What is it about?
In a 1945 White Paper, Australia’s Curtin Labor government declared it would keep post-war unemployment below 2%, and did so. By 1949, when Labor lost office, the public had grown accustomed to it. During 23 years in opposition, Labor and the unions forced conservative governments to maintain the policy by regularly fuelling public fear of its abandonment. Following the 1975 constitutional crisis, the policy was quietly abandoned by both major parties, as Labor became dependent on corporate patronage, and today pretends the policy never existed. A modern campaign to restore full employment can learn from its post-war rise and fall.
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Why is it important?
This paper rejects the framing of unemployment as an ‘accidental blemish on the capitalist system’, by demonstrating that a 32 year policy of keeping unemployment under two percent was established and discontinued in Australia by deliberate acts of political will.
Perspectives
To reassert their hegemony, big business funded the global neoliberal ‘small government’ campaign from the mid-1970s to remove the fiscal policy tools many developed countries used during the third quarter of the 20th century to minimise unemployment. In order to re-establish full employment around the world using modern price-stabilising approaches like the Job Guarantee, the motivation for, and methods of, political resistance to full employment need to be widely understood, particularly in relation to political parties that claim to serve the interests of working people.
Victor Quirk
University of Newcastle
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The light on the hill and the ‘right to work’, The Economic and Labour Relations Review, December 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1035304618817413.
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