Coronavirus vaccine: lessons from the 19th-century smallpox anti-vaxxer movement

English physician and scientist, who was the pioneer of smallpox vaccine, Edward Jenner sees off the anti-vaccinators.
Wikimedia/Wellcome Collection

Steven King, Nottingham Trent University

There is hope a coronavirus vaccine might be ready by the end of the year. But for it to eliminate COVID-19 a critical mass of people must be vaccinated. And if the protective benefits of a COVID-19 vaccine fall off rapidly (as seems to happen with naturally acquired antibodies) maintaining immunity will require multiple vaccinations. So unless people keep renewing their jabs, the critical mass will decline quickly.

How will politicians ensure critical mass and renewal? For UK prime minister Boris Johnson (who labels those who oppose vaccination as “nuts”) and others, vaccination is a matter of duty. There is a logical case (we know people who have died or suffered badly from COVID-19) and a moral case (to protect others if not yourself).

Yet anti-vaccination sentiment focused on the rights of citizens not to act is clear. A recent poll of 2,000 people across the UK found that 14% would refuse to take a vaccine.

The rights of citizens not to act mean that compulsory vaccination cannot be (and has not been) ruled out. The history of other vaccination programmes, particularly the first truly national campaign against smallpox, shows how difficult the balancing of rights and duties will be.

A disappearing act

The 19th-century invention of vaccination created a new national imperative for the UK to combat endemic smallpox. The risk of dying from smallpox for those who contracted it was substantially higher than that for COVID-19 today. Survivors gained immunity but often at the cost of physical scarring and long-term health problems.

Vaccination and subsequent elimination should have been a no-brainer. Yet local and regional outbreaks persisted across the 19th century.

Governments of this period assumed (sometimes incorrectly) that the middle-classes would realise the value of vaccination. The poor and marginal were different. For them, mass compulsory vaccination awaited.

The result was an explosive atmosphere. Rumours of deaths after vaccination and of the rounding up of the poor like animals generated a sustained popular backlash, with some organising under the umbrella of the National Anti-Vaccination League.

An attack on smallpox vaccination and the Royal College of Physicians’ advocation of it, 1812.
Wikimedia/Wellcome Collection

Yet even after vaccination became compulsory in 1853, there were many ways in which, by accident or design, ordinary people citizens avoided the jab. Some people simply disappeared from the records or failed to appear when asked. Those most prone to doing so (those in crowded households or immigrants, for example) were also the groups most susceptible to disease.

Census data consistently undercounts the national population. Undercounting in the 1800s may have missed around 10% of some communities. Even for the 2011 census, around 6.1% of the population is believed to have been missed. Achieving vaccination critical mass is difficult where you do not know the true size of the mass and the most vulnerable are the least detectable.

The poor also “clogged up” the vaccination system. Sometimes they agreed to participate and then did not turn up, a common feature for systems of compulsion where there is no ultimate sanction. On other occasions, as for instance at Keighley in 1882, people would supplement this activity with the sending of anonymous hate mail in an attempt to disrupt the work of local vaccinators.

Fight for their rights

Taking advantage of local tensions was also a useful avoidance technique. “Smallpox riots” in the face of attempts at crude compulsion were frequent and sustained.

Sometimes organised by local agitators, and sometimes spurred on by instances of children dying after vaccination, such unrest varied on a spectrum from small and localised to community-wide and sustained. Riots at Ipswich, Henley, Leicester and Newcastle were particularly notable.

Nor should we forget that vaccination opponents spread rumours about and caricatured vaccines and vaccinators, undermining the credibility of the system in the public imagination. These included one cartoon from the 1880s in which helpless children are shovelled into the mouth of a diseased cow while, at the other end, a doctor portrayed as the devil incarnate shovels dead children excreted by the cow into a cart bound for mass graves.

In July 2020 public figures stand accused of using Twitter to the same effect for COVID-19 vaccination.

Children are fed to a disease-ridden cow creature, representing vaccination.
Wikimedia/Wellcome Collection

Most forcefully, while politicians used the law in order to force vaccination, the law could also be turned against them. Penalties against parents for failing to vaccinate children, introduced in 1853 and strengthened in 1867, were routinely ignored by courts. Compulsory child vaccination was removed in 1898 and the freedom to refuse introduced.

Long-standing opposition to vaccination by some scientists as well as ordinary people crystallised in 1885 with a huge demonstration at Leicester (ironically the recent focus of a British local lockdown). This and ongoing smaller protests across the country forced the government to introduce a Royal Commission to reflect on the whole question of compulsion. The verdict ultimately fell on the side of the rights of the individual.

