Geoff Robinson, When the Labor Party Dreams: Class, politics and policy in New South Wales 1930-32, Australian Scholarly Press, Melbourne, 2008.
My first book When the Labor Party Dreams; Class, politics and policy in New South 1930-32 has recently been published by Australian Scholarly Press. It examines one of the most dramatic periods in Australian labour politics the 18 month state government of Labor premier Jack Lang in New South Wales from November 1930 to May 1932. The book goes beyond the preoccupation of much previous scholarship with Lang's own charismatic person to consider how labour governed. I situate the emergence of labour radicalism in the context of the 1914-18 war, 1920s class struggles and 1930s capitalist crisis but I also show how the expression of this radicalism at the political level was necessarily confined by political structures, in particular Labor's quest for an electoral majority in a society in which the core unionised working class remained an electoral minority and one in which working-class electors were economically dependent on capitalists. I examine how public policy was formed by the interaction of Labor ministers, labour activists and state bureaucrats. For the first time in Australia I employ ecological regression to estimate the electoral behaviour of different classes and suggest that previous scholars have underestimated the role of working-class electors for the right. I consider what lessons this experience of labour governance in a time of capitalist crisis holds for the contemporary labour movement.
When the Labor Party Dreams is available from Amazon and from:
Australian Scholarly Press
P.O. Box 299
Kew 3101
Victoria
AUSTRALIA
[url]http://www.scholarly.info[/url]
Dr Geoffrey Robinson
Lecturer in History & Politics
Faculty of Arts & Education
Deakin University
Pigdons Rd
Geelong
VIC 3217
Tel: +61 3 5227 1452
Fax: +61 3 5227 3380
Email: [mailto]geoffrey.robinson@deakin.edu.au[/mailto]
Web: [url]http://geoffrobinson.info[/url]
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