The Australian Labour Party. (1911)

From the January 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following extracts from a letter from a friend in South Australia may be of interest at the present moment:

   “Politics here are worse than dead—they are buried. So far as the worker is concerned the Labour Party is a calamitous failure. Even the most conservative of capitalist Governments could not have been more concerned about the rights of “property” than was Verran's Government in the Asphalters’ strike a few weeks ago. Most of the South Australian Labour M.P.s are wowsers (Wesleyans) of the virulent type, bound hand and foot to one or another little Bethel, and when it comes to a question of conventional or unconventional procedure, the wowseristic instinct comes uppermost, and the wowser feeling is ever for 'Plute,’ who keeps the chapels going. A few of the present Government are marked down for smash next election,—their vera religious pandering will prove their political undoing.’ 

“You will have read of the Labour victory in New South Wales. They have a better type of men there than we have in South Australia, as they are not so thoroughly tied up to the Gospel-mongers. We have a phalanx of saints with Verran as archangel.”

John A. Dawson