There is a large irony about the composition of the Third Hawke Labor government. Although it is sometimes said that the NSW ALP dominates the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party, the fact is that NSW enjoys its lowest representation in a Federal Labor ministry since the formation of the Scullin Cabinet in 1929.
In many ways, Lloyd Ross was the odd man out. In the Australian trade union movement he was the first and only man to hold a Doctorate of Letters and a leading position in a blue-collar union.
The trade union movement, as Engels once said of the proletariat, has discredited itself terribly at various moments of human history.
First circulated at the NSW ALP Council Meeting held at the NSW Teachers’ Federation auditorium in September 1977 Labor Leader was unmistakably a NSW ALP right wing factional newspaper, with various attacks on the Left and statements and articles articulating a social democratic approach.
The chief virtue of Machine Politics is its revelations concerning hitherto difficult to obtain information on factions within the ALP and on trade union affiliations and party membership in each of the state and territorial branches.
Published shortly before the formation of the Social Democratic Party, Dr Owen’s book is important both as a diagnosis of the Labour Party and for the impressions he gives of the “Gang of Four”.
Members of the Labor Party who are not enamoured of the pidgin Marxist rhetoric that often passes for analysis among the Socialist Left would do well to read Susan Crosland’s biography of Anthony Crosland. It is a valuable introduction to the mind and character of her husband.
Alan Reid’s introduction to the re-issue of Warren Denning’s handsomely illustrated Caucus Crisis contains a revealing memoir of the author of the classic account of the Scullin government and the Great Depression.
Studies of the workings of the Labour Party usually concentrate on the workings of Labour Cabinets, the intellectual pretensions of its leaders and the ideological significance of Annual Conference decisions. For this reason most of the literature does not score the tunes to which the party is marching.
Kim Beazley in his Foreword to Michael Thwaite’s book Truth Will Out comments that the Petrov affair is in the memory of the political professionals rather than the public and argues that it was the performance of Dr Evatt rather than the Petrovs’ revelations that was decisive in shattering the ALP’s electoral standing in the 1950s.