After spending a period as an itinerant worker (a "swaggie" in Australian slang), he moved to Sale, where he met Katherine Mary Bell McColl.

[1][2] In 1898, Anstey co-founded the Victorian Labour Federation (VLF) with George Elmslie and Tom Tunnecliffe.

[3] 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.

Anstey gained prominence as the lead speaker at meetings of the VLF, which collapsed in 1900 "amid political bickering and personal recriminations".

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".

It attacks us through the press – a monster with a thousand lying tongues, a beast surpassing in foulness any conceived by the mythology that invented dragons, wehr wolves, harpies, ghouls and vampires.

The mystic machinery of the churches it turns into an engine of wrath for our destruction.In 1914 Australia, under the Labor government of Andrew Fisher, entered the First World War on the side of Britain.

Anstey was one of the few Labor members who opposed the war from the start, and as a result he was highly unpopular for a time.

No nation can be really free where this financial oligarchy is permitted to hold dominion, and no 'democracy' can be aught but a name that does not shake it from its throne."

Anstey described this system as the "Black Masonic Plutocracy": "These men constitute the Financial Oligarchy, this group of speculators properly designated and distinguished as the Money Power, controls the whole mechanism of exchange, and all undertakings in the field of industry are subject to its will and machinations.

It wields an unseen sceptre over thrones and populations, and bloody slaughter is as profitable to its pockets as the most peaceful peculation."

"In The Kingdom of Shylock Anstey identified the leaders of the "money power" in London as a group of private financiers associated with the circles of the Morgan family in the United States.

The resulting stereotype of the greedy and cunning Jewish financier was a commonplace convention in the writings of British radicals and American populists.