When the Labor Party Dreams: Class, Politics and Policy in New South Wales 1930-32 (review)

Histories of state politics in Australia are not especially common, book-length studies of a particular government very rare indeed. One usually needs to turn to biographies of individual premiers to locate detailed research of this kind, with the result that politics is seen through the careers of leaders whose role and influence in the events being narrated might be exaggerated.

Geoff Robinson's When the Labor Party Dreams is therefore welcome as a study of a state government that briefly occupied the centre-stage of national politics during capitalism's greatest crisis, the Depression of the 1930s. While state government in Australia even today impinges on the daily lives of its citizens in all sorts of ways, it's less common for these sub-national regimes to matter deeply to anyone outside their jurisdiction. But the election of the second Lang Government late in 1930 mattered not only for the people of Australia's most populous state, New South Wales, but ultimately for the whole country. For, as Robinson shows in this valuable study, the Lang administration emerged as the most powerful centre of opposition to the more orthodox economic policies pursued by the federal Scullin Labor Government, as well as by the governments of the other states. This opposition was most famously expressed in the Lang Plan's controversial proposal to suspend interest payments on overseas loans.

Robinson is insistent on the radicalism of the Lang Government, its commitment to socialization, and its refusal to concede the logic or justice of deflationary solutions to the Depression. Its adherence to the essentially deflationary Premiers' Plan of 1931, for instance, became "increasingly nominal;" (159) in its industrial policy, the government undermined employers' property rights; and in its taxation policy, it increasingly sought to create jobs through higher duties. Near the end, in 1932, it tried unsuccessfully to introduce a confiscatory capital levy.

The author attributes this radicalism not to Lang himself but to the government as a whole, the particular balance of class forces that underlay it, and the left-wing union base on which its power rested. Robinson's focus on power bases is an approach to interwar New South Wales politics pioneered by Miriam Dixson in the 1960s, and it has a great deal to commend it, not least because it challenges the stereotype of Lang, the millionaire real estate agent, as some kind of crypto-socialist. That idea never really added up, and if it needed putting to rest, Robinson's study will help to do so.

It's barely an exaggeration to call Lang a bit-player in this account. We learn much about his ministers, as well as about the union leaders who, whether quietly, like Oscar Schreiber, or noisily, like Jock Garden, influenced policy behind closed doors. But Robinson also usefully reveals the limits of the power of both Lang and the government's inner group. Internal party processes remained reasonably fair and democratic, in contrast with later in the decade; and effective defiance of the will of the leader and his immediate circle was still possible.

Yet I also couldn't help feeling that Robinson might have taken the approach further than was warranted. The author warns us early on that for the purposes of this book, he accepted "the classical Marxist formulation: that there is an economic base which ultimately determines the political superstructure."(3) But there are plenty of passing references and historical judgements in the text that seem to contradict the author's basic stance, and rather suggest Lang's own character, personal wealth, and political style actually did matter, and that we cannot reduce this famous government to the sum of its factional parts. In one place, we learn that in explaining the greater power of the left in New South Wales compared with other states, "personalities were significant." (23) Elsewhere, Lang is described as having a "rhetorical sympathy" for the idea of farmers...