John Cain (senior) - Political Career

Political Career

Around 1910 Cain joined the Victorian Socialist Party (VSP), a Marxist party to the left of the Australian Labor Party (although like most VSP members Cain was probably also an ALP member at the time). In 1915 he became an organiser with the Theatrical Employees' Union, and in 1916 he became a clerk in the Defence Department. He was sacked from this job because of his opposition to conscription for World War I, and became an organiser with the Clothing Trades Union. From 1915 to 1927 he was a Labor member of the Northcote City Council. In 1921 when many VSP members joined the new Communist Party of Australia, Cain broke his connections with the left and became a mainstream Labor politician.

In 1926 Cain married Dorothea Grindrod, with whom he had two children. His son John Cain was born in 1931, when he was already nearly 50. He sent his son to Northcote High School and later Scotch College, Melbourne, an unusual choice for a Labor politician at that time.

Cain was elected in 1917 to the Victorian Legislative Assembly as MLA for Jika Jika, which was renamed Northcote in 1927, a seat he held for 40 years. Victoria was Labor's weakest state, and there had never been a majority Labor state government. This was partly because of Labor's weakness in rural areas (dominated by the Country Party) and partly because of the strength of Deakinite liberalism among middle-class voters in Melbourne. Most notably the lack of a Labor majority government was however due to the high degree of rural malapportionment existing in the state's electoral system, strongly favouring the rural electorates to the disenfranchisement of inner-city electorates, where Labor's vote was centralised.

Cain was assistant minister for agriculture in the short-lived minority Labor government of George Prendergast in 1924, a minister without portfolio in the first minority Labor government of Edmond Hogan (1927–28), and minister for railways and for electrical undertakings in the second Hogan government (1929–32).

When Hogan's government collapsed during the Great Depression and Hogan himself was expelled from the Labor Party, Cain became party deputy leader under Tom Tunnecliffe. It was Wren's influence which led Labor to support the minority Country Party government of Albert Dunstan from 1935 to 1943. Cain succeeded Tunnecliffe as Labor Leader in 1937.