School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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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.