For several years this question has been before the | Victorian P.L.C. Easter Conferences. On the last four | occasions it was the best debated item on the Agenda | paper. The exclusion of the employers from membership of | the party was supported, in the first division, in 1910, | by 23 per cent of those voting. In 1911, 29 per cent. In | 1912, 38 per cent. In 1914, 39 per cent. On each occasion | there was a big attendance. A majority of the whole | Conference is required by the Party Constitution to effect | the exclusion.
| The growing disappointment with both Federal and State
| Ministries in power, as well as in office, has led many
| delegates to acknowledge that their vote will be changed
| to the “exclusion” side at the forthcoming Annual
| Conference. The glaring neglect of those who are too
| ill-fed, ill-clothed, or ill-sheltered to start work, and the
| failure to see that existing work is shared between those
| able to do it, as nations do, with food supplies, in times
| of stress, must lead to a radical change in the Labor
| party, or to its displacement. "Greasing the fat sow," is
| no good. No legislation can benefit the wage-earning class
|
It is not proposed to exclude employers from the | Movement, but only from the political party. All sorts of | Socialist and Communist bodies, Christian sects, | Co-operative and Friendly Societies, and even Anarchist | groups, consider themselves in the Labor Movement. But as | when we ask a friend to make himself at home all over our | house, we trust him to avoid certain unmentioned rooms at | certain times, so we regard our Union meeting, and our | local political party meeting, as situations too delicate | for an employer to intrude himself.
|We do not attack employers "bonafides," nor make any | invidious distinctions, we merely take a lesson from all | the past centuries of human history, that no one is so | superhuman as to be able to fight hard, fast and | frequently enough to get substantial changes in economic | conditions from those whose interests are identical with | his own, on behalf of those on the other side of the | counter.
|We would be well rid of any employers who might turn | against us because we exclude them from so delicate a | situation, and we would win thousands of supporters for a | thoroughbred party in place of any scores we might lose | who now support a "half-and-half" half captured one.
|It is not in our platform, or our pledge, that we | differ from the "Fusion" of "Conservatives", and | "Liberals," but that, in the main we are sellers of labor, | while they are practically all buyers of labor. It is | consequently fatal for our party our sending into its | Caucus even a small number of employers, for they must | act, perforce, as a balance of power, in the Caucus, | between the "stick-in-the-muds" and the "revolutionaries" | when really vital changes are under consideration, though | they may generally be the most militant about things that | do not "cut ice".
|We shall watch the wage-earner members just as much | after we have excluded the employers as before. Some | become boodlers themselves. They also, will then be | excluded if our definitions are adequately worded.
| We propose "Exclusion"
The definition evolved laboriously, after years of | gradual improvement by our Victorian section of our | "Wage-earner Group of Members of the Australian Labor Party" | is as follows:~~
|
|
This definition, it will be seen, in order to provide | justice rather than merely apparent "consistency," | excludes some nominal wage-earners and includes some | nominal employers.
|A plebiscite amongst the above Victorian group showed | three to one against "small" employers, and three to one | against limiting the exclusion to "candidatures, etc." | only. Every section of the definition was nearly | unanimously carried.