Scullin was Australia's first Irish, as well as Catholic, Prime Minister in 1929. Labor Prime Ministers John Curtin, Ben Chifley and Paul Keating were also of Irish Catholic stock. Anthony Albanese, whose mother was Irish-Australian, was elected Prime Minister of Australia in 2022 as well. The same was true in the twentieth century at a state level. In New South Wales for example Labor premiers James McGirr, Joseph Cahill and Jack Renshaw were Irish Australian, while Queensland had Labor premiers T. J. Ryan, Ted Theodore, William Forgan Smith, Frank Arthur Cooper, Ned Hanlon, and Vince Gair. Conversely, conservative parties contained few Irish Catholics for most of the twentieth century. An exception was Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, who began his career in the ALP. The situation changed later especially following the Australian Labor Party split of 1955, which led many Catholics out of Labor via the Democratic Labor Party (DLP). The careers of Gerard Henderson, Frank Devine and Padraic McGuinness are illustrative of the drift by some Irish Australians away from Labor and towards the conservative side of politics in the later twentieth century. Status Walker (2007) compares Irish immigrant communities in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Great Britain respecting issues of identity and 'Irishness.' Religion remained the major cause of differentiation in all Irish diaspora communities and had the greatest impact on identity, followed by the nature and difficulty of socioeconomic conditions faced in each new country and the strength of continued social and political links of Irish immigrants and their descendants with the old country. For much of the 19th and the 20th centuries, Irish Australians, particularly but not exclusively Catholics, were treated with suspicion in a sectarian atmosphere. The outlaw Ned Kelly (1855–80) achieved the status of a national folk hero; ballads, films and paintings have since 1878 perpetuated the legend. Kelly, who was hanged for murder, is often viewed romantically as the sort of treatment Irish Catholics in Australia could expect. In reality, however, most of the Irish were urban workers who experienced less official discrimination in Australia than they had at home in Ireland, and many Irish Australians (Catholic and Protestant) rose to positions of wealth and power in the colonial hierarchy. Many Irish men, for example, entered law, the judiciary and politics, and in Ned Kelly's time, 80% of the Victorian police were Irish-born, and half of those had served in the