The pattern of national politics

The modern Australian party system was created by a working-class challenge to the bourgeoisie that dominated the colonial societies of the later nineteenth century. Towards the end of that century working-class organizations took two strategic decisions: first, to undertake political mobilization on a large scale; second, to challenge capital within the arena of the state organizations, by attempting to influence, and then control, councils and parliaments. In the generation from 1890 to 1920 the Labor parties that embodied these decisions developed enough strength to take office in several parliaments, and have remained as governments or pensioned oppositions ever since. They also developed enough strength to fight off the more radical strategy, represented within the labour movement by syndicalists and Communists, of mobilization to seize power by action against the state. Though this alternative achieved a certain following in the unions, especially in the 1940s, and has at times had some following within the Labor Party too, the mainstream of working-class politics has remained strongly reformist. A modernized version of this traditional reformism came to office in the 1972 federal election.

The early theorists of the Labor party had thought of themselves as completing the work of nineteenth-century democracy, and had anticipated (though the point was rarely made explicit) that the party would keep parliamentary power as the large majority of the people swung behind its programme.