page_title: History of the Australian Labor Party
section_title: World War II to early 1950s
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Australian Labor Party / World War II to early 1950s
caption_attribution_description: Ben Chifley
context_page_description: The history of the Australian Labor Party has its origins in the Labour parties founded in the 1890s in the Australian colonies prior to federation. Labor tradition ascribes the founding of Queensland Labour to a meeting of striking pastoral workers under a ghost gum tree in Barcaldine, Queensland in 1891. The Balmain, New South Wales branch of the party claims to be the oldest in Australia. Labour as a parliamentary party dates from 1891 in New South Wales and South Australia, 1893 in Queensland, and later in the other colonies.
  The first general election contested by Labour candidates was the 1891 New South Wales election, where Labour candidates won 35 of 141 seats. The major parties were the Protectionist and Free Trade parties and Labour held the balance of power. It offered parliamentary support in exchange for policy enactment. Also in 1891, three United Labor Party of South Australia candidates were elected to the South Australian Legislative Council.
context_section_description: The Curtin and Chifley Governments governed Australia through the latter half of World War II and initial stages of the transition to peace. Labor leader John Curtin became prime minister in October 1941, before the outbreak of the War in the Pacific, when two independents in the House of Representatives changed their support in the hung Parliament to Labor. Child endowment payments were introduced in 1941, and widow's pensions in 1942. At the start of that Pacific campaign in December 1941, Curtin declared that "Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom", thus helping to establish the Australian-American alliance (later formalised as ANZUS by the Menzies Government). Remembered as a strong war time leader and for a landslide win at the 1943 election, receiving 58.2% of the two-party preferred vote and a Senate majority. Commonwealth unemployment benefits were introduced in 1945. Curtin died in office just prior to the end of the war and was succeeded by Ben Chifley.
  Chifley Labor won the 1946 election winning 54.1% of the two-party preferred vote against the Coalition of the newly formed Liberal Party of Australia and the Country Party. Chifley oversaw Australia's initial transition to a peacetime economy. Early in this term Chifley was successful in obtaining voter approval for the 1946 Social Services referendum. Chifley's initiatives included the expansion of health care in Australia with a Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) and free hospital ward treatment, the introduction of Australian citizenship (1948), a post-war immigration scheme, the founding of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the reorganisation and enlargement of the Australian scientific organisation CSIR to the CSIRO, the Snowy Mountains Scheme, improvements in social services, the establishment of a Universities Commission for the expansion of university education, the creation of the Commonwealth Employment Service (CES), the introduction of federal funds to the States for public housing construction, the creation of a civilian rehabilitation service, over-viewing the foundation of airlines Qantas and Trans Australia Airlines, and the creation of the Australian National University. To a large extent, Chifley saw centralisation of the economy as the means to achieve his ambitions.
  After the war, the Communist Party of Australia contested for the leadership of the working class with the Australian Labor Party, and launched an industrial offensive in 1947, culminating in the 1949 Australian coal strike. Chifley saw this as a communist challenge to Labor's position in the labour movement. At the conference of the New South Wales Labor Party in June 1949, Chifley sought to define the labour movement as having:
  [A] great objective – the light on the hill – which we aim to reach by working for the betterment of mankind... [Labor would] bring something better to the people, better standards of living, greater happiness to the mass of the people.
  — Ben Chifley, 
  After seven weeks, Chifley used Australian military forces and strikebreakers to break the strike, the first time such a thing had been done by a Labor government. The measure cost Chifley a lot of his credibility among Labor supporters.
  In June 1948, the Chifley government adopted the British model for television in Australia, with the establishment of a government-controlled TV station in each capital city and the prohibition on commercial TV licences. This policy was never put into practice, however, because the Labor government did not have the opportunity to establish the TV network before it was defeated at the 1949 election. The incoming Liberal-Country Party coalition led by Robert Menzies changed the industry structure by also permitting the establishment of American-style commercial stations.
  The Chifley government made significant changes to the electoral laws prior to the 1949 election: the voting system for the Senate was changed to proportional voting, and there was a large increase in the number 
caption: Ben Chifley, Prime Minister 1945–49
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