Our leader today, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, has never known life outside of university and the Labor Party.

His life experiences are different from those he claims to represent and poles apart from those of his war-time predecessors.

ROUTINE

Outwardly, Ben Chifley’s move into the Prime Minister’s office at Parliament House in July 1945 did not change his routine.

He continued to walk to work each morning from the Hotel Kurrajong, opening the Lodge only when his wife Elizabeth joined him on special occasions to entertain distinguished guests.

He still spent long hours at his desk, the door to his office remaining open, visitors recalling how periodically he set fire to his wastepaper basket with the matches tossed over his shoulder after relighting his pipe; a jug of water was kept on his desk to douse the flames.

As before, he drove whenever possible to spend the weekend in his modest cottage by the Bathurst railyard and sauntered the town to yarn with mates and catch up on local news. (Australia’s Boldest Experiment by Stuart Macintyre)

The challenges of two Prime Ministers of Australia at war and at peace:

For Chifley, a modest cottage by the side of a railyard for a weekend retreat and the chance of a walk to catch up with mates.

For Albanese, the choice of a $4m mansion on the cliffs overlooking the ocean or another mansion, fully serviced, overlooking Sydney Harbour or just stay at home in the other fully serviced modest “company house” in Canberra.

With national unemployment above 30 per cent, Chifley had watched as poverty and hunger, shanty towns, suicide rates and political extremism had bashed the Australian people for 25 years.

Then on September 3, 1939, the bugle was blown again in Europe, this time fascism was on the march and England was threatened; Prime Minister Menzies spoke to the Australian people and gave them a message they didn’t want.

And no doubt Curtin and Chifley dreaded: “Fellow Australians, it is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that, in consequence of the persistence of Germany in her invasion of Polland, Great Britain has declared war upon her, and that, as a result, Australia is also at war.”

Between the outbreak of war in 1939 and August 29, 1941, there was upheaval in the parliament of Australia.

REFUSED

Curtin was the leader of the Opposition Labor Party in a finely balanced House; he refused the offer (from Menzies) to form a national government with equal representation, which would allow Menzies to return to Britain and represent Australia on the British War Cabinet.

On August 29, 1941, after an emergency cabinet meeting Menzies resigned. Arthur Fadden was elected Prime Minister; his tenure lasted barely a month; two independents voted with Labor to defeat the government and on October 7, 1941, John Curtin became Prime Minister of Australia.

Curtin was a man of extraordinary foresight. In 1940 and before he became PM, he started a conversation on the post-war reconstruction of Australia.

So certain was he that Australia must plan for rebuilding after World War II, that he made post-war reconstruction the centre piece of his address to a special Federal Labor conference in June of that year, and it became the focus of his election campaign.

Even as the nation went through the difficulties of rationing and the deprivations caused by the massive effort needed from every man and woman to manufacture and assemble the ships and aircraft, the munitions and weapons, uniforms and rations for all theatres of war where Australians fought, Curtin and his team planned for when it would be over, and for when half a million men and women would return home.

(Half a million was about 14 per cent of Australia’s population in 1945. Today that would mean mobilising nearly four million men and women to fight a war in another part of the world.)

A major part of Australia’s post war reconstruction was building houses. Chifley, like Curtin before him and like Menzies after him were committed to the Australian people, they believed it was their duty to provide a house for all who needed one.

In the first five post-war years the Chifley Labor Government (Curtin died in July 1945) completed 202,000 flats and houses in Australia.

In its first term of government the Albanese Government, according to Opposition Housing spokesman Michael Sukker, hasn’t built a single new house.

In the following five Menzies government years, 388,000 houses and flats were built.

There were no computers, mobile phones, internet and data storage banks in those days. There were telex machines, telephones, typewriters, slide rules, extraordinary brains and willing brawn and a Prime Minister driven to achieve.

After the World War II, large tracts of Europe needed rebuilding; there were shortages of everything, the world needed vast amounts of cement, steel and timber, and Australia was a long way away from pre-war suppliers, yet, somehow, the people of Australia prevailed.

In addition to the challenge of half a million people returning from fighting a war, the Chifley Government realised that another 200,000 men and women who had been employed in war industries in Australia, would also need to be absorbed back into the general workforce.

“Necessity is the mother of invention.” The absolute necessity of having to make and manufacture the materials necessary to fight the Second World War, turned Australia from a nation reliant on rural industries, into a manufacturing nation; in 1946 employment in manufacturing had reached an all-time peak of 28 per cent of total employment.

REGRESS

After the war the government believed it was essential that manufacturing continued and grew; they believed this would ensure the economy did not regress to its pre-war reliance on the rural industries of beef, wheat, wool and fruit growing.

Innovative men and women started manufacturing what was needed for this nation’s post war reconstruction; from houses, bricks and furniture to washing machines, from radios to, in 1948, Holden motor cars; and in 1949, in Western Australia, the famous Chamberlain Tractor.

For both vehicles, all the parts, gear boxes and engines and everything it was possible to make, was made in Australia.

Skills learned during the war years of casting and machining, of building and innovating started a mini industrial revolution in post war Australia; Australia took the first tentative steps to becoming self-sufficient.

Now in 2024, and after over 70 years of leading a largely placid life, Australia is being forced, like it was in 1939, to face the reality of being an island in a region where tensions are rising, and the oceans are its arteries and self-sufficiency, making things, is back on the agenda.

In 1939 Australia was dependent on rural exports, wheat, wool, meat and fruit.

Australia has never been a nation attracted to adding value to its exports; the same is true today as it was before the Second World War. Britain became world-famous for making garments out of Australian merino wool, it played a major part of their industrial revolution.

Australian wheat and meat fed the British worker, but it was up to them to make the flour and the stew, it was easier than milling the wheat and tinning the meat; value adding has never been part of the culture of Australian industry.

Nothing has changed; we still sell to the industrial nations of the world what we dig out of the ground and grow in our paddocks. We put unimproved commodities on ships and send them away to be made into goods some of which we buy back when others have added value to them.

Iron ore and coal are our two biggest exports. China produces about 50 per cent of the world’s steel, mostly by using Australian iron ore and burning Australian coal.

We buy our steel needs from China and ever increasingly everything else we need from knives and forks to motor vehicles to solar panels and wind turbines.

How cynical socialism is in Australia today compared to the years during and after the Second World War; those years when there was absolutely no doubt that Labor were the Party of the working classes; now they are the Party of the elite.

Men like Curtin and especially Chifley and many of their colleagues were not professional politicians like those who occupy the front bench of the Government in Canberra today.

Curtin left school at 13. Against conscription he was briefly jailed in 1916 for failing to attend a compulsory medical examination.

DRIVER

He left the Timberworkers’ Union in the same year; went to Western Australia and became the editor of the Westralian Worker and President of the Australian Journalists Association. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1928 at the age of 43, lost his seat in 1931 and won it back in 1934.

Ben Chifley became a train driver after joining NSW Government Railways on leaving school at 13. He became a union leader and didn’t enter parliament until the federal election of 1928, like Curtin, at the age of 43.

He became Minister of Defence in the Scullin Government in 1931 and lost his seat in that same year’s federal election.

He stayed in and around Labor politics and the Labor Party; he served on a royal commission into the banking system in 1935; he was a senior public servant in the Department of Munitions just before he was re-elected in the general election of 1940.

Our leader today; our Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, has never known life outside of university and the Labor Party of Australia.