[Socialism As It Is by William English Walling]@TWC D-Link bookSocialism As It Is CHAPTER VI 3/20
Finally, Australia is to be kept for the white race, especially for British and other peoples that the present inhabitants consider desirable. There remains that part of the program which has attracted the most attention, namely, the labor reforms: workingmen's insurance, an eight-hour day, and an increase of the powers of the compulsory arbitration courts.
Already in fixing wages it has been necessary for the court to decide what is a fair profit to the employers, so profits are already to some degree being regulated.
It has been found that prices and the cost of living are rising still more rapidly than wages; it is proposed that prices should also be regulated by withdrawing the protection of the customs tariff from those industries that charge an unduly high price. I have mentioned the labor element of the program last, for the Australian Labour Party is a democratic rather than merely a labor movement.
The Worker's Union, and the Sheep Shearer's Society of the Eastern States, enrolled from the first all classes of ranch employees, and "even common country storekeepers and small farmers."[80] Some of the miners' organizations have been built on similarly broad lines, and these two unions constitute the backbone of the Labour Party.
The original program of the New South Wales Labour Electoral League, which formed the nucleus of the Labour Party in 1891, proposed to bring together "all electors in favor of democratic and progressive legislation," and was nearly as broad as the present program; that is to say, it was by no means confined to labor reforms. But are there any other features in the Australian situation, besides the dominating importance of the land question, that rob this program of its significance for the rest of the world? It cannot be denied that there are.
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