It is not hard to imagine the 2021 human rights case in which a court must decide on the balance of the legal and collective duty of citizens to get vaccinated against COVID-19 nd the individual right to choose.

Our political and medical elites believe that people will accept moral responsibility: “get vaccinated”. Yet little thought has gone into how a mass vaccination programme works.

We will see some of the lessons of 20th-century vaccination schemes repeated, with public information campaigns and elements of coercion via vaccination programmes in schools and care homes. Nonetheless, the lack of serious credence given to anti-vaccination “nuts” and the resistance that a vaccination programme may generate feels oh so 19th-century.

Steven King, Professor of Economic and Social History, Nottingham Trent University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Lockdowns, second waves and burn outs. Spanish flu’s clues about how coronavirus might play out in Australia

National Museum of Australia

Jeff Kildea, UNSW

In a remarkable coincidence, the first media reports about Spanish flu and COVID-19 in Australia both occurred on January 25 – exactly 101 years apart.

This is not the only similarity between the two pandemics.

Although history does not repeat, it rhymes. The story of how Australia – and particular the NSW government – handled Spanish flu in 1919 provides some clues about how COVID-19 might play out here in 2020.

Spanish flu arrives

Australia’s first case of Spanish flu was likely admitted to hospital in Melbourne on January 9 1919, though it was not diagnosed as such at the time. Ten days later, there were 50 to 100 cases.

Commonwealth and Victorian health authorities initially believed the outbreak was a local variety of influenza prevalent in late 1918.

Consequently, Victoria delayed until January 28 notifying the Commonwealth, as required by a 1918 federal-state agreement designed to coordinate state responses.

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Meanwhile, travellers from Melbourne had carried the disease to NSW. On January 25, Sydney’s newspapers reported that a returned soldier from Melbourne was in hospital at Randwick with suspected pneumonic influenza.

Shutdown circa 1919: libraries, theatres, churches close

The NSW government quickly imposed restrictions on the population when Spanish flu first arrived.
National Library of Australia

Acting quickly, in late January, the NSW government ordered “everyone shall wear a mask,” while all libraries, schools, churches, theatres, public halls, and places of indoor public entertainment in metropolitan Sydney were told to close.

It also imposed restrictions on travel from Victoria in breach of the federal-state agreement.

Thereafter, each state went its own way and the Commonwealth, with few powers and little money compared with today, effectively left them to it.

Generally, the restrictions were received with little demur. But inconsistencies led to complaints, especially from churches and the owners of theatres and racecourses.

People were allowed to ride in crowded public transport to thronged beaches. But masked churchgoers, observing physical distancing, were forbidden to assemble outside for worship.

Later, crowds of spectators would be permitted to watch football matches while racecourses were closed.

Spanish flu subsides

Nevertheless, NSW’s prompt and thorough application of restrictions initially proved successful.

During February, Sydney’s hospital admissions were only 139, while total deaths across the state were 15. By contrast, Victoria, which had taken three weeks before introducing more limited restrictions, recorded 489 deaths.

At the end of February, NSW lifted most restrictions.

Even so, the state government did not escape a political attack. The Labor opposition accused it of overreacting and imposing unnecessary economic and social burdens on people. It was particularly critical that the order requiring mask-wearing was not limited to confined spaces, such as public transport.

There was also debate about the usefulness of closing schools, especially in the metropolitan area.

But then it returns

In mid-March, new cases began to rise. Chastened by the criticism of its earlier measures, the government delayed reimposing restrictions until early April, allowing the virus to take hold.

This led The Catholic Press to declare

the Ministry fiddled for popularity while the country was threatened with this terrible pestilence.

Sydney’s hospital capacity was exceeded and the state’s death toll for April totalled 1,395. Then the numbers began falling again. After ten weeks the epidemic seemed to have run its course, but as May turned to June, new cases appeared.

The resurgence came with a virulence surpassing the worst days of April. This time, notwithstanding a mounting death toll, the NSW cabinet decided against reinstating restrictions, but urged people to impose their own restraints.

The government goes for “burn out”

After two unsuccessful attempts to defeat the epidemic – at great social and economic cost – the government decided to let it take its course.

It hoped the public by now realised the gravity of the danger and that it should be sufficient to warn them to avoid the chances of infection. The Sydney Morning Herald concurred, declaring

there is a stage at which governmental responsibility for the public health ends.

