Here is a radical reassessment of 1901, the formation of Australia viewed as a less than glorious moment in Australian history. Economist, economic historian, and Australian Federation critic William Oliver Coleman argues and writes well, though leaving room for doubt about his critique and conclusions.
Until now, despite several appealing attempts, the brilliant, complex, exasperating, shrewd, and naïve Herbert Vere Evatt QC, PC, KStJ (1894-1965), Labor politician, judge, and historian, lacked a compelling biography.
This is a lucid and interesting story by Keith Harvey: From university activist in the Democrat Club at Monash University in the early 1970s, gradual attraction to the ideals and works of the National Civic Council (NCC), conversion to Catholicism, marriage, children, recruitment to the anti-communist union cause, union work, including the Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC) in 1977-78 (it did not end well), then the Federated Clerks Union (FCU) to retirement, and attraction to the ideals of the Australian Labor Party in coalition with Christians concerned with social justice.
Rodney Cavalier’s review (Newsletter 241) of the book The Write Stuff (Connor Court, 2020) comments on my Chapter, ‘Faithful and Labor: What Labor Ignores at Its Peril’ and argues that there is no problem.
There were two periods in recent British Labour history where leaving the party was a more than usually troubling question for a lifelong supporter to consider.
This essay suggests that Burkean ideas apply to the Australian labour tradition7 and help illuminate that tradition as well as enabling the explication of competing ideas that sit outside, sometimes in competition and sometimes as complementary.
Jim Walshe, rail unionist, Labor activist, superannuation reformer, keen golfer and family man, was born in Ballybunion in County Kerry, Ireland, a resort town known for its picturesque stretch of sand dunes overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, beaches, steep seaside cliffs, ruined castles, golf course, family farms and, in his early years, the rural poverty of Depression-era, newly independent Ireland.
The history of the ALP at the national level is one long lesson in humility. More often defeated than victorious, glorious in government but only in retrospect. This is our party. The thirteen-year golden era of Hawke and Keating between 1983 and 1996 created Medicare and universal, compulsory superannuation; broke the back of inflation; set the economy up for a quarter century of continuous economic growth; changed Australia for the better. At the same time as those governments fought to earn credibility and support, enthusiasm waxed and waned within the wider labour movement.
Jeremy Mark Spinak, Jewish communal leader, businessman, politics aficionado, US Presidential history buff, husband, father – “Jez” to family and friends – passed away aged 36 just five months after diagnosis with pericardial mesothelioma, a phenomenally rare cancer associated with proximity to and inhalation of asbestos.
The passing of Vincent Joseph (“Vince”) Higgins, union and Catholic activist, sees the demise of an important link to the turbulent clashes in the labour movement of the 1950s.