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The light on the hill and the ‘right to work’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2023
Abstract
In 1945 the Curtin Labor Government declared it had the capacity and responsibility to permanently eliminate the blight of unemployment from the lives of Australians in its White Paper ‘Full Employment in Australia’. This was the culmination of a century of struggle to establish the ‘right to work’, once a key objective of the 19th century labour movement. Deeply resented and long resisted by employer groups, the policy was abandoned in the mid-1970s, without an electoral mandate. Although the Australian Labor Party and union movement urged public vigilance to preserve full employment during 23 years of Liberal rule, after 1978 they quietly dropped the policy as the Australian Labor Party turned increasingly to corporate donors for the money they needed to stay electorally competitive. While few leading lights of today’s Labor movement care to discuss it, it is right that Australians celebrate this bold statement of our right to work, and the 30 years of full employment it heralded.
Keywords
- Type
- Symposium: The White Paper and Full Employment
- Information
- The Economic and Labour Relations Review , Volume 29 , Issue 4: Symposia: Global Financial Crisis 10 Years On; Full Employment White Paper , December 2018 , pp. 459 - 480
- Copyright
- © The Author(s) 2018
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