The Victorian Royal Commission on Communism, 1949-50 : a study of anti-Communism in Australia

Abstract

For the greater part of its history, the Communist Party of Australia has been a numerically tiny and politically ineffective organisation, isolated from the Labour Party by mutual animosity, and possessing only marginal influence in the Labour movement as a whole. Non-Labour parliamentarians seemed able to ignore these facts with impunity in their habitual utilisation of the Communist bogey at every Federal Election after 1925. But there was a period of years in the 1940's when their public tirade on the dangers posed by the Communist Party bore a much closer relation than usual to the realities of Communist influence in Australian politics; a period when the Party itself seriously anticipated the advent of revolution in Australia within the space of a decade. In the light of the present status of the C.P.A., it is difficult to imagine that in the mid-1940's it had more than 22 thousand members, and financial resources sufficient for the purchase of Marx House in Sydney at a sum of ^30,500; that Communists held executive control of most of the main transport, mining and heavy industry trade unions, and, with their sympathisers, a majority at the 1945 A.C.T.U. Congress; and that they were the guiding force behind a variety of prospering 'progressive' community organisations.