{"id":5484,"date":"2013-03-29T19:17:49","date_gmt":"2013-03-29T19:17:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=5484"},"modified":"2013-03-29T19:17:49","modified_gmt":"2013-03-29T19:17:49","slug":"the-alp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2013\/03\/the-alp\/","title":{"rendered":"The ALP"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The colonial political parties of the labour movement which preceded the Australian Labor Party date from 1891.\u00a0 The first Labour MPs were elected that year to the New South Wales Legislative Assembly (aka <em>&#8220;the Bear Pit&#8221;), <\/em>winning 35 of 141 seats.\u00a0 The first Labour government anywhere in the world was in Queensland in 1899, where the administration of Anderson Dawson held office for\u00a07 days.\u00a0\u00a0 Federally, the first\u00a0Labour Government was in 1904,\u00a0under Chris Watson, a minority government that lasted just 4 months. \u00a0The party adopted the US spelling of &#8220;Labor&#8221; in 1912,\u00a0in admiration of the US labor movement.<br \/>\nAn American journalist and historian of Australia, C. Hartley Grattan (1902-1980), once wrote this about the Party (cited in Button 2012, page 145 large print edition):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It has struggled with every handicap to which political parties are heir.\u00a0 It has been burdened with careerists, turncoats, hypocrites, outright scoundrels, stuffy functionaries devoid of sense and imagination, bellowing enemies of critical intelligence, irritatingly self-righteous clowns bent on enforcing suburban points of view, pussy-footers, demagogues, stooges for hostile outside groups and interests, aged and decaying hacks and ordinary blatherskites.\u00a0 Every political party falls heir to these.\u00a0 But it has outlived them all and still stands for something:\u00a0 it stands for a social democratic Australia.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong><em>Reference:<\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nJames Button [2012]: <em>Speechless:\u00a0 A Year in my Father\u2019s Business.<\/em>\u00a0 Melbourne, Australia:\u00a0 Melbourne University Press.<br \/>\n<em><strong>POSTSCRIPT (2013-03-30):\u00a0<\/strong> <\/em>And <a href=\"http:\/\/www.crikey.com.au\/2013\/03\/28\/the-15-shades-of-gary-gray-labor-on-the-edge-of-the-abyss\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a> is a perceptive analysis of the current situation of the ALP by Guy Rundle, writing for Crikey magazine (<a href=\"http:\/\/jezzascuriousblog.blogspot.co.uk\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">HT<\/a>).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I had not previously viewed the ALP&#8217;s Right-wing factions as being the descendants of the Catholic social movement, while the Centre-Left and Left factions may be seen descendants of Protestant Fabians and Marxists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The colonial political parties of the labour movement which preceded the Australian Labor Party date from 1891.\u00a0 The first Labour MPs were elected that year to the New South Wales Legislative Assembly (aka &#8220;the Bear Pit&#8221;), winning 35 of 141 seats.\u00a0 The first Labour government anywhere in the world was in Queensland in 1899, where [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-politics","p1","y2013","m03","d29","h19"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5484\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}