Notebook: Letter From Australia

...Un der Menzies, the Security Service insinuated its agents into every area of society...

...Election Factors The return of Labor to a point within striking distance of power was in part the result of a series of spectacular economic blunders on the part of the Liberal Government, but in part also the result of a new welling-up of restlessness and radical thought in the community as a whole...

...However much success the students may achieve as a freebooting liberal lobby,—and there are strong indications that their intervention in the Tait case will prove decisive—their strong native empiricism orientates them to the Labor party, rather than to the decimated and senescent ruin of the Communist party, and probably only the bitter disagreement over maintenance of the White Australia Policy stands between Labor and their full support...

...In foreign policy, Labor rejects the mindless subservience of the Liberals to American wishes in favor of judging issues on their merits (had Labor been in office, Australia might not have been the first country to endorse the Cuban blockade...

...but the focus of student activity has shifted to capital punishment, and in particular to a campaign to dissuade the Liberal Premier of the state of Victoria from terminating a run of eleven hanging-free years with the execution of Robert Tait, perpetrator of a particularly nauseating and pointless killing...

...munist party, then spread throughout the middle years of the decade...

...The party itself was sick...

...Much of the interest in Australian political maneuver derives from the efforts of the ALP to by-pass this obstacle without coming to terms, efforts which nearly succeeded last December, when the party came within a single seat of victory (the candidates who scraped home to give the Government its majority was a notorious Birch-type rightwinger, elected, by a quirk of the preferential voting system, on a bare hundred second preferences from voters who made the Communist can didate their first choice...

...The Australian political spectrum thus includes three parties of the Right —Prime Minister Menzies' Liberal Party (conservative, representing industrial and commercial interests), the Country Party (farm interests, junior partner in the coalition government) and the DLP, which has no seats in Parliament, but whose second preference votes at the elections last December gave Menzies his majority...

...In this campaign, the students have the support not only of articulate public opinion and the Labor Party, but also of the normally pro-Liberal press...

...They formed Australia's fourth significant political party, the Democratic Labor Party (DLP—as opposed to ALP, for the Australian Labor Party...

...In the universities, the radical and socialist societies saw their influence shrink to a shadow of what it had been during the war years and in the immediate post-war period...

...The real feature of the election cam paign was not the activities of the parties, but the sustained attempt on the part of university students to raise the issue of the White Australia Pol icy, on whose retention both Govern ment and Opposition agree...

...Since the election, student interest in immigration has continued at a high level, and has probably been a factor in restraining the Federal Government from carrying on its policy of deporting illegal Chinese immigrants to mainland China...

...Moreover, it is probably true that, even if nationalization were not ruled out by the Constitution, younger Labor parliamentarians of the stamp of the Deputy Federal Leader Whitlam, would prefer the more flexible— and amply precedented—alternative of creating government corporations to compete with private enterprise...

...This is nowhere more evident than in the universities, where radical and socialist ideas have regained much of the influence they enjoyed in the middle forties...

...Students staged mass demonstrations outside the meetings of the party leaders, pursued cabinet ministers around their elec tioneering circuits with systematic and searching questions, and invented a variety of means to bring the issue of official racialism to the public's attention as never before...

...There is also one party of the Left, the ALP, which forms Her Majesty's Opposition...

...The courts had blocked its chosen road to socialism by declaring the attempt to nationalize the banks unconstitutional...

...Public enterprises were dismantled or handed back to the private sector, and the direction of foreign policy was reversed...

...The party backs the United Nations as the natural defender of small nations, calls for negotiations of a nuclear-free zone in the Southern Hemisphere and seeks to restore the friendly relations with neighboring Asian powers fostered in its previous term of office and forfeit by the Liberals through their unswerving support of colonialist—and most notably South African — interests...

...the revered leader, Chifley, was worn out, soon to die...

...Labor was everywhere forced into a defensive stance, which periodically became a rout...

...The leaders of the Santamaria faction were defeated in the party councils and expelled, taking with them a number of supporters mesmerized by their anti-communist rhetoric...

...Labor's Policy Labor's own empiricism—a quality not always favorably regarded by social democrats elsewhere—is in the ascendant, and, although the party retains the traditional objective, "socialization of the means of production, distribution and exchange to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features in these fields," its leader was doing no more than acknowledge the facts of political life under the Australian Constitution when he pledged during the last election campaign that, should Labor be elected, there would be no nationalization during its three-year term of office...

...Visiting Melbourne University recently, Victorian Premier Bolte, who claims to have the "silent majority" of the citizenry behind him in the Tait case, found himself the object of an onslaught of anti-hanging demonstrators better than two thousand strong...

...and a secret organization, headed by a brilliant young Catholic lawyer named Santamaria and fired by his vision of an Australian corporate state, had begun to move its supporters into key positions at all levels of the party apparatus and the trade unions...

...The clash between the authoritarian values of the new corporate state ideologues and the liberal, egalitarian Labor tradition came to a head late in 1954...

...The average age of Labor party members climbed rapidly, while their numbers declined...

...Even so, in an individual capacity students and academics are playing a much greater part in the affairs of the party than ever before...

...These, together with emphasis on education, aid for underdeveloped countries and domestic social justice, are policies which draw the young radical to the party...

...It is the strategy of the DLP to keep hold of a segment of the Labor vote large enough to permanently deny the ALP office, and to use this vote as a lever to force the re-admission of its leaders to the ALP and the restoration of their influence there...