John Garden - Return To Labor

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

Read more about this topic:  John Garden

Famous quotes containing the words return to, return and/or labor:

    I got my first clear view of Ktaadn, on this excursion, from a hill about two miles northwest of Bangor, whither I went for this purpose. After this I was ready to return to Massachusetts.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Athletes have studied how to leap and how to survive the leap some of the time and return to the ground. They don’t always do it well. But they are our philosophers of actual moments and the body and soul in them, and of our manoeuvres in our emergencies and longings.
    Harold Brodkey (b. 1930)

    The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.
    Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901)