Wobblers: Single Taxers in the Labour Movement, Melbourne, 1889-1899’

The Single Taxers, disciples of the American economist-publicist, Henry George,
were among the losers of nineteenth-century radicalism.1
After an initial period of
prestige in the labour movement they fell alarmingly from grace and returned to
the factious liberalism from which they had emerged.2
The tax they advocated on
land values which promised to cure all manner of social evils was appropriated by
their rivals and emptied of its Utopian assumptions.3
By 1898 the Single Taxers
were a spent force, politically exhausted and ideologically bankrupt