Nothing to offer but fear? Non-Labor Federal electioneering in Australia, 1914-1954
Creators: name: Lee, Andrew
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 1997

description: Between 1914 and 1954 non-Labor federal politicians appealed for votes by claiming to guard property, the rule of law, and national loyalty, and denouncing the Labor Party as the enemy of these principles. Non-Labor electioneering comprised two aspects: 'limited', and 'threat and loyalty.' The former was based on proposals for national development and supposed that Labor's attitude to them was misguided, but not fundamentally dangerous. The latter was based on accusations that Labor sympathised with radicals who were disloyal to the state; and that Labor, therefore, posed an existential threat to the community. These tendencies overlapped, and were combined in election propaganda in order that threat and loyalty rhetoric might dramatise limited issues. In the 1914-18 war, the Nationalists demanded that national effort should be concentrated into support for British war aims, and defined the upholding of conscription as the criterion of loyalty. In the atmosphere of European war and Anglo-Irish violence, the Nationalists equated Labor's opposition to conscription with disloyalty, but promised to preserve a pre-war settlement that included the welfare and arbitration associated with Labor. From the early 1920s, the Anglo-Irish truce moderated the sectarianism of the nonLabor image. Nationalists promised to suppress the threat that union militancy allegedly posed to the development of Australia as an economy of Imperial trade, investment and immigration. During the Depression crisis of 1930-31, non-Labor undertook to restore confidence by shunning unorthodoxy and adhering to policies idealised as traditionally British. Throughout the 1930s, the United Australia Party persisted with a rhetoric of financial orthodoxy, despite the abandonment of many elements of laissez faire. The Second World War was the trough of non-Labor's fortunes in this period. Robert Menzies' first government enjoyed little credibility as a war administration, and the United Australia Party became discredited, as the proliferation of independent non-Labor groups at the 1943 election testified. Re-grouping among extra-parliamentary supporters, however, together with the defeat of the postwar reconstruction referendum in 1944, created the conditions for Menzies to form a new party at the end of that year. The Liberal Party continued a traditional non-Labor politics of antisocialism and anti-communism, but recognised !he popularity of 1940s welfare and full employment policies, and attempted to promote a positive agenda of free enterprise, and alliance with the West. A heavy win over the Labor government in 1949 seemed to confirm the success of these tactics, but two years later the government failed to carry a referendum to ban the Communist Party. Nor did repetition of the anti-socialist and antiCommunist themes of 1949 arrest a decline in the government's popularity. The government was returned to power in 1954, however, in a campaign which combined the celebration of postwar prosperity with an emotive antiCommunist campaign, fuelled by a spy scandal. This association of themes was typical of the range of non-Labor's federal electioneering tactics in the forty years since 1914.