Santamaria and the Organised Catholic Vote

The great Labor split of 1954–55 and the public exposure of the Santamaria Movement had explosive ramifications. It was considered an unprecedented event, and Santamaria a sui generis political operator, whose unique strategy had been to utilise Catholic parish lists to get out the numbers at union meetings. But some historical precedents existed.

On a number of occasions in the past Melbourne Catholics had organised a Catholic bloc vote based on parishes to try to achieve their political ends. The first great grievance for Victorian Catholics was the loss of state aid for religious schools in the 1870s. A Catholic Education Defence Association (CEDA) was formed in July 1879 to organise a constituency for action on the issue. The aim of CEDA was not to form a directly political organisation, nor to ask for total funding for Catholic schools, but to ask for the secular instruction given in Catholic schools to be paid for by the state. This was the substance of an amendment being proposed by Sir John O’Shanassy in parliament at the time. CEDA branches were quickly set up throughout Melbourne and Victoria. At this stage the small Catholic bloc in parliament almost had the balance of power. Then ensued a complicated set of political manoeuvres, best described by the journalist James Hogan in his biographical sketch on Archbishop Goold: 

Towards the close of 1879 Sir John O’Shanassy, despairing of success by the ordinary constitutional means, conceived the idea of turning out Ministry after Ministry until the Catholic educational grievance was redressed. With this object Catholic education defence associations were established, with the Archbishop’s approval, in every parish throughout the length and breadth of the land. Never before had the Catholic vote been so skilfully and systematically organised. The priest in every parish was president of the local association; constituencies were mapped out and canvassed and every possible Catholic name was added to the electoral rolls.

But the ageing O’Shanassy found that although he could destroy governments he could no longer make them. The Catholics were disappointed with the Premier, Berry, and moved away from him to support the conservatives. James Service became Premier with the support of the Catholic bloc, but he would not support Catholic grievances, so the Catholic vote was transferred back to Berry. Berry and O’Shanassy tried to form a new coalition, with Barry promising a royal commission on education, but they could not agree on other matters, so the Catholic initiative fizzled out.

In the 1880s a series of coalition governments prevented Catholics getting an effective corner, or a controlling bloc vote in parliament, like the Irish Party at Westminster. Catholics were getting nowhere on the education issue. Though almost a quarter of the population, they had only a sixteenth of the members of parliament. A debate on the causes of this political imbalance was initiated in the Catholic Advocate in 1890. Correspondents pointed out that at elections Catholic candidates were asked, to catch them out, if they supported the present free, secular and compulsory Education Act of 1872. If they opposed it, they were marked out as Catholic candidates who were opposing majority opinion, since the Education Act was the law of the land, and their vote suffered.

As a result some Catholic candidates didn’t support state aid, which had the effect of splitting the Catholic vote, so it was very hard to get a Catholic candidate elected, and if elected he was unlikely to be fervent on the state aid issue. As one letter writer put it, the education issue was being used as “a kind of moral bludgeon to slaughter the chances of any Catholic candidate with sufficient independence of spirit to maintain the courage of his conscientious convictions”. Another correspondent wrote: 

The Education Act is simply utilised by the organised bigotry of the colony as a convenient and plausible shibboleth, by the universal use of which to keep Catholics out of Parliament … It simply proves the rule that the profession of our religion practically amounts to a political disqualification in Tory land. 

The education grievance had had the unintended consequence of isolating Catholics on all public issues, not just the education one. Catholics now had two grievances.

The solution generally suggested was that there should be a lay organisation, like the previous Catholic Education Defence Association, based in every parish, to support Catholic candidates, and that a voter registration drive of Catholics be undertaken. The Catholic Young Men’s Society seemed to be the ideal organisation, being parish-based, to carry out this plan for a Catholic bloc vote, a proposal supported editorially by the Advocate on November 22, 1890: 

The Irish have shown us the road to victory. They REGISTERED, and sent to Westminster eighty-six members on whose fidelity they could count. They did not win at once, they have not won yet, but they will fight till they do!

But this notion of a parish-based organised Catholic vote came to nothing at this stage.

By the turn of the century Ulster had become a big issue, as it was unlikely to be easily digested by a newly independent Ireland if Home Rule was successful. As a result Catholics in Melbourne had to contend with increased anti-Papist activities by Orangemen. Under the Party Processions Act, the Orange Order, like any other body, was allowed to stage a march as long as the activity was a religious, not a political, event. In September 1897 Orange disturbances in Sydney Road, Brunswick, were so provocative that Catholics formed a big crowd to oppose them. In the ensuing melee several Catholics were charged with minor offences, and later convicted.

Such incidents led to Catholics forming a Victorian Defence League. This body was, its sponsors said, anti-Orange though not anti-Protestant. It claimed citizens’ liberties were endangered by these marches. Two hundred people met at the Hibernian Hall to form the new organisation. Public servants and police, the League argued, should not be members of Orange lodges because of their public positions. The League charged that the government was failing to enforce the clear provisions of the Party Processions Act. As a result of government inaction, the League was forced to instigate a court case on the legitimacy of the Brunswick procession, but lost. The League supported parliamentary candidates who backed the League’s policies, but was not well enough organised to make inroads on state politics. This was the third attempt in Victoria to organise a bloc Catholic vote, though this time it was on issues wider than the education question. 

