Arthur Calwell - Opposition

Opposition

Calwell left office in 1949 when the Chifley government was defeated by the Liberal Party, led by Robert Menzies. The following period in opposition was one of great frustration. Like many Labor parliamentarians and union officials at the time, Calwell was a Roman Catholic. The Australian Catholic Church was in this period fiercely anti-communist and had in the 1940s encouraged Catholic trade unionists to oppose communists within their trade unions. The organisations that co-ordinated Catholic efforts were called Industrial Groups. Calwell had originally supported the Industrial Groups in Victoria and continued to do so until the early 1950s. After Chifley's death in 1951 Dr H. V. Evatt became the Labor leader, and Calwell became his Deputy. Under Evatt, Labor's attitude towards the Industrial Groups began to change as Evatt suspected that one of their aims was to promote the Catholic element within the Labor Party. Calwell's friendship with many of the leaders of the Industrial Groups (known collectively as "Groupers"), led Evatt to privately question his loyalty. The two men thus had an increasingly difficult working relationship. This culminated in Evatt drafting, and delivering, the Labor Platform for the 1954 federal election without consulting with Calwell. Labor was narrowly defeated at the polls and this deepened the rift between the two men.

Evatt's subsequent public attack on the "Groupers" and his insistence on their expulsion from the party placed Calwell in a difficult position. He was made to choose between the Evatt-led official Labor Party and the "Groupers" (who were mainly Catholic and Victorian). During a specially convened Labor Conference in Hobart in May 1955 the "Groupers" were expelled from the Labor Party and Calwell chose to stay within the party. Calwell's loyalty to the party was to cause him much personal and political anguish: he lost many of its oldest friends at this time, including the Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, and was for a time denied communion at his parish church. Ironically this loyalty to the party did not prevent him from being deeply distrusted by the left-wing of the ALP, especially in his home state of Victoria, and for many years he had a stormy relationship with the state Labor Party. He never favoured the communist philosophy, and was eloquent in his attacks on communists, whom he once called "Pathological exhibits ... human scum ... paranoiacs, degenerates, morons, bludgers ... pack of dingoes ... industrial outlaws and political lepers ... ratbags. If these people went to Russia, Stalin wouldn't even use them for manure."