Settling the Office: The Australian Prime Ministership From Federation to Reconstruction by Paul Strangio & Paul 't Hart & James Walter

Author:Paul Strangio & Paul 't Hart & James Walter [Strangio, Paul & Hart, Paul 't & Walter, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Leadership, Political Science, World, Political Process, Australian & Oceanian, History, General
ISBN: 9780522868739
Google: zxt-CwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 28658790
Publisher: Miegunyah Press
Published: 2016-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

An Ungovernable Party

Lack of control over his own party remained the biggest threat to Scullin’s leadership during the frenzied years of the early Depression. A number of factors generated extreme unruliness that Scullin seemed mostly helpless to curb. First were the ideological and factional differences within the Caucus: its membership stretched from Sydney’s radical industrial socialists to Tasmania’s moderates.157 Alternative approaches to depression finances pitted these divergent elements against one another, making it extraordinarily difficult for Scullin to craft a consensus. His effort to assert authority over the party and run a government that practised cabinet solidarity was also complicated by Labor’s collectivist organisational principles; the notion that the ministry was an agent of Caucus and the government an agent of the extra-parliamentary party.158 Those principles tried all Labor prime ministers but had not presented an insuperable challenge to Fisher’s management of his government in the relatively benign circumstances of 1910–13. Governing in war and depression, however, was a different matter. Hughes had barely given lip service to operating by Labor’s organisational procedures: this created a negative legacy for Scullin. He had been elected party leader in 1928 based on a desire for more vigorous leadership within the party after a decade of unremarkable custodianship under Charlton and before him Tudor. Nonetheless, the trauma of 1916–17 was still fresh in the party’s historical memory. As Weller astutely observes of Scullin’s period in office: ‘At the last caucus meeting held when the party was in government Hughes had walked out with his supporters. Caucus was determined that this time the party would decide what was done and the cabinet would obey.’159

Scullin’s difficulties in managing party relations were also related to the intense power struggle within the New South Wales Labor branch, centring on a battle for supremacy between Theodore and Lang.160 That disruption was exacerbated by the dispersed governance of the Labor Party. This was a period when federal pre-eminence was still robustly contested by the state branches, particularly by the New South Wales party. Ultimately, the drawn-out and vitriolic struggle against the Lang forces that was waged during the 1930s led to a consolidation of federal authority, including the entrenchment of the principle that state executives could not compel their federal Caucus members on federal policy.161 This was greatly beneficial for the next Labor prime minister, John Curtin, in maintaining control over the party room, as was the chastening memory of the Caucus anarchy of 1930–31, but these developments came long after Scullin’s government had been laid to waste.

The complex and multilayered strains in party cohesion during Scullin’s prime ministership involved protracted and vitriolic disputes within and between cabinet and Caucus, between Labor’s federal and state executives, and extended deep into the trade unions and the branches.162 Yet the maelstrom was fiercest within Caucus and in the relations between the party room and cabinet. Following Labor tradition, the party room elected the cabinet. It lacked ministerial experience, apart from former premier Theodore and Tasmanian former premier Joseph Lyons, and like the Caucus was a heterogeneous grouping.

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