Reinterpreting the second Fisher government.

Hearn, Mark ; Dyrenfurth, Nick

Why is there a need to 'reinterpret' the second Fisher Labor government of 1910-13? The contributors to this thematic section of Labour History were drawn together by diverse but overlapping interests in the Labor government of the former child miner Andrew Fisher, and the politics of the pre-World War I Australia more generally, to reconsider the government's role in the process of social, political and cultural change in a turbulent and dynamic period. (1) Here, the collective aim of our thematic contributors is twofold. First, we seek to explain, and place in global and comparative context, both the nature of federal Labor's extraordinary electoral achievement in winning control of both houses of the Commonwealth Parliament less than a year after having redefined Australian politics by forcing the merger (or 'fusion') of the anti-Labor parties during May 1909, (2) and the subsequent reformist legislative program of the world's first majority Labor government. Second, we seek to clarify--once again with comparative and transnational reference--the nature of the Labor Party that emerged with such apparent political dominance from the fractious alliances and contested ideological terrain that constituted the multi-party 'federation project' in the decade following 1901.

The opening section of this thematic provides an overview of the origins of, and issues facing the Fisher Labor government, ranging across the internal processes of the labour movement which underpinned Fisher Labor's political successes, and the external factors which shaped and constrained that mobilisation; factors including both political opposition and the conditions of pre-war industrial capitalism. Nick Dyrenfurth examines the progress of Labor-in-politics between the party's foundation in the early 1890s and its historic victory of 1910. He suggests that the labour movement's novel form of cultural politics underpinned Labor's success. Mark Hearn argues that Labor's success was troubled by a concern over effectively controlling the transmission of its message in the public sphere, and the degree to which Labor could impose its legislative agenda. In searching for a solution to these difficulties, Fisher stressed the need for Labor to establish a network of labour dailies. Labor also committed to conducting a referendum in April 1911 to increase radically the Commonwealth's power to intervene in the economy. Neither of these solutions was achieved during the life of the government.

The second set of papers explores the gender politics of the Fisher government and the broader issue of the political mobilisation of Australian women in this era. In her contribution, Marilyn Lake insists that the landmark introduction of a maternity allowance reflected Fisher Labor's recognition of the economic needs of women and their growing political power. In her view, the allowance was both a radical and socialist measure, especially when viewed in its transnational and comparative context. In a similar vein Marian Sawer applies a gendered comparative approach to examine three major issues--progressive taxation, old-age pensions and the rights of women. She contends that the contemporaneous 'progressive' governments of Australia, New Zealand and Britain drew on a common pool of research and discourse in order to construct a reformist legislative program.

The final two articles reflect upon the nature of the 'liberal' nation-building project, or so-called 'Australian Settlement', that emerged in the first decade following Federation in 1901. Ian Tregenza places the wide-ranging reforms of the Fisher government within the context of earlier initiatives of Alfred Deakin's liberal protectionist governments and more broadly the Anglo-American 'New Liberalism' of the period. His paper stresses continuities between liberal and labour thought in this period and reassesses the relationship between New Liberalism and state socialism in the formative period of the Australian party system. Alan Fenna compares the policy settings behind the Australian Settlement with developments in New Zealand, the United States and Canada. He argues that strong labour movements played a decisive role in shaping the distinctive character of the Australian experience.

Fisher Labor and Labour Historiography

These contributions build on the historiography of the second Fisher government, which from its early development tended not to stress the enormity of Labor's electoral success in 1910 or the scale of its policy achievements during the term of office that followed, but the difficulties and disappointments that flowed from Labor's determination to emerge as a national political force. In his Short History of the Australian Labour Movement (1940) Brian Fitzpatrick described initiatives such as the introduction of a land tax on unimproved land values in November 1910 and the establishment of the Commonwealth Bank in July 1912 as ultimately 'depressing', with their redistributive and democratic intentions colonised by conservative interests. Fitzpatrick also identified the government's intention to 'extend and consolidate' the New Protection program of compulsory industrial arbitration to protect and improve workers' pay and conditions, and tariff protection of local industry. (3) Two years after the publication of Fitzpatrick's Short History, H.V. Evatt's Australian Labour Leader, a study of NSW Premier William Holman, incisively described the labour movement divisions that helped to undermine Fisher Labor's boldest initiative to 'extend and consolidate' New Protection: the referenda proposals to secure Commonwealth control over trade, corporations and industrial relations. Labor's proposals were twice rejected by the people, in April 1911 and May 1913, the second attempt contributing to the narrow defeat of the government at the simultaneously conducted federal elections. Holman led an effective campaign of opposition to federal Labor's proposals, stirring community fears and regional jealousies. (4) Rivalries between the states and the Commonwealth were added to the list of factors inhibiting the success of the government.

