Labor-Liberal amalgamation: Tasmania’s future?

Up until 1908 Deakin’s protectionists had relied on Labor support to maintain power, in return for concessions, but when it became apparent that Labor could gain majority electoral support in its own right, with the election of the short-lived Fisher government, trade issue “principles” and other differences with Reid’s right-wingers lost relevance.

So it came to be that the Fusionists created the Liberal Party, marrying a polyglot group of liberals, conservatives, business, property and industrial interests together that only had one thing in common which really united them all - a desire to stop Labor gaining parliamentary power.

History repeats itself, but never exactly, so it is not too difficult to discern the similarities between 1909 and Robin Gray’s suggestion for Tasmania here and now. In fact, there is much, much less to differentiate Tasmania’s Labor-Liberal accord now than there was between Deakin’s protectionists and Reid’s free-traders in 1909. The motive for such a “fusion” is essentially the same - to preserve the status quo, to stop a socially progressive reformist agenda, and to stop it in the interests of capital and corporate power.

The second occasion of party amalgamation occurred in the aftermath of the failure of the first conscription referendum in 1916, designed to draft troops for the trenches of the Western Front in World War I rather than rely on volunteers, a proposal backed by the Liberal Party and by the right wing of the Labor government, including Billy Hughes, the Prime Minister.

Hughes, who faced a revolt of anti-conscriptionist Labor MPs, joined with the Liberals to form a new political party (the Nationalist Party) in order to keep the prime-ministerial reins of power. In this new arrangement five ex-Labor politicians shared cabinet portfolios with six Liberals, and Hughes retained his position as Prime Minister until 1923, but the Labor Party did not regain government until the worst possible time to hold office, in 1929.

The lesson of this amalgamation was the first strong indication of the convergence of (right wing) Labor with the increasingly non-liberal Liberals on one key policy issue which enabled a long-standing workable merger. It was a merger, for example, which enabled Billy Hughes to be re-elected to federal parliament until his death in 1952, aged 88. (Hughes sat in the House of Representatives for 50 years, from its foundation in 1901 until 1952.)

Hughes’ 1917 merger is close to the sort of arrangement Robin Gray is suggesting for Tasmania, a merger of the right across the political spectrum in an attempt to marginalise the left. The main difference is that in 1917 the left was marginalised by a Labor split. However, just as with the 1909 Fusion, the relationships between Hughes and his new party colleagues were much more difficult than any differences between Bartlett and Hodgman in 2009, which are essentially cosmetic.

The third merger took place in 1932, at the height of the Depression, and again involved a Labor split to weaken or destroy the left, with the Labor right, led by Joseph Lyons (former Labor premier of Tasmania), joining with the anti-Labor parties to form the United Australia Party, with Lyons as leader and Prime Minister from 1932 to 1939.

There is an important element of difference between these amalgamations and Gray’s suggestion for Tasmania.

They all entailed the destruction of Labor as a political force. This is no longer necessary because since the 1960s the ALP gradually converted to the right-wing neo-liberal agenda of its opponents, especially in the period of the Hawke-Keating administrations, without any dissenting voices from within its own ranks. Gradually the ALP jettisoned its traditional commitment to a social reform agenda (except in rhetoric, because this helps to persuade the rusted-on voters to keep the faith, at least for old-time’s sake).

The two main parties have gradually converged on every main area of policy across the spectrum, and since the 1990s have rarely bothered to campaign on strong policy differences (Howard’s industrial relations policy of 2007 was an exception, at least in public perception), so that now, as Robin Gray says, there is nothing to differentiate them except the artificial battle for personal power, based around leadership perceptions.

In the first half of the 20th century there was always a genuine and strong commitment within Labor on matters of equity and social justice, a commitment which survived the splits of 1917 and the 1930s into the post-war years (or endured as a consequence), and which lingered against the trend of neo-liberal transformation for some time in the hearts and minds of some Labor politicians after the 1970s (best exemplified, in my view, by Bill Hayden, and his hard fight to implement an equitable national health scheme), but then weakened and has since died.