Fighting From the Shadows : the Private Trading Banks, Political Campaigns and Bank Nationalisation 1930-1949

The ALP was under attack throughout the 1940s from a host of seemingly unrelated and supposedly non-political organisations, all of which had links to and were supported by the trading banks. Initially, the banks sought to oppose and or restrict changes to the banking industry but by the mid to late 1940s the aim had widened in ideological terms to also include defeating ALP governments and attacking the political left. The campaigns commenced in the early 1930s and ran until 1959-1960. What is of concern here are the campaigns to the end of 1949. They commenced with the trading banks' opposition to ever increasing calls for bank nationalisation and the adoption of Douglas Social Credit panaceas in the early 1930s, continued with opposition to the Royal Commission on Banking and Monetary Reform in the mid-1930s and the banks' determination, especially by the Bank of New South Wales, to limit or stop implementation of any of its recommendations, opposition to the ALP's National Security Regulations that regulated the banking sector during the Second World War and the 1945 banking legislation that enshrined the regulations into law, opposition to the 1944, 1946 and 1948 Referendums, and finally opposition to the 1947 legislation that nationalised the trading banks.