School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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Item“The Age” on public affairs from 1861 to 1881( 1950)At the present, time, we may buy the Age in Melbourne every morning except Sunday for twopence. It enjoys the reputation for being a reliable newspaper, not sensationalist, and only using its largest headlines for some matter of real importance, not of just passing popular interest. Its leaders are serious, thoughtful, with a tendency to the left rather than to the right; but not expressing merely the views of any one political party. Once, the Age was the organ of change. It persistently opposed what it called the pretences of the wealthy - the squatters and the importers. It was a popular paper, pleading for the small man, to give him a place to live his own life and work for himself. Today, we may still find the same old tone, upholding the rights of the individual against the attempts of the large group, who threaten to absorb him. It no longer has the highest circulation among Melbourne papers. The tabloid press has outstripped it in that. I have looked at the Age in this earlier period to find out what it was like, and what it was saying. In this thesis I am trying to give an account of what the Age said about some important matters of public interest during the years 1861 to 1881. A newspaper, in giving the news and in reviewing it in articles, deals with many sides of the community's life. In order to bring the subject of this thesis within a reasonable compass, attention has been given to certain subjects only which happened to be dealt with by the Age in these years. These are the opening of the land in Victoria, the introduction of protective tariffs, and the struggle over a number of years between the lower and upper houses in the Victorian Parliament as constituted in 1854. Since the Age spoke most frankly and forcefully on these matters, some attempt will be made to estimate how much it influenced public opinion in these matters. (From Chapter 1)
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ItemVoting in Australian State and Federal elections 1937-1961( 1966)The main aim of this work has been to compare voting in elections for the lower Houses of the State and Federal Parliaments and to illustrate the complications of federalism. In so doing, I have also been concerned to examine the effects of different electoral systems at the two levels of government, (particularly the different methods of weighting used in the various states) and to look at the working of those distinctively Australian features – compulsory and preferential voting. Though the title of the thesis is limited to the period 1937 to 1961 this has not been strictly adhered to. It has been found convenient to extend comparisons by including the state elections in Western Australia of 1936 and in New South Wales of 1962. There are great problems in the handling and comparison of electoral statistics : Uncontested seats, changes due to redistributions of electoral boundaries and the identification of party affiliations of candidates are among the most obvious. On many occasions, and particularly in attempts to assess the under- or over-representation of parties, I have used adjusted election figures including allowances for uncontested seats and seats not contested by two major parties. Any such adjustments are necessarily arbitrary, but I have endeavoured to make clear when adjusted figures were being used and , where necessary, to indicate the limited nature of the material available. For some state elections the figures are far more “usable” than for others so I have done what seemed possible in the light of the material. This has made for a good deal of unevenness. No attempt has been made to treat each state uniformly. Though Victoria and New South Wales have been studied in most detail, even here different aspects have been stressed. Dissident party groups and candidates have been more fully treated in New South Wales. In Victoria the longer periods between redistributions and the recent “tow-for-one” system of electoral boundaries has made a more detailed comparison of voting at state and federal elections possible. The study has been limited to elections for the Commonwealth Parliament and the lower Houses of the State Parliaments. Since the interest has largely centred on the working of single-member electorate systems there has been no detailed discussion of the methods used to elect The Tasmanian House of Assembly or the Commonwealth Senate, though some analysis of voting for both these bodies has been included. (From Introduction).
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ItemAttitudes to Japan and defence, 1890-1923( 1956)No events of international consequences likely to bring Japan to Australia’s attention occurred before the Sino-Japanese war (1894-5). Japan had as yet shown no sign of her military power. Probably as far as Australians felt any insecurity, their anxieties centred on the expansion of European powers into the Pacific, the might of Russia and the Chinese hordes. In such conditions they were free to think of Japan chiefly as a country of cherry blossom and quaint people. Only the question of Japanese immigration which began to assume large proportions after about 1890 gave any basis for feelings of hostility.
