Return To Labor
Having rejected the likelihood of the CPA's mainstream political success following the party's 1925 defeats, Garden re-embraced the Labor Party and became a supporter of Lang. While retaining his power base in the Trades Hall, he was elected an Alderman of the Sydney City Council, and a member of the executive of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. He also ran the Labor Council's radio station, 2KY. In 1931, when the Labor Party split over the Scullin government's response to the Great Depression, Garden became a leading supporter of Lang's faction, which rejected Scullin's policies and favoured repudiating Australia's debt to British bondholders.
Garden stood for the House of Representatives at the 1931 election as a Lang Labor candidate in the Division of Cook in inner Sydney. He was unsuccessful, but at the 1934 election he was elected - the first of a number of ex-Communists to became Labor parliamentarians. However, when the Labor Party was re-united under John Curtin's leadership in 1936, Garden was dropped as a candidate as part of the peace settlement, and at the 1937 elections he retired from Parliament.
When Labor came to office federally in 1941, Garden was employed by Eddie Ward, a former Lang Labor man who was Minister for External Territories from 1943-49. In this capacity he travelled to Papua New Guinea, then an Australian possession, and was involved in the corrupt sale of timber leases to various business friends. In 1946 a Royal Commission found that Garden had engaged in corrupt conduct, and he was subsequently convicted of fraud and sentenced to three years imprisonment.
In 1949 M.H. Ellis intent upon showing the connections between the Communist movement and the ALP of the later 1940s, and ignoring Garden's 1920's leaving the party, wrote a book The Garden Path: The Story of the saturation of the Australian Labour Movement by Communism
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Famous quotes containing the words return to, return and/or labor:
“The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty.... From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now.”
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“Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing—to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.”
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“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)