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Robin Gollan's landmark Radical and Working Class Politics (1960) attributed Labor's successes and struggles in the pre-World War I period to its determination to emerge as 'the Party of intransigent Australian nationalism'. Labor's strident embrace of a White Australia was, according to Gollan, the most emblematic assertion of Labor's identification with exclusivist nationalism, represented in the adoption of the Party's objective in 1905: 'The cultivation of an Australian sentiment based on the maintenance of racial purity and the development in Australia of an enlightened and self-reliant community.' (5) The adoption of this objective strikes the modern reader with its pungent assertion of 'racial purity' and, to be sure, in 1905, and in the years that followed immediately afterwards, Labor's dedication to the ideal of 'white' nation and its sentiment registered in the public mind with equal force. Certainly, the dynamic growth in the Party's electoral support in that period owes much to its association with racially-defined nation-building. Indeed, Andrew Fisher believed as much in April 1910 when he spoke at a function held at Brisbane Trades Hall to celebrate Labor's historic victory only a few days earlier; Fisher urged the assembled unionists to think of themselves as 'part of the nation', and to 'cultivate a national spirit'. (6)

When Fisher's predecessor as Labor leader, John Christian Watson, moved the adoption of Labor's objective in 1905, he observed that while other parties had attempted to 'pose' as the Australian party, his party's adoption of the objective would display to the Australian people Labor's 'identification with the statement pledging themselves to develop every possibility in Australia to the fullest extent'. (7) It was the adoption of this strategically crucial mission statement that set Labor on the course of victory achieved in April 1910. To unite the fractious forces of the labour movement and the wider community in at least temporary unity to this cause was itself a stunning achievement, and easily overlooked in accounts of the turbulent tasks of government. In the post-Federation decade, Labor's appeal to Australians not only cultivated electoral support, but in large part helped to shape a sense of national identity, whilst also lending substantial support and purpose to the legislative program pursued by Deakin's protectionists. Despite his reproaching tone, Fitzpatrick was right to identify Labor's aim as extending and consolidating that nation-building program, and to an extraordinary degree the second Fisher government realised that ambition: the Commonwealth Bank; extending federal compulsory arbitration to state employees; the establishment of the Royal Australian Navy and the maternity allowance, the design competition for the new national capital in Canberra, and the pursuit of the referendum proposals. All of these initiatives displayed an ambitious and strategic policy approach to initiating nation-building institutions and programs. Even the issue of bank notes, coins and postage stamps (with the image of King George replaced by a Kangaroo), and the adoption of a more overtly nationalistic coat of arms, also served to lend everyday meaning to the idea of the flourishing nation, as Fisher's biographer David Day observes: 'There were many ways in which Fisher broke down the old parochialism'. (8)

In some measure, recent biographical studies of Andrew Fisher have sought to restore a more positive focus: Day offers a portrait of a diffident personality overcoming his limitations to lead, between 1910-13, 'the most energetic and successful government since federation ... passing almost as much legislation during his three years in power as during the first nine years following federation'. (9) The second Fisher government initiated 113 Acts of Parliament, more even than the activist Deakin administration of 1905-08 (albeit that Fisher's government was aided by its majority in both houses of parliament). (10) Peter Bastian also comes to the defence of an 'underestimated man' and the governments he led: 'Fisher was the first leader to openly declare the ALP to be the real voice of the Australian people and a genuinely national party.' (11) Similar sentiments are echoed in Edward Humphrey's recent quasi-biographical study. (12) Other general accounts of the ALP have also cast the Fisher government in a more positive light, such as Ross McMullin's The Light on the Hill (1992), and most recently Nick Dyrenfurth and Frank Bongiorno's A Little History of the Australian Labor Party (2011) and Dyrenfurth's more narrowly focussed study, Heroes and Villains (2011). (13)

