In OTL, the 1961 federal election was very close: the Liberal Party won against Labor with 62 seats to 60, scraping victories in a few seats due to DLP preference deals.
The POD: the election goes slightly differently in a couple of seats, and Labor ends up in government with 62 seats to 60 instead. Robert Menzies is voted out after 12 consecutive years as Prime Minister and Arthur Calwell becomes PM. How goes the country from there?
This is a great WI, but one that I'm afraid doesn't end well for old Arthur (in that volume of Oz AH published recently there's an essay on this that apparently reads as ALP wank, not that I've read it).
Federal Labor in 1961 still has a number of ex-ministers from Chifley's time on the frontbench. There's Calwell, Reg Pollard, Nick McKenna, Eddie Ward (whose usefulness is debateble--plus he's dead in two years), Pat Kennelly (a former state minister); these men are all in the caucus executive (shadow cabinet), which means they're all going to get ministries. Off the bat Calwell's ATL '61 Cabinet has more experience upon taking office than Whitlam's OTL government.
This, plus Calwell's natural conservatism, is going to make for a very cautious government. In OTL Labor campaigned on a policy of reflating the economy through mild stimulation and loosening monetary policy. In fact Calwell would later say Menzies had stolen his policies and implemented them after the election!
There'll be no rocking of boats by a Labor goverement with a slim majority.
The economy had come to a dreadful halt under the credit squeeze of the previous 12 months. There won't be much fear of inflation--at least not for about half-a-year, when Arthur and his treasurer (Frank Crean?) are putting together their first budget to be delivered in August, nineteen sixty two. That's when they quietly start to put a halt to any union pay claims that look like getting out of control.
The concept of a National Health Service might be revived, but in a watered-down form that can be sold at a premiers conference, not as something that would be struck down by the High Court (before the election Calwell had promised he wouldn't introduce anything 'socialist', which rules out seizing control of any of the States' powers).
You'd think everything would look peachy, as this is a very restrained government, taking office just before the economy is about to recover, lead by a man who's not into 'crash or crash through' politics like Whitlam will be. After all, there was no heavy policy manifesto written by the Opposition ALP until the Great Man's leadership in the late sixties. Come to think of it, young Deputy PM Gough will have to be careful not to get marked down as too radical by the old bulls (he's probably chosen External Affairs as his portfolio, as is his right as deputy).
But Labor has a terribly shaken movement at it's back, a movement that has just been through six years of vicious civil war. The federal extra-parliamentary party body is dominated by angry Leftwingers. There's an equally angry breakaway party called the DLP which enjoys considerable influence in the Rightwing trade unions. Calwell has to tread carefully, otherwise the Left will think he's selling out to these Rightwingers.
There are a couple of events from OTL's '62/'63 that are going to present the governent with real headaches if they still take place. The first is national security, and the US request for Australia to allow the USN to build an electronic surveilance base at Northwest Cape in Western Australia. This caused trouble for Calwell as Opposition leader when he and Whitlam were photographed outside a federal conference meeting in Canberra in 1963 while the policy was being debated inside by delegates*--that the two leaders of the federal Caucas weren't members of the ALP's leading policy body was an embarrassing holdover from the Edwardian era. In this TL PM Calwell wil have to find a way to handle this unwieldy party machine, as well as stop any backlash from anti-American Leftwingers both in and outside of parliament who realise they actually have the power to stop the project from going ahead.
The worst threat to Calwell's government will come from the Goulburn Catholic school strike that occurs less than a year after he takes office. By early 1963 NSW's Heffron Labor governmemt will begin planning to subsidise Independent schools because of the RC militancy at Goulburn. Calwell will have to stop this if he doesn't want the Left to destroy the leaderships of either himself or the NSW premier--neither event would particularly help his chances for re-election in 1964.**
However, both national security and state aid are issues on which the Calwell government can't afford to appear to have been 'captured' by the Left on, as this just helps the DLP survive, thrive even.
The DLP won almost 10% of the national vote in '58, 8% in nineteen sixty-one, and more than 7% in nineteen sixty-three. If Labor is in power with a slim majority, and there's a continuing strong DLP presence in Australian elections, with these voters directing ninety percent of their preferences to the Coalition, then winning in 1964 against a resurgent Liberal leader might just be impossible for Arthur, regardless of how competent a PM he is.
(BTW, I just took a look at Adam Carr's
Psephos webpage on the '61 election and I find that the very close seats are all outside of NSW and Victoria--in those states the DLP's preferences saved a whole raft of Liberals whose primary votes had collapsed since '58.
Now, in Queensland, the preferences of Vince Gair's QLP candidates tended not to be overwhelmingly pro-Coalition, which tells us Labor would have picked up several of the perilously cose seats like Moreton if they'd run a few more hardworking candidates, determined to win 2nd preferences from people who'd mostly been stauch ALP voters as recently as the '56 state election!
This wouldn't involve preference deals--the QLP, like the DLP it shortly merged with, never preferenced official Labor candidates--just more good local candidates for Calwell's team.
It needn't have meant Labor winning any more primary votes off of Menzies' and McEwen's parties.)
*The 36 Faceless Men! was the tabloid headline when the photos appeared.
**Basically Calwell has to resume the taditional Labor policy of telling the Catholic Bishops that those hateful Liberal Orangemen will tear the country apart if one penny goes from the treasury to educate Catholic schoolchildren. A cynical tactic, but one which worked--until that Empire Loyalist Menzies decided that state aid was a decent tory policy.
This WI was inspired by my musings that Kevin Rudd seems to me to be basically a modern-day Calwell to Howard's Menzies... except that Rudd won
I fear that Rudd's character is more like Fisher or Scullin than any other ALP prime minister. Knock on wood.