Australian Labor Party
The Australian Labor Party, also known as the Labor Party or simply Labor, is the major centre-left political party in Australia and one of two major parties in Australian politics, along with the centre-right Liberal Party of Australia. The party has been in government since the 2022 federal election with the Albanese government, and with political branches active in all the Australian states and territories, they currently hold government in New South Wales, South Australia, Victoria, Western Australia, and the Australian Capital Territory. As of 2025, Queensland, Tasmania and Northern Territory are the only states or territories where Labor currently forms the opposition. It is the oldest continuously operating political party in Australian history, having been established on 8 May 1901 at Parliament House, Melbourne, the meeting place of the first Federal Parliament.
The ALP is descended from the labour parties founded in the various Australian colonies by the emerging labour movement. Colonial Labour parties contested seats from 1891, and began contesting federal seats following Federation at the 1901 federal election. In 1904, the ALP briefly formed what is considered the world's first labour party government and the world's first democratic socialist or social democratic government at a national level. At the 1910 federal election, Labor became the first party in Australia to win a majority in either house of the Australian parliament. In every election since 1910 Labor has either served as the governing party or the opposition. There have been 13 Labor prime ministers and 10 periods of federal Labor governments, including under Billy Hughes from 1915 to 1916, James Scullin from 1929 to 1932, John Curtin from 1941 to 1945, Ben Chifley from 1945 to 1949, Gough Whitlam from 1972 to 1975, Bob Hawke from 1983 to 1991, Paul Keating from 1991 to 1996, Kevin Rudd from 2007 to 2010 and 2013, Julia Gillard from 2010 to 2013, and Anthony Albanese since 2022.
The Labor Party is often called the party of unions due to its close ties to the labour movement in Australia and historical founding by trade unions, with the majority of Australian trade unions being affiliated with the Labor Party. The party's structure allocates 50% of delegate representation at state and national conferences to affiliated unions, with the remaining 50% to rank-and-file party members. At the federal and state/colony level, the Australian Labor Party predates both the British Labour Party and the New Zealand Labour Party in party formation, government, and policy implementation. Internationally, the ALP is a member of the Progressive Alliance, a network of progressive, democratic socialist and social democratic parties, having previously been a member of the Socialist International.
Name and spelling
In standard Australian English, the word labour is spelt with a u. However, the political party uses the spelling Labor, without a u. There was originally no standardised spelling of the party's name, with Labor and Labour both in common usage. According to Ross McMullin, who wrote an official history of the Labor Party, the title page of the proceedings of the Federal Conference used the spelling "Labor" in 1902, "Labour" in 1905 and 1908, and then "Labor" from 1912 onwards. In 1908, James Catts put forward a motion at the Federal Conference that "the name of the party be the Australian Labour Party", which was carried by 22 votes to 2. A separate motion recommending state branches adopt the name was defeated. There was no uniformity of party names until 1918 when the Federal party resolved that state branches should adopt the name "Australian Labor Party", now spelt without a u. Each state branch had previously used a different name, due to their different origins.Although the ALP officially adopted the spelling without a u, it took decades for the official spelling to achieve widespread acceptance. According to McMullin, "the way the spelling of 'Labor Party' was consolidated had more to do with the chap who ended up being in charge of printing the federal conference report than any other reason". Some sources have attributed the official choice of Labor to influence from King O'Malley, who was born in the United States and was reputedly an advocate of English-language spelling reform; the spelling without a u is the standard form in American English.
Andrew Scott, who wrote "Running on Empty: 'Modernising' the British and Australian Labour Parties", suggests that the adoption of the spelling without a u "signified one of the ALP's earliest attempts at modernisation", and served the purpose of differentiating the party from the Australian labour movement as a whole and distinguishing it from other British Empire labour parties. The decision to include the word "Australian" in the party's name, rather than just "Labour Party" as in the United Kingdom, Scott attributes to "the greater importance of nationalism for the founders of the colonial parties".
