Something I posted at the other place, which sums up my starting point for thinking about the federal election that brought the Liberal-Country Coalion to power, and lead to Labor being consigned to Opposition for 23 years:
This is a subject close to my heart, the first substantive debate I ever had on this site was about one important yet misconstrued aspect of the 1949 election.*
Anyway, all the reading I've done over the years since then on this subject has brought me to the conclusion that Ben Chifley always had a fight on his hands for a third full-term, or a fourth term in total (Labor had taken power in the middle of the 1940 parliament), but he signed the death warrant on a close result between, (a.) his attempts at bank nationalisation starting in 1947 (and more specifically, the fact that it was drawn out right through to the middle of 1949, thanks to Evatt's foolish Privy Council appeal strategy), and (b.) the reintroduction of some rationing after the devaluation of the Australian Pound in late 1949, said devaluing being done in conjunction with the UK Pound sterling devaluation.
Rereading Ross McMullin and David Day on these subjects, I find that a theme of Chifley's leadership in those two years is of complacency and emerging inflexibility, which explains that two-year-long political strategic failure I identify playing out. But then I recently read Julie Suares' book on his belief in internationalism, which highlights subtle, engaged elements of his leadership which have never been properly appreciated, and also, among other things, simply retells the story of his victory in getting Labor to support Australia signing the Bretton Woods agreement. That treaty fight is something which has always been viewed as an example of Chifley still being very pragmatic, still being very much on top of internal party political strategy, right in the very same year he made his fatal mistake on banking. So I think Labor could have made 1949 competitive with just a few realistic changes on the part of Chifley and others.
As a base PoD, I'd simply have a combination of, (a.) the public service's high finance expert, Nugget Coombs, not being overseas at a conference with his minister, John Dedman, but being in Canberra when Chifley was receiving news on the Hight Court decision against his banking legislation, and (b.) Chifley not only entering into a deliberative process with Coombs at the Department of Post-War Reconstruction vis-a-vis options, but also reaching out to his old friend ex-treasurer Ted Theodore for advice on what to do (I think Theodore was still healthy enough to travel to Canberra in late 1947, as he was a Packer press board member until 1949). FWIW Coombs in his memoirs declares he would have urged against nationalising the retail banking sector if he'd been present for the decision in August. But he also says that he was perfectly willing to write a position paper citing DeGaulle's nationalisation of France's banks as a viable policy example. I think the combination of complicated devil's advocate advice from Coombs, blunt big-end-of-town advice from Theodore, and perhaps also advice from literally any constitutional lawyer other than H.V. Evatt RE what realistically happens when the High Court gets handed the issue... (Bare in mind, nobody even expected Chifley to go as far as he did IOTL, it was a total surprise!)
Avoiding the banking debacle is the base PoD. That removes the greatest motivating force for conservative middle class mobilisation against socialism (Stuart Macintyre claims the banks put up a fighting fund of £100,000, phenomenal if true; certainly thousands of white collar workers felt compelled to become footsoldiers in this cause, which basically allowed the Liberal Party to reach parity in activism with a historically united and successful Labor movement.)
But I also think a second PoD is needed; Menzies not only has to be denied the political consolidation his Liberal leadership gained in OTL from the bank nationalisation issue, but as Opposition leader his tenure has to be threatened, and at times even downright beseiged, in the two years going to the election. It needn't follow that no bank crusade robs him of all his momentum against a long-in-the-tooth social democratic reformist govt, but it is true that he was not hugely respected by his own side at this time; Ian Hancock's history of the NSW Liberal Party organisation is strong on the idea that it was the nineteen fifties that made Menzies be beloved by his party, not the late nineteen forties.
I think Menzies then facing problems with fellow Coalition MPs, over his welfare state policy of extending child endowment, something very easily demagogued from the Right (who in this scenario would not be usefully diverted over the bank issue) as either Labor-lite socialism, or as a bribe for large Catholic families, plus also a garbled Opposition response to the currency devaluation in September 1949, possibly with Menzies-sceptics talking up committing to 'putting value back in the pound' regardless of the effects on primary exports, is enough to get to a Labor reelection.
