
(1) Why I Wrote James Scullin
An address on 9 October 2024 at the Sydney Institute, Phillip Street, Sydney, on the launch of James Scullin, Australian Biographical Monographs # 24, Connor Court publishers, subsequently published in The Sydney Papers, 2024. The video is here: Michael Easson – Prime Minister Jim Scullin: The Great Depression & The Labor Split – The Sydney Institute

Thank you very much, Anne and Gerard, for putting on these functions and on this occasion allowing me to speak on a relatively obscure political leader.
James Scullin was born in country Victoria in 1876 and died in 1953. He was a Federal MP from 1910 to 1913, and again from 1922 to 1949, the leader of the Australian Labor Party from 1928 until 1935, Prime Minister from 1929-1932. He held the party together after several tumultuous splits during the Great Depression. John Curtin succeeded him as Labor Leader in the mid-1930s.
I wrote this book for two reasons. One, because of the challenge: Scullin is known as the man who won with the biggest majority ever with the election victory in 1929 and remembered also as a one-term prime minister who lost office with the biggest defeat of any Labor figure. He was appraised as a political failure. In the words of the late Don Rawson – to whom I co-dedicated the book, a great Labor historian I knew a long time ago – he once told me that Scullin was the man who failed even at failure; meaning that even in going down as prime minister in the election in December 1931, it was a mess. The Labor Party was engulfed with various splits and divisions. It was seen that during his period as prime minister during the Great Depression he was bewildered and befuddled by the challenges. I thought it would be interesting to write about this person, to examine whether he was more interesting than the customary summation of his political life, whether there was more than just ‘failure’.
The second reason to write was because I was trapped – I say that whimsically – on a boat. Mary, my wife, took us on a cruise from Barcelona to Fremantle last year. There is a limit to the number of times you can walk the deck, with port visits on average every three days. I said to Mary, “I will join you for all our meals but maybe doing nothing otherwise would be exhausting. Let me find on-board a library and a good internet connection and let me look up Trove and do this work I have been thinking about for several years.”
That is why I am here and why this book is now published.
Scullin is a person who stood for parliament for the first time in 1906, three years after he joined the Labor Party. In 1903 Tom Mann, a radical, eloquent unionist from the UK toured all over country Victoria and across Australia. He enthused people to join the Labor Party. John Curtin joined around that time as well as Scullin. Both were inspired by this radical, critical approach by Mann, hopes of and the possibilities for the trade unions and Labor to transform society.
With Scullin, an interesting question to evaluate was this: to what extent did Scullin’s Catholicism matter in the way he developed his political thinking? One of the stories that I found, in doing the research, is that Scullin carefully read and took copious notes about Rerum Novarum, the encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. This set out Catholic Church theory about the nature of and preferred organisation of civil society. Scullin went to his parish priest in Ballarat with his well-earmarked copy. Father Roper, who had just completed seminarian studies at St Patrick’s, Manly, and had just been posted to Ballarat, met Scullin. He asked: “Can we go over this encyclical please because it seems to convey a great deal about what Catholics should be thinking about in terms of their vocation in politics?” Father Roper looked at him, sighted the document in Scullin’s hands, and said words to the effect: “I wouldn’t worry about it”. He had not made a study of it. This fellow later became a bishop. Nonetheless, Scullin was profoundly influenced by that encyclical and associated teachings of the church. He always argued that there was no inconsistency between Labor values and those of the church. He did not regard Catholic social teaching as grafting foreign concepts to Labor philosophy and practice. He believed they were completely compatible with each other. That was one of the issues I wanted to think and write about.
The other thing that is notable about Scullin’s career: not only being the very devout Catholic who translated to the highest rank as a Labor politician, he also got intricately involved in the socialisation debates in the Labor Party in 1921. That was the debate about what Labor’s objective should be.
Consider his life – until then. He already had had an interesting career. In 1903, he joined the Labor Party. In 1906 he ran against prime minister Deakin as the Labor candidate for the seat of Ballaarat. He was defeated. The then Labor Leader John Christian Watson (about whom I also wrote about on the good ship Queen Elizabeth) would not campaign in the election in Ballarat because he hoped that Deakin would win, and Labor and the progressive Liberals would form a coalition. However, Ramsay MacDonald, the British Labour leader, did campaign in that election and in Ballarat, during a visit. Because of that campaign, Scullin became known to the public and admired in important circles of Victorian Labor. He was appointed an organiser for the Australian Workers Union. In 1910, he stood for election for Corangamite, a country electorate in Victoria, won the seat in the election that saw the first majority Labor government in Australia. Andrew Fisher won that election in 1910. Scullin narrowly lost the seat in 1913 when Fisher (unexpectedly) lost the election. Scullin continued to be an organizer with Australian Workers Union and later became a full-time editor of the Ballarat Echo newspaper. He had had several other jobs including for a period as a grocer when he first stood for parliamentary office.
In 1921 Scullin, heavily active in Victorian Labor politics, got involved in the debate about what Labor’s core objective should encompass. I am interested to understand how this person, of all people, could be so involved in the crafting of the Labor Party socialisation objective. Because, you would think, as a good Catholic, a person reading and believing in the principles of Rerum Novarum, the papal encyclical, that he too would be critical of state-controlled socialism, hostile to communism, and condemning of untrammeled capitalism. The encyclical, to quote from part of it, said that “…public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degree it had come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated, and helpless to the hard-heartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition.” That’s a quote from Rerum Novarum. So, it was censorious of unfettered capitalism, contemptuous of some of the more radical remedies springing from the Left. How could Scullin embrace the full-throated radicalism of Labor’s 1921 socialisation objective?
It turns out that he was very involved, the co-author, of that objective, first in June at the All-Australian Trade Unions Conference held in Melbourne, where he was the chair of the drafting committee of the socialisation objective (along with John Curtin). And then again at the Brisbane ALP Conference in October that year, where adoption of the socialisation objective became Labor Party policy. It turns out that, compared to many other of his colleagues, Scullin had a different view of what socialisation meant compared to nationalisation. He thought as a perspective that it was compatible with moderate and Catholic thinking. The meaning of the word ‘socialisation’, however, is almost lost in the mists of time. Scullin had in mind that society should be organised based on the fullest participation of ordinary people. He meant by socialisation that society should be organised such that people had the opportunity to be deeply involved in the workplace, were engaged in electing their representatives, and participated from the ‘grassroots’ up in the organisation of society. He was hugely influenced by Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, the Catholic writers, and by the British economist and socialist G.D.H. Cole, during the latter’s ‘guild socialist’ phase.
