Unity Tickets and the Victorian Branch of the ALP

Abstract

The possibility of co-operation for industrial purposes between members of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and non-members of the party is inherent in the relationship between the party and its affiliated trade unions. While unions are an essential part of the party and have been since the 1890s, there is no party rule requiring that all members of affiliated unions must be members of the ALP, let alone supporters of it. Unions affiliate with the party as unions but they contain people who have also joined the party, individuals who support the ALP with out joining the party and those who are members and supporters of other parties or of no party at all. This case study of one period of the ALP's history examines how it coped with the jumbling together in its affiliated unions of people of diverse political preferences. Unity tickets in union elections may be defined as how-to-vote advice or other material in which members of the ALP are coupled with non members so that members and non-members do not oppose each other for individual positions. While some unity tickets involved ALP members collaborating with Democratic Labor Party (DLP), Queensland Labor Party (QLP) or non-party candidates, most such tickets coupled ALP members with communists. Although they were not new in the 1950s, unity tickets proliferated in that decade because of the tactics and strategy of Australian communists and because of the Labor Party's in ternal struggles culminating in the party split of 1955. Communist in fluence in Australian trade unions reached its peak in 1945 before being dissipated in the early post-war years by excessive strikes and other forms of confrontation. Communist union leaders then turned to the strategy of the 'united front', seeking non-communist allies in the struggle to regain communist union offices lost to the ALP-sponsored Industrial Groups in the years 1950-52. The Groups, organisations of ALP members in unions, were dominated by the Roman Catholic lay organisation known as 'the Movement', led by B. A. Santamar?a. The communists gained allies among non-Grouper ALP unionists as the Groupers turned their attention to unions where militant or even moderate ALP members