John Cain (34th Premier of Victoria)

Cain was born, one of 18 siblings, in Greendale, Victoria, near Bacchus Marsh. His father, Patrick Kane, was an Irish-born Roman Catholic who worked as a small farmer and contractor.

As a young man John Kane 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 little education, and worked from an early age as a farm labourer. By 1907 he had moved to Melbourne, where he worked as a fruiterer in Northcote.

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 left 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.[1] 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.

The Australian Labor Party split of 1955 started in October 1954 after the federal leader, Dr H. V. Evatt, blamed B. A. Santamaria and his supporters in the Victorian Labor Party for Labor's loss of seats at the 1954 federal election. Santamaria exercised strong influence in the Cain government through "Movement" linked ministers such as Bill Barry and Frank Scully. Protestant and left-wing ministers strongly opposed the Movement faction. In December 1953 the Lands Minister, Robert Holt, resigned rather than introduce a Santamaria-influenced bill which would have promoted the settlement of Italian immigrants as small farmers in Gippsland (a favourite Santamaria scheme which was seen as a plot to create a Catholic peasantry).

In early 1955 the Labor Party's federal executive dissolved the state executive and began to expel Santamaria's supporters from the party. The Victorian branch then split between pro-Evatt and pro-Santamaria factions, and in March the pro-Evatt State Executive suspended 24 members of State Parliament suspected of being Santamaria supporters. Four ministers were forced to resign from the government. When the Parliament met on 19 April, 19 expelled Labor members crossed over to vote with the Liberal and Country Party members to defeat the government. At the ensuing May 1955 election, the expelled members and others stood as the Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist). Labor was heavily defeated, winning only 20 seats to the Liberals' 34 and the Country Party's ten. Only one of the expelled Labor members was re-elected.

Cain was now 73, although he remained outwardly vigorous and his real age was a well-kept secret. He retained the leadership and declared that he would fight the next election against the Liberal premier, Henry Bolte. In 1957, however, the ALP split spread to Queensland, and Cain went to campaign for Labor at the state election which followed the fall of the Queensland Labor government. In Townsville on 9 August he suffered a stroke and died within a few hours, aged 75. Alfred Ernest "Ernie" Shepherd (1901–58) succeeded Cain as ALP leader, only to die himself little more than a year afterwards. Labor remained in opposition in Victoria until the 1982 election, when Cain's son, John Cain, Jr., led the party back to government.¹

¹ John Cain (1882–1957) was the father of John Cain (41st Premier of Victoria) (1931–2019), who also has a son named John Cain[3] who in 2019 became State Coroner of Victoria.[4]

• Geoff Browne, A Biographical Register of the Victorian Parliament, 1900–84, Government Printer, Melbourne, 1985
• Don Garden, Victoria: A History, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1984, ISBN 978-0-17-005873-5
• Kathleen Thompson and Geoffrey Serle, A Biographical Register of the Victorian Parliament, 1856–1900, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1972, ISBN 978-0-70-810739-3
• Kate White, John Cain and Victorian Labour 1917–1957, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1982, ISBN 978-0-86806-026-2
• Raymond Wright, A People's Counsel: A History of the Parliament of Victoria, 1856–1990, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992, ISBN 978-0-19-553359-0