Bob Santamaria, Labor’s Nemesis

Labor and Santamaria
by Robert Murray
Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2017, 103 pages, $24.95
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A disastrous division in its ranks in the mid-1950s kept the Australian Labor Party out of power federally for twenty-three years. Until Gough Whitlam was elected Prime Minister in 1972, there hadn’t been a federal Labor government since 1949, when Ben Chifley was defeated. The infamous Labor Split fundamentally reshaped Australian politics, both nationally and in the states, especially in Victoria and Queensland.

In 1970 Robert Murray published The Split, a groundbreaking analysis of Labor in the mid-1950s. In Labor and Santamaria Murray re-examines, to good effect, much of the original story of the Split, continuing its repercussions into the twenty-first century. It’s a story that is well worth bringing up to date because the effects of the Split are still with us, and some of the issues have never been adequately resolved within Labor’s…