Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Victoria
Theupperhousewasasourceofsomecontroversyduringthesetimes.The
1855 constitution gave the Legislative Council powers commensurate with those of
the British House of Lords including the power to defeat Appropriation Bills and
thus force governments formed in the lower house to early elections. The Legislative
Council exercised the power to block supply on 10 occasions, the last time being in
1952 when it brought down a Country Party government. 10
The 1952 blocking of supply occurred as a result of a political crisis within
conservative politics over the state’s electoral laws. 11 Debates about the structure of
lower house representation to accommodate rural fears about being overwhelmed
bythepopulationofmetropolitanMelbournewerearguablythegreatestpolicy
controversy in Victorian politics from self-government until the 1950s. At issue
was rural malapportionment, where rural voters had greater capacity to elect
representatives than metropolitan voters. Rural political interests fought tooth and
nail to protect voter inequality, and this split conservative politics. Spectacularly in
1929, the Labor Party was to form a coalition government with the Country Party
by promising to protect rural malapportionment, despite the fact that it was Labor
voters, clustered in a handful of seats in Melbourne’s industrial western suburbs,
whohadtheweakestvotingpowerinthestate.
Labor’s desire to have executive power overrode its opposition to rural malapportionment.
The Labor–Country coalition lasted for only a matter of months, and
left in its wake a long-lasting bitterness between the Country Party and the main
anti-Labor Party of the time (initially the Nationalists, then the United Australia
Party, and then the Liberal Party). The most explicit expression of this antipathy
was to be found in the refusal of the two anti-Labor parties to form a coalition – a
position that was maintained until 1990. 12
This also contributed to governmental instability. With the vote split across
three parties, absolute majorities in the Legislative Assembly were rare and most
of the governments formed between the end of the First World War and the
1950s were minority administrations that could collapse very quickly. Even those
governments that did survive struggled to get legislation through a very conservative
Legislative Council. So volatile were the times that Labor eventually got
the opportunity to govern in its own right, having won a lower house majority in
1947 and again in 1952 as the anti-Labor parties split over proposals to reform the
electoral system. 13
These Labor governments did not last long. In 1949, the Legislative Council
blocked supply in protest at Labor’s policy of nationalising the private banks (the
federal Labor government had passed legislation to do this in 1947, only for it to
be overturned by the High Court). On the second occasion, the Labor Party itself
10 Holmes 1976.
11 Costar 2006, 248.
12 Costar 1999, 90–1.
13 Costar 2006, 235–8.
299