Advertising Contrasts: The Impact of Fin de Siècle Globalisation on British and Australian Labour Movement Relations, 1901–10

In the period 1900 – 10 the labour movements in Australia and Britain were confronted by the consequences and opportunities of profound changes sweeping the globe at the fin de siècle. Increasingly conflicting aims and outlook between the British and Australian labour movements manifested in strong divergences over the fundamental issues of race, trade, wages policy and defence. The anxieties of an insular, imagined white settler community drove the Australian labour movement’s project that championed racial exclusion, tariff protection and support for compulsory military training. Conversely, British Labour stood against racial discrimination, militarism and protectionist trade policy. The visits of leading British labour movement figures Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie to Australia in 1906 − 07 drew tensions over issues of policy to the surface, and challenged assumptions that Australia represented a social and political laboratory whose policy innovations might be admired and replicated. The publication of MacDonald’s Labour and the Empire in 1907 highlighted the divide between British and Australian labour and the complex relationship between the respective labour movements at the fin de siècle.