Ben Chifley

The Right Honourable Ben Chifley
16th Prime Minister of Australia Elections: 1946, 1949, 1951
In office 13 July 1945 – 19 December 1949
Preceded by	Frank Forde
Succeeded by	Robert Menzies
Constituency	Macquarie (New South Wales)
Personal details
Born	(1885-09-22)22 September 1885 Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia
Died	13 June 1951(1951-06-13) (aged 65)
Political party	Labor

Joseph Benedict Chifley (22 September 1885 – 13 June 1951), Australian politician and 16th Prime Minister of Australia, was one of Australia's most influential Prime Ministers. Among his government's accomplishments were the post-war immigration scheme under Arthur Calwell, the establishment of Australian citizenship in 1949, the Snowy Mountains Scheme, the national airline TAA, a social security scheme for the unemployed, and the founding of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). One of the few successful referenda to modify the Australian Constitution took place during his term.

Early life (1885-1917)

Born in Bathurst, New South Wales, Chifley was the son of a blacksmith of Irish Roman Catholic descent. He was one of four brothers and between the ages of five and 14 was raised mostly by his grandfather, who lost all his savings in the bank crash of 1892: Chifley acquired his lifelong dislike of the private banks early. He was educated at Roman Catholic schools in Bathurst, and joined the New South Wales Railways at 15.

Ben Chifley became an engine driver. He was one of the founders of the AFULE (the Australian Federated Union of Locomotive Enginemen) and an active member of the Labor Party. In 1914 he married Elizabeth Mackenzie. She was a Presbyterian; Chifley left the Roman Catholic Church to marry her and never returned. In 1917 he was one of the leaders of a prolonged strike which resulted in his being dismissed. He was reinstated by the Jack Lang New South Wales Labor government in 1920. He represented his union before industrial tribunals and taught himself industrial law.

Early Political career (1928-44)

Chifley in the 1930s

In 1928, at his second try, Chifley won the Bathurst-based seat of Macquarie in the House of Representatives. He was in general a supporter of the James Scullin government's economic policies, and in 1931 he became Minister for Defence. At the 1931 general election, the Scullin government fell and Chifley lost his seat. During the Depression he survived on his wife's family's money and his part-ownership of the Bathurst newspaper the National Advocate.

In 1935 the Lyons government appointed him a member of the Royal Commission on Banking, a subject on which he had become an expert. He submitted a minority report advocating that the private banks be nationalised.

Chifley finally won his seat back in 1940, and the following year he became Treasurer (finance minister) in John Curtin's Labor government. Although Frank Forde was Curtin's deputy, Chifley became the minister Curtin most relied on, and he controlled most domestic policy while Curtin was preoccupied with the war effort. He presided over the massive increases in government expenditure and taxation that accompanied the war, and imposed a regime of economic regulation that made him very unpopular with business and the press.

Prime Minister (1945-49)

Chifley (left) meets with Premier of South Australia Tom Playford (centre) and Governor of South Australia Baron Norrie (right) in 1946

Chifley (middle) and Herbert Evatt (left) with Clement Attlee (right) at the Dominion and British Leaders Conference, London, 1946

When Curtin died in July 1945, Forde became (very briefly) Prime Minister, but Chifley defeated him in the leadership ballot and replaced him six days later. Once the war ended, normal political life resumed, and Chifley faced Robert Menzies and his new Liberal Party in the 1946 election, which Chifley comfortably won. In the post-war years, Chifley maintained wartime economic controls including the highly unpopular petrol rationing. He did this partly to help Britain in its postwar economic difficulties.

Feeling secure in power, Chifley decided it was time to advance towards Labor's objective of democratic socialism. In 1947 he announced the government's intention to nationalise the banks. This provoked massive opposition from the press, and middle-class opinion turned against Labor. The High Court of Australia eventually found Chifley's legislation to be unconstitutional.

In the winter of 1949 a prolonged and bitter strike in the coal industry caused unemployment and hardship. Chifley saw the strike as a move by the Communist Party to challenge Labor's place as the party of the working class, and he sent in the army to break the strike. Despite this, Menzies exploited the rising Cold War hysteria to portray Labor as soft on Communism.

