The Dominion TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 1921. AUSTRALIAN LABOUR POLITICS

Dominion, Volume 15, Issue 26, 25 October 1921, Page 4

The Dominion TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 1921. AUSTRALIAN LABOUR POLITICS

The Labour Premier of New South Wales (Me. J. Dooley) declared recently that his party had much less to fear from its overt opponents than from men within its own ranks who had their own interests and their own selfish ambitions and desires, and who would attempt destruction because they were not in places that o.thers filled and in which they thought they should be. Mr. Dooley spoke as a State politician, but his observations may be applied without reservation to the total Labour movement of the Commonwealth. The accuracy of his diagnosis in this wider sense could not bo attested better than in the outcome of the Inter-State Conference of the Australian Labour Party, held lately at Brisbane. At an immediate view the result of the conference was to demonstrate that the machinery of Labour political and industrial organisation in the Commonwealth is controlled for the moment by exponents of Bolshevik doctrine—that is to say by men whose avowed aim is to wreck the existing constitution of society, allegedly in order that they may build something better on the ruins thus created. By 22 votes to 10 the conference endorsed the following recommendation made by the AllfeAustralian Trades Union Congress held in Melbourne in June last: — That socialisation of industry, production, distribution, and exchange be the objective of the Labour Party.

In order to grasp the significance of this endorsement it is necessary to note the lines on which this proposal was elaborated by the Melbourne congress. ‘ That body declared, amongst other things, that there is a class struggle in society, and that "Capitalism can only, be abolished by the workers uniting in one class-conscious economic organisation, to take and hold the means of production by revolutionary, industrial, and political action/' Again: “We hold that as the working class creates and operates the socially operated machinery of production, it should direct production and determine the working conditions.” In declaring for ‘•socialisation,” the Inter-State Conference at Brisbane, in fact, declared for nothing else than the establishment of the Soviet system in Australia. This was recognised and emphatically stated at the conference by Me. Theodore, the Premier of Queensland. He said the trouble was that some of the delegates were basing resolutions, etc., upon a study of proletarian revolution in Russia and I.W.W. in America. They were proposing to replace constitutional representation by an "industrial Parliament,” and he could see “that the tendency of some of the resolutions meant the political destruction of the [Labour] movement in Australia.” This, no doubt, is an accurate reading of the situation. If 'the Inter-State Conference at Brisbane h’acl been a really representative body, its action in casting the die for Bolshevism would have amounted to a catastrophe for Australia. In fact, however, this action entails a much less serious threat. to the welfare of the Australian people than to the solidarity of the Australian Labour Party. While the Labour executive, against the protests of a minority, has gone Bolshevik, the two Labour Governments still in office in Australia, in Queensland and New South Wales, are in an exceedingly precarious position, and to all appearance are steadily losing support. Labour political stock is already at a discount in the Commonwealth, because in recent experience Labour Governments have shown l themselves uniformly incompetent and extravagant. Appealing for a renewal of popular support on the basis of the doctrines propounded at Brisbane, the Labour Party would simply sign its own deathwarrant. This is well understood by Labour politicians, and as an early sequel to the enunciation of these doctrines, the Labour Party throughout the Commonwealth will no doubt split asunder, the moderates forming their own camp apart from the extremists. Tn essentials these events are a normal continuation of the' past history of Labour political and industrial organisation in Australia, and to some extent- in other countries. It is true that in comparison with what has gone before, the declaration of the Brisbane conference in favour of pure Bolshevism is an extreme and exaggerated development, but the. underlying elements in the situation a?o unchanged. Over and over again men of ability have won a place of leadership in Australian Labour politics only to find themselves undermined by those to whom they mfght have looked for aid and support. Extreme doctrines arc enunciated by eager place-hunters loss from conviction than as a means of going one better tliail the men whose shoes they are eager to fill. Tn Federal politics alone, Mr. J. C. Watson, Mr. Andrew Fisher, and Mr. W. M. Hughes have been successively repudiated by their erstwhile supporters in the Labour camp, and Mr. Hughes was only saved from political extinction by the qualities of versatility which enabled him to develop new political associations. The Brisbane conference conspicuously illustrates the fact that as a political force in tile Commonwealth Labour is weighed down by an incubus of which it must rid itself if it is ever to attain unimpeded growth and development. The incubus

consists of a small army of officials and agitators who live on the Labour movement and concern themselves little about the interests or welfare of its rank and file. So long as reckless extremists and selfseeking agitators are allowed to dominate the industrial side of the Labour movement-—largely as a result of the indifferent neglect of union affairs by a majority of wage-earners —its political leadership, in the Commonwealth and elsewhere, will be a byword for instability, and it will inevitably tend as a whole to mere futility. It ought to contribute in some degree to a needed awakening that men of this type, sitting in conference at Brisbane, have dared to suggest that the people of Australia should be deprived of their democratic liberties and subjected to a system under which control of industrial and national affairs would pass nominally to the workers, but actually, as experience in Russia has shown, to a gang of selfappointed autocrats.' Atlhough there is no danger of such ideas being developed in Australia beyond the point of mischief-making agitation, the Brisbane conference Evidently has a very significant bearing on Labour political prospects in the Common-wealth.