A Democratic Nation by David Kemp

Author:David Kemp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

8

Liberalism frustrated

JOSEPH COOK WAS in a unique position to challenge Labour’s claim to represent working-class interests. From a working-class mining background and inspired by the politics and successes of George Reid, especially in New South Wales, he believed passionately that Liberalism offered the best way forward to the working man. For Cook the term ‘labour’ was a positive one. The Labour Party’s appropriation of the label and its claim to represent the interests of the working man was, for him, the gravest deception.

We have not the name of Labour to conjure with; that word Labour has given the other side many thousands of votes. They have no right to it; for there is nothing that connotes labour in the right sense of the word as Liberalism does. Liberalism is labour, and concerns itself with labour and with the interests of the working man. The traditions of Liberalism are traditions of a constant, continuous struggle for the betterment of the working man, and the pity is that we have allowed this idea to become obscured and blurred, and have allowed the other side, under the false glamour of the term Labour, to win people away from the right principles …1

Unlike Watson and Fisher, however, Cook was not prepared to appeal to prejudice to win the support of voters. ‘White’ Australia did not attract his enthusiasm as a goal. It was a term that left him uncomfortable. If he could have done so, he would have redefined it away from its racial connotations, as he tried to do. He sought to appeal to reason and principle, and these were not necessarily the most persuasive appeals in the heated environment of electoral politics.

His opponent, Fisher, was not a dominant figure but was widely respected. Fisher’s lifestyle was a middle-class one, confirmed by his purchase in February 1912 of a grand but run-down mansion in the inner Melbourne suburb of St Kilda, Oakleigh Hall, where he brought up his large family. His careful management of his own finances gave him property and security. His lifestyle raised eyebrows among his militant colleagues, among whom the aspiration to a comfortable middle-class lifestyle was not an approved goal in life.

The Labour leader’s greatest difficulty was that his party was increasingly being shaped by the consequences of politicised unionism, often propelled by a militant utopianism, which consumed it in factional wars and machine politics, and was a standing threat to its parliamentarians. He was not helped by young radicals with little understanding of the fundamentals of the liberal economy nor of concepts such as productivity and their contribution to workers’ standard of living—men such as John Curtin, who told a crowd at the Gaiety Theatre on 18 August 1912 that ‘loafing’ was a good thing, ‘because every man who makes a job last longer helps to reduce the time between that job and the next’.2

Uneasily, Fisher felt compelled to compromise on matters that, left to his own devices, he might have handled differently. On the 1911 referendum to centralise power, Hughes had prevailed.

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