Overall, however, the historiographical focus continues to accentuate frustration and failure: Stuart Macintyre's contribution to the Oxford History of Australia echoed Fitzpatrick, lamenting of the second Fisher government that 'the moderation of the parliamentary Labor Party was confirmed ... the ambit of federal government remained narrow'. (14)

Yet this adverse judgement was not quite so apparent at the time. Whilst Labor shared many of the same ideological leanings and policy prescriptions as the Deakin Liberal Protectionists (and indeed Readite Free Traders), the Party favoured a more heavily interventionists state than did either non-Labor grouping, and envisaged a vastly enlarged role for government-owned enterprises, an aspiration it sought to realise by altering the Constitution. The introduction of a graduated land tax clearly distinguished Labor from its liberal and conservative rivals. Industrially speaking, Labor's union links inevitably meant that the party would seek to shift the balance of power in Australian workplaces in favour of employees and their representatives--Deakin's refusal to include state employees within the bounds of arbitration can be compared with Labor's hearty legislative embrace of such workers. (15) In the more favourable opinion of D.J. Murphy, Fisher had been 'one of the most successful Australian politicians' of his time and one who had bequeathed a legacy of 'enduring reforms'. (16) Thus we need to recall the circumstances of Labor's election, and the response its initiatives generated, to appreciate the forces that Labor contested, and to creatively recalibrate earlier historical interpretations.

The 1910 Election and the Ascendancy of 'the Australian Party'

The federal election conducted on 13 April 1910 was the first held since 12 December, 1906 and the fourth general election staged since federation. At the first election in 1901 Labor established itself as a force in national politics winning 24 of 111 seats on offer across the houses of parliament and securing the balance of power between Free Traders and Protectionists. By 1903 Labor, led by Watson, had drawn level with the anti-Labor parties after nearly doubling its primary vote, although in 1906 its gains were rather more modest. The subsequent four years witnessed a hitherto unknown political intensity and organisation. Indeed the sheer scale of the 1910 election process--the 11 week campaign was the longest on record--and the mobilisation of the national electorate excited considerable enthusiasm in the weeks prior to the ballot. On 9 April the Sydney Morning Herald reported the campaign under the awestruck heading: 'five million ballot papers'--which in fact only represented the number of ballot papers distributed in New South Wales.

The result was the first electoral landslide to take place in Australian federal politics. 'Australia has spoken with trumpet tongue and Labor stands at the open door of opportunity', exulted the Sydney Worker on 21 April. (17) For the first time since federation, a government would control both chambers of federal parliament. Labor won 43 of the 75 seats in the House of Representatives, and, typically for the electoral system of the time, all 18 seats contested in the Senate, giving it 23 of the 36 Senate positions. Labor's victory was not merely a national first. With Labor having already formed the world's first minority social democratic governments at both a federal and regional levels (ie Anderson Dawson's week-long government in Queensland during 1899 and Chris Watson's three month federal administration of 1904), Fisher's victory meant that Labor was the first party of type to govern in its own right. And not only did Labor secure national office that year, but NSW and South Australia both witnessed the advent of stand-alone Labor governments for the first time and Western Australia Labor also won office in its own right the next year. By 1913 Labor had held office in every state and colony, although in Victoria (1913) and Tasmania (1909) the party's time in office would barely extend past one week.

As the contributors to this special issue suggest, Fisher Labor's success can and must be appreciated in its transnational, comparative context. Like the ALP, the British Labour Party had formed a decade prior to 1910, and in the election conducted in the United Kingdom in December, 1910 Labour managed to gain only 42 of the 670 House of Commons seats, reflecting its struggle to emerge as an effectively united and independent political force. (18) In Europe, many social democratic parties were still in a formative stage of development, or poised uncertainly on the fringe of government, pursuing a 'policy of abstention' as Eley observes, hoping, in vain as it turned out, for the global collapse of capitalism. (19) In the United States, the Progressives, and the Socialist Party, struggled to gain substantial political purchase--the latter already passing the high-water mark of electoral appeal, and increasingly challenged from the Left by the Industrial Workers of the World. (20) By contrast Australian Labor seemed to have achieved political ascendancy in a society which may have led the world, at least in some areas of social policy, in the pre-World War era. Key to that success was Labor's claim to be the champion of Australia's national destiny.

