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Sectarianism Australian style
3 September  2003 

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Author Judith Brett talks about her new book and the Catholic/Protestant divide in Australian political history.

Program Transcript

Stephen Crittenden: Judith Brett teaches politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, and her latest book is called Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard, and it provides � among other things � a fascinating analysis of the great sectarian divide between Protestant and Catholic that shaped 20th century political life in Australia.

Judith Brett traces the ways in which conservative Liberal politics during the 19th century were shaped by Protestant ideals of freedom of conscience, and how Liberal politicians saw their Labor counterparts as exemplifying all the vices of the Roman Catholic Church. But she also explodes a few myths: for example, the one that says Catholics gravitated to Labor because Catholics were predominantly poor, and Labor was the party of the working class. Judith Brett is talking to David Rutledge.

Judith Brett: It�s not to say that class doesn�t have some role to play, but it doesn�t have anywhere near the role that it�s been given. The problem with that picture is that it underestimates the role that religious belief itself played in the formation of the party system. And what I�m arguing is that the non-Labor parties in particular were deeply Protestant. They believed in freedom of conscience, freedom of judgement, and the demands that the Labor party made � particularly for the organisation for people to sign the Pledge � were something which they were very uneasy about. So I�m arguing that that Protestant character of the non-Labor parties made them fairly uncomfortable places for Catholics to be, and so when we�re looking at the fact that there�s an overwhelming majority of Catholics in the Labor party, we need to take into account that there�s a religious factor at work here.

David Rutledge: And that religious factor has to do with religious discrimination as much as anything else?

Judith Brett: Well a �push�, a push factor. �Discrimination� I don�t think quite captures it. I suppose we�d call it discrimination nowadays, but there I think it was more just a sort of incompatibility of belief.

David Rutledge: So why do you think that historians and political scientists have been so keen to describe Catholics in Australia as predominantly working class? Because it�s a deeply entrenched stereotype, isn�t it?

Judith Brett: Yes, I think there�s a whole lot of reasons. One is that in the post-war period, when a lot of Australian political history�s been written, it�s a fairly secular period, and the role that religious belief played in people�s motivations is less easily understood, I think. Also, that once Catholics find themselves � for essentially sectarian reasons � in the party of the workers, well then it�s not surprising that they take on working class identification, and come to believe that that�s the reason they�re there. Because class is the sort of coinage of the Labor party, i.e. if you want to get support, get on, it helps if you can identify yourself as working class.

David Rutledge: And of course we�ve seen this as recently as somebody like Paul Keating, going back and visiting the village in Ireland where his predecessors came from. Is that part of that strategic identification with an oppressed, working-class, ethnic background?

Judith Brett: Yes, I think the Irish thing is more complicated, but Keating�s a good example. I mean, if you look at Keating and you look at Howard, in many ways their class identity � in terms of objective status � is almost the same. They�re both the sons of small businesspeople; Howard�s in retail, Keating�s father�s a small manufacturer. But Keating, through partly his Catholicism and partly through a sort of Irish ethnic identification, bundles that up with class identification, and puts it in the Labor party. I think the other thing is that Catholics were a minority group, and they did have a lot of grievances in Australian society, and so it makes sense for them to be in the party that was, if you like, a party of grievance, a party that was about the ways in which the structures of power excluded certain people, and so there were patterns of religious exclusion as well as patterns of class exclusion. So it made sense for them to be in the party of Labor.

David Rutledge: You point out parallels as well with Catholic religious teaching, which sort of chimes with Labor thinking in that it�s interested in ameliorating the harsh consequences of capitalism.

Judith Brett: Yes, and I think that�s something that historians could look more closely at, the resonances between Catholic social thinking and the more collectivist aspects of the Labor party.

David Rutledge: Well, if historians have tended to sideline religion as an important factor in political alignment generally, what was the view at the time? For example, how closely did Liberal politicians see themselves as Protestants, and perceive their own virtues as Protestant virtues?

Judith Brett: Well, more than I think�s been acknowledged. There�s always been an awareness that there are Protestant pressure groups that influenced the non-Labor parties � like the wowsers, on issues of temperance, and people have always known that. But what I was wanting to argue is that in a sense, in the very formation of the non-Labor parties around the notion of the individual, individual freedom of conscience, this is a quintessentially Protestant character formation, and it meant that Catholics were sort of automatically a bit suspect. And there�s a lot of anecdotal evidence of the way that operated in preselections. I suppose the most striking is John Cramer, who went for preselection after the Second World War, where he�s asked questions about �where does your loyalty lie, to your country or your Pope?� That sort of very old suspicion of Catholics is still there as a sort of sub-stratum, I think in the parties themselves, not just in groups outside of the parties.