History
The Australian Labor Party has its origins in the Labour parties founded in the 1890s in the Australian colonies prior to federation. Labor tradition ascribes the founding of Queensland Labour to a meeting of striking pastoral workers under a ghost gum tree in Barcaldine, Queensland in 1891. The 1891 shearers' strike is credited as being one of the factors for the formation of the Australian Labor Party. On 9 September 1892 the Manifesto of the Queensland Labour Party was read out under the well known Tree of Knowledge at Barcaldine following the Great Shearers' Strike. The State Library of Queensland now holds the manifesto; in 2008 the historic document was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Australian Register and, in 2009, the document was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World International Register. The Balmain, New South Wales branch of the party claims to be the oldest in Australia. However, the Scone Branch has a receipt for membership fees for the Labour Electoral League dated April 1891. This predates the Balmain claim. This can be attested in the Centenary of the ALP book. Labour as a parliamentary party dates from 1891 in New South Wales and South Australia, 1893 in Queensland, and later in the other colonies.The first election contested by Labour candidates was the 1891 New South Wales election, when Labour candidates won 35 of 141 seats. The major parties were the Protectionist and Free Trade parties and Labour held the balance of power. It offered parliamentary support in exchange for policy concessions. The United Labor Party of South Australia was founded in 1891, and three candidates were that year elected to the South Australian Legislative Council. The first successful South Australian House of Assembly candidate was John McPherson at the 1892 East Adelaide by-election. Richard Hooper however was elected as an Independent Labor candidate at the 1891 Wallaroo by-election, while he was the first labor member of the House of Assembly he was not a member of the newly formed ULP.
At the 1893 South Australian elections, the ULP was immediately elevated to balance of power status with 10 of 54 lower house seats. The liberal government of Charles Kingston was formed with the support of the ULP, ousting the conservative government of John Downer. So successful, less than a decade later at the 1905 state election, Thomas Price formed the world's first stable Labor government. John Verran led Labor to form the state's first of many majority governments at the 1910 state election.
In 1899, Anderson Dawson formed a minority Labour government in Queensland, the first in the world, which lasted one week while the conservatives regrouped after a split.
The colonial Labour parties and the trade unions were mixed in their support for the Federation of Australia. Some Labour representatives argued against the proposed constitution, claiming that the Senate as proposed was too powerful, similar to the anti-reformist colonial upper houses and the British House of Lords. They feared that federation would further entrench the power of the conservative forces. However, the first Labour leader and Prime Minister Chris Watson was a supporter of federation.
Historian Celia Hamilton, examining New South Wales, argues for the central role of Irish Catholics. Before 1890, they opposed Henry Parkes, the main Liberal leader, and of free trade, seeing them both as the ideals of Protestant Englishmen who represented landholding and large business interests. In the strike of 1890 the leading Catholic, Sydney's Archbishop Francis Moran was sympathetic toward unions, but Catholic newspapers were negative. After 1900, says Hamilton, Irish Catholics were drawn to the Labour Party because its stress on equality and social welfare fitted with their status as manual labourers and small farmers. In the 1910 elections Labour gained in the more Catholic areas and the representation of Catholics increased in Labour's parliamentary ranks.
Early decades at the federal level
The federal parliament in 1901 was contested by each state Labour Party. In total, they won 15 of the 75 seats in the House of Representatives, collectively holding the balance of power, and the Labour members now met as the Federal Parliamentary Labour Party on 8 May 1901 at Parliament House, Melbourne, the meeting place of the first federal Parliament. The caucus decided to support the incumbent Protectionist Party in minority government, while the Free Trade Party formed the opposition. It was some years before there was any significant structure or organisation at a national level. Labour under Chris Watson doubled its vote at the 1903 federal election and continued to hold the balance of power. In April 1904, however, Watson and Alfred Deakin fell out over the issue of extending the scope of industrial relations laws concerning the Conciliation and Arbitration bill to cover state public servants, the fallout causing Deakin to resign. Free Trade leader George Reid declined to take office, which saw Watson become the first Labour Prime Minister of Australia, and the world's first Labour head of government at a national level, though his was a minority government that lasted only four months. He was aged only 37, and is still the youngest prime minister in Australia's history.George Reid of the Free Trade Party adopted a strategy of trying to reorient the party system along Labour vs. non-Labour lines prior to the 1906 federal election and renamed his Free Trade Party to the Anti-Socialist Party. Reid envisaged a spectrum running from socialist to anti-socialist, with the Protectionist Party in the middle. This attempt struck a chord with politicians who were steeped in the Westminster tradition and regarded a two-party system as very much the norm.