Fisher Labor and the Challenge of Nation Building

Winning national office allowed Fisher Labor to further claim the mantle of Australian nation-building, if not to redefine its meaning. Fisher reassured the Australian people in 1910 that Labor offered its citizens the greatest possibilities within the developing nation, provided that they were white. In its 1910 election manifesto, Labor stressed the fundamental significance of the principle of a White Australia to its nation building ambitions, both in terms of social and economic policy and defence matters. (21) Hence the maternity allowance legislation Labor introduced in 1912 specifically excluded Asians and Aboriginal Australians. The maternity allowance was designed in part to relieve an anxiety over Australia's low birth rate--that is, the low rate of birth of white Australians--although as Lake points out in her contribution, the payment can also be seen as a socialist and pro-feminist radical measure. A poorly populated continent was ill-prepared to defend itself against the threat of invasion from the north, and vulnerable to claims that the white race did not deserve to lay claim to an entire continent. (22) These racial and demographic anxieties intensified Labor's commitment to a strong defence policy, a commitment that Fisher stressed in his first major post-election public speech, held in Brisbane's Exhibition building on 22 April 1910. Fisher told an overflowing rally of Labor supporters that by developing an effective defence policy, Labor would 'help to inculcate in the citizens of Australia that incentive to patriotic thought and action which alone made a people great'. (23)

The advent of the second Fisher government witnessed a sharp contest over the terms and the direction the young Commonwealth should take--either of greater direct government intervention in the lives of the people, and greater government and national direction of the economy and society, or maintaining a more restrained liberalism that characterised the 1901 Constitution and the powers that it conferred. Fisher Labor policies in regard to Land Tax, the Commonwealth Bank and the powers sought in the referenda all had in common a desire to confront and restrict the operation of monopoly capitalism, and restrain the growth and power of corporations. Faced with Labor's double majorities in the federal parliament and its constitutional proposals, the fusionists slowly began to resolve their differences and organise themselves in order to counteract Labor's onwards march. These political struggles during 1910-13 tested the limits of the 'Australian Settlement', and imposed considerable stress on the government, and its ministers: Minister for External Affairs Egerton Batchelor died suddenly of a heart attack in October, 1911; Attorney-General Billy Hughes was absent for several months that same year, having succumbed to exhaustion; and Fisher himself sought to escape the pressures of office in substantial periods of absence--notably several months of 1910 in a tour of South Africa, after exhibiting signs of 'severe strain'. (24)

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Both the success and some of the difficulties experienced by the government were, in a real sense, embodied by its Prime Minister. Andrew Fisher was 48 years old when he became Prime Minister for the second time in 1910. He conveyed an impression of 'a kind of Olympian dignity', and an 'impenetrable calm'. (25) Yet it would appear that beneath this surface churned considerable anxieties generated by the demands of public life, and the burden of the immense legislative program to which Labor had committed itself. That the government achieved so much is a testament to the dedication of Fisher, his ministry, and the movement that he helped to inspire. Fisher could not, of course, know that the government's narrow election loss in 1913 drew to a close the political cycle that had opened with federation, and the inauguration of the federal Labor Party in 1901: the first wave of nation-building, with which Labor had so closely associated itself. The federal Labor Party returned to office under Fisher's leadership in September 1914, but Labor did not long prosper in the new conditions imposed by the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. Andrew Fisher soon grew disillusioned with leading an increasingly divided party and resigned as leader, and as a member of Parliament, in October 1915.

Conclusion

Andrew Fisher served as Australian High Commissioner in London from his retirement from politics in 1915 until 1921. Together with his family Fisher lived in Hampstead, a middle-class suburb in north London. Fisher made some rather half-hearted attempts to revive his political career in the post-war period: one in Scotland, another in Australia. Attard says that Fisher wound up his affairs in Australia in 1921, bowing to family pressure to settle in London. (26) Fisher spent barely more than a year in Australia between 1915 and his death in 1928. Even in death he symbolised an ambiguous relationship between nation and empire. In the funeral procession, Fisher's coffin was draped in an Australian flag; the governor and staff of the Commonwealth Bank sent 'a huge wreath fashioned like a Union Jack in everlasting flowers, with a branch of wattle diagonally across it'. A granite obelisk was erected over Fisher's grave in Hampstead cemetery, paid for by friends as a tribute to Fisher's 'services to the empire'. (27) In February, 1930 Fisher's fellow Scot, the British Labour Party leader Ramsay Macdonald, unveiled the obelisk by drawing aside a Union Jack; an Australian flag was draped around the base. The chiselled text succinctly expressed Fisher's empire experience: born Crosshouse Ayrshire, died London, Privy Councillor and Prime Minister of Australia. Peter Bastian laments that 'the memorial is now rarely ever seen by the large number of Australians who visit London. In a sense, it symbolises the historical obscurity into which Fisher has fallen'. (28)