My view is that all of this was incoherent. But Scullin’s motivations were based on those strands of opinion. One of the worst aspects of what was adopted, reflected in what Scullin moved, the resolution at both conferences in 1921, was to call for a Supreme Economic Council to manage the economic affairs of state, something that was clearly lead in the saddle bags of Labor leaders thereafter, until that was eventually repudiated at the ALP Federal conference in 1927. [The British Guild Socialists during World War One had coined the term Supreme Economic Council even before the Soviets. They wanted independent guilds to meet in a parliament of guilds, but this idea was never well-explicated. The conflating of Guild and Soviet terms was unfortunate, to say the least. As the Soviet concept was deployed in the early 1920s, it was reckless for Australian Labor to seemingly ‘borrow’ a concept with barely a word about what it meant in an Australian context.]
I wanted to understand where Scullin had come from, whether his Catholic thinking and pragmatic Labor politics influenced his political outlook – which, clearly, it did. He believed his religion was completely compatible with Labor values and social democracy. The debate on the socialisation objective, however, was an episode in Labor history which I never fully understood. To some degree, I still find this a mystery. Scullin was in the thick of it. Kim Beazley snr once wrote that even though Scullin was traduced by the Langites in the 1930s as this extremely cautious, moderate Labor leader, in his youth he was a firebrand in the Victorian Labor Party. The socialisation objective was just one aspect. Another was in 1916 when Scullin moved the resolution at the federal conference that all those labor MPs who had supported conscription were all expelled from the Labor Party, effectively never to return. That was the attitude of Scullin. I regard that as another extraordinary moment in the history of this party, where people were condemned to the fire. Perhaps ‘eternal damnation’ was the Catholic principle that Scullin was sub-consciously applying! [I suspect Easter 1916, in Dublin, was the bigger influence. Scullin, the son of migrants from County Derry, was radicalised by the Irish uprising.]
Of course, part of Scullin’s history is that he got lucky. He was the editor of the Ballarat Echo. In 1922, the leader of the Australian Labor Party, Frank Tudor, the member for Yarra in the Federal Parliament, died. Richard Crossman, a UK politician craving preferment, wrote in his diaries in 1963 that in politics where there is death there is hope. [UK Labour Leader Hugh Gaitskell’s death in 1963 was the turning point in Crossman’s career.] Scullin stood for Labor pre-selection for the seat of Yarra, won that and then the by-election in February. He created a modest reputation for speaking on tax, money bills, and tariffs. In 1927, the deputy leader of the Labor Party, Frank Anstey, took ill and Scullin won the ballot for deputy leader. When Matthew Charlton, the Leader of the Opposition and Australian Labor Leader took ill and resigned, Scullin was elected Leader. Scullin led Labor’s campaign in the 1928 elections. He lost to Stanley Melbourne Bruce, though Labor won eight seats in that election. Then, dream of dreams, the then prime minister Bruce decided that he would seek to end the national system of compulsory conciliation and arbitration. Legislation was drafted to that end, proposing to return industrial relations powers to the states, except for the wharves and for shipping. (Interstate trade was naturally and constitutionally a national responsibility.) The Bruce government’s proposed legislation was defeated in parliament. Billy Hughes led a revolt of government back-benchers. In the ensuing election in 1929, Scullin won a thumping majority.
Scullin became prime minister. In the week that he was sworn-in, the Great Depression began with the Wall Street collapse in October 1929. At one stage unemployment was 30%. During his prime ministership, unemployment hovered between 20% to 30%. Scullin was prime minister from 1929 to 1932, defeated at the December 1931 election. And in that period, no one really had an idea of what to do about the Great Depression. Many remedies were tried and talked about; everyone was an expert on what to do. The conventional wisdom led by Sir Robert Gibson, the chairman of the Commonwealth Bank board, was that you needed to cut wages, cut expenditure, and deflate the economy. Yet this was at a time when already Australia faced major problems. For example, earlier in 1929, before the Wall Street collapse, a significant reduction in prices to Australian exports – wheat and wool products, for example – occurred. An attempt to raise money in the London market for an Australian government bond was under-subscribed by 80%. There was a view in London that Australia was borrowing too much and not spending carefully on productive industries. There was too much political interference in where borrowings were spent.
Scullin came to the office facing calamity. The Labor Party and no one else knew what should be done. He had a deputy leader and treasurer in Ted Theodore, a former premier of Queensland, who had great promise. In 1929 Scullin persuaded Joe Lyons, a former Tasmanian Labor Premier, to run for a federal seat from Tasmania. Lyons was a very popular figure. In Scullin’s Cabinet, the only two with ministerial experience were former state leaders, Theodore and Lyons. Speaking of state Premiers, there was Jack Lang in New South Wales, who was elected Premier in 1925 to 1927 and again from 1930, a determined opponent of Scullin.
Ultimately, the Labor Party split in many directions. The Lang group broke away from official Labor in March 1931, forming a minority rump within the parliament. In January that year, John Fenton and Joe Lyons, acting prime minister and acting Treasurer, respectively, from August 1930 to January 1931, left the Labor Party to form the United Australia Movement and, ultimately, the United Australia Party, in combination with the Nationalists. Lyons became Leader of the Opposition. Labor splintered in many directions, divided about the Premiers’ Plan.
As troubles brewed, Scullin was overseas for five months from August 1930 to January 1931. He renegotiated some of the terms of some of the loans that the Australian government had in London. His other notable achievement was ‘staring down’ the monarch and his advisers to see the appointment of the governor general, the first Australian-born Governor General, Sir Isaac Isaacs. While he was away Lyons was acting treasurer. In July 1930, Ted Theodore had to step aside from this post because the then conservative Queensland government had established a royal commission into allegations of corruption over the Mungana mines, the sale in 1922 of some privately owned mines in Northern Queensland to the Queensland Government. The commissioner determined or found that there was a high probability that both Theodore and the subsequent premier, McCormack, had had secret shares in those mines. The commission found both former premiers guilty of ‘fraud and dishonesty’ and abuse of ministerial position. The case against Theodore was circumstantial. [The commissioner adduced that because McCormack made regular payments the Theodore, equivalent to-half of the former’s receipts from the Mungana mines, that this pointed to Theodore as a co-conspirator and co-beneficiary of the sale. Theodore vigorously protested his innocence in and out of parliament.]
