Fabian Socialism - Oxford Companion to Australian Politics Entry
Fabian socialism owes its inception to the revulsion and agony of conscience over poverty in late Victorian England. The Fabian Society was formed in London in 1884. Its best-known members have included Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Bernard Shaw, H.G.Wells and G.D.H. and Margaret Cole. Sidney Webb endowed the Fabians with his commitment to parliamentary reform and the encapsulation of their guiding principle as ‘the inevitability of gradualness’. Shaw summarised the society’s method of working for change no less memorably, in the slogan ‘Educate. Agitate. Organise’.
The society was instrumental in bringing about the foundation of the British Labour Party, and remains an affiliate of the party, with representation at the party conference. Every leader of the party has belonged to the society, and in most cases served as a member of its Executive Committee. Margaret Cole describes the new party platform – Labour and the New Social Order - which Sidney Webb and the party secretary Arthur Henderson drafted in 1918 as representing ‘as nearly as possible the purest milk of the Fabian word’. The wife of a newly elected Labor MP in Attlee’s 1945 Labour government was heard to remark following the delivery of the King’s Speech ‘It’s just like a Fabian Summer School – all the same faces’.
The society’s first Australian member was the prominent Melbourne statistician, senior public servant and barrister, William H. Archer, who joined in 1890. The first of numerous overseas Fabian societies was in Australia, where an expatriate London Fabian, the Reverend Charles Marson, established the Fabian Society of South Australia in 1891 – narrowly preceding the foundation of India’s Bombay Fabian Society in 1892 - and a Melbourne Fabian Society was established in 1894 by a second expatriate, Henry Hyde Champion, who also had been instrumental in bringing about the foundation of the London society, but had not joined it.
A Fabian-in-all-but-name Social Questions Committee was established in Melbourne in 1905 by the militant English trade unionist Tom Mann, and shortly evolved into the Victorian Socialist Party, and Champion was again instrumental in the establishment of a Fabian Society of Victoria in 1908. The SQC and the VSP in its Fabian phase provided a political nursery for key figures in the Labor governments which held office during or immediately after the Second World War, including the future Prime Minister, John Curtin, and John Cain Snr who became Premier in Victoria in 1952.
Even so, Australian Fabianism in the period up to and including the First World War was largely ineffectual, consequent on the adversarial approach of its leading identities to the trade union movement and the Labor Party. For example, Champion notoriously described unionists involved in the 1890 Maritime Strike as ‘lions lead by asses’, and the relationship was not improved by Mann’s resignation from his position as a Labor Party organiser to head the rival Victorian Socialist Party, or the standing of VSP candidates against Labor Party candidates at the 1908 state elections.
The effect was that the early Fabians inadvertently became significant contributors to a protracted estrangement of much of the Labor mainstream from intellectual influences. An impression was created that ‘intellectuals’ – Fabians among them – were people who both stabbed in the back honest, loyal trade unionists, and subverted the electoral arm with which the union movement had equipped itself in order to pursue through parliament those of its objectives that industrial action had failed to achieve for it. Champion and Mann were, in this respect, tragic figures who, with the best of intentions, did their cause more harm than good.
As well, the VSP in the years of its post-Fabian decline, and later the nascent Communist Party, drained away energies which otherwise might have fuelled the development of a distinctive Fabian entity and identity in the inter-war period, and the predominantly labourist climate of opinion within the unions and the ALP was inhospitable to the Fabian emphasis on public policy research and consciousness raising. The demise of the Fabian society of Victoria in 1909 was followed by a thirty- year hiatus in overtly Fabian activity, until the establishment of a further South Australian Fabian Society in 1937, which failed to outlive the Second World War.
In the near absence of explicitly Fabian organizations from the Australian political landscape throughout the twenty and more lean years of the inter-war period, Fabian thinking was spread through channels such as the Workers’ Educational Association, the group around Oswald Barnett in Victoria whose activities gave rise the ALP Slum Abolition Committee and the Victorian Housing Commission, and the Australian Institute of Political Science. It was not until the post-war period that Australian Fabianism experienced an incomparably more significant second flowering, with the appointment of Fabian-minded public servants such as H.C.Coombs to senior commonwealth and state public service positions and the establishment of much more effective Fabian Societies, in all states other than Tasmania.
The instigators of the new wave and founders of the new societies included in Victoria the future Whitlam government Treasurers and Deputy Prime Ministers Frank Crean and Jim Cairns and the academics Geoffrey Serle, Alan Davies and John H. Reeves, in NSW the Attorney-General of the day Clarrie Martin and the academics Noel Butlin, Heinz Arndt and Kingsley Laffer, and In South Australia the future Premier Don Dunstan, Clyde Cameron who also held ministerial office under Whitlam and John Menadue who was to head key commonwealth departments and serve as Ambassador to Japan and CEO of Qantas. The NSW society in particular was well-connected within the Chifley government, but relations in all states soured following the government’s 1949 election defeat and the increasing influence within the party of the Catholic Social Studies Movement and the Industrial Groups which were unsympathetic or actively hostile to the Fabian outlook and approach. Subsequent revivals of activity in NSW were instigated in the 1960s by the state’s future Chief Justice, Jim Spigelman, in the 1980s by its future Premier, Bob Carr, and in the 1990s by the future Federal Parliamentary Party Leader, Mark Latham.
Following an abortive attempt to establish a federal structure in 1949, the Victorian Fabian Society gradually moved to fill the gap by operating nationally, with members in every State and Territory. The new phase coincided with Whitlam’s tenure as Deputy Leader and Leader of the Labor Party. His claim in 1988 that ‘Among Australian Fabians, I am Maximus’ was no less accurate for being, in part, self-parody.
The broad intellectual influences which shaped Whitlam’s outlook and actions were those of the leading London Fabian intellectual of the day, C.A.R. Crosland, and other near-Fabian scholars as the American economist J.K. Galbraith. His consistent aim was to correct the imbalance between what Galbraith termed memorably as ‘private affluence and public squalor’. It was his quintessentially Fabian conviction throughout that ‘The quality of life depends less and less on the things which individuals obtain for themselves and can purchase from their personal incomes and depends more and more on the things which the community provides for all its members, from the combined resources of the community’.
He adopted the Fabian approach of sustained policy analysis and exposition from the day he entered parliament in 1952, and the seminal 1972 election policy speech was a drawings together of twenty years of systematic Fabian planning and research by networks instigated or appropriated on his behalf. His government’s great investigatory and recommendatory commissions – bodies such as the Schools Commission and the Hospitals and Health Services Commission - are best understood as having institutionalised the Fabian commitment to bringing about reform on the basis of informed public consent.
Whitlam wrote and spoke widely for the society, and held office as its president. His wide-ranging interests and the breadth of the international experience on which his policies drew also served to broaden the society’s hitherto predominantly British focus. As the University of New England historian, Frank Bongiorno, points out, ‘An organization that had once been an expression of Australia’s Britishness now became an expression of Australian national sentiment and an international outlook concerned with how Australia might adapt in a postcolonial world order’.
A further peak of membership and activity coincided with the run up to the election of John Cain Jnr’s Labor government in Victoria in 1982. In 1984 the Victorian, NSW, ACT and Queensland societies merged to form the Australian Fabian Society which is the largest ever Fabian body outside Britain, and at the turn of the century the society was again growing rapidly, reaching out through new networks, and exploring new technologies and techniques for the more effective conduct of its traditional activities and advancement of its long-standing goals.
Race Mathews, 5/9/04