*The notion that Chifley's breaking of the NSW coal miners strike in the winter 1949 lead to an actual working class, pro-union revolt at the polls against his government. This is a belief held by many Left sectionalist labour (deliberate use of both the small 'l' and 'u' there) people, in that they draw on the implication that because that strike and its legal suppression were so controversial, it must therefore have been a factor at the election in the exact activist, determinative way they believe it was, i.e. dedicated, militant, working class solidarity voters withdrew their support for Labor, electing the Liberal-Country Party coalition in its stead.
This is, to put it bluntly, contested. Because it's a claim based on either the work of polemicists, or of certain historians inferring things they inevitably all fail to follow through on in their conclusions RE the 1949 election results. When debating this in long ago 2008, I was simply relying on my memory of what Ross McMullin had written in his history of the ALP, what veteran class-of-'49 Labor politician Clyde Cameron wrote in his memoirs, and also the fact that original local New Left historian Humphery McQueen hadn't even bothered to mention it in his then new history of Australian society (a case of absence of evidence being actual evidence of absence, as it turns out).
Going further into the weeds, I find many accounts of 1949 will infer a complex relationship between the demoralising effects of the strike and the ALP's subsequent election defeat, because that is objectively true; but no credible writer will outright endorse the workers' revolt thesis. But it's an important origin myth for anti-Cold War Left ideology in this country, not to mention having been an important element of the revival of anti-parliamentary Left thought at the time.
Recently, the closest thing to an endorsement of the workers' revolt thesis I've come across was by new Evatt biographer John Murphy, who goes close to saying it was an actual determinative factor in the election; but his two sources for this are Clyde Cameron and Kim Beazley Sr. And I know for a fact Cameron never made a causative link between the strike and the psephology of 1949, he simply cited it as a demoralising factor for Labor internally. I haven't read Beazley's book, though it's on my reading list, but I'd be surprised if his conclusion was much different than Cameron's.
Very much a subject I'd like to return to, either in discussing 1949 or the successive events that came out of it.
This is a subject close to my heart, the first substantive debate I ever had on this site was about one important yet misconstrued aspect of the 1949 election.*
Anyway, all the reading I've done over the years since then on this subject has brought me to the conclusion that Ben Chifley always had a fight on his hands for a third full-term, or a fourth term in total (Labor had taken power in the middle of the 1940 parliament), but he signed the death warrant on a close result between, (a.) his attempts at bank nationalisation starting in 1947 (and more specifically, the fact that it was drawn out right through to the middle of 1949, thanks to Evatt's foolish Privy Council appeal strategy), and (b.) the reintroduction of some rationing after the devaluation of the Australian Pound in late 1949, said devaluing being done in conjunction with the UK Pound sterling devaluation.
Rereading Ross McMullin and David Day on these subjects, I find that a theme of Chifley's leadership in those two years is of complacency and emerging inflexibility, which explains that two-year-long political strategic failure I identify playing out. But then I recently read Julie Suares' book on his belief in internationalism, which highlights subtle, engaged elements of his leadership which have never been properly appreciated, and also, among other things, simply retells the story of his victory in getting Labor to support Australia signing the Bretton Woods agreement. That treaty fight is something which has always been viewed as an example of Chifley still being very pragmatic, still being very much on top of internal party political strategy, right in the very same year he made his fatal mistake on banking. So I think Labor could have made 1949 competitive with just a few realistic changes on the part of Chifley and others.
