Reading Stewart Cockburn’s biography of Sir Thomas Playford dispelled a couple of myths.
I falsely believed that Playford created the gerrymander which helped keep him in power for a Commonwealth record 26 years, and that he was responsible for merging the conservatives with the Country Party.
Both of these circumstances occurred shortly before Playford began his extraordinary career, but helped his fortunes immensely.
I won’t retell his life story here.
To give a short summary, he was born into an established affluent family with orchards in the Adelaide Hills, from a non-conformist religious background and his grandfather was a former Premier of South Australia, also Thomas Playford.
The Liberal Federation and Country Party merged in 1932 to form the Liberal and Country League as a tactic to end Labor’s stranglehold on power.
The LCL subsequently won the 1933 election, where Playford was first elected to represent a multi-member rural constituency.
He proved a meddlesome backbencher, often needling his own side, and Premier Richard Butler soon elevated him to the frontbench.
Playford was a hard worker and researched everything carefully. His main interests were land reform and industrial development.
When Butler made an unsuccessful tilt at Federal Parliament, he handed over to Playford as Premier, thinking he wouldn’t last long in the role.
That was in 1938 and he remained Premier until 1965.
The gerrymander guaranteed two country seats to every city seat. The Labor Party was strong in regional South Australia in the 1930s and never minded this arrangement too much until the 1950s when Adelaide’s population was growing rapidly and country areas became more conservative.
Ironically, Adelaide’s population grew because Playford transformed the state from an agricultural backwater to a highly industrialised society.
He oversaw the development of automobile manufacturing, the Whyalla steel works and Leigh Creek coal mine among many others.
Best Labor Premier
Playford was once described by a Labor MP as “the best Labor Premier in Australia”.
He took on the Adelaide establishment to takeover the Adelaide Electric Supply Company and create the state-owned Electricity Trust of South Australia.
He collaborated with the Australian Workers Union to keep the Communist-controlled Miners Federation out of Leigh Creek, thereby saving South Australia from the terrible coal strikes which afflicted New South Wales.
In his foreword, Sir Charles Court described Playford as a “right wing democratic socialist”. The author disagrees, but the point is well made, that while Playford was socially conservative he was interventionist with the economy and supported organised labor.
Under Playford’s premiership, acrimonious parliamentary debates were rare because he got along with the Labor leaders and they often supported his program.
When it came to taking over the electricity company his biggest hurdle was conservative opposition in the Legislative Council.
Cockburn theorises that Playford’s downfall was brought about by the Stuart case and demographic changes in Adelaide, which the rising Don Dunstan exploited cleverly for Labor.
Max Stuart was an Aborigine accused of raping and killing a young white girl at Ceduna. I read the authoritative book by KS Inglis before I went to live at Ceduna in 1991.
Stuart was convicted and sentenced to hang. Some anomalies in the case, new evidence and concerns about Stuart’s ability with English led to public agitation for a retrial and commutation of the death penalty.
Playford was slow to react but eventually commuted the sentence. When he finally appointed a Royal Commission, two of the three judges had been involved with the original trial and the first appeal.
Playford was seen to be out of touch with community sentiment, perhaps reflecting his age.
Six o’clock closing
He also faced a less compliant media, with the Rupert Murdoch-run Adelaide News probing hard on the Stuart case and hospital neglect and television on the rise.
Playford resisted ending six o’clock pub closing, which cost him support from workers in the growing industrial suburbs and these suburbs were spreading into former regional areas like the Barossa Valley.
The LCL narrowly lost the 1965 election and Playford’s reign was over.
While he created many industries and jobs, these were arguably to contribute to South Australia’s later decline as the state produced goods at a high cost which Australia didn’t need. The state became reliant on its manufacturing industries.
These industries were established without much thought given to environmental issues and obtaining water was problematic.
Playford’s solution was to pipe water from the Murray to Adelaide, Whyalla and the Eyre Peninsula.
In terms of his personality, he was a dominant individual and possibly crossed the line occasionally into bullying.
It’s hard to imagine a similar style of leadership coming to the fore in Australia today and no government could operate as Playford’s did with minimal scrutiny.
Nevertheless, everything he did was for South Australia and he retired from Parliament with an ordinary pension.
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