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ItemResponsible government in Australia 1928-1951( 1952)Do party candidates for Parliament campaign upon reasonably clear and consistent policies? Does the winning party carry out its promises? To find answers to these questions is the main purpose of this study. The writer's thesis is that parties seeking a Parliamentary majority are generally responsible for presenting clear alternative policies and that the winning party is responsible to those voting for it for the implementation of its policies. There is also a responsibility of the opposition party to its supporters, as well as a less definite responsibility of each party to the whole electorate; but these aspects of the subject are not treated in detail. If this approach is valid, it follows that a system of government should encourage, rather than impede, the responsible functioning of the parties. Therefore Part I presents a brief description of the party system, the structure of government and the extent of legislative power. Parts II and III cover the operation of the electoral system and the vital question of party promise and performance. It should be noted that the term responsible will be used in two different ways. First, the term responsible cabinet government will be used where the writer is referring to the arrangement whereby a cabinet is responsible to the popular house, and continues to govern only if supported by a majority of the house members. Second, the term responsible party politics will be used with the broader meaning of parties responsible to the electorate, as summarized above. Ideally, at least, responsible parties should function best where the government has maximum powers to deal with political problems with minimum interference from the structure of the system. Thus it might be expected that severe limits on legislative powers would restrict the scope of government activity and thereby limit the choice of party programs. Similarly, the presence of structural checks, such as an upper house, independent state governments, or courts which can invalidate government policy, may retard or confuse the solution of political problems. But the growth of responsible parties may be influenced by other factors of an economic, historical or geographical character. In Australia, for example, the existence of a strong trade union movement by 1900 provided the basis for the growth of a strong Labor party. Indeed, responsible parties have developed in spite of considerable limitations of the kinds already mentioned. Thus Australian politics offers the possibility of studying responsible parties working under difficult conditions.
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ItemCatholic judgements on the origin and growth of the Australian Labor Party dispute 1954-1961( 1967)This is a study of how Catholics in Australia have assessed the dispute which has affected the Australian Labor Party and Australian Society, from 1954-1961. It examines what Catholics have said and written about the causes of the original dispute and the way it has developed. The study examines seven main themes: -the history of communist activity in Australia's trade unions; the origin and growth of the Catholic Social Studies Movement (better known as 'The Movement•); the role of the Industrial Groups and ‘The Movement’ in the politics of the Australian Labor Party; the growth of two Labor Parties; the divisions which the dispute caused in Australian society generally and in the Catholic community in particular; the problem of conscience for the individual Catholic in politics; the problem of church-state relations in a pluralist society. Part I is a background study (1941-1954) of the various forces that clashed in the dispute. Part II is a chronological account of the course of the dispute from 1954 until 1961. Part III is an evaluation of the four main Catholic viewpoints on the causes and progress of the dispute. I have devoted considerable space to Parts I and II for two reasons. First, there is no one satisfactory narrative of the events that led up to the dispute in 1954 and that followed it. Second, some such chronological account is needed if all that was said about the dispute is to be intelligible. I have chosen 1961 as the year at which to terminate the study because by that time each main Catholic group had stated its case fully. Whatever each group has said since then has been mainly a re-statement of previous positions. A note is needed on the nature of the evidence available. In general there is a mass of written material in Catholic papers which presents problems of selection. But a greater problem is the uneven distribution of such comment; for example, the Melbourne Advocate and the Sydney Catholic Weekly, being weeklies, commented much more frequently on the dispute than did the monthly Catholic Worker. Those persons representing the viewpoint of Catholics who remained in the Labor Party after 1954 have commented even less than the Catholic Worker. I have tried to supplement this lack of written information on some viewpoints by extensive interviewing of some of the key figures in the dispute. (Here, too, there were difficulties: for example, the ALP parliamentary leader, A.A. Calwell, declined to be interviewed). In all I spent 116 hours interviewing thirty of the main actors in the drama in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane. Here, a problem of evidence was the sometimes fading memories of some of those interviewed ten years after the events they were discussing. With some of this evidence, therefore, allowance must be made for possible, inaccuracies. Yet another problem was striking a balance with conflicting information from interested parties to the dispute. Since a thesis of this type cannot deal in detail with every aspect of this dispute, it might be well to mention some of the issues one would have liked to treat in greater depth had there been room. Some of these questions are: the impact of federalism or the federal structure of bodies like the Australian Labor Party, 'The Movement' and, to some extent, the Catholic Church, on the behaviour of regional units of these bodies; the development of Catholic Social theory as a result of 'The Movement' experience and the Labor Party split; the sociological changes in the Catholic community since the split within the Labor Party and within the Catholic Church; the changing patterns of Australian Catholics' political participation. All these enticing questions can only be touched on more briefly than one would have liked.
