ABSTRACT
By the turn of the century there was a growing awareness of the ways in which seasonal variations in the demand for labour, imperfections in the labour market and other factors created involuntary unemployment. The opposition of the employers and charitable organistions was hardly surprising and, since the main employers’ organisations had prepared a common position, it proceeded along a well-trodden path. Most Australians experienced the Depression as an elemental force laying waste to the national economy and reducing whole communities to hardship and despair. The traditional demand of the right to work was now reinterpreted to mean ‘the right to work, the right to live and a place in normal society’, Thus in 1933 a group of sustenance applicants in a country town reacted against an inquisition by the police as to their means with the complaint that ‘the police were robbing them of their freedom of citizenship’.
