page_title: Frank Anstey
section_title: Political career
hierarchical_section_title: Frank Anstey / Political career
caption_attribution_description: English: Australian politician Frank Anstey
context_page_description: Francis George "Frank" Anstey was an Australian politician who served as a member of the House of Representatives from 1910 to 1934, representing the Labor Party. He was Minister for Health and Minister for Repatriation in the Scullin Government from 1929 to 1931.
context_section_description: In 1902 Anstey was elected as a Labor member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly for East Bourke Boroughs, and from 1904 he was member for Brunswick, both electorates being in the working-class suburbs of Melbourne. He switched to federal politics at the 1910 election, winning the seat of Bourke in the House of Representatives.
  
  Despite his English birth, Anstey was an Australian nationalist. He saw Australia as an economic colony of the finance houses of the City of London, which, like many in the labour movement at this time, he described as the "money power". His views are typified by this passage from a 1907 editorial in the newspaper of the Australian Workers' Union:
  The Money Power! It is the greatest power on Earth; and it is arrayed against Labour. No other power that is or ever was can be named with it.... It attacks us through the press – a monster with a thousand lying tongues, a beast surpassing in foulness any conceived by the mythology that invented dragons, wehr wolves, harpies, ghouls and vampires. It thunders against us from innumerable platforms and pulpits. The mystic machinery of the churches it turns into an engine of wrath for our destruction.
  — The Brisbane Worker
  In 1914 Australia, under the Labor government of Andrew Fisher, entered the First World War on the side of Britain. Anstey was one of the few Labor members who opposed the war from the start, and as a result he was highly unpopular for a time. By 1917, however, anti-war sentiment was growing and Anstey became one of the leaders of the movement against conscription for the war.
  Anstey published a book called The Kingdom of Shylock, in which he described the "money power" which he said controlled and manipulated capitalism from behind the scenes. "London is, so far, the web centre of international finance," he wrote. "In London are assembled the actual chiefs or the representatives of the great financial houses of the world. The Money Power is something more than Capitalism. These men constitute the Financial Oligarchy. No nation can be really free where this financial oligarchy is permitted to hold dominion, and no 'democracy' can be aught but a name that does not shake it from its throne."
  Anstey described this system as the "Black Masonic Plutocracy": "These men constitute the Financial Oligarchy, this group of speculators properly designated and distinguished as the Money Power, controls the whole mechanism of exchange, and all undertakings in the field of industry are subject to its will and machinations. It wields an unseen sceptre over thrones and populations, and bloody slaughter is as profitable to its pockets as the most peaceful peculation." 
  "In The Kingdom of Shylock Anstey identified the leaders of the "money power" in London as a group of private financiers associated with the circles of the Morgan family in the United States. "After Medina came the Jew, Manasseh Lopes," Anstey wrote. "Then came Samson Gideon and the Goldsmids – Abraham and Benjamin. They were succeeded by the Rothschilds."
  The fact that some of Anstey's prominent targets were Jewish has caused critics to accuse him of anti-Semitism. The Australian labour historian Peter Love writes: "The anti-Semitism in The Kingdom of Shylock was no aberration. It arose from the logic of his [Anstey's] analysis combined with the cultural tradition of which he was a part. The vulgarities of Christian mythology had built up an accretion of hatred and suspicion towards Jews over many centuries. The resulting stereotype of the greedy and cunning Jewish financier was a commonplace convention in the writings of British radicals and American populists. It was also a persistent theme among Australian labour radicals.
  
  In 1922 Anstey became Assistant Leader of the ALP in the House, a post he held until 1926.
caption: Frank Anstey
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