Theodore was an active, intelligent, and generally well-regarded political figure. Scullin wondered during the first six months of his prime ministership whether he should hand over to his able deputy. But this became impossible. Theodore had to stand aside while subsequent inquiries occurred, including the Queensland government taking civil action for damages. They were in no rush to do so. Eventually, there was a court case in 1931, and that August Theodore was found not to have a case to answer. But during the period Scullin was overseas, Theodore had a cloud over his head. Fenton and Lyons carried the burden of running the government. They thought that they were not looked after by Scullin when he returned to Australia. Scullin decided on Australia Day 1931 that he would reappoint Theodore as the country’s Treasurer, even before he had been ‘cleared’ and that he would revisit the Premiers’ Plan, in the making of which Fenton and Lyons were closely associated with. [Theodore had toyed with reflationary measures. It is important to note that the ‘Premiers’ Plan’, the remedies agreed to by the Commonwealth and most of the state premiers, inspired by the country’s leading economists, was never a static set of measures or recommendations. As the initial cuts in wages and accompanying deflation hit hard, more liberal, reflationary measures, including devaluation of the Australian currency were devised. There was creative experimentation in Australia getting out of the contracting of its economy, especially after the fall of the Scullin administration.]
Throughout 1931, the Scullin government floundered with competing economic ideas vying for attention and favoritism. The prevailing wisdom initially was to deflate the economy in a period when there was already a collapse in the terms of trade. I do not think Scullin had much of an idea of what to do as prime minister in this period. Therefore, this idea of the man who failed even at failure seemed to be vindicated by the way that he handled the Great Depression challenges.
Yet, Scullin’s great achievement, in my view, was to prevent the Labor Party being taken over by Jack Lang, the ruthless, demagogic, ‘leader for life’ of the NSW Labor Party, which formally broke away from Federal Labor early in 1931. The Lang, anti-Premiers’ Plan, called for repudiation of government debts. There was a sinister, dark side to Lang’s rhetoric.
Despite the fissures in the Labor Party, with sizable parts of its membership all over the country quitting in disillusionment, defecting left and right or to Lang, Scullin soldiered on, as Opposition Leader, 1932 to 1935. He kept what was left of Labor united enough to prevent Lang seizing control of the party. Note that Lang’s supporters in the House of Representatives moved to vote of no confidence in the government in November 1931. They succeeded with Lyons relishing the opportunity for an election. As mentioned, in December Scullin and Labor were completely crushed, Labor winning 14 seats in that result. Prime Minister Lyons, almost a year after he left the Labor Party, was sworn in as the United Australia Party’s first prime minister in January 1932.
Subsequently, Scullin remained a member of parliament for 18 years. Probably his greatest claim to fame thereafter was to be a great support to Curtin and to Chifley. When Curtin became prime minister, Scullin had an office in between Curtin and Chifley, the treasurer. Scullin was the great confidante of both. Scullin also participated in the caucus vote in 1942 over conscription – which Curtin proposed with Calwell opposing conscription of any kind – to allow Australian conscripts to fight in the ‘southwest Pacific’. The debate was whether we should conscript Australian soldiers to fight in the defense of Australia, given the Japanese invasions to the north, and to push back the Japanese. Scullin helped Curtin and Chifley win the day.
My conclusion about Scullin is that his period as prime minister was tragic. Yet, some of his ideas came to influence Curtin and Chifley. Especially, he played a major role in the changes to tax collection during the war when the Commonwealth took over personal income tax collection. He played a major role in the stability of the Curtin and Chifley governments. He lived a life of purpose. Although he demanded of government great things, he thought the enemy was those who showed indifference and apathy in the face of hardship and disadvantage. Erected over his grave in Melbourne cemetery, where he was buried in 1953, is a tall granite Celtic cross. Emblazoned on the stonework are Scullin’s words: “Justice and humanity demand interference whenever the weak are being crushed by the strong.” In his interesting and to some degree chaotic career, you can see that his message to posterity is that Labor’s historic mission is to civilise capitalism, to fight injustice. That is what he stood for and what his life represents.
(2) Bill Shorten at the Melbourne Launch
Launch sponsored by the John Curtin Research Centre, with Sam Almaliki, Centre Chair introducing, on 2 October 2024, at Jimmy Watson’s bar, 333 Lygon St., Carlton 3053. Speech is here.



Photo credit: Gili Inbar
Good evening, everybody. It’s lovely to be here. So many of you should be acknowledged but I will acknowledge of course Gareth Evans who brilliantly employed me. He has several other achievements to his fame too. It’s great to see Andre Haermeyer, who was an outstanding minister in successive Victorian Labor governments. Of course, we have Senator Jacinta Collins. She’ll always be Senator Collins to me. And great to see Rob Bladier here too, who’s also served Labor. And I’d also like to acknowledge Mary Easson. I had a separate sort of component but, of course, she has served in parliament and of course is Michael’s remarkable partner. Dr. Daniel Mulino is here as well. I’m very pleased that Daniel serves in parliament. The hope of the side. And I don’t know if he is here still, but if Bill Kelty is here. Just great Australian. Any good idea I’ve ever had is his. Any failure to implement is mine. So, it is lovely to be amongst friends. When Michael mentioned this opportunity to catch up, I thought it was fantastic.
I should just talk a little bit about Michael and Mary specifically. I mean, I understand Mary, of course, came out of Victorian Young Labor, that very successful generation which included Garth and Andre. But I first met Mary and Michael when Michael was at the New South Wales Labor Council and dare I say it, the glory is of the New South Wales Labor Council. I mean, they’ve been successful since, but I think that was an era where Michael’s intellect as a thinker, as a moderate labour union leader, I think, was very influential on a lot of us coming through the labour movement, starting off. And Michael continues to contribute now along with Mary.
Now, I’ve looked at the three books that we’re launching today. And, of course, I would have launched Mary’s book on superannuation, but she didn’t ask me to. Oh dear! I know, I know. And when Mary, at least, when you launch one of Mary’s books, she gives you a fabulous tie, Michael. But tonight is Michael’s night and his books.
Now, when looking through the book about John Christian Watson, I understand that the idea for this came — not dissimilar, I mean, John Christian Watson came from Valparaiso to Australia. But I think Michael was on a voyage from Barcelona to Western Australia and he didn’t have much else to do. So, he decided to write the book on Watson. But I also understand both the story of Watson and the story his book of course on Whitlam, Prime Minister Whitlam, have been launched a number of times before. I think Prime Minister Albanese has launched one. I think Deputy Prime Minister Miles has launched one of the books. So, it’s good that you’ve asked me to launch them again, Michael. I lose one election, lose two, whatever, anyway. No, enough self-sledging. I’ll leave that to News Limited and friends in the party. In particular, I would like to talk tonight about the book on Scullin, if that’s all right, Michael.
