of course helped that.

The "Doc" wasn't without his problems and largely they stemmed from his deteriorating mental faculties. If they had been identified earlier and treated, his performance might have been better. As it was, his "crash or crash through" mentality did not help to smooth over the increasing fissures in the ALP.

I've often wondered why people consider the Coal Strikes to be have been seminal in defeating the Chifley Government in 1949. They were in NSW, which despite what most Sydneysiders believe, is not the whole country. I'd suggest that it was economic, rather than political matters which caused Chifley's defeat. The proposed nationalisation of the banks and the continued rationing of many things, most particularly petrol caused more angst to more Australians than the coal strikes IMHO.
 

Cook

Banned
The miners were pretty militant (too militant IMO), but I doubt they were among the highest paid workers in this country at that time. We're not talking about the fly-in, fly-out workers at today's multinational mines. 1949 pit coalmining is black lung territory. They weren't cashed up bogans.



In 1942 Coal Miners were earning more than 10 Pounds per week, which was considered phenomenal. For a comparison, my parents rented their first home twenty years later for 1 Pound a week.
 
In 1942 Coal Miners were earning more than 10 Pounds per week, which was considered phenomenal.

Cite?

I was thinking a little about this before, and it strikes me that the most highly paid Australian bluecollar workers in 1949 would almost certainly have been involved in some combination of either manufacturing, high technology or heavy engineering. And preferably something of great strategic impotance.

So I'd go with select craft union workers at AWA, Holden, CAC, the Snowy Mountains scheme or the Woomera Rocket Range. Each of those enterprises is more important in the early years of the Cold War than even the coalmines that powered the NSW electricity grid.

As for industry wide award wages I can believe the WWF/Painters and Dockers of the postwar years were doing well, as they had a stranglehold over commerce, and were kind of like brute capitalists themselves <cough>Australia's version of a mobbed-up union<cough>. I once heard an interview with notorious ex-painter and docker Billy 'The Texan' Longley, and the way he told it that union ran it's legal affairs like a business. God only knows what the under the counter stuff was like.

But I find it hard to believe the coalminers of the Hunter Valley were the kings of the workforce when it came to take home pay.
 
I'd suggest that both of you were incorrect. If we consult the ABS, you'll find that the average wage in 1945 was above 10 pounds a week. This is taken from a statistical comparison for the state of Queensland, available here but it includes totals for all states and the nation as a whole.

australianaverageweekly.jpg

qld-past-present-1896-1996-ch05-sec-03.pdf
 
I'd suggest that both of you were incorrect. If we consult the ABS, you'll find that the average wage in 1945 was above 10 pounds a week. This is taken from a statistical comparison for the state of Queensland, available here but it includes totals for all states and the nation as a whole.

Hah, thanks Rickshaw. Despite the fact I was happy to write a great big historical synopsis about the politics of the era I dreaded having to go look for hard economic data. (Though I stand be my theory about other workers in other industries being much better paid than coalminers, even if I have no idea what the actual figures were. Otherwise are you sure I was much wrong?)

What I do know about the Hunter coalminers is that they did originally have a fairly legitimate grievance thanks to the state government coalboard having taken a long time to adjust their pay.

Overall their wasn't a problem in most industries of the late forties, as there was a lot of restraint in union wage claims through the regular arbitration system. So no 'wages breakout'. Inflation was considered to be under control before the Korean War boom.
 
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