John Cain (19 January 1882 – 4 August 1957) was an Australian politician, who became the 34th premier of Victoria, and was the first Labor Party leader to win a majority in the Victorian Legislative Assembly. He is the only premier of Victoria to date whose son has also served as premier.
Early life
Cain was born, oldest of 13 siblings, in Greendale, Victoria, near Bacchus Marsh. His father, Patrick Cane, was an Irish-born Roman Catholic who worked as a small farmer and contractor. His birth (number 3094 of 1882) was registered as John Caine, son of Patrick Caine and Julia Brannen at Greendale. His siblings were variously registered with the surnames Cane and Cain. (n.b. unusual mis-spelling of his mother's surname)
John Caine changed the spelling of his surname and converted to Anglicanism. He left no personal papers and very little is known about his youth (so little, indeed, that reference works published during his lifetime, and shortly after his death, continued to give the year of his birth as 1887). He had little education, and worked from an early age as a farm labourer in the Goulburn Valley. By 1907 he had moved to Melbourne, where he worked as a fruiterer in Northcote.
Political career
Around 1910 Cain joined the Victorian Socialist Party (VSP), a Marxist party to the left of the Labor Party (although like most VSP members Cain was probably also an ALP member at the time). In 1915 he became an organiser with the Theatrical Employees' Union, and in 1916 he became a clerk in the Defence Department. He was sacked from this job because of his opposition to conscription for World War I, and became an organiser with the Clothing Trades Union. From 1915 to 1927 he was a Labor member of the Northcote City Council. In 1921 when many VSP members joined the new Communist Party of Australia, Cain broke his connections with the party and became a mainstream Labor politician.
In 1926 Cain married Dorothea Grindrod, with whom he had two children. His son John Cain was born in 1931, when he was already nearly 50. He sent his son to Northcote High School and later Scotch College, Melbourne, an unusual choice for a Labor politician at that time.
Cain was elected in 1917 to the Victorian Legislative Assembly as MLA for Jika Jika, which was renamed Northcote in 1927, a seat he held for 40 years. Victoria was Labor's weakest state, and there had never been a majority Labor state government. This was partly because of Labor's weakness in rural areas (dominated by the Country Party) and partly because of the strength of Deakinite liberalism among middle-class voters in Melbourne. Most notably the lack of a Labor majority government was however due to the high degree of rural malapportionment existing in the state's electoral system, strongly favouring the rural electorates to the disenfranchisement of inner-city electorates, where Labor's vote was centralised.
Cain was assistant minister for agriculture in the short-lived minority Labor government of George Prendergast in 1924, a minister without portfolio in the first minority Labor government of Edmond Hogan (1927–28), and minister for railways and for electrical undertakings in the second Hogan government (1929–32).
When Hogan's government collapsed during the Great Depression and Hogan himself was expelled from the Labor Party, Cain became party deputy leader under Tom Tunnecliffe. Cain succeeded Tunnecliffe as Labor Leader in 1937. Under both Tunnecliffe and Cain, Labor supported the minority Country Party government of Albert Dunstan from 1935 to 1943.
Cain's three governments
First Cain government
In September 1943, Dunstan resigned, when his government lost a vote of no confidence in the Victorian Legislative Assembly, the Lower house of the Victorian Parliament. Cain became Premier and Labor formed a minority government on 14 September.