Today, ALP supporters and even many critics regard the Curtin and Chifley governments between 1941 and 1949 as a period of achievement, exemplifying the best in the Party's traditions. There is no doubt that the Labor governments of the 1940s did a great deal. It is, however, worth asking whose interests they served. This chapter briefly considers their actions and ALP policies in several key areas. While these governments were responsible for the rapid expansion of the Australian welfare state and attempted to nationalise the banks, they also devoted a great deal of effort to containing and even defeating working class struggles, and to promoting capitalists' profits. Contradictory pressures from workers and bosses in the late 1940s help to explain the eventual fall of the Chifley government in 1949. They also contributed to the great split of the mid 1950s that had devastating consequences for the Party in Victoria, Queensland and federally.

Still smarting from its internal turmoil in the 1930s, Labor lost the 1940 federal elections with a primary vote of only 40 per cent. But the UAP–Country Party coalition was not in a commanding position because it was incapable of mobilising the working class for war. Workers simply did not trust Prime Minister ‘Pig Iron Bob’ Menzies, who had been an admirer of Hitler, had prosecuted wharfies for banning the export of scrap metal to Japan in 1938, and had supported Chamberlain's Munich Agreement.