The Australian teachers’ federation (1921–1991)

Abstract

In January 2001 the Australian Education Unions (AEU) Federal Conference in Melbourne observed briefly the centenary of Australian Federation. The centenary has become an occasion for stocktaking by historians and others of our national institutions that owe part of their formation, identity and focus to the Australian system of federalism. Teachers' unions should be included in this review process because their aspirations for national organisation were derived from both a 'federal spirit' in teachers' professional interests, and the structures and institutions that shaped the growth of federal/state relations in education, training and employment relations. This article intends to celebrate the twentieth century life of Australia's first and largest national federation of teachers, especially in the period 1937-1982, of what was commonly known as the Australian Teachers' Federation (ATF). Unlike the AEU, which is a recent industrial invention of the state unions, the ATF suffered from significant constraints on its capacity to act as a national trade union. First, it was always denied by its affiliates any central authority to impose its policies on them as state unions because they directly represented teachers employed by the state departments of education. Second, the ATF was denied by federal law access to the federal industrial system (except for its affiliates in the two territories). As such, the ATF's primary orientations were confined to representing teachers nationally (as did state unions independently of the ATF) on a restricted range of professional issues affecting teaching, intergovernmental arrangements in public education, the funding of school systems, and towards the end of its life, international teacher unionism and international education. In brief, die ATF was a national teachers' union without an industrial persona or presence for most of its long history. Any study of the ATF, therefore, must be framed by its behaviour as an interest group in an emerging national education polity, in much, the same way as historians have been forced to study the behaviour of the state unions before they were granted access to state arbitration systems between 1916 and 1926 or special wages boards in Victoria and Tasmania after 1945. The distinction is well made by John Dunlop, the American labour theorist, who wrote of early public employees' unions in the United States that they were forced to act as 'lobbying agencies' by 'virtue of the practical prohibitions on effective collective bargaining'. This stands in direct contrast to his labour development theories that I applied to explain the 'formation' period of Australasian