Abstract
In the 1940s across much of the world there was a collective determination to build new social forms in place of those that had nurtured depression, fascism and two rounds of global military conflict in one generation. The mood was cross-class in form rather than a repeat of the proletarian revolutionary movements that mushroomed after the First World War, though in postwar national elections socialist, communist and labour parties were the main political beneficiaries. This was ‘postwar reconstruction’. In the spirit of Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s/1940s United States, without undermining the capitalist order but generating a larger role for state intervention, it led to less apocalyptic and more moderate, stable and much more universal outcomes than the post-1917 events. Stuart Macintyre’s book Australia’s Boldest Experiment is about Australia’s version of it.
The idea of postwar reconstruction first showed in the Anglo-American nations not inhibited by Nazi occupation. Within a year of the beginning of hostilities in 1939 it had taken root in Britain. It was crystallized in the Roosevelt-Churchill Atlantic Charter of 1941, with its sweeping phrases about ‘freedom from fear and want’ and ‘all the men in all the lands’ that anticipated the UN Declaration of Human Rights half a decade later. Though the grand gendered phrase ‘all the men in all the lands’ was from Churchill, he was not very enamoured of the idea of postwar reconstruction. The ‘would-be peace planners’, he said, ‘should not overlook Mrs. Glass’s Cookery Book recipe for jugged hare – “First catch your hare”‘ (p. 33). But his government soon found that the quasi-utopian notion of a new order after the war was won was effective in mobilizing people for whom the death and injury toll of the First World War, which affected almost every extended family, was still current. No doubt widespread hopes for a new order explain Churchill’s defeat by the British Labour Party in 1945 when he moved too soon, tactically speaking, to replace the utopia of the New Jerusalem with the dystopia of the Red Menace.
The idea of postwar reconstruction soon reached Canada, Australia and the other British dominions, which, though far from the theatre of war in the earlier conflict, had sent large numbers of troops to Europe and been battered by the brutal demographics; and where continuing fears of unemployment dominated the political culture. In Australia the Atlantic Charter was quickly taken up by all political parties. For John Curtin, leader of the Labor Government that took power in 1941, just before Japan captured Singapore and bombed ports in Northern Australia, the idea of postwar reconstruction became a tool to persuade his Labor Party to accept the introduction of military conscription and constraints on union wage demands. The actual administrative process of postwar reconstruction began slowly, but in 1942 Curtin secured the agreement of the Australian states that they would transfer to the national government key powers over economic management and resources for five years after the end of hostilities. In early 1943 the Commonwealth department of postwar reconstruction (DPWR) was created under H.G. ‘Nugget’ Coombs as Director-General with a mandate to coordinate and extend the work of other federal departments. The minister responsible for postwar reconstruction was Federal Treasurer Ben Chifley, until he became Prime Minister after Curtin’s death in 1945. He was succeeded as minister by John Dedman.
All combatant countries saw an expansion in the role of government under wartime conditions; and because of the momentum for a new economic and social order, that expansion was only partly reversed in the postwar years. The reversal was greater in the United States and less in Britain, with Australia about halfway between. In Australia the DPWR was the engine room for the most significant expansion of the role of the state in national history. Yet reconstruction was more transformative than this quantitative trend suggests. The history of postwar reconstruction explains much about government, politics and society in modern Australia. While Australia’s present political culture contains little hint of it, from time to time there has been an activist democratic state in Australia, one that has made belated use of the space and the freedom from aristocracy and tradition afforded by the settler state, while mobilizing a temporary national consensus that constrains the political potency of commercial interests and the leading families of the Sydney and Melbourne bourgeoisie. The postwar reconstruction government in 1941–9 was the most important of these exceptional episodes. It outdid the 1983–96 Hawke-Keating Labor governments in the range and depth of the changes that it wrought, and it outdid the 1972–5 Whitlam Labor government in duration.
Postwar reconstruction was both a concentrated moment of nation-building and the principal vehicle for modernization in Australia, with a faster-beating and more determined pulse than the consumption-oriented political economy of the 1950s/1960s that followed, a political economy that was grounded in the 1940s enlargement and sustained by a long economic boom. Australia’s Greatest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s provides a definitive history of reconstruction’s trials and achievements. Macintyre has made a masterful work. Grounded in archival sources, it is as readable as a long, engrossing novel. While there might have been even more chapters and details – one area that seems underdone is the national reforms in transport and road safety – it is hard to see how a better kind of book on the topic could have been created. It was a wonderful opportunity for the historian – a neglected and profoundly important story. But it is also exceptionally well-written: spare, modest, lucid and with good pace. No doubt it was the quality of the writing as much as anything that triggered the jaw-dropped admiration that characterized the first round of media reviews.