The second wave’s peak arrived in the first week of July, with 850 deaths across NSW and 2,400 for the month. Sydney’s hospital capacity again was exceeded. Then, as in April, the numbers began to decline. In August the epidemic was officially declared over.

Cases continued intermittently for months, but by October, admissions and deaths were in single figures. Like its predecessor, the second wave lasted ten weeks. But this time the epidemic did not return.

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How Australia’s response to the Spanish flu of 1919 sounds warnings on dealing with coronavirus

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More than 12,000 Australians had died.

While Victoria had suffered badly early on compared to NSW, in the end, NSW had more deaths than Victoria – about 6,000 compared to 3,500. The NSW government’s decision not to restore restrictions saw the epidemic “burn out”, but at a terrible cost in lives.

That decision did not cause a ripple of objection. At the NSW state elections in March 1920, Spanish flu was not even a campaign issue.

The lessons of 1919

In many ways we have learned the lessons of 1919.

We have better federal-state coordination, sophisticated testing and contact tracing, staged lifting of restrictions and improved knowledge of virology.

Australia’s response to coronavirus has seen sophisticated testing and contact tracing.
Dean Lewis/AAP

But in other ways we have not learned the lessons.

Despite our increased medical knowledge, we are struggling to find a vaccine and effective treatments. And we are debating the same issues – to mask or not, to close schools or not.

Meanwhile, inconsistencies and mixed messaging undermine confidence that restrictions are necessary.

Yet, we are still to face the most difficult question of all.

The Spanish flu demonstrated that a suppression strategy requires rounds of restrictions and relaxations. And that these involve significant social and economic costs.

With the federal and state governments’ current suppression strategies we are already seeing signs of social and economic stress, and this is just round one.

Would Australians today tolerate a “burn out”?

The Spanish flu experience also showed that a “burn out” strategy is costly in lives – nowadays it would be measured in tens of thousands. Would Australians today abide such an outcome as people did in 1919?

It is not as if Australians back then were more trusting of their political leaders than we are today. In fact, in the wake of the wartime split in the Labor Party and shifting political allegiances, respect for political leaders was at a low ebb in Australia.

Australians today may not tolerate the large numbers of deaths we saw in 1919.
James Gourley/AAP

A more likely explanation is that people then were prepared to tolerate a death toll that Australians today would find unacceptable. People in 1919 were much more familiar with death from infectious diseases.

Also, they had just emerged from a world war in which 60,000 Australians had died. These days the death of a single soldier in combat prompts national mourning.

Yet, in the absence of an effective vaccine, governments may end up facing a “Sophie’s Choice”: is the community willing and able to sustain repeated and costly disruptions in order to defeat this epidemic or, as the NSW cabinet decided in 1919, is it better to let it run its course notwithstanding the cost in lives?

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Jeff Kildea, Adjunct Professor Irish Studies, UNSW

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Face masks: what the Spanish flu can teach us about making them compulsory

Red Cross nurses in San Francisco, 1918.
Wikimedia

Samuel Cohn, University of Glasgow

Should people be forced to wear face masks in public? That’s the question facing governments as more countries unwind their lockdowns. Over 30 countries have made masks compulsory in public, including Germany, Austria and Poland. This is despite the science saying masks do little to protect wearers, and only might prevent them from infecting other people.

Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, has nonetheless announced new guidelines advising Scots to wear masks for shopping or on public transport, while the UK government is expected to announce a new stance shortly. Meanwhile, US vice president Mike Pence has controversially refused to mask up.

This all has echoes of the great influenza pandemic, aka the Spanish flu, which killed some 50 million people in 1918-20. It’s a great case study in how people will put up with very tough restrictions, so long as they think they have merit.

The great shutdown

In the US, no disease in history led to such intrusive restrictions as the great influenza. These included closures of schools, churches, soda fountains, theatres, movie houses, department stores and barber shops, and regulations on how much space should be allocated to people in indoor public places.

There were fines against coughing, sneezing, spitting, kissing and even talking outdoors – those the Boston Globe called “big talkers”. Special influenza police were hired to round up children playing on street corners and occasionally even in their own backyards.

Restrictions were similarly tough in Canada, Australia and South Africa, though much less so in the UK and continental Europe. Where there were such restrictions, the public accepted it all with few objections. Unlike the long history of cholera, especially in Europe, or the plague in the Indian subcontinent from 1896 to around 1902, no mass violence erupted and blame was rare – even against Spaniards or minorities.