I think James Scullin deserves more than being the trivia question about ‘name the one-term government in Australia’. I think James Scullin looms large in the Labor subconscious as well as the consciousness and I think this is the first monograph or book written about James Scullin since 1974. So, long overdue for a revisit. The monograph does achieve that, and I would encourage you to read it. There are many gems in it and there’s insights as well. There are gems of facts, but there’s insights as well. And I just wanted to extrapolate some of the insights that I took from Michael’s research and writing. He deserves to be remembered for more than being a one-term government. Michael addresses that fundamental unfairness about the coverage of Scullin. Scullin was the first Irish Catholic to become a prime minister of Australia. And he came through a time when James Scullin – and I am not quite sure the conclusion that Michael drew in the book about him – but was able to reconcile his secular view. I mean, Scullin interestingly was involved with a committee – because, of course, in the Labor Party we need a committee – to set up the socialist objective. And then he was involved in subsequent conferences where the socialist objective seemed to move a bit away from the 1921 aspirations. He was a leader who reconciled his religious values which ran very deeply. And I love the idea that he could see, I don’t know it was Michael or James Scullin who coined this or someone else, but it’s in the book, that Pope Leo the 13th was the working-class Pope or the working man’s Pope with Rerum Novarum in 1891. Scullin tried to reconcile his view of the secular with his religious views. Whether or not that was in tension or was an easier journey, I’ll leave it for Michael to discuss when he talks about Scullin. But it does remind the family of Labor that people can hold views of faith and be consistent with the proposition of social justice. So, that was one proposition I took early out of reading the monograph, but it goes further than that.
Of course, it was very interesting to know that Scullin was a very active Australian Workers Union official, when you read about Scullin’s early organising. He was first elected to Corangamite in 1910. I think Stewart McArthur ran against him then. No, I just made that up. Stewart McArthur, the Liberal member for Corangamite, was famously the only Liberal MP in the parliament older than John Winston Howard. They both lost their seats in 2007. Scullin then lost again in 1913, but the proposition about Michael’s writing about Scullin, reminds us of an Australia which Labor has perhaps in its modernity forgotten. That is, that we were a party which succeeded electorally well in non-metropolitan Australia. Reading about the organising efforts of James Scullin and small towns in the Otways and around the district around Ballarat, it gives us a glimpse of what was.
Now, the universe doesn’t take us back into time. Of course, then a lot more Australians lived outside of our big cities, but it’s clear that at certain points, sliding door moments in Labor’s history, since the time of Scullin – perhaps accelerated by the split in 1955, but at other times since – that Labor invested in the regions of Australia. That is, again, an insight which is still pretty contemporaneous, for now, to be a party of people who have faith, to be a party which understands the value of the regions as well as the cities.
Then we get beyond the trivia question of what the only one-term government Australia was. I think James Scullin has unfortunately been attributed with the building up of this consciousness in Labor that we get elected when times are tough, that that seems to be our fate, one of timing. He was unlucky to be elected in that week in October when Wall Street collapsed. The Labor Party has ingested, imbibed, by osmosis, that view. Sometimes we think that our timing is unlucky. Of course, James Scullin got the seat of Yarra when his Labor predecessor died. So, good for Mr. Scullin, not so good for Frank Tudor. And then, again, he got the deputy leadership of the party following the illness of another Labor figure. So, Scullin’s timing wasn’t always bad, but then we get to 1929. This is one of our challenges for Labor. We must never have a chip on our shoulder. We must never look at our history as being just a series of accidents of history.
Scullin, whilst he lost by the largest margin ever in Australian electoral history in 1931, he won by the largest electoral margin in Australian electoral history in 1929. I think the version of history says that he got elected, then a series of economic catastrophes really rendered Labor out of office very quickly, but this summary fails to look at the underlying events and Scullin’s accomplishments. When you think about it, Scullin had to deal with Lang and the breakaway New South Wales movement. I mean, he had to deal with premiers who fitted him up with the Niemeyer plan. He had to deal with a very active communist insurgency in the trade unions directed by the Comintern. He had to deal with the fact that he went to the Imperial Conference in 1930 to negotiate a favorable deal for Australia in terms of debt and our repayments. He had to do so with a Treasurer with a cloud on his head from a failed mining venture from the 1920s. I’m talking about, of course, Ted Theodore and the Mungana controversy.
So, this was a bloke who really had a lot on his plate. But at the same time, he forged ahead with a view of workplace relations or industrial relations and the powers there. Michael will have a more granular and a better qualitative understanding, but he was a proto-Keynesian in terms of how to tackle economic demand at a time when we were experiencing massive unemployment.
Scullin is an underrated figure in our national story. He reflects the colonial aspiration of working-class people at the end of the 19th century. He was an autodidact when he suffered. I think Michael does ambitiously say he suffered a football injury at 10. I should have used that excuse too, but in all seriousness, he did read all of Dickens’ novels in his convalescence at the age of 10. But, of course, there wasn’t social media to keep him busy. Then you look at the times that he was there. He was part of the building of the Labor Party and he went through the conscription split. I mean, a lot of erstwhile Labor leaders up to that point left.
As Michael says in his Watson book, John Christian Watson didn’t have a map of what the Labor Party should look like, although you could argue with some of our current structural-governance people don’t care about the map of what we are supposed to look like. The proposition is that he needed, that Watson had to be a pathfinder. Well, Scullin was there for all of those debates. And he was there at a time when he could bring people together. And it was a very dynamic time for the Labor Party. I mean, it’s very interesting that in 1906 when Scullin first ran, he ran against affable Alfred Deakin, in 1906, Watson didn’t turn up to campaign for him but, interestingly, Ramsay MacDonald who was the British Labour leader, did turn up in Ballarat and campaigned for Scullin. Scullin was a considerable figure, a considerable figure in what he represents, a strand of Australian Labor activity which we would be well reminded to try and engage with, be it faith, be it the bush, but also, in his period in office, extraordinarily big challenges.
