John Thomas Lang (21 December 1876 – 27 September 1975), nicknamed "the Big Fella", was an Australian politician who served as the 23rd premier of New South Wales from 1925 to 1927 and from 1930 to 1932. He was the state leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) from 1923 to 1939 and his Lang Labor faction was an influential force in both state and federal politics, breaking away from the official ALP on several occasions.
Lang was born to a working-class family in Sydney and grew up in the city's inner suburbs. He left school at the age of 14 and worked a variety of jobs, eventually establishing a real estate agency in the Sydney suburb of Auburn. Lang was first elected to the New South Wales Legislative Assembly at the 1913 state election and would hold several seats over the following 30 years. He remained loyal to the ALP following the 1916 party split over conscription and served as state treasurer from 1920 to 1922 in the governments of John Storey and James Dooley.
In 1923, Lang replaced Dooley as state leader of the ALP, a position he would maintain for 15 years despite a confrontational and pugnacious leadership style and competing factional demands. He led the party to a narrow victory at the 1925 state election. His first term as premier saw the passage of social and industrial reforms, but was also marked by conflict with the conservative Legislative Council and by internal party conflict. He was forced to an early election in 1927, which saw the ALP defeated. However, Lang and the ALP were returned to office in a landslide victory at the 1930 election.
During the Great Depression, Lang was a key figure in the ALP split of 1931, which saw the defeat of the federal Labor government led by James Scullin. He advocated economic populism and produced the "Lang Plan", which called for the repudiation or deferral of overseas debts to avoid the austerity measures in the Premiers' Plan. Lang's supporters in federal parliament supported a no-confidence motion in Scullin's government, with the ALP suffering a landslide defeat at the 1931 federal election. Lang's continued conflict with the new federal government led by Joseph Lyons, including defiance of federal laws, precipitated the 1932 New South Wales constitutional crisis. The crisis culminated when the Governor, Sir Philip Game, used his reserve power to dismiss Lang and his government, the only such dismissal of an Australian state premier.
After his dismissal, Lang suffered a landslide defeat at the 1932 state election and led the ALP to further defeats at the 1935 and 1938 state elections. His faction rejoined the official ALP in 1936, but factional conflict continued and he was finally ousted as leader in 1939. Attributing his defeat to communists, in 1940 he formed the Australian Labor Party (Non-Communist), which achieved some electoral success but soon rejoined the official ALP in the interests of wartime unity. Lang was expelled from the ALP in 1943 and later served a single term in the House of Representatives from 1946 to 1949, representing the seat of Reid. He assumed the role of elder statesman in retirement and was re-admitted to the ALP in 1971 a few years before his death at the age of 98.
John Thomas Lang was born on 21 December 1876 on George Street, Sydney, close to the present site of The Metro Theatre (between Bathurst and Liverpool Streets). He was the third son (and sixth of ten children) of James Henry Lang, a watchmaker born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Mary Whelan, a milliner born in Galway, Ireland. His mother and father had arrived in Australia in 1848 and 1860, respectively, and married in Melbourne, Victoria, on 11 June 1866, moving to Sydney five years later. Although Lang's father had been born Presbyterian, he later became a Catholic like his wife, and the family "fitted into the normal low social stratum of the great majority of Sydney's Catholics".
The family lived in the inner-city slums for the majority of Lang's early childhood, including for a period on Wexford Street in Surry Hills, where he attended a local school, St Francis Marist Brothers' on Castlereagh Street. His father suffered from rheumatic fever for most of Lang's childhood, and he supplemented his family's income by selling newspapers in the city on mornings and afternoons. In the mid-1880s, due to his parents' poverty, he was sent to live with his mother's sister on a small rural property near Bairnsdale, in the Gippsland region of Victoria, attending for about four years the local Catholic school. Lang returned to New South Wales in the early 1890s to seek employment, aged 14. His first jobs were in the rural areas to the south-west of Sydney: on a poultry farm at Smithfield, and then as the driver of a horse-drawn omnibus in and around Merrylands and Guildford.
Aged 16, he returned to the inner city, working first in a bookstore, and then as an office boy for an accountant. Nairn (1986) writes that Lang's experience in the Sydney slums brought "an intimate knowledge […] of the protean denizens who found shelter there", inculcating in Lang some "real sympathy for them, but above all a determination to avoid their kind of existence, reinforced by a revulsion against the hardships of his own life in a large, generally poverty-stricken family."
During the banking crash of the 1890s which devastated Australia, Lang became interested in politics, frequenting radical bookshops and helping with newspapers and publications of the infant Labor Party, which contested its first election in New South Wales in 1891. At the age of 19 he married Hilda Amelia Bredt (1878–1964), the 17-year-old daughter of prominent feminist and socialist Bertha Bredt, and the step-daughter of W. H. McNamara, who owned a bookshop in Castlereagh Street. Hilda's sister, also named Bertha, was married to the author and poet Henry Lawson.
Lang became a junior office assistant for an accounting practice, where his shrewdness and intelligence saw his career advance. Around 1900 he became the manager of a real estate firm in the then semi-rural suburb of Auburn. He was so successful that he soon set up his own real estate business in an area much in demand by working-class families looking to escape the squalor and overcrowding of the inner-city slums.
As a resident in the unincorporated area around Silverwater and Newington, Lang became Secretary of the Newington Progress Association and led local efforts for the area to join the Municipality of Auburn. On 20 June 1906, this was proclaimed, with the area included as the "Newington Ward", returning three aldermen. Lang was elected to first position in the new ward in April 1907, and served two terms as Mayor of Auburn in 1909–1911.
He was elected as a member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly in 1913 for the district of Granville, serving as a backbencher in the Labor Party government led by William Holman. When Prime Minister Billy Hughes twice tried to introduce conscription to the country in WWI, Lang sided with the anti-conscriptionist wing of the ALP. The mass defection from the ALP of parliamentarians and supporters who supported the military measure opened up opportunities and Lang positioned himself for advancement. His financial skills led him to become Treasurer in Premier John Storey's Labor government from 1920 to 1922. Due to the post-World War I financial recession, the state's accounts were in deficit; Lang managed to cut this deficit significantly. From 1920 to 1927, he was a member for the multi-member seat of Parramatta.
After the Labor Party (ALP) lost government in 1922, Lang was elected as Opposition Leader in 1923 by his fellow Labor Party MPs. He led the ALP to victory in the 1925 NSW general election and became Premier.
During his first term as Premier, Lang carried out many social reforms, including state pensions for widowed mothers with dependent children under fourteen, a universal and mandatory system of workers' compensation for death, illness and injury incurred on the job, funded by premiums levied on employers, the abolition of student fees in state-run high schools and improvements to various welfare schemes such as child endowment (which Lang's government had introduced). Various laws were introduced providing for improvements in the accommodation of rural workers, changes in the industrial arbitration system, and a 44-hour workweek. Extensions were made to the applicability of the Fair Rents Act while compulsory marketing along the lines of what existed in Queensland was introduced. Adult franchise for local government elections was also introduced, together with Legislation to safeguard native flora and to penalize ships for discharging oil. His government also carried out road improvements, including paving much of the Hume Highway and the Great Western Highway.