The Lang Labor Party was a

political party A political party is an organization that coordinates candidates to compete in a particular country's elections. It is common for the members of a party to hold similar ideas about politics, and parties may promote specific ideological or p ...

active in

South Australia South Australia (commonly abbreviated as SA) is a state in the southern central part of Australia. It covers some of the most arid parts of the country. With a total land area of , it is the fourth-largest of Australia's states and territories ...

from 1931 to 1934, aligned with

Lang Labor Lang Labor was a faction of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) consisting of the supporters of Jack Lang, who served two terms as Premier of New South Wales and was the party's state leader from 1923 to 1939. Following the expulsion of the N ...

and the policies of

Premier of New South Wales The premier of New South Wales is the head of government in the state of New South Wales, Australia. The Government of New South Wales follows the Westminster Parliamentary System, with a Parliament of New South Wales acting as the legislatu ...

Jack Lang.

Establishment

It was formed as a result of increasing tensions within the

Australian Labor Party The Australian Labor Party (ALP), also simply known as Labor, is the major centre-left political party in Australia, one of two major parties in Australian politics, along with the centre-right Liberal Party of Australia. The party forms t ...

over the party's economic response to the

Great Depression in Australia Australia suffered badly during the period of the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Depression began with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and rapidly spread worldwide. As in other nations, Australia suffered years of high unemployment, povert ...

. The opponents of austerity in the Labor Party, of which Lang was among the most prominent figures, had supported repudiating Australia's debt, while supporters of austerity policies would subsequently introduce the national "

Premiers' Plan The Premiers' Plan was a deflationary economic policy agreed by a meeting of the Premiers of the Australian states in June 1931 to combat the Great Depression in Australia that sparked the 1931 Labor split. Background The Great Depression ...

" to achieve those ends. The 1931 Labor split occurred both at a state and federal level, with Lang's supporters being known as "

". By May 1931, the "Lang Plan Campaign Committee" had been formed in South Australia to give publicity to and campaign for Lang's ideas. Its members were not, at its inception, outside the Labor Party; however, the breach between Lang's supporters and the mainstream party quickly broadened, and reports that month suggested that a split in the party was imminent. The committee's president was Doug Bardolph, and its secretary was Tom Howard. In July 1931, a

by-election A by-election, also known as a special election in the United States and the Philippines, a bye-election in Ireland, a bypoll in India, or a Zimni election (Urdu: ضمنی انتخاب, supplementary election) in Pakistan, is an election used to f ...

was held for the

South Australian House of Assembly The House of Assembly, or lower house, is one of the two chambers of the Parliament of South Australia. The other is the South Australian Legislative Council, Legislative Council. It sits in Parliament House, Adelaide, Parliament House in the st ...

seat of

Adelaide Adelaide ( ) is the capital city of South Australia, the state's largest city and the fifth-most populous city in Australia. "Adelaide" may refer to either Greater Adelaide (including the Adelaide Hills) or the Adelaide city centre. The dem ...

, in the wake of Labor MP Bert Edwards being sentenced to jail. The Lang Plan Campaign Committee decided to separately contest the by-election, and the secretary of the Ironworkers' Union, Martin Collaton, was chosen as their candidate. Collaton went on to win the by-election, in which he had been usually referred to as a "Lang Plan supporter" or a "Lang Plan candidate". The supporters of Lang had begun being referred to as the "Lang Labor Party" by August 1931, by which time they had established local branches. In addition to Collaton, the party supported independent Labor state MP Bob Dale, who had been expelled from the Labor Party for supporting Lang's ideas, and who would later run for re-election under the party's banner. In October, the Lang Labor Party nominated Bardolph in a Legislative Council by-election for the Central District No. 1 seat and ran a significant campaign on his behalf, but saw him defeated by independent

Joseph Anderson Joseph Inslee Anderson (November 5, 1757 – April 17, 1837) was an American soldier, judge, and politician, who served as a United States Senator from Tennessee from 1797 to 1815, and later as the First Comptroller of the United States Treasur ...

South Australian Lang Labor Party (SALLP)

Two of the three Lang Labor Party MHAs elected at the 1933 state election, Bob Dale and Tom Howard, left the party in 1933 post-election after falling out with leader Doug Bardolph and formed their own party, the South Australian Lang Labor Party (SALLP). In June 1934, the four Labor factions were reunited.

References

{{Defunct Australian political parties Defunct political parties in South Australia Australian Labor Party breakaway groups

Establishment

South Australian Lang Labor Party (SALLP)

See also

References