The book moves freely between Australia in the world and Australia at home. The first section tells the story of the military crisis of 1941–2 and the practical adoption of reconstruction and its machinery; and offshore, the diplomatic pursuit of Australia’s argument for the ‘positive approach’, an international charter committing all nations to the goal of full-employment. The positive approach was designed to ensure demand for Australian exports and thereby protect Australia’s vulnerable balance of international payments within the emerging American-led free trade order. It was pursued vigorously, often against Britain and the United States, signifying Australia’s newly independent stance in foreign affairs, which had been triggered by the geographic divergence between Australian strategic interests in the Pacific theatre and the core interests of the Atlantic countries. The middle section describes the work of postwar reconstruction, and its limits, across each of the main economic and social sectors, beginning with an engrossing discussion of agriculture. The third section returns to the narrative. It reflects on the failure of the government to turn its agreement on the transfer of powers from the states into constitutional change, thereby cementing and normalizing the expanded and more national reconstruction state, and describes how the Australian political culture and national government gradually return to type.
The final chapters are vibrant with thwarted passion, as the window of opportunity that had been created by the war closes again. The democratic consensus recedes, traditional Anglo anti-statism re-emerges, the media becomes fascinated by the constraints of planning rather than the benefits it is meant to bring, the government’s capacity to take on recalcitrant state governments dissipates, the reconstruction projects wind down, the Labor government is defeated and the 1940s are over.
By then, ‘the notion of a common citizenship’ has ‘succumbed to the conflicting demands of labour and capital’ (p. 474), reinforced by Cold War anti-communism in industrial relations; and full employment has been the norm for almost a decade, so that reconstruction no longer seems essential to it. The conservative political parties, factionalized and unstable but with a supporting media campaign financed by plutocrats and the private banks, are sufficient to overcome Chifley in the 1949 election. Robert Menzies becomes Prime Minister. The DPWR is instantly abolished, though many (but not all) of its officers are found leading posts in the new government, including Coombs. Planning gives way to management and there is a drift back to dependency in global affairs. The Cold War, long resisted by Chifley, becomes integral to Australia – though not yet the free market and the invisible hand; that will wait until the 1980s.
The central figures of the book – aside from Curtin and Chifley – are Coombs and the leading officials who conceived, spruiked and implemented reconstruction, and were sometimes called on to advocate the Australian position on the world stage. These officials, many of them trained as economists and recruited specifically to the DPWR, are important to Macintyre, and his pithy biographical detail and quotations bring them alive. National emergency and reconstruction encouraged a more public kind of public servant, though advocacy by the DPWR officials eventually triggered a media backlash. Their mode of discourse was direct and non-pompous. The rubric guiding the DPWR was ‘full employment, rising standards of living, a larger measure of security and opportunity’ (p. 472). For a time, these notions were widely shared and understood: The majority of monuments erected after the First World War had taken the form of shrines and cenotaphs, columns and obelisks, and above all diggers on pedestals, but when a Gallup Poll in 1944 asked ‘What kind of memorial do you favour?’, 90 per cent of Australians opted for something useful. Utility here meant amenities that would enhance community life: schools, hospitals, playgrounds, tennis courts, bowling clubs and swimming pools. (p. 410) If you examine the life of an individual from babyhood, you will find that a surprisingly small proportion of the significant things in his life derive from the things he buys and sells in the market. (p. 273)
Despite its masculinist language and the top-down homogenizing character of its programs, the 1940s DPWR was also gender aware. It focused on the needs of women and empowered a small number of women officers to campaign in the community. Nevertheless, the emphasis was largely on women in traditional family roles. Coombs also wanted to include the arts and indigenous people in the DPWR agenda but was unsuccessful in persuading Chifley. The Prime Minister was pained by the portraits of politicians at parliament house; and while indigenous welfare was included in the 1944 referendum to expand national powers, the fate of indigenous Australians, who still lacked the vote, was barely noticed. Macintyre unearths the scare traces of the issue.
Despite the agreement with the states that was secured early in Curtin’s tenure, Chifley, Coombs and the generation of university-trained intellectuals empowered by them pursued their ambitious and centralist program within a largely unchanged constitutional structure. Despite the policy ascendancy of Keynesian demand management from the beginning of the war period, and the legitimization of state intervention that had been created by Roosevelt’s New Deal, large-scale reforms in the economy were more difficult to achieve in postwar Australia than in postwar Britain, which nationalized the Bank of England, the railways, coal and steel. In Australia the federal structure was a solid brake on centrist ambitions. When in 1944 Labor finally went to its major referendum to secure a transfer of powers from the states, the military crisis was well past. The referendum succeeded only in South Australia and Western Australia and was soundly rebuffed in the most populous state, New South Wales. Immediately afterward, the states kicked back firmly against national initiatives in housing and even struck down daylight saving. Why did Curtin move on national powers 18 months too late, when the wartime consensus was fragmenting? This puzzles Macintyre. Perhaps it derived from Curtin’s singular focus on the military conflict. Further referenda to increase national powers failed in 1946 and 1948 (the exception was the power over social service payments granted in 1946). Chifley’s attempt to nationalize banking, rebuffed by the High Court, excited a well-financed campaign from the private banks that was a major element in Labor’s defeat. Following the High Court decision, the bank staff simply kept on campaigning against Labor until the 1949 election.