The recent biographical studies, and hopefully the papers in this thematic section of Labour History, will go some way to stimulating further research into Fisher and the governments he led, and hopefully in the spirit of a simple commemoration offered in Australia in 1928: Tom Brown, the secretary of the Australian Labor Party's branch in Coogee, Sydney, was instructed by the branch, 'with members standing', to offer Mrs. Fisher its condolences, and to express the members respect for this 'ideal leader who did so much for the Labor movement'. (29)

Endnotes

(1.) 'The Australian Settlement and the Fisher Government' seminar was sponsored by the Business and Labour History Group at The University of Sydney.

(2.) See Paul Strangio and Nick Dyrenfurth (eds), Confusion: The Making of the Australian Two-Party System, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2009.

(3.) Brian Fitzpatrick, Short History of the Australian Labour Movement, Macmillan Australia, Sydney, 1940, pp. 162-65.

(4.) H.V. Evatt, Australian Labour Leader: The Story of W.A. Holman and the Labour Movement, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1942. See chs 37 and 38.

(5.) Robin Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1960, pp. 193-94.

(6.) Cited in David Day, Andrew Fisher: Prime Minister of Australia, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2008, p. 194.

(7.) Worker (Sydney), 11 February 1905.

(8.) Day, Andrew Fisher, pp. 213, 264.

(9.) Ibid., pp. 273, 277.

(10.) http://primeministers.naa.gov. au/primeministers/fisher/in-office.aspx accessed 8 February 2012.

(11.) Peter Bastian, Andrew Fisher: An Underestimated Mian, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2009, p. 362.

(12.) Edward Humphreys, Andrew Fisher: The Forgotten Mian, Sports and Editorial Services, Teesdale, 2008.

(13.) Nick Dyrenfurth and Frank Bongiorno, A Little History of the Australian Labor Party, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2011; Nick Dyrenfurth, Heroes and Villains: The Rise and Fall of the Early Australian Labor Party, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2011.

(14.) Stuart Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia, Volume 4, The Succeeding Age, 1901-1942, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 94-95.

(15.) Dyrenfurth and Bongiorno, A Little History of the ALP, p. 41.

(16.) D.J. Murphy, 'Fisher, Andrew (1862-1928)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/fisher-andrew-378/ text10613, accessed 15 February 2012.

(17.) Worker (Sydney), 21 April 1910".

(18.) Henry Pelling, The Origins of the Labour Party, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983, ch. 11.

(19.) Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002, pp. 65-69, 83.

(20.) John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy, Simon & Schuster, London, 2009, pp. 341-55; Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1982.

(21.) Worker (Sydney), 10 March 1910.

(22.) Day, Andrew Fisher, pp. 255, 258.

(23.) Sydney Morning Herald, 23 April 1910.

(24.) Day, Andrew Fisher, pp. 201, 252-54.

(25.) Ibid., p. 192.

(26.) Bernard Attard, 'Andrew Fisher, the High Commissionership and the Collapse of Labor', Labour History, no. 68, May 1995, p. 127; John Murdoch, A Million to One Against: A Portrait of Andrew Fisher, Minerva Press, London, 1998, p. 89.

(27.) The Times (London), 27 November 1928; Sydney Morning Herald, 29 October 1928.

(28.) Bastian, Andrew Fisher, pp. 351-52.

(29.) Fisher papers, MS2919/1/627, National Library of Australia.

Mark Hearn teaches Australian history at Macquarie University. He is currently researching the fin de siecle imagination in Australia, 1890-1914. <[email protected]>

Nick Dyrenfurth is a Lecturer in the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University. He is the author of Heroes and Villians: The Rise and Fall of the Australian Labor Party. <[email protected]>