The first Political Convention of the Queensland Labour Party

*THE WORKER*

Brisbane August 20, 1892

The first Political Convention of the Queensland Labour Party has earned for itself the gratitude of all who look to the approaching general elections as the gates through which a corrupt and tyrannical Parliament is to take its final departure. Everyone realises the overwhelming power that even under the present Electoral Act the workers exercise at the poll. Nobody understands that better than the men who have hitherto been running the country for all that it is worth; and their object is always to play us off against each other. Up to the present we have been practically at the mercy of the players. It has been a choice between evils – the devil we knew and the devil we didn't know.

Since the last elections, however, a set of entirely new conditions has come into force. The social atmosphere has under gone a complete revolution. The Labour Movement has risen like the morning sun, and in its rays we have seen a breath of possibility the like of which never shone upon an Australian election. But sunshine is hard to gather up in ballot boxes. Without some central organisation without some generally accepted forms of political faith, without a plan of campaign, the probability is that in spite of the truths that are stirring Society to its heart's core, when the next parliament assembled the Labour Party would find itself in outer darkness.

And that is where the good work of the Convention comes in. As a gathering of forces widely separated districts and from organisations the most diverse in kind the assemblage itself was full of promise. The unanimity that prevailed on all the important questions that came up for discussion was an additional ground of hope. The platform upon which they decided to appeal to the country is about as judicious and as much to the point as any that could well have been formulated. It has its purely political side and it has its social – economic side. It is good as an election war cry and it contains the principles of steady political work for a long time to come.

Some of the planks will, of course, be acceptable to the ordinary politician of to-day; but those, it is unnecessary to add, are the planks upon which the workers place the least importance. Others are radical enough. What, for instance, could be more thoroughly out of accord with the tone of recent legislation, what more out of harmony with the temper of the present parliament, than the principle of one-man-one-vote to taxation upon the unimproved value of land. Yet we have only to glance at South Australia and New Zealand, the two most prosperous colonies of the group, to see these very principles working smoothly in the form of laws which no sane man ever expects to hear of being over-turned.

To the Greeks foolishness, to the Jews a stumbling-block, but who heeds that when the political Goths are already on the march. What seems to me a matter of infinitely greater importance is the necessity,when the time for legislation arrives, of selecting from so many good planks a single one and dealing first with that. The axiom of the boss politician is one thing at a time, and that is precisely the most difficult point for workers to grasp. With so much to do our temptation is always to do all at once with the natural consequence that we end in doing nothing.