Face masks came closest to being the measure that people most objected to, even though masks were often popular at first. The Oklahoma City Times in October 1918 described an “army of young women war workers” appearing “on crowded street cars and at their desks with their faces muffled in gauze shields”. From the same month, The Ogden Standard reported that “masks are the vogue”, while the Washington Times told of how they were becoming “general” in Detroit.

Shifting science

There was scientific debate from the beginning about whether the masks were effective, but the game began to change after French bacteriologist Charles Nicolle’s discovered in October 1918 that the influenza was much smaller than any other known bacterium.

The news spread rapidly, even in small-town American newspapers. Cartoons were published that read, “like using barbed wire fences to shut out flies”. Yet this was just at the point that mortality rates were ramping up in the western states of the US and Canada. Despite Nicolle’s discovery, various authorities began making masks compulsory. San Francisco was the first major US city to do so in October 1918, continuing on and off over a three-month period.

Alberta in Canada did likewise, and New South Wales, Australia, followed suit when the disease arrived in January 1919 (the state basing its decision on scientific evidence older than Charles Nicolle’s findings). The only American state to make masks mandatory was (briefly) California, while on the east coast and in other countries including the UK they were merely recommended for most people.

San Francisco gathering, 1918.
Wikimedia

Numerous photographs, like the one above, survive of large crowds wearing masks in the months after Nicolle’s discovery. But many had begun to distrust masks, and saw them as a violation of civil liberties. According to a November 1918 front page report from Utah’s Garland City Globe:

The average man wore the mask slung to the back of his neck until he came in sight of a policeman, and most people had holes cut into them to stick their cigars and cigarettes through.

Disobedience aplenty

San Francisco saw the creation of the anti-mask league, as well as protests and civil disobedience. People refused to wear masks in public or flaunted wearing them improperly. Some went to prison for not wearing them or refusing to pay fines.

In Tucson, Arizona, a banker insisted on going to jail instead of paying his fine for not masking up. In other western states, judges regularly refused to wear them in courtrooms. In Alberta, “scores” were fined in police courts for not wearing masks. In New South Wales, reports of violations flooded newspapers immediately after masks were made compulsory. Not even stretcher bearers carrying influenza victims followed the rules.

England was different. Masks were only advised as a precautionary measure in large cities, and then only for certain groups, such as influenza nurses in Manchester and Liverpool. Serious questions about efficacy only arose in March 1919, and only within the scientific community. Most British scientists now united against them, with the Lancet calling masks a “dubious remedy”.

These arguments were steadily being bolstered by statistics from the US. The head of California’s state board of health had presented late 1918 findings from San Francisco’s best run hospital showing that 78% of nurses became infected despite their careful wearing of masks.

Physicians and health authorities also presented statistics comparing San Francisco’s mortality rates with nearby San Mateo, Los Angeles and Chicago, none of which had made masks compulsory. Their mortality rates were either “no worse” or less. By the end of the pandemic in 1919, most scientists and health commissions had come to a consensus not unlike ours about the benefits of wearing masks.

Clearly, many of these details are relevant today. It’s telling that a frivolous requirement became such an issue while more severe rules banned things like talking on street corners, kissing your fiancé or attending religious services – even in the heart of America’s Bible belt.

Perhaps there’s something about masks and human impulses that has yet to be studied properly. If mass resistance to the mask should arise in the months to come, it will be interesting to see if new research will produce any useful findings on phobias about covering the face.

Samuel Cohn, Professor of History, University of Glasgow

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Coronavirus lessons from past crises: how WWI and WWII spurred scientific innovation in Australia

CSIRO Archives, CC BY-SA

Tom Spurling, Swinburne University of Technology and Garrett Upstill, Swinburne University of Technology

In the wake of COVID-19, we’re seeing intense international competition for urgently-needed supplies including personal protection equipment and ventilators. In Australia, this could extend to other critical imports such as pharmaceuticals and medicines. And when our manufacturing sector can’t fill unexpected breaks in supply chains, we all face risk.

However, Australians have lived through crises of comparable magnitude before. During and after the two world wars, scientific innovation played a crucial role in reform. It led to the creation of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and an array of subsequent discoveries.

Some may assume life will go back to normal once COVID-19 withdraws. But if the past is to be learnt from, Australia should prepare for a greatly different future – hopefully one in which science and innovation once more take centre stage.