And so, I don’t think it’s fair to just say that he’s a one-term government. You have got to look at the scales. He may have experienced failure but he himself was not a failure. From 1931, perhaps the final insight which I wanted to share with you from what I read from Michael’s work, is that Scullin then served in the parliament and continued to serve. Interesting point, he was of great use to Curtin and indeed, his office was between Curtin’s and Chifley’s. And so, he was a person who understood that you didn’t have to be the leader to be a leader. I think that’s very significant. Rancour is easy. As we know in politics, very few people walk out. They generally are carried out, generally by other people, but it would be clear from your reading of Scullin that he was a contributor and he supported the future administrations of Labor.
That’s a very powerful insight and it’s a good lesson for people in the modern movement that you can contribute and that it’s up to the person themself whether or not they are consumed by a sense of what they haven’t got the chance to do or what they can contribute and the absolute privilege to serve.
The very final thing: I went to the Melbourne General Cemetery just to have a look at what’s written on the cross. I mean, I believed it when it was written in Michael’s book, but I thought it was sufficiently interesting, that great tradition of the Melbourne General Cemetery, where they have political figures. On his Celtic cross, it is written, and I think this really sums it up, and it was a philosophy which he had at the end of the 19th century carried through the first half of the 20th century, but I’d put to you these words ring true now – “Justice and humanity demand interference whenever the weak are being crushed by the strong.” They were Scullin’s words: a great thought by a great politician.
(3) Tanya Plibersek at the Gleebooks Launch
Book launch speeches and Q&A on 9 December 2024 at Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Road, Glebe NSW 2037.
The sound recording is here:


Heather McNab, Book Club Host, Gleebooks:
Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. My name is Heather. I’m lucky enough to be part of the Gleebooks team. Before we get started, I’d just like to acknowledge that we are meeting on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and pay respects to elders, past and present, as well as any other First Nations folk who might be joining us this evening. First Nations people, no matter the lands that we originate from or meet on, are the original storytellers of this country and it is incredible privilege that this tradition endures today. So, on behalf of Gleebooks and Connor Court’s Australian Biographical Monographs, it is my pleasure to welcome everyone to celebrate James Scullin by Michael Easson. And I also have the privilege of introducing Michael and the Honorable Tanya Plibersek.
Michael Easson AM is a businessman, company director, former union leader and labor historian. 30 years ago, he was Secretary of the Labor Council of New South Wales, which we is now known as Unions New South Wales, a vice president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions and senior vice president of the New South Wales ALP. He published for Connor Court Whitlam’s Foreign Policy as well as the two books In Search of John Christian Watson, Labor’s First Prime Minister and today’s publication, James Scullin, all of which are available right here in store if you would like to pick up a copy and
The Honorable Tanya Plibersek is the Minister for the Environment and Water and the Federal Member for Sydney. Tanya grew up in the Sutherland Shire and is the daughter of migrants from Slovenia. Tanya holds a BA in Communications from the University of Technology Sydney and a Master of Politics and Public Policy from Macquarie University. Tanya worked in the Domestic Violence Unit at the New South Wales Ministry for the status and advancement of women before being elected to Federal parliament in 1998 where she has served ever since.
Please join me in welcoming Michael and Tanya.
The Hon.Tanya Plibersek:
Heather, thank you so very much for that introduction. And I want to join you in acknowledging that we’re meeting on the lands of the Gadigal and Wangal people, and also pay my respects to elders, past and present. I also want to acknowledge that we’ve got a lot of Labor Party elders in the room with us today as well. Of course, we’ve got John Murray, John Faulkner, John Robertson, more Johns, then we’ve got Michael Forshaw, Mary Easson, John Hewson, so many Johns. Thank you very much. Put your hand up if you’re sitting next to someone that I’ve missed acknowledging because that’s always what happens.
All right. Thank you. It’s such a pleasure to be invited by Michael to make some comments on this marvelous book. And before I do that, can I thank Gleebooks for hosting this event because really one of the wonderful things about Gleebooks is the way that it brings people together to discuss issues that are important to us, important history and important projects for the future. Gleebooks has played that role for many decades and continues to do so in this beautiful updated new environment. So, thank you to the staff of Gleebooks. We really appreciate all the richness that you give this suburb and this city.
This is a very thoughtful and illuminating book and I think it has taught me a lot about Scullin. He was not someone that I knew a lot about before reading this book. So, the very first thing I want to say is if he’s not a prime minister that you’re particularly familiar with, [the book] is short and it’s a great read. So, give it a go.
One of the interesting things about Scullin, perhaps one of the reasons that he’s often overlooked, is he was a one-term prime minister. And people often see that as a failure. Some have written him off because he was the prime minister for such a short term, but I think, as Michael says so very eloquently in the introduction, Scullin tasted failure, but he was never a failure himself. And despite the turmoil of the times including the conflict within the Labor Party, the split, Lang Labor and a lost election, as Michael has also said quite beautifully, he was serenely un-embittered. I think all of us, the fact that you’re self-selected to be in this room tonight means that you read history and probably love history. And history is important. It’s a great gift to know our history for itself, but we read history as well to give us tips on how to handle the present. And I found quite a few elements of this monograph on Scullin instructive for some of the challenges that we’ve been facing in more modern times.
Throughout this work, I saw in Scullin’s life things that have echoed through time to help shape the modern Labor Party. He was Catholic, he was working class, he was self-taught, he was deeply committed to social justice and the Labor movement. Born in 1876, the middle of nine children, Scullin left school at 14 to work a grocer’s shop in Ballarat. He loved learning. He frequented the Ballarat Library and became a debater. He worked where he could, jack-of-all-trades, Michael describes him, labouring in the mines and after long days, he would often go to an evening class to feed his hungry mind.
This is a theme of every person being able to access the education that brings richness to their lives and allows them to explore their potential and give back to their community and really, in this case, to rise to the highest office in the land or, I suppose, the second highest if you count the governor-general – that’s a debate for another day perhaps – this is such an enduring project for Labor. And I think Scullin’s example is such a wonderful one. My dad was a plumber who left school very early, education was disrupted by the war in Europe, came here, had to do his apprenticeship all over again, but he always had a New Scientist in hand or a National Geographic, or Radio National on the radio. This idea that education is for the elites or, as our opponents like to often say, the inner-city elites is so disproven. When you look at the people who fight for education for themselves and for other people, it’s so often working-class people who understand the value of it; and it’s so often the people who’ve had the best and most expensive educations who disparage the role of education in our society and in our economy. So, I thought that was an interesting insight into Scullin. But the thing that I particularly enjoyed is the drawing out of the deep interests, the connective tissue between the social justice messages in the Gospel, the work of the Catholic Church on the ground, and what Labor can do as its project for justice for working-class people. It did actually remind me, Michael, you would remember Archbishop Fisher’s fantastic eulogy at Johno Johnson’s funeral where he quoted Pope Leo the 13th in 1891 talking about the rights of those who labour under capitalism. and not just the right of workers to demand something better, but the responsibility of each of us to contribute to that work. Pope Leo said a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teaming masses of the labouring poor, a yoke little better than slavery itself. Throughout Scullin’s life, he searched for ways to best support social justice aims, whether that be through his Catholic faith and the active role he took in Catholicism and in the faith, through the union movement, through editing his newspaper, or in parliament. And I thought it was interesting, more than once the Catholic Church’s loss has been the gain of the federal parliamentary Labor Party. Yet again, here we have an example of a young man who decided that he could have pursued a more religious path but that the rights of working people would be best pursued through collective organisation and through Labor politics.
