Francis George Anstey (18 August 186531 October 1940) was an Australian politician and writer. He served as a member of the House of Representatives from 1910 to 1934, representing the Labor Party. He was Minister for Health and Minister for Repatriation in the Scullin Government from 1929 to 1931. Early life Anstey was born in London, England, the son of an iron-miner, who died five months before he was born, and he had little formal education. He stowed away on a passenger ship when he was 11 and arrived in Melbourne in 1877. He then spent ten years working on ships to the South Pacific islands. After spending a period as an itinerant worker (a "swaggie" in Australian slang), he moved to Sale, where he met Katherine Mary Bell McColl. They married in 1887 and had two sons. He became a cleaner in Melbourne, where he soon became involved in politics. He worked on the Melbourne tramways and became President of the Tramways Employees Union. Self-educated, he wrote extensively for Labor newspapers such as The Tocsin and Labor Call. In 1898, Anstey co-founded the Victorian Labour Federation (VLF) with George Elmslie and Tom Tunnecliffe. The VLF was intended to challenge the existing labour institutions in Victoria, which its founders believed had failed to advance the goals of the movement. The federation was modelled on the Belgian Workers' Party and sought to combine the functions of a syndicated union, a co-operative, a friendly society, and a political party. Anstey gained prominence as the lead speaker at meetings of the VLF, which collapsed in 1900 "amid political bickering and personal recriminations". He subsequently focused his efforts on the mainstream United Labor Party. Political career In 1902 Anstey was elected as a Labor member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly for East Bourke Boroughs, and from 1904 he was member for Brunswick, both electorates being in the working-class suburbs of Melbourne. He switched to federal politics at the 1910 election, winning the seat of Bourke in the House of Representatives. Despite his English birth, Anstey was an Australian nationalist. He saw Australia as an economic colony of the finance houses of the City of London, which, like many in the labour movement at this time, he described as the "money power". His views are typified by this passage from a 1907 editorial in the newspaper of the Australian Workers' Union: In 1914 Australia, under