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ItemVictorian railway policy, 1850-1883( 1952)Introduction: In this thesis my aim is to present a clear outline – a narrative account – of the early history of Victorian Railway Policy, concerning the Railways as government department and the later change to statutory corporation. But in doing so, my aim is to suggest the main reasons, together with their degree of importance, for this particular sequence of events that is the beginning and most important part of Railway History. These reasons are intended to be brought out and substantiated by a significant selection of political evidence. They can be no more than suggested, however, because this evidence is confined mainly to Parliamentary documents, contemporary political writings and fairly inadequate secondary source histories. It is political evidence, rather arbitrarily defined, and therefore does not extend, for example, to the favourable or unfavourable condition of the London money market at certain times and its effects on railway policy. Nor in another direction, does it extend sufficiently to the power and influence of local pressure groups, which, together with the charges of corruption that are so often put forward as reasons for particular lines of railway, must be among the most difficult matters to investigate, gauge and verify in this subject – which is made enormous by ramifications of that kind. Nevertheless, there will be, I hope, considerable value in the disentangling and enumerating of such reasons as are plausibly given for the change and development of railway policy. They might perhaps provide interesting information about the political climate of the time, but I think they would be far more usefully employed if they were to be compared with the apparent reasons behind other public utility policies, and , especially, with the principles introducing and governing the recent British Nationalization statutes.
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ItemThe structure of Liberal state politics in N.S.W.( 1962)The liberal party of Australia is a collective of six state divisions, each one a different organisation facing different problems at two and sometimes three levels of government. But the academic stereotype of the liberal Party has been based upon its operation at the federal level, where the party has dominated for over a decade the more politically significant legislature, and where the party makes no apology for oligarchic conrol by its parliamentarians….
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ItemThe Australian Federal Labour Party 1900-1905( 1959)In the ten years before the proclamation of the Commonwealth on 1st January, 1901, Labour Parties established themselves firmly in the colonial parliaments of New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia and began to exert and influence on legislative programmes which had hitherto been prepared with little regard for the interests of the workers. In Victoria the Labour Party founded in 1892 developed more slowly, and in Western Australia and Tasmania unionists were still engaged in establishing permanent political organisations in the late ‘nineties, but throughout Australia it was clear by federation that the representatives of organised Labour were to be a permanent feature of the parliamentary scene.
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ItemThe Premiership of Sir Albert Dunstan( 1960)Writers on Australian politics have constantly stressed the need for detailed research into the Country Party's role in its structure, and some have "tended to deplore the Labour Party's almost complete monopoly of such pursuits. Out of a profound sympathy for such sentiments, as well as a desire to unearth something original, I decided to direct my attention to this need. Apart from considerations of domicile, 'which leave little elbow room for an impecunious student, there were other pressing reasons for concentrating my efforts on Victoria. In New South Wales and Queensland, the Country Party has never enjoyed sufficient power in the legislature to form its own government, but has had to be content with participating jointly with other parties of an urban non-Labour stamp, and only during short breaks in long-established Labour ascendancies. In Victoria, however, the coin has fallen on the reverse side. There Labour has achieved power only for short unstable intervals as a minority Government, until 1952 when it commanded a majority over all other parties for the first time in its existence. In its place the responsibility of governing the State has been thrown from one non-Labour party to another, frequently too hot to hold in such an unstable climate. Since 1917 the Country Party has made its own peculiar contribution to this instability, by exerting an influence out of all proportion to its electoral strength. In 1935 this culminated in its seizure of office from the party with which it had shared it for two and a half years, and its enjoyment of an almost uninterrupted decade of office under the record-breaking premiership of Sir Albert Dunstan. Until 1943 he led a minority Government composed entirely of his own party members, deriving his support from a hapless Labour Party which gained little in the way of concessions. Even when the latter withdrew its support, the Country Party under Dunstan was able to continue in office with little loss of influence despite a small grant of portfolios to the Liberals. Such a sweep of political history, with such singular features, seemed at first sight to be too great a gift for a Melbourne research worker to overlook. (From Preface)
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ItemThe organisation of the Australian Labor Party 1916-1941( 1954)This study is an attempt to describe the organisational development of the Australian Labor Party between 1916 and 1941, a transitional period for the party, lying between its two great periods of parliamentary success, 1910-16 and 1941-49. Few Labor achievements marked the intervening twenty five years. Except in Queensland, Labor governments were usually of short duration, and frequently ended in disruption and disaster. Yet it was not an era of unqualified decline, for at its conclusion the party was in a position to begin its longest and perhaps its most fruitful period of political supremacy.