National Labor Party - Western Australia

Western Australia

The National Labor movement in Western Australia started off as two separate groups—one known as the Labor Solidarity Committee based out of Trades Hall in Perth, and the other known as National Labor and based on the goldfields. The two merged in April-May 1917, with former Premier John Scaddan as their leader. However, by July he was without a seat in Parliament, and the party turned to Federal Senators Patrick Lynch, Hugh de Largie and George Pearce for leadership and guidance. Unlike its federal counterpart, it maintained its own distinct identity and structure and worked with the Nationalists as coalition partners. A number of Western Australian unions disaffiliated from the Australian Labor Federation to support the National Labor movement—most notably those representing the engine-drivers, railway employees, boilermakers and carpenters which were powerful in the goldfields. Organisationally, however, the party was believed to be over-dependent on its Senate patrons and struggled to build a genuine extraparliamentary organisation.

The party scored six of 50 Assembly seats in each of the 1917 and 1921 elections, and held three of 30 Council seats during this period. However, in the 1924 elections, their representation was reduced to one in the Assembly and two in the Council—many through the defeat of sitting NLP members by Labor candidates—and later that year, what remained of the Party was subsumed by the Nationalists.