On Friday 4 August 1939, while members of the Queensland State Labor Caucus were having their morning meeting in a room in Parliament House in Brisbane, a group of 37 men, calling themselves the ‘Social Justice League’, entered, making threats, carrying batons, coils of barbed wire, hammers, knuckledusters and other tools. Barricading themselves in, they demanded a 40-hour week, lower taxes and tolls, unemployment relief, cooperative ownership of primary industry, and a ‘stabilised price’ for farmers.
It was, unsurprisingly, a dramatic scene. ‘I refuse to be instructed by you’, Premier William Forgan Smith told the group’s leader, and went on, in his strong Scottish accent, to lecture the men. ‘This is a display of Fascism and I will not countenance such an outrage in Queensland. We refuse to be intimidated by you, individually or collectively, and I ask you to withdraw’. When a leader (perhaps Richard Newton Boorman), claimed to be a rebel in the Jacobite mould, making reference to the 1746 battle of Culloden, the premier told him that if he was a rebel he ‘would have to take the consequences of being one’. In the excitement, one Minister slipped out to call the police, who soon arrived, and took everyone to jail.
This vignette about your grand-daddy's SJWs comes from Liam Hogan's potted history of the nutty Social Credit movement at
Overland.