John Cain (19 January 1882 – 4 August 1957) was an Australian politician who served as the 34th Premier of Victoria. He was the first Labor Party leader to win a majority in the Victorian Legislative Assembly, and is the only premier of Victoria whose son has also served as premier.

Early life

Cain was born, oldest of 13 siblings, in Greendale, Victoria, near Bacchus Marsh. His father, Patrick Cane, was an Irish-born Roman Catholic who worked as a small farmer and contractor. His birth (number 3094 of 1882) was registered as John Caine, son of Patrick Caine and Julia Brannen at Greendale. His siblings were variously registered with the surnames Cane and Cain. (n.b. unusual misspelling of his mother's surname).

John Caine changed the spelling of his surname and converted to Anglicanism. He left no personal papers and very little is known about his youth (so little, indeed, that reference works published during his lifetime, and shortly after his death, continued to give the year of his birth as 1887). He had extremely limited formal schooling, and worked from an early age as a farm labourer in the Goulburn Valley. By 1907 he had moved to Melbourne, where he was employed as a fruiterer in the suburb of Northcote.

Political career

Around 1910 Cain joined the Victorian Socialist Party (VSP), a Marxist party to the left of the Labor Party (although like most VSP members Cain was probably also an ALP member at the time). In 1915 he became an organiser with the Theatrical Employees' Union, and in 1916 he became a clerk in the Defence Department. He was sacked from this job because of his opposition to conscription for World War I, and became an organiser with the Clothing Trades Union. From 1915 to 1927 he was a Labor member of the Northcote City Council. In 1921 when many VSP members joined the new Communist Party of Australia, Cain broke his connections with the party and became a mainstream Labor politician.

In 1926 Cain married Dorothea Grindrod, with whom he had two children. His son John Cain was born in 1931, when he was already nearly 50. He sent his son to Northcote High School and later Scotch College, Melbourne, an unusual choice for a Labor politician at that time.

Cain was elected in 1917 to the Victorian Legislative Assembly as MLA for Jika Jika, which was renamed Northcote in 1927, a seat he held for 40 years. Victoria was Labor's weakest state, and there had never been a majority Labor state government. This was partly because of Labor's weakness in rural areas (dominated by the Country Party) and partly because of the strength of Deakinite liberalism among middle-class voters in Melbourne. Most notably the lack of a Labor majority government was however due to the high degree of rural malapportionment existing in the state's electoral system, strongly favouring the rural electorates to the disenfranchisement of inner-city electorates, where Labor's vote was centralised.

Cain was assistant minister for agriculture in the short-lived minority Labor government of George Prendergast in 1924, a minister without portfolio in the first minority Labor government of Edmond Hogan (1927–28), and minister for railways and for electrical undertakings in the second Hogan government (1929–32).

When Hogan's government collapsed during the Great Depression and Hogan himself was expelled from the Labor Party, Cain became party deputy leader under Tom Tunnecliffe. Cain succeeded Tunnecliffe as Labor Leader in 1937. Under both Tunnecliffe and Cain, Labor supported the minority Country Party government of Albert Dunstan from 1935 to 1943.

Cain's three governments

First Cain government

thumb|left|John Cain during the 1940s

In September 1943, Dunstan resigned, when his government lost a vote of no confidence in the Victorian Legislative Assembly, the Lower house of the Victorian Parliament. Cain became Premier and Labor formed a minority government on 14 September. Cain indicated that he would request a dissolution of parliament from the Governor, but if his request was refused, he would resign as Premier. On 17 September, Cain visited the Governor who refused his request for a dissolution, Cain then resigned and the Governor commissioned Dunstan to form a coalition government with the UAP, which was sworn in on Saturday 18 September.

Second Cain government

After Dunstan's resignation and a brief Liberal government under Ian Macfarlan, Cain again became premier on 21 November 1945. Labor's lower house parliamentary position was much better than it had been in 1943, since the 1945 state elections had given Labor 31 seats to the Country Party's 18 and the Liberals' 13, with three independents.

With a majority in neither House, Cain's government was unable to pass much legislation. On 2 October 1947 the upper house, the Victorian Legislative Council blocked his government's budget to show its opposition to the federal Labor government of Ben Chifley, which had announced plans to nationalise the private banks. Although this issue had nothing to do with state politics, Cain was forced to resign and call an election for 8 November 1947, at which Labor was heavily defeated. Even some reforms to the electoral system were carried through the council, where Labor and Liberal members united to reduce the malapportionment which had given the Country Party disproportionate representation since the 1920s. In its first two years the Cain government won the approval of the Melbourne daily papers The Age, The Herald and The Argus. Nevertheless, Cain's third Government fell on 19 April 1955 when 19 expelled Labor lower house members aligned to "The Movement" "crossed the floor" against the government in a vote of no confidence, ironically the same procedure that initiated Cain's first government. who in 2019 became State Coroner of Victoria.

References

  • Geoff Browne, A Biographical Register of the Victorian Parliament, 1900–84, Government Printer, Melbourne, 1985
  • Don Garden, Victoria: A History, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1984,
  • Kathleen Thompson and Geoffrey Serle, A Biographical Register of the Victorian Parliament, 1856–1900, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1972,
  • Kate White, John Cain and Victorian Labour 1917–1957, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1982,
  • Raymond Wright, A People's Counsel: A History of the Parliament of Victoria, 1856–1990, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992,

See also

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