There’s a lot of parallels, I think, still in today’s modern Labor Party. There’s a lot of us who are bad Catholics, lapsed Catholics but, as my very good friend Jim Chalmers says, we might be more tribal than Bible, but those influences of struggling for something better and richer for the mass of the people, the broadest number in the community, is so ingrained in us as people and in the modern Labor Party. And I thought – there’s a really interesting The Rest Is Politics Podcast recently, where they were talking about whether socialism could have existed without Christianity. This idea that every person is equal, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for rich man to enter through the gates of Heaven, is like this fundamental notion that equality, social justice, redistribution are part of fairness and should be struggled and fought for. Scullin’s contribution to that is richly borne out, and again, that echoes through history. He is a real reminder of the why, of so much of what we do as a modern Labor Party.
The other great theme that I thought you drew out so well in this book, Michael, is that almost universally, when times get tough, people turn to Labor. Which I can tell you, when we were a newly elected government and facing the global financial crisis, felt like a bit of bit of a poison chalice, a bit of a heavy burden. Post-COVID, Great Depression, World War II, GFC, as I said, but as a Labor Party, we rise to it. Who else would you want in charge, but us? So, I thought Scullin’s incredible misfortune, which you described so well, to become … well, I mean, of course, he was incredibly fortunate to become Prime Minister, but what followed immediately afterwards, the eve of the Great Depression, there was such richness in the way that you described the debates that were happening in Australia and globally about how to respond to the Great Depression. So, again, for people who aren’t deeply engaged in this period of history, I would say this is a really good primer on the expectations of Otto Niemeyer [Sir Otto Niemeyer, sent to Australia by the Bank of England in 1930 to advise the Australian government on economic policy], the exhortations to cut wages, to cut government spending, Scullin’s resistance to that, Lang’s totally populist Peronista kind of approach to that, in those debates Ted Theodore emerges here as a really strong character and potentially a great lost opportunity as a leader in Australia. The description of the debates and the conflict of this period that Scullin was prime minister is rich and instructive as well.
Just as an aside, the trip that you described, five months in England, trying to convince the banks not to be so mean to us, also gave Scullin the opportunity to argue that Sir Isaac Isaacs should be appointed as governor-general, the first Australian-born governor-general. Michael makes the point of what an important step that was in showing greater independence from mother England and greater independence within the Commonwealth.
Now, the final thing I wanted to say about this period, and I think the way Michael talks about the debates that were happening in Australia at the time of Great Depression, whether there should be more spending on job-creating infrastructure projects, whether we should devalue the Australian dollar, all of these ring true for successive generations as well.
So, can I say, Michael, congratulations on a terrific book that taught me a lot about James Scullin but also gave me some real insights into not just the man but the times that he lived.
Thank you and congratulations.
Michael Easson:
Thank you very much, Tanya. I can now openly admit that the reason that I wanted Tanya to launch the book was for her to say kind things about me. So, shamelessly, having got that out of the way, I can now make a few remarks in thanks.
One interesting thing about Scullin is that he was this one-term prime minister, the prime minister who won with the biggest majority ever in 1929, and went out with a big defeat, subsequently, during the Great Depression. He was the third one-term prime minister. The first was Prime Minister Andrew Fisher who won in 1910 and then went out in 1913, and Joseph Cook came in then and was defeated in 1914. So, they were the first two; and then Fisher came back. Scullin had this amazing victory and this tremendous defeat.
It’s interesting to hear the reference to Pope Leo the 13th. As a young man, Scullin went to his local priest at the cathedral in Ballarat and asked “I’ve got this copy of the Rerum Novarum encyclical by Pope Leo the 13th. I wonder if you could take me through it.” The priest responded that he hadn’t read it closely – he had recently completed seminarian studies and perhaps was more interested in the founding fathers of the church in the early centuries than what Leo the 13th stated. The new priest dismissed Scullin’s interest and enthusiasm – “I wouldn’t worry about it”, or words to that effect. But Scullin never took that advice.
My theme is that Scullin is a person who deserves to be remembered for more than that tumultuous period of the Depression.
There’s a great statue in Canberra of Curtin and Chifley walking together, chatting about the issues associated with their roles when Labor came to office in 1941 – and ultimately went out in ’49 when Chifley was defeated. But during the time Curtin was alive, to 1945, the third person who should be represented in that statue is Scullin. Because when Curtin became prime minister, in between the office of the Prime Minister and the Treasurer, Curtin’s and Chifley’s offices in the old Parliament House, was Scullin’s office. He was the person who inspired, who guided, who gave great counsel to those two prime ministers. He also intervened in 1942 when there was a debate in the Labor Party as to whether limited conscription should occur, given the fight for our lives during World War II. And off his sickbed – he was often unwell –Scullin went into the caucus room to argue in favor of what Curtin put forward. So, he was a person who, in my view, weathered the storms of the Depression and saved the Labor Party from Jack Lang. Lang would have been a disaster, if he had taken control of Australia. The reference that Tanya made to the Peronista-like leadership of Lang, a populist demagogue, inspiring people, but he was a Labor version of Donald Trump but far worse. There was a dark side to Lang. That was one of Scullin’s great achievements. He stymied Lang from seizing control of the party.
