The Golden Age Express

It happened in New Zealand last fortnight, and it happened again last week in Australia: the ruling Socialist party was decisively thrown out.

Almost from the start of the parliamentary campaign, Australia's Labor government had had its back to the ropes. Australians were plainly fed up with widening bureaucratic controls, gasoline rationing and high prices, creeping nationalization, hamstringing restrictions on private enterprise. Through the campaign Labor fought with feeble punches: Government orators warned that only Labor could maintain full employment; Labor propaganda included a "ticket" bearing a crossed pick & shovel and the slogan, "Express to the Golden Age." But Australia had been riding the express for eight years, had found no golden age, eaten no pie from the sky.

Last week, in shirtsleeves and summer dresses, some 5,000,000 Australians went to the polls (voting is compulsory; slackers can be fined up to $5). They gave the combined Liberal and Country parties a clear majority of at least 27 seats (by incomplete count) in the new House of Representatives. Labor seemed sure of at least 46 seats out of a total of 123. In the victorious coalition the Liberals represented the professional and business classes; the Country Party the farmers. In the past these groups had not always cooperated. But against socialism they had a common front.

To Lose or Choose. Australia's new Prime Minister would be the Liberals' Robert Gordon Menzies, 55, an urbane lawyer and veteran politician. Out of government leadership and onto the Opposition bench goes Labor's Joseph Benedict Chifley, 64, a dignified, pipe-smoking former locomotive engineer with a talent for playing the ponies (Australia is a horse-happy land).

Winner Menzies, once an aloof personality with a tendency to talk down to his audiences, showed a new character in the Liberal-Country Party campaign. He mingled with audiences, took heckling good-naturedly, responded genially to hails of "Bob" from the crowd. He banged away at a single theme with crusading fervor: "We've come round again to a crucial decision. A vote for Labor means a vote for the ultimate bereavement of freedom." Labor retorted, "Vote for Bob and lose your job!" The Liberals countered with a crack at socialistic regimentation: "Vote for Bob and choose your job!"

Menzies promised to stop bureaucratic highhandedness, also promised to outlaw the weak Australian Communist Party. The Dominion social welfare program (old-age pensions since 1909, maternity benefits since 1912) was not a campaign issue. Menzies will retain it in full.

Two Down, One to Go. Dearest to Chifley's heart was a drive to nationalize banks. Private bankers, cried he, had greedily levied up to 8% interest on loans. Then a rebel Labor politico in Sydney, "Big Jack" Lang, charged sensationally that Chifley himself once lent money at rates up to 9%. Labor's embarrassed leader said it was true--only he had invested the money for proletarian friends and neighbors, taken nothing for himself. At his final rally, shirtsleeved Premier Chifley mixed with former railway cronies, reminded hard-drinking Australians how Labor had relaxed the closing time for pubs: "Remember how pubkeepers had to keep cockatoos to warn them when cops were coming?" But it was no use.

In the campaign's closing days, the news of Labor's defeat in New Zealand severely jarred Chifley and his men, made a sharp impression on the voters. Menzies hoped New Zealand and Australia had set a trend against Socialism that would reach all the way "home," i.e., to Britain. Said Melbourne's dapper Richard G. Casey, onetime Minister to Washington: "The man who should get the most kick out of this is Winston Churchill."

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