John Ducker

Who was John Ducker?

John Patrick Ducker AO, Australian labour leader and politician, played a leading role in the Australian labour movement and the Australian Labor Party for 20 years.

Ducker was born in Kingston upon Hull, in northern England, the son of a bus driver, and worked on the docks from the age of 14. He migrated to Australia with his family in 1950, and became an ironworker and active in the Federated Ironworkers Association, at that time controlled by the Communist Party of Australia. Ducker, a convert to Catholicism, was a strong anti-Communist and became a supporter of B.A. Santamaria's Industrial Groups, which campaigned successfully to overturn the Communist control of the union.

From 1952 Ducker was an official of the union under the new anti-Communist leader, Laurie Short. When the Labor Party split in 1955 over the related issues of Communism and the role of Santamaria's "Movement" within the party, Ducker did not follow many other Catholic anti-Communists into the Democratic Labor Party, but remained in the Labor Party, becoming a leading figure in the party's right wing.