Asio and the Australian Labour Movement

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was established through administrative fiat in March 1949 by the Chifley government acting under subtle and not so subtle prompting from the British and American governments. Because ASIO was established by a Labor government it has always been argued by the non-Labor elements that ASIO should be supported in a bipartisan spirit. The labour movement has always denied this relationship and the history of the establishment of ASIO goes far towards an understanding of the years of tension that continued between ASIO and the labour movement. It is an understatement to say that uneasy relationships have always existed between the Australian labour movement and surveillance bodies. It is in the nature of both organisations to view each other with enmity. The role of surveillance bodies to preserve the state from attempts to change political structures and redistribute political power readily comes into conflict with the role of the labour movement in attempting to bring about such changes. Added to this is the fact that surveillance bodies have always been looked upon with favour by the anti-labour organisations in Australia. Despite assertions of bipartisan support for such bodies, it has therefore been the anti-labour forces that have defended and given increased powers and resources to them, and the labour movement which has attempted to check their powers and make them more publicly accountable. The very broadness of the labour movement has not stopped it from main taining a united front towards surveillance bodies. It has been the radical left of the movement such as Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the militant trade unions, the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), the anti-war elements, socialists and ethnic groups inspired by foreign Communist or socialist governments while supporting the ALP in Australia, who have attracted the attention of the surveillance bodies. In spite of internal conflicts between these various elements of the labour movement, the movement sees itself as encapsulating the real values and traditions of Australian nationalism and has come to resent any surveillance body compiling dossiers on it and its members. Those elements in ASIO concerned with watching radicals have traditions dating back to late in the nineteenth century when the police forces first began watching the more radical elements that made up the nascent labour movement of those years.1 The First World War saw surveillance procedures expanded to a full-time activity when the Commonwealth government had Military Intelligence pursue anti-recruiting and anti-war elements, particularly the IWW. The use of the Army and the War Precautions Act for this work contributed to the first split in the ALP in 1916 by raising the important and divisive question of the extent to which government departments should be used to suppress the left wing of the labour movement. At the end of the war non-labour forces were in little doubt over the value

Government (linguistics) · Movement (music) · Perspective (graphical) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Project commissioning · Publishing · Sociology · Law · Military History and Strategy

• Data Rights in Transition

  Open Access•Rachelle Bosua, Damian Clifford et al.•Data Rights in Transition•2025

  Add to list

• Forthcoming

  Open Access•Beverley Symons•Labour History•1994

  Add to list