It is interesting that Theodore, who was a [potentially] great Treasurer, who toyed with some ideas against the orthodoxy of the era, at a time where most economists including Otto Niemeyer advocated wage cuts, increased taxes, etc. In other words, in this the period when we were contracting as an economy, Theodore questioned conventional wisdom and asked if the economic downturn would worsen. Theodore had an inkling of the Keynesian approach about how to expand the economy. [Growth was the ‘get-out-of-jail’ card.] Theodore was the treasurer under Scullin at the beginning of the government; but he had to leave office because of the Royal Commission in Queensland over a mining deal that we know as Mungana Mines controversy [or scandal] and its sale to the Queensland government in the early 1920s. The thwarted promise of Theodore to change the Scullin government’s [political and fiscal] trajectory is one thing I touch upon in the book.
I want to thank Mary for having inspired me to write. I did this one, and the Watson biography – both on sale at the back of the room. This is the second task for me tonight, not only to thank Tanya for being very generous in her comments, but to say there’s not only one. There are three books on sale here. There’s tonight’s Scullin book. There’s Whitlam’s Foreign Policy. Plus the Watson book I wrote when Mary and I were on a cruise between Barcelona and Fremantle a year and a bit ago. I had to say to Mary, “Look honey, there’s a limit to the number of times I can walk the deck. So, I need a library, and a good internet connection.” All that was onboard. I could look up Trove, which is the digitised record of most newspapers published in Australia. I could get going. “I’ll join you for the meals but there’s sometimes three days before we get to the next port.” I had to do something. This book is one of the products of that joyful cruise between Barcelona and Fremantle. So, Mary, thank you very much for permission, and the journey.
Finally, Scullin wasn’t a profound thinker, but he got some basic ideas right. It is often the case that some of the most admirable people in public life may not be geniuses, but they get to the nub of what matters. There’s a tall granite Celtic cross above his grave; emblazoned on the stonework are Scullin’s words “Justice and humanity demand interference whenever the weak are being crushed by the strong.” Those words symbolise his life, his mission, and what the Labor movement stands for. That’s a good reason as to why he should be remembered – for his mistakes, for his inspiration, and for his continuing relevance as to what Labor believes in and why we exist.
Thank you.
Q&A

Michael Easson: Question and answer session now for either Tanya or I. Maybe given that everyone is thinking about that wine that they didn’t have earlier, perhaps we might get, say, five questions from the audience.
None? That’s okay too.
Question: How important was religion to Scullin?
Michael Easson: Scullin always thought that there was no inconsistency between his faith and Labor values. He never explicitly said “I’m the Catholic Labor prime minister.” He just believed that what Catholicism stood for in terms of social justice is what the Labor movement stood for. There is an interesting passage at the end of John Robertson’s book on Scullin, that was published in 1971; he asked the question whether it really was Rerum Novarum that mattered [to Scullin’s political development], or would the son of a rail-worker have come up with the same or comparable viewpoints as what Scullin formed? The question asked by that author illuminates. There’s no inconsistency between what inspired Scullin from of his faith and what inspired him into Labor. It’s interesting that Australia, well ahead of the rest of the England, had a Catholic prime minister. The United States had their first Catholic president in 1963 and only their second with Joe Biden. So, maybe Australia overcame a lot of the anti-Catholic prejudices in the way that that Scullin, then Lyons [also a Catholic], were prime ministers. And there’s also the fact that we had Jewish governor-general [with Sir Isaac Isaacs]. Those were tangible signs of tolerance and respect in those times Down Under.
Tanya Plibersek: Thanks, Daniel. I think Australians have been good at saying you can be religious, you can be an atheist, not really our business. For example, I think it’s much harder in America, if you said you’re an atheist, to become president. I think that would be a real mark against you. I would say the exception to what I think is the general Australian view of Live and Let Live is more recently we’ve got Jewish members of parliament who’ve had extraordinary pressure put on them from both sides of the debate after terrible events in Israel in October last year and Muslim members of parliament. And there’s been assumptions about what they should do, what they should say in these circumstances. I think that’s a quite recent and, I would say, quite unhelpful development in our politics.
Michael Easson: Any other questions?
Question: I lived in London for 11 years. As an Aussie who’s been overseas for a long time, thinking about the context of one-termism with a big majority, then swept away. Do you feel there’s any sort of political echoes or lessons or even economic policy lessons that maybe flow through either into Australian politics today, you alluded to it, or overseas when there’s all these sorts of headwinds against the centre-left?
Michael Easson: Maybe I can refer to the UK. There was a huge majority for Boris Johnson in 2019 and a huge Kier Starmer win this year. That’s an example which shows a very fickle electorate out there. In the Australian context, just as occurred during the Great Depression where people are hurting and feeling frustrated, populism can be successful. I’ve to some degree avoided mentioning in any detail the battles between Scullin and Lang but it is interesting how desperate, fickle, and dangerously populist ideas were prominent in that period. We also live in volatile times.
Tanya Plibersek: And I would say that the times are particularly volatile now for all sorts of global reasons. But one of the things that has really affected politics is the rise of social media and the hollowing out of mainstream media, lack of competition and alternate voices. Most people get most of their information from social media now. And social media thrives on division, discord, extreme views. And so, it’s not surprising that things change very quickly and change in a big way when the kind of engines of discussion that most people are engaged with thrive on conflict.
Michael Easson: Any other questions or comment?
Question: The three most recent books that are for sale are all about late leaders. What’s the attraction of writing about a late leader? And do you think you would write about a current prime minister or a prime minister who’s still alive but no longer in office?
Michael Easson: Was that question directed to Tanya or to me? Look, I’ve been asked to write a chapter in a book on the Albanese government. I’ve explained to the editor of that book, I’m not writing it until after the next election. My piece will be on foreign policy. I am fascinated with the past and the current. I don’t envy anyone involved in public life. I mean, Mary [Easson] especially went through that when she was the Federal member for Lowe between 1993 and ’96. It is incredibly demanding going through elected public service. It’s incredibly tough. Tanya knows this too well. I admire anyone who gets involved in any political party, who cares for Australia to get involved. If you subject yourself to election, and becoming a leader or as a minister, or shadow minister, it’s an incredibly tough life. I generally admire the people who are in political life in Australia. One thing I agree with Malcolm Turnbull about is when he said politics in Australia is amongst the most boring in the OECD. It’s partly boring because the polarisation that we see in the United States and many other countries is not the case here. There’s a greater degree of stability in Australia and it’s one of our successes. Obviously, I’m voting for the government because of who I am, whenever that election is held here. I’m looking forward to writing about the government, but it will be after Albanese government is re-elected.