The Australian Catholic Federation (ACF) was founded as a Catholic Action initiative in December 1911 at an enormous rally at the Cathedral Hall. The ACF’s aims were to “assert the necessity of Christian principles in social and political life, in the State, in business, and in all financial and industrial relations”. It was made clear that the new body was not a political party, but was a move into the public realm in a way Catholic bodies hadn’t tried before. The aim was to have every Catholic on the electoral rolls to defend the church’s interests. It was the most concerted effort yet in Victoria to organise a Catholic bloc vote.

In early 1914 the ACF submitted a list of questions to by-election candidates, and supported those who gave favourable replies. The ACF wished before the coming state election in late 1914 to meet with the executive of the Political Labor Council (the name by which the Victorian Labor Party was then known) to discuss Catholic grievances, and to water down the Labor Party’s commitment to secular education. This approach was rejected by the PLC President, Laurie Cohen, who claimed that only the annual conference of the party could alter policy, and that the Labor Party did not give pledges to outside bodies.

In November 1914 the PLC banned ACF members from being members of the PLC, a very different situation from New South Wales, where relations between Catholics and Labor were much more cordial. At a large Catholic demonstration at the Melbourne Town Hall in April 1915, Archbishops Carr and Mannix declared that although they agreed with much of the PLC’s policies, they would fight back if treated badly. To overcome the PLC ban, in July Victorian Catholics formed a new body, the Catholic Workers Association (CWA), open to unionists and PLC members, aiming to co-operate with the PLC to improve workers’ conditions, and to push for religious education. Mannix stated the CWA was being organised “within the Labor Party by Catholics”. The Catholics hoped through the CWA to gain a controlling influence in the Labor machine. Mannix was becoming a leading strategist of the ACF, even though it was supposed to be a lay organisation.

At the Victorian Labor Party conference in April 1916 a truce was called, and the ban on ACF members was ended, with the successful motion moved by James Scullin. But the Labor Party was still in favour of secular education. A motion was put “that salaries of all primary school teachers should be paid by the state”, an obvious bid for state aid for Catholic schools. The motion was easily defeated, with Scullin, a future Catholic Labor Prime Minister and E.J. Hogan, a future Catholic Labor Premier of Victoria, voting against the motion. Scullin supported Labor’s secular education plank because he didn’t want to introduce a sectarian argument into the Labor Party’s internal debates. For this action he was roundly condemned by Tom Brennan, one of the founders of ACF, and by Advocate editorials. His brother Frank Brennan, later Attorney-General in the federal Scullin government, was not associated with the ACF, as he was opposed to the idea of a Catholic bloc vote. In political matters he, like Scullin, put his membership of the Labor Party before his membership of the Catholic Church. Overall the ACF and the CWA were not successful in infiltrating the Political Labor Council and changing Labor attitudes. Catholics could not be unhooked from their primary political allegiance to Labor.

The ACF’s attempt in 1915 to infiltrate the Labor Party in Victoria, through a new body, the CWA, when the ACF was banned by Labor, has obvious parallels with industrial and political events in the 1940s and 1950s, when the Catholic Action organisation formed the Movement, which tried to dominate the Victorian ALP and was in turn proscribed by the ALP. Mannix had form on this issue, as he was deeply involved in both manoeuvres. The CWA was a body of Catholic unionists and ALP members, the same tactical composition as the Movement. 

How much was Santamaria aware of this earlier Victorian Catholic history? He knew of the church school problem, but did he know the history of the proposed Catholic bloc vote, Mannix’s support of the Catholic Workers Association in its attempt to control the Victorian Labor branch in 1915, and so on? How much did Mannix tell Santamaria of these events? How much did Santamaria know in the 1940s of the earlier pressure group, the ACF, with its parish-based organisational structure, and its Catholic Action aims which were like his own: “[The ACF] asserts the necessity of Christian principles in social and political life, in the State, in business, and in all financial and industrial relations”? Unfortunately we don’t know if these earlier examples influenced Santamaria to similarly use the ALP to get Catholic policies accepted, as he doesn’t allude to historical precedents in his writings. He relied mostly on Celia Hamilton’s 1959 article on the ACF for his account of that body in his Mannix biography. But he does mention that Scullin told him that he (Scullin) had abstained from supporting the ACF.

It has been previously assumed that Bob Santamaria thought up the idea of the parish-based Movement to fight communist influence in the unions and the ALP, and that in the background Mannix provided spiritual and financial assistance. In 1941 when the Movement was formed, Mannix was a wily seventy-seven-year-old and Santamaria an inexperienced twenty-six-year-old. Given Mannix’s involvement in the CWA’s use of parish lists and unionists in an attempt to infiltrate the local Labor Party, it is possible that he had a more crucial input into the Movement’s inception and tactics than has been previously realised.