Frank Anstey: Labor's First MP for Brunswick

Frank Anstey emerged as a political and trade union activist in Brunswick during the 1890s. Born in London, fatherless, he endured an unsettled childhood, before stowing away in a ship which was bound for Sydney. After a career as a seaman he married Katherine McColl and settled in Brunswick around 1887.

He was active in the establishment of the labour weekly, Toscin, and became a co founder of the Victorian Labor Federation in 1898 - though it soon collapsed amid political bickering and personal recriminations.

After the collapse of the Victorian Labor Federation Anstey decided to energise the labour movement from within rather than criticise it from the fringe. In 1902 he was elected to State Parliament, where he represented Brunswick until 1910.

Anstey soon developed a reputation as a 'consummate mob orator'. He rose to prominence during the 1903 Victorian railways strike opposing the Governmentís attempts to break the union by force.

Instead of promoting differences between the classes, we should seek by what means the opposing forces may be brought together, and the agencies of government may be used for the common well-being. There is a curse upon the legislation that breeds hatred...

Anstey's rise would place him, and Brunswick, at the centre stage for one of the great political and ideological contests of the 1907 election.

The Christian Social Reformers targeted Anstey and the seat of Brunswick in the 1907 General Election. Anstey, a boxing fan, moderate drinker, occasional punter and friend of liquor and gambling baron John Wren vigorously opposed the ìwowsersî in State Parliament.

Anstey claimed that the campaign to close down small clubs and hotels - of which there were many in Brunswick - revealed a bias against the working class. Anstey contended that it was not drink or gambling that caused the oppression of the working class - and its attendant suicides, embezzlements, murder, crime, insanity and poverty - but rather the social system itself.

Methodist lay preacher William Henry Judkins opposed Anstey in Brunswick. A prominent wowser, Judkins could count on the support of the Protestant Churches, the Brunswick City Council and the Salvation Army.

Anstey was backed by the Wren-Catholic-ALP alliance, trade unions, the Brunswick Football Club, the league of sportsmen and Brunswickís many hoteliers. After a campaign of increasingly vitriolic accusations about sectarian hostility and class enmity or moral degeneracy and political corruption, Anstey was elected with 60 per cent of the vote.

Anstey's triumph was one of those which would set the stage for the first half of the 20th century. Brunswick in 1907, and other such triumphs, meant that it was the Wren-Catholic alliance, and its Tammany Hall style machine would dominate the ALP for decades to come, and that its mixture of sectarian and tribal culture would frustrate many of the hopes that socialists had for the ALP after the war.

Following the election Anstey took a sabbatical and travelled to Europe. He returned by 1908 and in 1910 moved to Federal politics, representing the seat of Bourke that included Brunswick.

As a parliamentarian and caucus member Anstey was a difficult colleague. He correctly predicted Labor's defeat in 1913, which won him no friends. As World War One approached Anstey took a radical, oppositional path to national prominence that transformed him from a local working class hero to the harbinger of revolutionary insurrection.

Anstey began to denounce the coming war, and the capitalist class whom he believed would benefit from its prosecution. Labor he contended must stay out of an imperialist war.
The Labor movement was functioned to make war upon hunger, disease, dirt, destitution, ignorance, unemployment and slums, not upon imaginary enemies.

It was a view out of step with his party and the times which was increasingly patriotic and pro empire. War came and despite his anti war stance Anstey was returned with an increased majority in the 1914 election.

For the next few years he was an irritation to the Government, especially the Billy Hughes, opposing the restrictions on civil liberties of the War Precautions Act.

By 1915 he was threatened with expulsion from the ALP. His reputation as one of the most passionately forthright and controversial figures of the Labor Left meant that he would be prominent in the anti conscription fight along with other Brunswick identities such as John Curtin.

With the final defeat of conscription in 1917, at the cost of party unity and Government, Anstey travelled to Europe during its year of revolution - 1918. He returned to Australia inspired declaring that "the impatient world will wait no longer."

For Anstey's brand of Labor radicalism this was the moment when the working class would rise up and the instruments of oppression would crumble. He wrote Red Europe in 1919 which was published internationally, banned in New Zealand, and became required reading for a new generation of young socialists who would found the Australian Communist Party.

Despite Anstey's hopes Australian workers did not rise in revolution and as such the 1920s were unrewarding for him. The factional intrigue and the grinding, mundane parliamentary work did not appeal to him. Anstey's career seemed in decline until the surprising election of the Scullin Labor Government.

Anstey was reinvigorated and found himself Minister for Health and Repatriations. Any hopes for a new set of working class reforms were dashed by the onset of the Great Depression as James Scullin's Labor Government was rent by divisions over how to react.

Faced with rising unemployment and social hardship the Government was instructed by the banks to reduce wages and cut pensions. Labor and the Government was split and Anstey allied himself with those who argued that the bank's advice should be rejected.

But with an unfriendly Senate, Labor was unable to fashion a "New Deal" type response. As divisions within the Government deepened Anstey himself was dumped from Cabinet in March 1931. He retreated to the backbench to berate the Government for its betrayal of the working class. "This Government is crucifying the very people who raised its members from obscurity an placed them in power," he thundered to Parliament in July 1931.

For all his bitterness, Anstey could not join Jack Lang's rebels in crossing the floor and defeating the Labor Government. In the December election Laborís margin in Bourke was cut from 77.7 to 51.1 percent.

This was Frank Anstey's crisis of faith, and he succumbed to disillusion and despair.

It is not the enemy that scares me. It is the hopeless, spineless mob you try to save. The educated democracy is a myth. The Government of the people is a delusion.

Tired, Anstey retired in 1934 and moved to Sydney. Writing his memoirs of the Scullin Government Anstey's bitterness came to the fore. He was now contemptuous of parliamentary politics and its inability - as he saw it - to effect change. It signalled the crumbling of his faith in the onward march of socialism.

Following the death of his wife he returned to Brunswick in 1938 and passed away a year later after a short battle with bowel cancer.

Anstey's branch of Labor radicalism - socialist, sectarian and uncompromising is an important legacy. His connections with the Tammany Hall machine of John Wren blight his legacy, and his loss of faith during the Great Depression gives it a tragic dimension.

Anstey's Labor Radicalism lives on today. In its scepticism about the ability of capitalism to bring justice to working people, and its opposition to offensive and imperialistic war Frank Anstey provides an inspirational historical legacy for Brunswick Labor.