least one undercover member (Herbert Chandler) lost his place on the proposed ticket for the 1940 executive, he was replaced by others: Ted Walsham, a railway shop steward and James Starling, a teacher. Over 50 years later it is difficult to identify with certainty all the dual members who reached the executive level of the ALP in this period. On one level it was of secondary importance to the fact that the political line of the CPA was clearly accepted by a broad group of non-communist anti-Lang forces on the executive. How ever, it is essential to understand the strength and strategy of the CPA to identify as accurately as possible its actual members in the leadership of the ALP.
The 1939 Unity Conference elected a 32-member executive which contained at least five. They included Hughes, Evans, the union officials Barker and Glasson, and the mayor of a mining town, H.B. Chandler. At the 1940 conference the 32-person executive included Hughes, Evans, Barker and Glasson, plus Walsham, Starling and Sloss who became a city councillor with left-wing support and later a member of parliament. A group of five or seven communists from an executive of 32 could exercise considerable weight given that they were held in high regard, acted en bloc and held the vital full time position of General Secretary.
As the annual Easter 1940 conference drew closer, the CPA forces, in line with Comintern, became alarmed about the possibility that Britain and France would conclude an agreement with Hitler who would then turn the war to the East. This issue came to a head on the second day of the conference on Saturday, March 23. A sub-committee of three: Jack Hughes, Bill Gollan and Lloyd Ross, all undercover CPA members, drafted a tough resolution. It read, in part:
The Labor Party has always been opposed to imperialist wars and today in the present war situation we demand that every energy be utilised to bring about a cessation of hostilities and the establishment of peace at the earliest opportunity on a just and equitable basis in order to avoid the slaughter of millions. We declare that the Australian people have nothing to gain from the continuance of the war.
The resolution effectively declared that Australia should refuse to assist Britain, which had declared war on fascist Germany. In place of loyalty to Empire it substituted loyalty to the anti-war traditions of the labour movement. The parliamentary Labor leader, William McKell, who was a co-opted member of the committee took no issue with its general tenor but insisted that one sentence be deleted. This was agreed but it was then restored on the conference floor. That sentence read:
The conference makes it clear that, while being opposed to Australian participation in overseas conflicts, it is also opposed to any effort of the anti-Labor government to change the direction of the present war by an aggressive act against any other country with which we are not at war, including the Soviet Union.
The resolution and its rider created uproar from the Langite minority. Hughes told the conference that the war В«is just a war of adventure and plunder in which we should have no concern В». In a phrase that would come to symbolise the stance of the new leadership of the ALP he said: В«Hands off Russia is the policy of the labour movement today as it has been in the past. В»Amid interjections suggesting he was a not a Labor man, but a communist, Lloyd Ross predicted В«within a few months we will be asked to stand side by side with Imperialist Britain in a war against the only real Social [ist] State in the world. We won't be there. В»Ross was cheered for this comment and the В«Hands Off RussiaВ» resolution passed by 195 to 88.
For conservative Prime Minister Menzies, the Easter conference opened a vital chink in Labor's armour in the coming federal election in that it allowed the conservatives to link federal Labor with the taint of unpatriotic and anti-British feeling. Menzies argued that the resolution was treason and marked a stage in the disintegration of federal Labor's war policy and challenged its leaders to rebut it. Yet the Hands Off Russia resolution - or the assumptions on which it drew its support - was not so extreme or absurd as it might appear today. The labour movement and ALP had not forgotten the bloody cost of the В«war to end warsВ» in 1914-18 and prior to September 1939, a significant strand of Labor opinion, including the parliamentary leader at the federal level, John Curtin, was passionately isolationist.
In Moscow the spirit of the resolution was in tune with the Comintern. In March 1940, Andre Marty dictated directives for Australia and New Zealand. In discussing work in the unions and the Labor Parties, Marty urged:
We must not forget for one moment, that the British Empire must disappear and that in this fight the social democratic partie...