Question: Thanks, Michael. I think the answer to my question is going to be in the book which I will buy and read, of course. Maybe writing about current prime ministers, most prime ministers these days are writing their own memoirs. My question is: you mentioned Lang a couple of times and the divisions that existed because of that time. The Labor Party was also out of office for many years because of the split in the ’50s. How important was the split, I’ll call it that, with Lang and the party at that time particularly say in regard to losing that election or was it essentially just the depression and economic circumstances keeping us out of office for a number of years, because there was and still is –I can remember my father and others saying this – there was a lot of love for Lang because he was dismissed; he was a gigantic figure, but could you just comment more about the importance of the fight within the Labor Party between the Lang forces from the [NSW] state position where he was Premier and then subsequently when he was in the federal parliament. How much [did] that contributed to the demise of the Scullin government?
Michael Easson: Great question. For those who don’t know – my brother can correct me – Lang was leader of the Labor Party between 1923 and 1939. And for a large part of this period, the central executive of the party appointed him; there was no caucus or MPs’ ballot. He was a dictatorial person, he expelled people left, right and center who disagreed with him. That diminished the calibre of candidates and MPs within the Labor Party. But he was sometimes inspiring, as he argued we should repudiate the bondholders of London who were trying to extract to the maximum interest on their debt. Lang never thought hard about the fact that Australia had freely entered those arrangements. But he was right to say everyone should take a haircut. Labor in New South Wales split into three different Labor parties. They hated each other. I grew up in a household where my father said Lang and Chiefly were great Labor leaders; the greatest. I discovered as I heard and learnt more of our history that they ran candidates against each other and hated each other. The turmoil had to be corrected. It was when William McKell became NSW Labor Leader in 1939 and went on to win at the May 1941 state election. McKell set up Labor for an extended period of government in NSW; initially, his example helped Federal Labor to be trusted when independents switched to Curtin, and he became prime minister in 1941. McKell created a standard of Labor governing that other states and the Commonwealth sought to emulate. One of the interesting things about the legacy of the Lang-inspired divisions in Labor, not only in NSW, but across the country, is when the Labor Party split in 1955, a number of people in New South Wales recalled how bad it was during the Lang period. People like Joe Riordan, who many people may not have heard of, he was the leader of Clerks Union, a leading ALP Industrial Grouper (as I would have been if I had been alive in that period), he took the view that splitting away from Labor would be a disaster for all. His father was a Langite. [Riordan was a successful minister at the end of the Whitlam government.] Riordan told me about Lang, how bitter that was, how ‘a house divided’ kept Labor out of office in NSW. The Lang period had that consequence. [The memory of which, ironically but powerfully, was helpful in keeping NSW Labor mostly whole in the mid-1950s.]
Question: To add a little something, I thought, Michael, you said almost as an aside in the book and you mentioned it again then that some of Lang’s demands were quite reasonable, and it would have been reasonable to argue for an interest rate pause or a repayment pause. Can you expand a little bit on what you thought was reasonable in Lang’s argument?
Michael Easson: That is a hard question. Look, the disagreement I have with Lang is the way he led the party, expelling anyone opposed to him. Even McKell was in danger of expulsion from the Labor Party. That was one thing that I disagreed with Lang, his style of leadership. In terms of his approach to the Great Depression, he was all over the place at various times. One thing referenced in the book which, maybe I could have spelt out more clearly, is that the Premiers’ Plan, the consensus approach to how to combat the economic depression, the plan which marshalled all of the premiers and the Commonwealth government to an agreement, was not a stable document. It varied over the period between 1930 and 1931. Lang was always against and always mischievous. There were good points. I agree about sharing the pain, haircuts, temporary repayment holidays, which were sometimes powerfully expressed by Lang, but it was married with the attitude “Unless I’m in charge, I’m going to smash you.”
Question: Especially if you’re arguing for wage cuts, pension cuts, all the others …
Michael Easson: Exactly. And that is the big reason why Scullin was identified, tarred, with that approach of the Premiers’ Plan, as it was initially formulated. The Communist Party also rose in support amongst parts of the manufacturing industry where unemployment became rife. All those factors were there. And then you had Theodore trying to project how we needed to expand the economy. It was a mess, this whole period. I found it incredibly hard to understand all of it. I found a book of Australian economists reflecting on the Great Depression. I was reading these chapters hoping to get an insight. One chapter said that the measures adopted during the Great Depression had negligible impact on what took Australia out of the doldrums. The most significant thing that pushed Australia to recovery was through the devaluation of the Australian Pound. This led to our exports becoming more interesting – cheaper – to other parts of the world. We used to export to European countries as well as export to Great Britain. That devaluation was the most significant factor generating growth.
Question: Thanks to both of you for a very entertaining talk. Of course, for Scullin, it wasn’t only Lang that split off, but also on the right Joseph Lyons split off. So, Scullin had to deal with a three-way split of the party at the time when he was trying to manage this declining economy. So, how do you judge his dealing with this catastrophic three-way split?
Michael Easson: You can’t say I’m impressed. In 1930, Scullin went away to the UK to try to deal with the bondholders, getting a reduction in interest rate repayments, which he achieved. Immediately before he left for overseas, Theodore had to stand down as treasurer because of the Royal Commission in Queensland. There was eventually a finding that there was not enough evidence to convict. But before that finding, Scullin believed that Queensland’s conservative government was playing politics, maximizing the political pain for Theodore, not swiftly bringing legal actions to a head. When Scullin came back at the end of January 1931, after five months away, he saw Lyons and Fenton who had been holding the fort for Scullin in the Labor Party. Lyons was the acting treasurer. Fenton was the acting prime minister. When he came back, Scullin thought, if I might paraphrase: Theodore’s got the best brain here. I am going to reinstate him as treasurer. To hell with what the Queensland government is doing. They are dragging their feet on taking legal criminal action against him. So, I’m going to reinstate him. He is the brightest man in the caucus. Lyons and Fenton felt betrayed, dishonoured. Scullin should have handled that better. Neither Scullin, Lyons, nor Fenton had thought through ‘what next?’. Lyons and Fenton did not plan to hive away from the Labor Party in the way that they did. They thought “If you’re reinstating Theodore, we’re off.” Originally, they formed an All for Australia League, wanting to sound and be non-party partisan. The Nationalists, the opposition, ably led at that moment by John Latham, said “Hell no; let’s combine; we could create a new party.” That happened rapidly. [The United Australia Party was formed; Lyons was its leader and soon the nation’s prime minister.] Scullin did not handle that well or foresee possible consequences
That’s the end of the Q&A. I’d like to thank Tanya and to remind anyone who hasn’t yet bought the book[s] – we can both sign them!