Yet the six years 1943–9 transformed Australia at home and abroad. For the most part the work of the DPWR was not reversed. Chifley’s reconciliation of capitalism and democracy within the framework of managed living standards, including currency management and protective tariffs, was the policy norm of the Menzies Government – albeit without the DWPR drive to social improvement – and lasted until the neoliberal era, kick-started by financial deregulation under another Labor regime in the 1980s. On the other hand, the distinctive international identity that was established in the 1940s, especially in Asia, proved to be more fragile. It was undermined by the Cold War, which Labor for a time resisted, and the White Australia policy, which it continued to embrace.
In February 1942, four months after Curtin took office, ‘the ABC stopped playing a recording of The British Grenadiers before the news and began playing Advance Australia Fair’ (p. 96). At the Bretton Woods conference Australia threw its small weight around in the attempt to secure international support for a compact on full employment. At first Australia refused to sign up to the new international money order until that compact was established. Against strong pushback from the United States, Australia succeeded in including a universal commitment to full employment in the United Nations Charter. The quixotic Foreign Minister Herbert Evatt was elected President of the UN General Assembly in 1948. He made himself into the champion of the smaller and emerging powers. This was more than a manoeuver. The reconstruction government, in contrast with all its predecessors, claimed (though with limited success) a major role in postwar Asia, distinct from Britain and the United States. In contrast with both those powers and the 1949–72 government in Australia, it also supported national independence.
In relation to Indonesia, Evatt wanted to position Australia as a regional manager in cooperation with the retreating European powers. However Chifley, who had seen firsthand the exploitation of Indonesian workers, and urban poverty and disease in Calcutta, was determined the old colonial order had to go (p. 375). Australia refused to send troops to help Britain to suppress the independence movement in Malaya, refused to guarantee support for Hong Kong as the Chinese Communist Party forces moved closer, and planned to recognize the new communist regime in China after the 1949 election. However, despite initial Australian protest at American and British strategy towards Russia, including the formation of NATO – the Labor leaders argued that Russia’s stance should be seen as essentially defensive and that a strategy of aggressive containment was bound to both entrench Russian hostility and trigger global polarization – the Cold War became unstoppable. Australia was forced to align itself with the Western powers.
At the same time, regardless of its exemplary position on national independence Australia was handicapped in Asia by the White Australia policy. On one hand the DPWR organized the entry into Australia, as permanent migrants, of 170,700 ‘displaced persons’ (European postwar refugees), the largest number anywhere other than the United States. This is startlingly generous when compared to the present Australian policy on refugees, but the 1940s policy was selective and populist in other ways. ‘The first shipment of refugees was chosen carefully: 843 young, single Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, flaxen haired, fair skinned and blue eyed’ (p. 405). Opinion polls showed that only migrants from Britain or Northern Europe were acceptable. The government deployed the displaced person migrants (known as ‘DPs’ or ‘reffos’) at will on national reconstruction projects such as the Snowy scheme. Despite the Holocaust there was strong opposition to Jewish immigration, while the non-white wives and children of servicemen who served in the Pacific were not allowed to enter. The Displaced Persons scheme opened the way for further immigration from Europe, with lasting consequences for Australia’s composition and character, though in doing so it reattached the country to its settler origins at a time when it was seeking closer relations with the Asian region (p. 407).
The Whitlam government did not share the spirit of frugality and sacrifice that typified postwar reconstruction. Expansive, optimistic and generous, a belated echo of the Kennedy presidency and the later 1960s, it ran hard against all forms of discrimination and ballooned funding of education and health, promising the same in urban services. It also resurrected Chifley’s independent foreign policy and support for national liberation in Asia. Thus it brought national identity inside and outside national borders into line with each other, completing what Coombs had glimpsed, but few others. The Whitlam government also recovered postwar reconstruction’s planning and community consultation, though it lacked Chifley’s touch in budget management.
The 1940s remain integral to that side of Australian politics. Social democracy in one country, independent in foreign policy and mindful of its neighbours: this is still the Labor ideal. The further that they move from the conditions that sustained the wartime consensus, the more difficult it is for actual Australian Labor Party governments to fulfil the ideal. Yet it is still compelling, for through it the country was made better. The awful truth suggested by Macintyre’s wonderful book is that in all the Anglo-American democracies – not only in Australia – with their commitment to untrammelled markets and the freedom of capital to shape politics, it is only under conditions of extreme national distress that collective commitment become possible on a sufficient scale to hold down the monied elite and lift up the society. It is clear that neither the rational science of global warming nor the fears engendered by the security apparatus are sufficient to provide the conditions for wiser states to emerge and to reverse the hard running tide to inequality. Yet states in the Nordic world, and to a lesser extent other parts of Western Europe, achieve clearly superior levels of social mobility and social care and equivalent levels of economic prosperity. One ingredient they share with 1940s Australia is an active reflexivity for national improvement. Under Curtin and Chifley that reflexivity was embodied in Coombs and the DPWR. It was vulnerable to isolation and decline, once the war was over, because in contrast with the political cultures of Northwest Europe today, it was not sufficiently entrenched in civil society.