LETTER FROM SYDNEY: The world's first labour government was formed in Australia 100 years ago last week. On April 27th, 1904, the leader of the Australian Labor Party (named after the US labor movement), Chris Watson, was sworn in as prime minister, writes Pádraig Collins
Though the ALP went on to become probably the most successful labour party in the world - 10 out of Australia's 25 prime ministers have been party members - their first government was a minority one.
At the time, no party had a majority in either the Australian House of Representatives or the Senate. The Protectionists, the Free Traders and Labor were all of similar strength. In a cricket analogy used by the Protectionists' Alfred Deakin it was the era of "the three XIs".
The Protectionists, with Labor support, had governed since federation in 1901. But on April 21st, 1904, Labor fatefully voted against Deakin's government on the Conciliation and Arbitration Bill. Deakin resigned and Watson subsequently accepted the governor-general's invitation to form a government. He had turned 37 two weeks before becoming prime minister.
Watson had a colourful background. He was born Johan Cristian Tanck aboard a ship in the Chilean port of Valparaiso to a Chilean-German father and a New Zealander mother. He is the only Australian prime minister not to have been born in either Australia or Britain.
After his mother moved back to New Zealand and remarried, his name was changed to John Christian Watson. Following his death in 1941, questions were raised about whether Watson had been eligible to sit in parliament. It is possible that he deliberately blurred his past.
Having left school at 10, Watson trained as a newspaper compositor before moving from New Zealand to Sydney. There he got a job as a stable hand at Government House. But while shovelling horse manure, he was also educating himself. Dr Ross McMullin, whose book* on the Watson government has just been published, recounts how Watson was once given sixpence for a beer by the New South Wales governor but instead used the money to buy a book.
He went on to become a prominent trade unionist, the inaugural secretary of the west Sydney branch of the ALP and, in 1901, leader of the federal party.
According to his biographer, Watson's success at such a young age resulted from temperament as well as ability. "Genuine and humane, patient and reliable in his dealings with people, he radiated the calm wisdom of an old head on young shoulders," McMullin writes. It didn't hurt that he was almost six feet tall, which must have made him seem like a giant in those days.
His fellow ministers in that first Labor government included an umbrella-mender, two miners and a labourer. The postmaster-general was an Irish nationalist named Hugh Mahon. In 1881 Mahon had been imprisoned with Charles Stewart Parnell, whose private secretary he was, in Kilmainham Gaol. Upon his release the following year, Mahon moved to Sydney and worked as a journalist.
He later became the only MP to be expelled from the federal parliament. The expulsion occurred on November 11th, 1920, for having attacked British policy during the Irish War of Independence at a public meeting in Melbourne (where parliament sat from 1901 until Canberra became the Australian capital in 1927).
An unrepentant Mahon said he would be proud to hang the expulsion motion on his wall. "The indignity surely attaches to the garrotter, not his victim," he said.
Because of their predominantly working-class background, the members of the Watson government were subject to great snobbery from the opposition. The idea that tradesmen and labourers could hold positions of power was revolutionary.
Naked hostility from the newspapers made governing difficult. Before the government was even formed, Melbourne's Argus pronounced: "It will exist entirely on sufferance" and "has no claim to an extended life".
Sydney's Telegraph added that the Labor government was a "curious political freak" and said that allowing this "government of political apprentices . . . to reign for a single day . . . goes too far beyond a joke".
Defence minister, former miner Anderson Dawson, was immediately involved in a battle with Sir Edward Hutton, the autocratic British officer in charge of Australia's defence forces. "Hutton scorned Dawson as an illiterate ignoramus, yet Dawson was intelligent and sharp, an avid reader and a capable writer," McMullin writes.
The new prime minister was pragmatic about the skills of his MPs. Though the former umbrella-mender Billy Hughes had recently qualified as a barrister, Watson did not consider it proper that someone so inexperienced should become attorney-general. Instead he invited H.B. Higgins of the Protectionists to take up the position. Higgins remains the only deputy to have been a Labor minister without being a member of the ALP.
The reality of leading a minority government ensured relentless opposition pressure.
Watson and his external affairs minister Hughes had to make some unpalatable concessions to stay in office. One concession they could not make, though, was to vote for a watered-down version of their pioneering arbitration legislation. They could not stomach an opposition amendment which restricted trade union rights and on August 18th, 111 days after taking power, it was all over.
However, as treasurer, Watson's command of the nation's finances was vigilant. He disproved predictions of financial doom and gloom at the formation of his government, and delighted in pointing out that the value of Australian stocks in London had increased during his administration.
The sky had not fallen in, there were no riots on the streets, but the world had changed. Watson and his party had shown that Labor was ready for government.
*So Monstrous a Travesty: Chris Watson and the World's First National Labor Government by Ross McMullin is published by Scribe Books