These events, together with a perception that Chifley and Labor had grown increasingly arrogant in office, led to the sweeping Liberal election victory of December 1949. Chifley suffered a 48-seat swing--still the worst defeat of an incumbent government at the federal level in Australia. Chifley was now aged 64 and in poor health (like Curtin he was a lifelong smoker), but he refused to retire. Labor had retained control of the Senate, and Chifley took advantage of this to bring misery to the Menzies government at every turn. Menzies responded by introducing a bill to ban the Communist Party of Australia. He expected Chifley to reject it and give him an excuse to call double dissolution election. Menzies apparently hoped to repeat his "soft-on-Communism" theme to win a majority in both chambers. However, Chifley let the bill pass (it was ultimately thrown out by the High Court)

However, when Chifley rejected Menzies' banking bill a few months later, Menzies called a double dissolution election in April 1951. He succeeded in winning control of both Houses at the election.

A few weeks later Chifley died of a heart attack in his room at the Kurrajong Hotel in Canberra (he had lived there throughout his prime ministership, having refused to reside at The Lodge). Menzies heard of Chifley's demise while attending an official event at the Albert Hall in Canberra, to mark fifty years of Australian Federation. Normally impassive, "Ming the Merciless" (as his foes called him) had difficulty on this occasion in fighting back tears; and he ordered that the function be brought to an end, in homage to his predecessor and adversary, whom (for all the previous decade's political quarrels) he had never ceased to respect as a person.

"Chifley legend"

Chifley in the 1940s

Like Curtin, Chifley has been made a secular saint by the labour movement, but the basis of the "Chifley legend" is somewhat different. Curtin is remembered mainly for his wartime leadership and forging the US-Australia Alliance. Chifley is remembered by the left as the only Labor Prime Minister who tried to implement the party's socialist objective.

More than 30 years after his death, Chifley's name still aroused partisan passions. In 1987 the New South Wales Labor government decided to name the planned new university in Sydney's western suburbs Chifley University. When, in 1989, a new Liberal government renamed it the University of Western Sydney, controversy broke out. According to a (see [1]) debate on the topic, held in 1997 after the Labor Party had regained government, the decision to rename Chifley University reflected a desire to attach the name of Western Sydney to institutions of lasting significance, and that idea ultimately received the support of Bob Carr, later the Premier of New South Wales.

Places and institutions have been named after Chifley. The main library of the Australian National University, Chifley Library, is named after him. There is an Australian hotel chain, a central Sydney building and square, and two suburbs (in Canberra and Sydney), named after him. Several public high schools in Western Sydney are now known as Chifley College, as well as a grouping of dormitories from the Bathurst campus for CSU collectively named as Chifley Halls in 2007. Many of his reforms also remain in place.

Chifley had lived apart from his wife for many years: his secretary, Phyllis Donnelly, was with him when he died. Long-held suspicions that she had been his lover were confirmed in David Day's 2001 biography.

Bust of sixteenth Prime Minister of Australia Ben Chifley by sculptor Ken Palmer located in the Prime Minister's Avenue in the Ballarat Botanical Gardens

The light on the hill

"I try to think of the labour movement, not as putting an extra sixpence into somebody's pocket, or making somebody Prime Minister or Premier, but as a movement bringing something better to the people, better standards of living, greater happiness to the mass of the people. We have a great objective - the light on the hill - which we aim to reach by working the betterment of mankind not only here but anywhere we may give a helping hand. If it were not for that, the Labour movement would not be worth fighting for." Excerpt from The light on the hill speech, 12 June 1949.

See also

• First Chifley Ministry
• Second Chifley Ministry
• 1949 Australian coal strike
• The light on the hill

Further reading

• Ben Chifley, Things Worth Fighting For (collected speeches), Melbourne University Press, 1952
• L F Crisp, Ben Chifley: A Political Biography, Longman, Green and Co, 1961
• David Day, Chifley, HarperCollins, 2001
• Duncan Waterson, Australian Dictionary of Biography Vol. 13 A-D pp. 412-420, Melbourne University Press, 1993

External links

• Ben Chifley - Australia's Prime Ministers / National Archives of Australia
• Chifley Research Centre
• Chifley College, Sydney