Reclaiming Chifley

by Mark Latham

One of the strengths of the Labor Party has been that we understand the importance of our history. We use it to nurture the Party for the present and to prepare us for the future. A recent example was the celebration of the centenary of the Federal Labor Caucus that coincided with and, to a large extent, overshadowed the centenary of the Federal Parliament in May last year.

In recent years, the Liberal Party has begun to acknowledge its 'history problem'. Its solution, characteristically, has been reactionary. Unable to use its own history as a confident and inspiring source of tradition, the Liberals have tried to hijack Labor's past.

This strategy first emerged in 1999, as sympathetic newspaper columnists tried to associate John Howard with Labor's great Prime Ministers, John Curtin and Ben Chifley. Frank Devine wrote in The Australian that Howard was the contemporary politician most like Chifley. Christopher Pearson even compared Howard's Timor leadership to that of Curtin during World War II, inventing an image of Howard pacing the grounds of the Lodge (or perhaps Kirribilli) at night.

These first attempts at myth-making failed, however, because they were simply unbelievable. Howard looks barely adequate in comparison to his Tory peers. To place him alongside giants was to invite ridicule. Labor's opponents were forced to try a new tactic. That is why the Liberals are now trying to rewrite Labor history and to use it against us.

Chifley has become a central figure in this struggle for the meaning of Labor's past. But in order to use Chifley against the Labor movement, the Liberals have had to grossly distort his character and career. Unfortunately, if it is repeated often enough, the politics of the Big Lie can gain currency. Andrew West's article in the first edition of It's Time is an example of this process.

West wrote in January that Chifley "literally stepped off the locomotive and into Federal Parliament, where he rose quickly to become Defence Minister and later Prime Minister." This cartoon-like image of Chifley as Labor's noble savage, emerging from a South Bathurst cottage into the glare of national life, is false.

It is true that Ben Chifley did not have the benefit of a formal education in his childhood. Indeed, he liked to say that he would have given a million pounds to have the educational opportunities of Dr Evatt. But Chifley the engine driver was no unlettered hod-carrier. The engine drivers of the early 20th century were highly skilled and responsible workers, the equivalent of airline pilots today. Their employment gave them considerable social status. Chifley's latest biographer, David Day, puts it this way:

"Engine drivers were at the forefront of the 'new men' of the industrial era, presaging the respectable breadwinners of the interwar years ... the relatively high pay of the engine drivers had established them as the aristocrats of the working class."

Chifley also had a hunger for learning and advancement that showed both in his rapid promotion at work and in his extraordinary efforts at self-education. As a young man Chifley attended Workers' Educational Association and Bathurst Technical School classes for four nights a week. He had books shipped to Bathurst from Sydney, reading Plutarch and Gibbons and subscribing to the Bathurst School of Arts, with its library of 20,000 volumes. He later lectured in technical subjects at the Railway Institute.

Chifley and his colleagues were the epitome of working class aspiration. As well as embodying this Labor tradition, the engine drivers embraced the virtues of social responsibility. There were strict rules against smoking and drinking at work. Even off-duty, the railways demanded sober conduct. As Day explains:

Railway workers represented the respectability of a working-class elite that aspired to emulate and even join the middle class.

Economic aspiration and social responsibility. New Labor values, most certainly, but also an essential part of the Chifley and Curtin legacies. And just as Chifley typified aspiration and responsibility, his political career embodied Labor's longstanding belief in politics as a force for public good.

Tony Abbott has said repeatedly that Labor is dominated by "an apparatchik political caste." He defines this group as "union officials, political staffers and public sector employees" and argues that, "if (he was) seeking preselection today, Ben Chifley would almost certainly not get a look in." Abbott is particularly scornful of political families.

These statements, however, reflect a double standard. Just last week, in an obituary to Jim Cameron - a former Liberal Party organiser, State politician and the father of Ross Cameron MHR - Abbott lavishly praised Cameron's choice of politics as a lifelong career and vocation. That is, he attacks Labor families and apparatchiks while eulogising Liberal Party ones. For Abbott, rewriting history is just another way of playing politics. This hypocrisy extends into his revision of Chifley.

Consider the facts. Patrick Chifley, Ben's father, was an active Labor supporter who travelled to Sydney to take part in eight-hour-day celebrations. He was a shareholder in Bathurst's Labor-aligned newspaper, the National Advocate. The Chifley home was full of politics. Fin Crisp, Chifley's first biographer, records that Ben held an ambition to enter parliament from his time as a small boy.

Chifley was actively involved in his union from an early age, first representing his fellow workers before the State Arbitration Court in 1912 when just 26. Chifley was a 'lily-white' in the great strike of 1917, one of those who held out to the bitter end. He joined the Federal Council of the union in 1919, becoming one of its most powerful advocates in the industrial courts.

