DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE

In its development, the Australian working class has exhibited many of the contradictory features that characterised the workers' movement in Britain in the 19th century. Like the Australian capitalist class, the Australian working class has been strongly marked by its British origins, but it has also displayed many distinctive features, flowing mainly from the special position of Australia as a capitalist power with a predominantly white population in a large continent on the edge of the Asian region.

Distinctive features of the Australian labour movement

During the first decades of the British settlement of Australia, the labouring population consisted overwhelmingly of convicts. In the early part of the 19th century, a non-convict labour market began to develop in response to complaints by private employers about the inefficiency of convict labour. This ``free'' labour supply consisted of ex-convicts, free immigrants, retired military personnel, and convicts who were permitted to sell their labour power in their spare time. With the expansion of the pastoral industry and large-scale assisted immigration of Britain's urban poor to Australia from the early 1830s, convict labour declined significantly in the economic life of the Australian colonies.

Because Australia's interior is not so well watered as comparable land in the USA, the country was not nearly so favourable for small farming. As a result, Australian agriculture was dominated from the beginning by large-scale capitalist pastoral operations using wage labour.

Rather than the peasant farmer of Europe or the independent smallholder of the United States, from the very early stages the typical rural dweller in Australia was an itinerant wage worker. This conditioned the early rise of a rural labour movement. The shearers, in particular, became the backbone of the Australian Workers' Union.

The itinerant lifestyle of much of this rural workforce, and the fact that an important part of the capitalist class acquired its initial wealth from the pastoral capitalism of the early 19th century, provided the social basis for a key component of the nationalist ideology of the Australian capitalist class — the myth of rugged individualism and mateship in the harsh conditions of the Australian bush.

In the period from 1860 to 1890, a long capitalist boom in Australia provided the material conditions for the rise of a strong, though narrowly based, trade-union movement, and for the domination of liberal and opportunist ideas within it. The boom established the basis for collaboration between Australian capital and the leaders of the labour movement around the following issues:

1. Protectionism. The mining of gold in the 1850s provided investment funds for industrial and commercial capital in Australia. In Victoria — the immediate centre of the gold rush — the new industries were protected by tariffs on imports. The young working-class movement allied itself with the industrial capitalists in their fight with the rural capitalists (squattocracy) for tariff protection. This seemed to be the obvious way of securing jobs for the growing numbers who abandoned gold prospecting after the initial rushes. In the minds of many workers, higher living standards became identified with protectionism.

2. State intervention. Like other industrial capitalist economies that began their development in the shadow of Britain's industrial and commercial domination of the world market, Australian capitalism was forced to rely on a high degree of state intervention in the economy to provide the infrastructure within which indigenous capitalist industry could flourish.

Protectionism was but one aspect of this state intervention. Unlike Britain and the USA, where there was a high level of private investment in railways, roads, canals, bridges, harbours, telegraph networks, etc., in Australia no private entrepreneur could provide the necessary capital for the construction of these vital transport and communications systems. Instead, they were built and operated by the collective capitalist — the capitalist state.

The capitalist state thus became a large employer, providing secure employment for a significant section of the workforce and strengthening the unions' bargaining power with private employers. As a result, Australian workers were able to win comparatively high wages. Within the emerging labour movement, this strengthened the false belief that the capitalist state could be used to serve workers' interests. This liberal illusion was most strongly expressed in the demand of the trade unions for the establishment of state arbitration courts. For many labour radicals, socialism simply meant increased economic intervention by the capitalist state.

3. Racism and pro-British xenophobia. Because the Australian nation emerged as a white settler outpost of British colonialism, based on the dispossession and brutal suppression of the Aboriginal tribes and dependent on the protection and prosperity of British capitalism in a region of non-white, colonially oppressed peoples, the nationalist ideology of the emerging Australian capitalist class was characterised by white supremacism and pro-British xenophobia.

An economic boom in the 1860s coincided with the end of assisted immigration from Britain, creating a chronic labour shortage that enabled the working class to win wages and conditions better than those prevailing in Europe. Defence of this relatively higher standard of living through control of the labour supply became a key aim of the unions.

Sections of the capitalist class sought to weaken the unions' position by swelling the labour market with immigrant labour from Asia and the South Pacific. Instead of attempting to draw Chinese or Pacific island labour into the union movement, the labour leaders identified these non-white immigrant workers as enemies and sought an alliance with the dominant section of the bosses to impose racially based immigration controls. Many union leaders became active proponents of the xenophobic racism that was central to Australian nationalism. Repeatedly in the 1880s and 1890s, intercolonial trades union congresses passed resolutions calling for a White Australia policy.

4. Bourgeois-democratic reforms. In the relatively favourable circumstances of a persistent labour shortage, the working class was able to achieve the democratic right to organise in trade unions. The general prosperity resulting from the post-1850s boom softened social conflicts and made the Australian capitalist class far more willing than its European counterparts to concede formal democratic rights (universal male suffrage, secret ballot, etc.) to sections of the working class.

The absence of an entrenched hereditary landowning class and the early extension of formal democratic rights to male workers fostered strong petty-bourgeois egalitarian illusions among the latter. These illusions were incorporated into the nationalist ideology of the Australian capitalist class through the myth that Australia is a classless, egalitarian society in which conflict between capital and labour may be resolved harmoniously.