Frank Anstey : a political biography

Abstract

This biography of Francis George Anstey (1865-1940) is a study of a radical in Labor politics. Although he did not achieve fame through high office, Anstey was one of the most prominent and influential Labor politicians of his generation. He was a flamboyant and witty orator who could enthral and delight his audiences on an impressive range of subjects. He was a prolific journalist and occasional editor of a labour weekly he helped establish. His stirring account of the Russian revolution and civil war was received enthusiastically by radicals in Australia and abroad. But his greatest influence was as a popular theorist. It was he more than anyone else who defined and elaborated a radical political economy of finance capital which not only helped sustain pressure for public control over the monetary system, but was at the centre of a tradition which inspited the Chifley government s attempt to nationalise the private banks. He was a publicist, a theorist and, on matters of loyalty to its working class origins, a conscience of the Labor party. Anstey, however, could be a difficult colleague. He was a man of prodigious, if erratic, energy whose extravagant moods could change quickly from elation to despondency. His gently ironic wit could switch suddenly to savage satire and, occasionally, vitriolic abuse. He was also a man of strong principles which often brought him into conflict with his party colleagues who were more willing to accept the limitations which parliamentary politics imposed on the exercise of power, and to make the necessary compromises. Anstey had no taste nor talent for that. He was impatient for Labor to implement its policies and advance the cause of working class emancipation. The thesis argues that the very qualities which brought him to prominence as a romantic, populist radical were ill-suited to the steady, cautious reform which has characterised the work of the parliamentary Labor party. It suggests that the tension between his ideas, principles and personality, and the constraints imposed by liberal parliamentary democracy in a capitalist economy finally condemned him to failure. It further argues that his somewhat romantic vision of the potential for the working class to transform society, in the end, turned his disappointment into an embittered fatalism The tragedy of Anstey's career, it is suggested, was not just the destruction of his faith, but its apparent inevitability,