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The birth of the CSIR

It was WWI that heightened awareness of the role of science in defence and economic growth. In December 1915, Prime Minister William (Billy) Hughes announced he would set up a national laboratory “which would allow men of all branches of science to use their capabilities in application to industry”.

A CSIR council meeting in 1935, held at the McMaster Laboratory in Sydney.
CSIRO Archives, CC BY

This led to the formation of the CSIR in 1926, and its rebirth as the CSIRO in 1949. In the years after WW1, the CSIR contributed greatly to improvements in primary production, including through animal nutrition, disease prevention, and the control of weeds and pests in crops. It also advanced primary product processing and overseas product transport.

In 1937, the CSIR’s mandate was expanded to include secondary industry research, including a national Aircraft and Engine Testing and Research Laboratory. This was motivated by the government’s concern to increase Australia’s manufacturing capabilities and reduce its dependence on technology imports.

War efforts in the spotlight

The CSIR’s research focus shifted in 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbour. Australian war historian Boris Schedvin has written about the hectic scramble to increase the nation’s defence capacities and expand essential production following the attack, including expansion of the scientific workforce.

Minister John Dedman died in 1973.
Wikipedia (public domain)

The John Curtin government was commissioned in October, 1941. Curtin appointed John Dedman as the Minister for War Organisation and Industry, as well as the minister in charge of the CSIR. Dedman’s department was concerned with producing military supplies and equipment, and other items to support society in wartime.

Dedman instructed the council to concentrate on “problems connected with the war effort”. The CSIR responded robustly. By 1942, the divisions of food preservation and transport, forest products, aeronautics, industrial chemistry, the national standards laboratory and the lubricants and bearings section were practically focused on war work full-time.

Scaling up production

The Division of Industrial Chemistry was the division most closely involved in actual production. It was formed in 1940 with Ian Wark as chief, who’d previously worked at the Electrolytic Zinc Company.

Wark was familiar with the chemical industry, and quickly devoted resources to developing processes (using Australian materials) to produce essential chemicals to the pilot plant stage. They were soon producing chemicals for drugs at the Fishermans Bend site, including the starting material for the synthesis of the anaesthetic drug novocaine (procaine).

The researchers developed a method to separate the drug ergot, which is now essential in gynaecology, from rye. They also contributed directly to the war effort by manufacturing the plasticiser used in the nose caps of bullets and shells.

CSIRO today

In response to the current pandemic, CSIRO at the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness in Geelong, Victoria, is working with the international Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness to improve understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They are currently testing two vaccine candidates for efficacy, and evaluating the best way to administer the vaccine.

CSIRO’s directors Trevor Drew and Rob Grenfell share progress on COVID-19 vaccine testing being carried out at the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness in Geelong.

Australian scientists have made monumental contributions on this front in the past. In the 1980s, CSIRO and its university collaborators began efforts that led to the creation of anti-flu drug Relenza, the first drug to successfully treat the flu. Relenza was then commercialised by Australian biotech company Biota, which licensed the drug to British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline.

The CSIRO also invented the Hendra virus vaccine for horses, launched in 2012.

Prior to that, Ian Frazer at the University of Queensland developed the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine which was launched in 2006.

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What can we take away?

COVID-19 is one of many viral diseases that need either a vaccine or a drug (or both). Others are hepatitis B, dengue fever, HIV and the viruses that cause the common cold. Now may be Australia’s chance to use our world class medical research and medicinal chemistry capabilities to become a dominant world supplier of anti-viral medications.

As was the case during WWI and WWII, this pandemic drives home the need to retain our capabilities at a time of supply chain disruption. While it’s impossible for a medium-sized economy like Australia’s to be entirely self-sufficient, it’s important we lean on our strengths to not only respond, but thrive during these complicated times.

In 2020, Australia has a much greater and broader research and production capacity than it did in 1940. And as we march through this pandemic, we can learn from the past and forge new paths to enhance our position as pioneers in sciencific innovation.

Tom Spurling, Professor of Innovation Studies, Swinburne University of Technology and Garrett Upstill, Visiting Fellow, Swinburne University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Lessons from the Great Depression: how to prevent evictions in an economic crisis

Eviction in Redfern, NSW, in 1934.
State Library of New South Wales

Vanessa Whittington, Western Sydney University

The queues of unemployed people outside Centrelink offices in recent days are reminiscent of the dole queues seen across Australia during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

At that time, most states provided inadequate food vouchers rather than cash to people in the form of income support payments. This made it particularly difficult for renters, many of whom were unemployed due to the mass closure of factories, to continue to pay rent.

