Cain and The Labor Split
In 1954, the federal Labor Party suffered a public split when the Leader, Dr H. V. Evatt, blamed Santamaria and his supporters in the Victorian ALP for Labor's loss of seats at the 1954 federal elections. Santamaria exercised strong influence in the Cain government through "Movement" linked ministers such as William Barry and Frank Scully. Protestant and left-wing ministers strongly opposed the Movement faction. In December 1953 the Lands Minister, Robert Holt, resigned rather than introduce a Santamaria-influenced bill which would have promoted the settlement of Italian immigrants as small farmers in Gippsland (a favourite Santamaria scheme which was seen as a plot to create a Catholic peasantry).
In early 1955 the Labor Party's federal executive began to expel Santamaria's supporters from the party. The Victorian branch then split between pro-Evatt and pro-Santamaria factions, and in March the pro-Evatt State Executive suspended 24 members of State Parliament suspected of being Santamaria supporters. Four ministers were forced to resign from the government. When the Parliament met on 19 April, the expelled Labor members crossed over to vote with the Liberal and Country Party members to defeat the government. At the election which followed in May, Labor was heavily defeated, winning only 20 seats to the Liberals' 34 and the Country Party's ten. Only one of the expelled Labor members was re-elected.
Cain was now 73, although he remained outwardly vigorous and his real age was a well-kept secret. He retained the leadership and declared that he would fight the next election against the Liberal premier, Henry Bolte. In 1957, however, the ALP split spread to Queensland, and Cain went to campaign for Labor at the state election which followed the fall of the Queensland Labor government. In Townsville on 9 August he suffered a stroke and died within a few hours, aged 75. Alfred Ernest "Ernie" Shepherd (1901–58) succeeded Cain as ALP leader, only to die himself little more than a year afterwards. Labor remained in opposition in Victoria until 1982, when Cain's son, John Cain, Jr., led the party back to government.1
Read more about this topic: John Cain (senior)
Famous quotes containing the words cain, labor and/or split:
“I’ll kill you with my own hands rather than let you put the mark of Cain on my brother!”
—Abraham Polonsky (b. 1910)
“Learning without thought is labor lost.”
—Confucius (551–479 B.C.)
“Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves,—sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)