Although Watson led the party to a plurality victory in 1906, he stepped down from the leadership the following year, to be succeeded by Andrew Fisher's minority government for seven months until it fell in June 1909. At the 1910 federal election, Fisher led Labor to victory, forming Australia's first elected federal majority government, Australia's first elected Senate majority, the world's first Labour Party majority government at a national level, and after the 1904 Chris Watson minority government the world's second Labour Party government at a national level. It was the first time a Labour Party had controlled any house of a legislature, and the first time the party controlled both houses of a bicameral legislature. The state branches were also successful, except in Victoria, where the strength of Deakinite liberalism inhibited the party's growth. The state branches formed their first majority governments in New South Wales and South Australia in 1910, Western Australia in 1911, Queensland in 1915 and Tasmania in 1925. Such success eluded the other Commonwealth Labour parties for another decade; the Labour Party in Great Britain would not form even a minority government until 1929, and would have to wait another sixteen years to win a majority in its own right. Even in neighboring New Zealand, Labour would not take power until 1935. In Canada, a national labour party was not even formed until 1932 and never formed government.
Analysis of the early NSW Labor caucus reveals "a band of unhappy amateurs", made up of blue collar workers, a squatter, a doctor, and even a mine owner, indicating that the idea that only the socialist working class formed Labor is untrue. In addition, many members from the working class supported the liberal notion of free trade between the colonies; in the first grouping of state MPs, 17 of the 35 were free-traders.
In the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917, support for socialism grew in trade union ranks, and at the 1921 All-Australian Trades Union Congress a resolution was passed calling for "the socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange". The 1922 Labor Party National Conference adopted a similarly worded socialist objective which remained official policy for many years. The resolution was immediately qualified, however, by the Blackburn amendment, which said that "socialisation" was desirable only when was necessary to "eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features". Only once has a federal Labor government attempted to nationalise any industry, and that was held by the High Court to be unconstitutional. The commitment to nationalisation was dropped by Gough Whitlam, and Bob Hawke's government carried out the floating of the dollar. Privatisation of state enterprises such as Qantas airways and the Commonwealth Bank was carried out by the Paul Keating government.
The Labor Party is commonly described as a social democratic party, and its constitution stipulates that it is a democratic socialist party. The party was created by, and has always been influenced by, the trade unions, and in practice its policy at any given time has usually been the policy of the broader labour movement. Thus at the first federal election 1901 Labor's platform called for a White Australia policy, a citizen army and compulsory arbitration of industrial disputes. Labor has at various times supported high tariffs and low tariffs, conscription and pacifism, White Australia and multiculturalism, nationalisation and privatisation, isolationism and internationalism.
From 1900 to 1940, Labor and its affiliated unions were strong defenders of the White Australia policy, which banned all non-European migration to Australia. This policy was motivated by fears of economic competition from low-wage overseas workers which was shared by the vast majority of Australians and all major political parties. In practice the Labor party opposed all migration, on the grounds that immigrants competed with Australian workers and drove down wages, until after World War II, when the Chifley government launched a major immigration program. The party's opposition to non-European immigration did not change until after the retirement of Arthur Calwell as leader in 1967. Subsequently, Labor has become an advocate of multiculturalism.