As a base PoD, I'd simply have a combination of, (a.) the public service's high finance expert, Nugget Coombs, not being overseas at a conference with his minister, John Dedman, but being in Canberra when Chifley was receiving news on the Hight Court decision against his banking legislation, and (b.) Chifley not only entering into a deliberative process with Coombs at the Department of Post-War Reconstruction vis-a-vis options, but also reaching out to his old friend ex-treasurer Ted Theodore for advice on what to do (I think Theodore was still healthy enough to travel to Canberra in late 1947, as he was a Packer press board member until 1949). FWIW Coombs in his memoirs declares he would have urged against nationalising the retail banking sector if he'd been present for the decision in August. But he also says that he was perfectly willing to write a position paper citing DeGaulle's nationalisation of France's banks as a viable policy example. I think the combination of complicated devil's advocate advice from Coombs, blunt big-end-of-town advice from Theodore, and perhaps also advice from literally any constitutional lawyer other than H.V. Evatt RE what realistically happens when the High Court gets handed the issue... (Bare in mind, nobody even expected Chifley to go as far as he did IOTL, it was a total surprise!)
Avoiding the banking debacle is the base PoD. That removes the greatest motivating force for conservative middle class mobilisation against socialism (Stuart Macintyre claims the banks put up a fighting fund of £100,000, phenomenal if true; certainly thousands of white collar workers felt compelled to become footsoldiers in this cause, which basically allowed the Liberal Party to reach parity in activism with a historically united and successful Labor movement.)
But I also think a second PoD is needed; Menzies not only has to be denied the political consolidation his Liberal leadership gained in OTL from the bank nationalisation issue, but as Opposition leader his tenure has to be threatened, and at times even downright beseiged, in the two years going to the election. It needn't follow that no bank crusade robs him of all his momentum against a long-in-the-tooth social democratic reformist govt, but it is true that he was not hugely respected by his own side at this time; Ian Hancock's history of the NSW Liberal Party organisation is strong on the idea that it was the nineteen fifties that made Menzies be beloved by his party, not the late nineteen forties.
I think Menzies then facing problems with fellow Coalition MPs, over his welfare state policy of extending child endowment, something very easily demagogued from the Right (who in this scenario would not be usefully diverted over the bank issue) as either Labor-lite socialism, or as a bribe for large Catholic families, plus also a garbled Opposition response to the currency devaluation in September 1949, possibly with Menzies-sceptics talking up committing to 'putting value back in the pound' regardless of the effects on primary exports, is enough to get to a Labor reelection.
*The notion that Chifley's breaking of the NSW coal miners strike in the winter 1949 lead to an actual working class, pro-union revolt at the polls against his government. This is a belief held by many Left sectionalist labour (deliberate use of both the small 'l' and 'u' there) people, in that they draw on the implication that because that strike and its legal suppression were so controversial, it must therefore have been a factor at the election in the exact activist, determinative way they believe it was, i.e. dedicated, militant, working class solidarity voters withdrew their support for Labor, electing the Liberal-Country Party coalition in its stead.
This is, to put it bluntly, contested. Because it's a claim based on either the work of polemicists, or of certain historians inferring things they inevitably all fail to follow through on in their conclusions RE the 1949 election results. When debating this in long ago 2008, I was simply relying on my memory of what Ross McMullin had written in his history of the ALP, what veteran class-of-'49 Labor politician Clyde Cameron wrote in his memoirs, and also the fact that original local New Left historian Humphery McQueen hadn't even bothered to mention it in his then new history of Australian society (a case of absence of evidence being actual evidence of absence, as it turns out).
Going further into the weeds, I find many accounts of 1949 will infer a complex relationship between the demoralising effects of the strike and the ALP's subsequent election defeat, because that is objectively true; but no credible writer will outright endorse the workers' revolt thesis. But it's an important origin myth for anti-Cold War Left ideology in this country, not to mention having been an important element of the revival of anti-parliamentary Left thought at the time.
Recently, the closest thing to an endorsement of the workers' revolt thesis I've come across was by new Evatt biographer John Murphy, who goes close to saying it was an actual determinative factor in the election; but his two sources for this are Clyde Cameron and Kim Beazley Sr. And I know for a fact Cameron never made a causative link between the strike and the psephology of 1949, he simply cited it as a demoralising factor for Labor internally. I haven't read Beazley's book, though it's on my reading list, but I'd be surprised if his conclusion was much different than Cameron's.
Very much a subject I'd like to return to, either in discussing 1949 or the successive events that came out of it.