Looking back on Evatt and the split.(History)

JUST FIFTY YEARS AGO--on October 5, 1954--the alternative prime minister of Australia, Dr Herbert Vere Evatt, issued a press statement that tore his own party apart, weakened national politics for fifteen years and bitterly divided much of the community. The commentator Alan Reid called it "Dr Evatt's Hydrogen Bomb".

Evatt made an existing problem a dozen times worse. Suspicion stalked the land. Relationships between Protestants and Catholics were poisoned and savage, and enduring divisions resulted among Catholics. Trade unions as well as Labor Party branches fell into turmoil. In Canberra the ALP was so disrupted that Evatt spoke in parliament facing his own distraught MPs, his back turned to the relaxed Menzies ministers across the table from him.

The simple explanation, which Australians of the time found so unpalatable that they usually looked for other explanations, was that Evatt had gone mad and his paranoia flowed down through society. "The Doc's" normal behaviour could be bad enough but at least by that point there was a medical explanation for it. Many other men just behaved badly, swept up in or taking advantage of the climate of the times; as in any kind of war, behaviour quickly tended to the extreme.

The brief story is as follows. Evatt, becoming unbalanced but desperately ambitious to be prime minister, had narrowly lost the May 1954 election. He blamed and largely invented a conspiracy against him by Prime Minister Menzies and ASIO over the defection the month before the election of the Soviet diplomat-spy Vladimir Petrov. A gifted barrister, Evatt appeared before the Royal Commission investigating the Petrov affair but the judge-commissioners withdrew his leave to appear because he persistently politicised the issues.

In the October 5 press statement Evatt added to the conspiracy against him--without at first naming them-the intensely anticommunist, largely Catholic right wing of his parliamentary party and the then clandestine "Movement" led by B.A. Santamaria (later the National Civic Council). These had been among his close political allies until the 1954 election, if not later, and this leg of the conspiracy had little more substance to it than the Petrov leg.

Evatt called in the ALP federal executive to investigate the Victorian branch, epicentre of his charges. It sacked the state executive on allegations rather than evidence of control by the Movement, culminating after turbulent months in a federally-sponsored "new" executive expelling from the party a total of 104 parliamentarians, Labor councillors and endorsed candidates who refused to acknowledge it. Several thousand rank-and-file members left in support to form a new ALP (Anti-Communist), which claimed to be the "true" Victorian branch. In 1956 it became the backbone of a new Democratic Labor Party (DLP) nationally.

Both over Petrov and the Right, Evatt was in effect, if not in conscious and cynical intent, dumping allies and changing sides in order to hold his leadership. In this narrow sense he was successful, as he was able to fight two more--losing--elections, in 1955 and 1958, and remained leader until in 1960 friends manoeuvred a "soft landing" for him as Chief Justice of New South Wales. In this job he was a confused disaster, until another manoeuvre got him a long overseas trip in 1962. He collapsed before departing and was an invalid with his mind entirely gone until he died in 1965, aged seventy-one.