Explosion

An ugly, long-smoldering dispute exploded last week and split Australia's brawling, sprawling Labor Party wide open. Labor Party Chief Dr. Herbert Vere Evatt, 60, openly declared war on the party's biggest single faction: the Catholic right wing, which contains almost half of Labor's membership.

A former High Court judge and Foreign Minister, whose passion to right all wrongs sometimes leads him to wrong the right, shaggy Herbert Evatt had never hit it off with his party's hornyhanded, mainly Catholic trade unionists in the big cities. His indiscriminate sympathy for the underdog led him to plead the case of martyred Cardinal Mindszenty before the U.N., but it also prompted Evatt to lead the opposition when Australia's ruling Liberal Party tried--and failed--to outlaw the Communists in 1951. Evatt's defense of the Reds, high-minded as it was. provoked a rumble of discontent among his party's Catholic right wing. But the rumble grew into tumult when Evatt assailed the Petrov spy investigation (TIME, Sept. 27) as "a foul conspiracy" hatched by the conservative Liberal government. He carried on so melodramatically that the investigating Royal Commission finally barred him from participating in the hearings.

At the very next meeting of Labor Party chieftains, Right Wing M.P. William Bourke picked up Evatt's "conspiracy" cry and flung it back at him: "If the conspiracy exists, you have been the leading conspirator . . . You have been, in effect, senior counsel for the Communists." Retorted an Evatt supporter: "If Dr. Evatt walked the Sea of Galilee, you'd say the Communists were holding him up."

Evatt's own response was a political bombshell: he demanded last week that Labor's federal executive purge the party of its "subversive and disloyal groups," meaning not the quasi-Communists but the Catholic Actionists (who make up 20% of the executive itself). Since one-third of Australia's voters are Catholics, Labor politicians realized that the Evatt move was an open invitation to political suicide. But Evatt and his supporters pressed on. The crisis engulfed all Australia as Evatt named names, and Catholics hit back with a resolution calling for his ouster as parliamentary leader.

The anti-Evatt motion was placed before a caucus of Labor M.P.s, and at week's end a preliminary roll call showed that more than half of them thought Evatt would have to go. But as chairman of the meeting, Evatt ruled the motion out of order, since no prior notice of the maneuver had been given. At this, a veteran M.P. from the gold fields called from the floor: "Doc, why don't you give the party a chance and resign?" Snapped Evatt: "I'll be damned if I do."

By adroit maneuvering, Evatt managed to postpone the showdown until this week. But whether the vote went for or against Dr. Evatt, the chief loser would be the Labor Party as a whole. Said a well-pleased Cabinet minister of the Liberal government: "We've never been so well in the saddle in 30 years."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.