which freed the public budget for more popular spending, on transport,
education, and health (Abbott 2014).
Two Victorian public enterprises owe their origins, to some extent, to the
need to reduce dependence on strike-prone NSW for suitable coal: the State
Electricity Commission of Victoria (SECV) in 1920 (Butlin, Barnard, and
Pincus 1982, pp. 251–8); the Gas and Fuel Corporation in 1951 (Proudley
1987). Despite this common factor, it is reasonable to conclude, especially
for SECV, that the Victorians’familiarity with statutory corporations also
played a part.
Public ownership of rail affected economic policy and practice in other
ways, especially through efforts to isolate the rail systems from political
interference.
9.2.4Politics and Unions
Because the railways were run in an integrated fashion, they gave rise to
permanent government jobs, internal labour markets, and unionization
(Seltzer 2014); and because railway employees were so many and because of
their electoral distribution, they had significant political influence.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, three men—Duncan Gillies,
James Patterson, and Thomas Bent—all held the position of commissioner
and minister for the railways, and later became premiers of the colony of
Victoria:‘the railway commissionership was much coveted by ambitious
politicians’for the patronage to be dispensed, and the influence that the
position gave them on the timing and location of construction of new lines’
(Lee 2009, p. 81).
By the 1890s, patronage had mostly ended; but serious industrial relations
troubles had started. It is telling that Edmund Gerald FitzGibbon, the ablefirst
chairman of the Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works, reversed his sup-
port for the expansion of the board’s own labour force in 1891 (rather than
day labour or contracting out) for fear it would make the board unduly
vulnerable to industrial disputes and union pressure. Equally striking is the
Irvine government’s 1903 Constitution Act that created a separate roll and
parliamentary representation for public servants, and especially railway
employees, in an effort to dilute their political influence. (Of the sixty-eight
Legislative Assembly members, two were to be elected by railway officers.) This
followed a bitter dispute between the Irvine government and the Enginemen’s
Association; and the ineffectiveness of earlier Victorian legislation restricting
the political rights of government employees (Plehwe 1983). Eggleston (1932,
p. 146), former minister for railways in Victoria, pointed out that‘Mere sale of
the Victorian railways would not accomplish much. In all countries where
railway organizations exist, their problems become political.’
Socialism in Six Colonies: The Aftermath