The ALP has shown great skill in working the constitution to get its way. It lowered the voting age to 18 years thus ensuring an end to conscription, no matter what the will of any future government. It repealed the provision that huge rural electorates could vary from the average population size by 20 per cent, and made it 10 per cent, like compact city electorates.

The Scullin ALP government boasted in the 1930’s, that Australia was not prepared for war. Half the the ALP cabinet called in 1933 for the abolition of the armed forces. This paled into insignificance against the conduct of the war by John Curtin’s ALP government.

Unions sided with Hitler’s Germany because it had allied itself with Russia, and when Hitler invaded Russia, shifted its ground to opposing a capitalist war. There has only been one worthwhile account of Australia at war in those years, that by Hal Colebatch entitled Australia’s Secret War. It is a chronicle of strikes that the government was unable to control.

Australia’s industrial effort was shamefully inadequate. Canada produced 16,400 aircraft, including 1,500 Hurricanes, 1,000 Mosquitoes, 650 Catalinas and 450 Lancasters. Australia built 3,500 aircraft, comprising Tiger Moth biplanes, Beauforts, Wirraways, Wackets and Boomerangs. Only the Beauforts were effective, modern fighters. Curtin refused to send equipment to the British forces in Burma.

Colebatch describes Australia’s war effort as an indictment of quasi-treasonous behaviour by the Australian Labor Government and unionised work-force.

That was then, and this is now. Surely it is different. Surely, it is not. The Rudd and Gillard governments undid the industrial reforms of the Howard coalition government, reversing a steady decline in unemployment. It set fiscal booby traps for the coalition government, plunging the country into deficit financing stretching out into the future. Unless Tony Abbott breaks a few promises in the Budget next month Australia will have to live with the mess which is the ALP legacy.

Bill Shorten promises reform but useful reform is beyond him, because the ALP is fundamentally the political wing of the trade union movement, which is dedicated to pursuing higher wages and costly conditions of employment, seemingly oblivious to the impact this has on Australian industry, and consequently on employment.

So Chinese products fill our shops, with India, South-East Asia, Indonesia, Brazil and Africa waiting their turns.

While the ALP remains the political wing of the trade unions, any ALP government must fail the country.

David Barnett

Yass