We are going to start the series with a look back at the Scullin Government.
There are a number of parallels between the situation the newly elected Scullin Government found itself in and the circumstances surrounding the Rudd Government's election.
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In winning the election of 1929, Labor didn't just beat the incumbent Government, they also unseated the Prime Minister (Stanley Bruce). The Scullin Government was also immediately faced with a monumental challenge, dealing with the onset of the Great Depression, which was triggered by a banking crisis.
In 2007, Labor took Government, unseating the Prime Minister (John Howard), and was soon faced with a global economic crisis triggered by the banks. Thankfully we got it right the second time around and avoided the financial and human cost that blighted 1930's Australians. But to be fair, Scullin was working in very different times, without history as a teacher.
Scullin's Govt only lasted one term, and while many might be justified in thinking that his Labor Government highly unlucky, they would be wrong to think that he was highly unsuccessful. Despite the challenging times Scullin managed to:
- Suspend compulsory military training for the first time since World War I
- Roll back Bruce's changes to Industrial arbitration and competition (the roaring twenties version of Workchoices)
- Increase social service payments for people facing the Great Depression
- Protect many jobs (reducing the scale of the catastrophe)
- Reduce the budget deficit after 3 consecutive large Bruce Government deficits (Bruce's spending was funded with foreign borrowings)
- Negotiate for the British to reduce Australia's annual interest payments in the Great Depression by £1.6 million
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Although Scullin paid a political price for making hard decisions, in his later life he was rightly proud of what he had achieved while in Government.
One idea which attracted a great deal of opposition was inflationary financing, a radical idea by the standards of his times but an accepted pillar of Keynesian economics adopted by Australia and most other Western governments in the late 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, John Maynard Keynes himself would state of Scullin's Premier's Plan which caused him so much woe and electoral unpopularity that it "saved the economic structure of Australia". The Economist admitted after the election of 1931 that Scullin "had already done much to place Australia on the high road to recovery".
What was also interesting was that several measures which had been proposed and defeated by the UAP (predecessor to the modern Liberal party) opposition were subsequently reintroduced and passed by the UAP once in government.
This may be another occasion where history repeats. If the Coalition wins the up-coming election, it will be interesting to see how many of the Labor policies they have vigorously opposed, will in turn be implemented by them.