Moreover, Chifley was deeply immersed in the political wing of Labor. He unsuccessfully sought preselection for State Parliament in 1922 before gaining ALP endorsement for the seat of Macquarie at the 1925 Federal election. He finally won election to the House of Representatives in 1928.

After Chifley lost his seat in 1931, during the Lang-inspired split, his involvement in organisational politics deepened. He was President of the NSW Branch of the Federal Labor Party from 1934 until 1936, when Lang Labor was readmitted to the Party. He unsuccessfully contested the 1934 Federal election and then unsuccessfully sought preselection for Macquarie in 1937.

During this time, Chifley never returned to the rails. He remained a director of the National Advocate, a position he had inherited from his father in 1921. He served as a Labor Councillor for his local Shire and was a director of the local private hospital. In the mid-1930s he was appointed to the Royal Commission into Banking and also served as a member of the Board of the State Ambulance Transport Service and the Capital Issues Advisory Board in Sydney. In June 1940, months before his re-election to Parliament, Chifley accepted appointment as Director of Labour Supply and Regulation in the Department of Munitions.
Throughout the 1930s, unlike most Australians, Chifley was never short of financial assets and support. He was a well-resourced ALP activist, both from private investments and public funding. He did not hesitate to accept government appointments and opportunities for public service. By today's standards, he might even be thought of as an apparatchik.

In fact, Ben Chifley was a leading Labor figure and an eminent Australian when he returned to Canberra in September 1940. He had been active in organisational and parliamentary politics and in the unions for nearly 30 years. He combined an absolute dedication to the ideals of the Labor movement with an abiding commitment to parliamentary politics as the best means of serving his beliefs. He was a professional politician, in the finest sense of the term.

Chifley, of course, has not always been a favourite of anti-Labor MPs. In 1935, for instance, the Federal Treasurer Richard Casey said that Chifley, a radical on finance policy, "wouldn't know a bank from a public convenience." In the post-war election campaigns he was vilified as an enemy of freedom and enterprise. Only in recent years have the Liberals recast their opinion of the great man.

But Ben Chifley doesn't belong to the likes of Tony Abbott. It is not for a Santamaria disciple and Howard Cabinet Minister to decide who Chifley was and what he means to the Labor movement. Instead of worrying about Labor's political families, Abbott should spend more time worrying about his own. It was the Chifley family that gave its son to the Labor movement. And it was the Labor movement that gave Chifley to the nation. Not Tony Abbott.

The Labor movement, of course, has added to the romanticism that surrounds the Chifley legend. Chifley himself, as a practicing politician, made the most of his humble origins to build a favourable public image. There is some truth in the 'log cabin to Lodge' aspect of Chifley's life (or at least log cabin to the Kurrajong Hotel). We should, however, be inspired by this history and not blinded by it. In his values, aspirations and long climb up the ladder of public office, Chifley was a typical Labor MP.

Andrew West concludes that the ALP should "look like the Australia it seeks to represent." I agree. In Chifley's day we were representative of the nation because our MPs were earthy yet ambitious. They were prepared to see politics as a career, not just for its private benefits but overwhelmingly, as a means of serving the working people of this land.

I would argue that, for all our flaws and failures, today's Labor Caucus has remained true to these ideals. Chifley came from the back streets of Bathurst. We come from the public housing estates and country towns of modern Australia. He was a self-educated railwayman, one of the aristocrats of the working class, who wanted a higher education for all. We are the university-educated products of that vision, as implemented by the Whitlam and Hawke Labor Governments.

We have got what Chifley wanted us to have - a better education than our parents and grandparents before us. And we are using it, as Chifley used his skills in public life, for the betterment of working people. Our organisation is not perfect, our policies are in need of renewal, but we are no less typical of the Australian people than Chifley was in his day.

Ultimately, however, this is not the key issue. Chifley did not merely reflect Australia; he reconstructed it. He knew that the Labor Party's role was to change Australia, so that our country would be strong enough to seize the opportunities of the new world that was emerging from depression and war.

I believe Ben Chifley would win preselection in the Labor Party today. What is more, I believe he would embrace the challenge of Labor modernisation. He would recognise that trade union membership has fallen away and that the world of work has undergone a revolution. Globalisation and the spread of information technology mean that our society and its economy will ever be the same again.

Today's Labor Party seeks to lead Australia at a time of even greater change and challenge than in the 1940s. The real lessons of Ben Chifley's career, his belief in politics as a force for public good, and the real legacy of Chifley's character, his commitment to economic aspiration and social responsibility, have never been more important for the ALP. It's time to reclaim Chifley.

Mark Latham, Federal Member for Werriwa
February 2002