David Rutledge: And I suppose there would have been characteristics of the Labor party that fed into those fears of Popish servitude. You�ve mentioned the Pledge for example; what were some other ones? Other Labor vices that were seen as Catholic vices?

Judith Brett: Well, I think just a sense of loyalty to the organistaion, a sense that in Labor it was the party and the demands of the party that overrode the individual. I don�t think they ever saw the ALP as being run by Catholics, because it wouldn�t have been true. In a sense the ALP was run by the trade unions, they were the main enemy of the Liberal party, but in the ways in which the trade unions were represented as giving orders to the Member of Parliament, there was a parallel in the ways in which individual Catholics didn�t have freedom of judgement and movement. Protestantism�s always had a deep ambivalence about organisations. You know, you can see it in the way Protestant churches are prone to split; there�s always a sense in which an individual will move away, and to some extent the non-Labor parties in Australia have that same tendency to split. Now, it�s not to say that there weren�t very many Protestants, obviously, in the Labor party as well. But I think that there�s a sense in which certain aspects of Protestantism do underpin the Liberal party and its predecessors.

David Rutledge: Let�s talk about World War I. You write about World War I as a crucial period in the entrenchment of this sectarian divide, crucial because it raised the question of loyalty to Empire and to the national interest, in a way that it hadn�t perhaps been raised before. But you also point out that actually when the War broke out, that Catholic priests urged their parishioners to go and sign up, and Catholic men did sign up in large numbers to go and fight. So what were the issues there that deepened the divide around the War?

Judith Brett: I think what World War I showed was that there�s a sort of a sub-stratum of sectarian beliefs about Catholics that exist in Protestant Australia, and which different issues will bring to the fore, so that the War and the imagery, the Imperial loyalty � and this is partly based on an argument that Linda Colley makes in a book called Britons: Forging the Nation, where she argues that British Imperial imagery is Protestant through and through, and that Britain formed itself as a Protestant Britain essentially against Catholic Europe. And later on Catholic Ireland comes into the picture, but it was that that joined the Scots, the Welsh and the English together. And so she argues that once issues of loyalty are raised, disloyalty is always something of which Catholics can be suspected, because of their loyalty to the Pope, or to other Catholic nations. And I think what happened is that for the Catholics, this is quite a shocking experience, and even though they were loyal � and one of the reasons they pitched for nationalism in a sense, is that they could show that they were loyal to the Australian nation � they were still suspected of being disloyal. And it means that coming out the other end of the War there�s a real sectarian bitterness in Australian society, so that the hope that the War would unify people � and that the Catholics who served, and who signed up, and who lost sons, felt very bitter. I think the other thing that should be said about the Catholic position in the War is the fact that the whole issue of funding for Catholic schools wasn�t dropped by Catholic groups during the War, was also something that put them in the Labor camp. You know, that they were pushing a sectional grievance, just like Labor and the trade unions were pushing for their sectional grievances, their wage demands or conditions of employment. So Catholics were worried about the funding for their schools at a time when everybody ought to have given up on their sectional demands and thrown themselves into the national war effort.

David Rutledge: Just finally: how obvious to you today are the remnants and the residue of that sectarian divide?

Judith Brett: I don�t think it�s there any more. What all of the studies suggest now is that it�s the difference between the religious and the secular that�s much more crucial, now, than the difference between Protestants and Catholics, if we�re looking at the role of religion in politics. And you can see, for example, in the current Liberal party that there�s a number of Catholics in the Cabinet, and that clearly, being a Catholic is no longer the sort of barrier to preselection in the Liberal party that it once was.

Stephen Crittenden: Judith Brett, author of Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard, published by Cambridge University Press. And you can find all the details on our website. If you want a measure of how much the Protestant-Catholic divide has disappeared in Australia, try finding any mention of it in the Australian National Museum in Canberra.

Judith Brett
Reader in Politics, La Trobe University, Melbourne

Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class : From Alfred Deakin to John Howard
Author: Judith Brett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press Australia (Melbourne 2003)

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