In NSW, lower-income areas of Sydney were particularly badly hit by unemployment, and because the working class was a renting class, this quickly translated into homelessness.

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For example, male unemployment reached 38.9% in the then-working class suburb of Newtown by 1933, well above the NSW average of 32% and three times the rate in the affluent suburb of Vaucluse.

Tent cities sprang up in Sydney’s Domain and on the outskirts of the city in suburbs like La Perouse, such as the ironically named tent city, Happy Valley. Although this is likely to underestimate the numbers of homeless at the time, the 1933 census reported

33,000 people [were] travelling in the hope of work and 400,000 [were]
living in shelters made of ‘iron, calico, canvas, bark, hessian and other scavenged materials’.

Residents in Happy Valley in the 1930s.
State Library of New South Wales

COVID-19 and assistance for renters

There are distinct parallels between the severe economic downturn of the 1930s and the economic repercussions of the COVID-19 crisis in terms of mass business closures and worker layoffs.

The Australian government has estimated that one million Australians could become unemployed as a result of the coronavirus. However, it is not clear if this comprises only those who will be directly affected by business closures or includes people impacted by the flow-on effects.

Taking into account the current unemployment rate, an additional one million Australians would bring the rate to 13% of the Australian workforce, from my own estimates.

Although the increase in Centrelink payments announced by the Morrison government will help those workers suddenly without jobs, additional measures are needed to protect people who can’t pay their rents and are faced with possible eviction.

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The National Cabinet is working on a range of strategies to assist renters, including preventing landlords from evicting tenants directly impacted by the coronavirus and offering tax relief to landlords who reduce or waive rents.

But these need to be supplemented by strong legislative measures, such as the amendment passed by the NSW parliament this week that empowers the housing minister to ban evictions for renters for six months.

Emergency laws to protect renters are also currently being debated in Tasmania.

Queues of people formed outside Centrelink offices nationwide this week.
JOEL CARRETT/AAP

Staving off homelessness in the Great Depression

There is precedent for legislative reform of this kind from the Great Depression.

In response to the mass numbers of job losses in NSW, the government at the time, led by Premier Jack Lang, passed two pieces of legislation aimed at providing relief for renters. This legislation was very significant, as it was the first of its kind that afforded tenants across NSW any serious amount of protection.

One of the bills, passed as the Reduction of Rent Act 1931, reduced rents state-wide by 22.5% and made leases that did not acknowledge this reduction illegal.

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The other piece of significant tenancy reform was the Ejectments Postponement Bill 1931. This bill prohibited eviction from a dwelling house without an order of the court. If the court could be shown the rent could not be paid, the tenancy could be extended indefinitely.

In his second reading speech, William McKell, minister for justice in the Lang government, described the bill as “a bona fide effort to provide against hardship due to unemployment”.

As honourable members are aware, there is a large amount of unemployment, and there are many very deserving and reputable people who, unfortunately, are not able to pay their rent. It is a tragedy that people of that type, with their families, are being evicted from their homes, and the Government is desirous of preventing as far as possible evictions of that character.

Though the government was committed to helping renters, McKell clearly distinguishes between the deserving and undeserving unemployed in his speech, an unhelpful way of thinking that is still with us today.

Although it is not known how many evictions the reforms of 1931 prevented, the new laws were undoubtedly a boon for renters, given the news coverage of the time. Landlords and their representatives complained about the impact the laws had on their ability to evict tenants.

In fact, the Real Estate Institute noted the financial hardship the Ejectments Postponement Act was placing on landlords.

Hundreds of cases have been reported to the Real Estate Institute, where the owners of houses, dependent on rents for their livelihood, have been refused possession, and have also been refused relief under the dole system, on the grounds that they are property owners.

Unfortunately for renters, these reforms were relatively short-lived. The Lang government was sacked by the NSW governor in May 1932 and replaced in the next election by the more conservative United Australia Party and Country Party coalition government.

This change in government saw the passage of the Landlord and Tenant (Amendment) Act 1932, which repealed the Ejectments Postponement Act 1931. The rent reduction law was also made more favourable to landlords.

The interests of landlords were prioritised over those of unemployed renters, a salutary lesson to present governments not to let ideology and vested interests get in the way of needed reforms that will benefit a significant portion of the population during a crisis not of their making.

Vanessa Whittington, PhD Candidate, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.