T he organisational work that achieved the ‘boilover’ of 1967 owes most to the General Secretary of the Miscellaneous Workers’ Union (MWU), Ray Geitzelt, of the Left.
Geitzelt, who had trained as a chemist, had, after serving in the AIF, joined his father’s chemical company as an employee and become active in the MWU, which, in the early 1950s, was under Right-wing control. In 1954 he set out to defeat the union’s leadership; he took legal action to have MWU elections declared invalid. Geitzelt’s instructing solicitor was Neville Wran and his junior counsel was Lionel Murphy. The action succeeded and Geitzelt became one of the most formidable numbers men in New South Wales; nationally, his union was active throughout the state structures of the ALP. It was on the say-so of the MWU that Wran (later premier of New South Wales) was appointed to the Legislative Council in that state and Murphy (later attorney-general and self-appointed to the High Court) was selected for a winnable place on the New South Wales Senate ticket. By the mid-1960s Geitzelt was on the central executive of the New South Wales ALP, where moderate and Left-wing colleagues of his were Charlie Fitzgibbon of the Waterside Workers’ Federation; Fred Hall, of the Meat Industry Employees’ Union; and Joe Anderson of the Painters’ Union. That other most important part of New South Wales machine politics, the Trades and Labour Council (TLC), was controlled by a confederacy of Right-wingers: Jim Kenny, the secretary; Ralph Marsh, the assistant secretary; John Ducker, the organiser and Freddie Brown, the president. Already the Left–Right fight within the New South Wales machine which, in 1970, led to federal intervention, was being waged and a spirited feud established: Geitzelt and Ducker were learning to dislike each other to the point of detestation.
Geitzelt had, until the mid-1960s, committed his talents to state politics and to building up his union—which he did with notable success, raising it from 19,000 members in 1955 to more than 60,000 a decade later. In 1965 he had backed a move to have one of the New South Wales Right’s most intelligent and articulate spokesmen, Joe Riordan (later Minister for Housing in the Whitlam government and vice-chairman of the New South Wales Electricity Commission) unseated from the ACTU, but had failed on a tied vote. He had held no ambition to be a member of the ACTU executive himself—until the Left’s defeats at the 1965 Congress.
In that year the 16-member executive slewed to the Right. The economy was booming; Australia was about to send conscripted, unenfranchised youths to fight in a foreign war; and there were many trade union leaders, Left and centre, who had grown tired of waiting for a federal Labor government to take up causes and who believed that the time had come for the unions to wage major industrial and social campaigns. However, they were held back by a cautious ACTU, and cautious trades and labour councils: the Right had effective control of the trade union movement in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia, and in Queensland the flabby giant, the Australian Workers’ Union, acted as counter-force to the more energetic, Left-wing TLC.
When, soon after the 1965 Congress, Hawke asked Geitzelt to support him in a campaign for the presidency, Geitzelt telephoned his union’s federal president, got his blessing, and pledged to run against Joe Riordan in 1967. He worked quietly and efficiently: Hall, Anderson and Fitzgibbon all joined the Geitzelt–Hawke team. Of these, Fitzgibbon was crucial, for the transport group of unions (which he could influence) had a large block of Congress votes and, personally, Fitzgibbon was a man of notable ability, especially in administration and in framing resolutions that would outwit or sidestep ambushes from the Right. His rather frosty manner, his command of language and his capacity for sarcasm caused many to fear him. The AWU hierarchy, with sly Queensland humour, referred to Fitzgibbon as ‘The Educated Waterside Worker’. The AWU was another reason why Left and moderate union leaders were prepared to join in the early sparring that would precede the real fighting for the ACTU presidency. After 1965 the AWU began negotiating in earnest to affiliate with the ACTU, a move that for forty years it had resisted. The AWU would bring a large batch of Right-wing votes into the 1967 Congress; it had bargained, as the price of its affiliation, to have its own permanent seat on the ACTU executive. The executive membership would increase to seventeen. (Needless to say, all seventeen would be white males born in Australia or the UK and, with the exception of Geitzelt, not a ‘foreign’ name among them.) The AWU’s decision to affiliate was an irony for Hawke, because the union would stand against his presidential ambitions, yet it was joining the ACTU in part because its boss, Tom Dougherty, had been so impressed by Hawke’s ability as an advocate.
As the Congress approached, the Right felt no frisson of alarm; Souter, although he continued to place restrictions upon Hawke’s activities as an employee, had not yet begun manoeuvres to ensure his own succession. As usual, the executive had allotted Hawke time on the agenda to deliver a major economic policy speech. Like every other Congress there would be Left–Right skirmishing and the Right would end up firmly in control. Or so it was thought.
But to this basic plot a fine machiavellian twist was added. In February 1967 Whitlam replaced Calwell as leader of the ALP and from that moment a new type of Labor Party began to reveal itself. Whitlam appealed to large numbers of Australians who had been ignored by both major parties. He appealed to women; Aborigines; immigrants; artists of all types—and to the arrivistes of Australian society, the sons and daughters of the working class who had recently climbed in to the middle class. In realising their dreams they had shucked off their parents’ class ideologies, but still had a nostalgia for Labor, and were eager for someone to give expression, in modern, materialist terms, to their old family loyalties. The new Labor Party that Whitlam was shaping with such verve and urbanity relegated the rhetoric about Communists and anti-Communists, the very foundation of the DLP, to the level of a barnyard cackle. Riordan said,
There were those in the DLP who foresaw that with a moderate ALP, under Whitlam, the DLP would disintegrate; it was, therefore, to the DLP’s advantage if the ACTU executive could be pushed to the Left, for then the Right could scream, ‘Look what’s happened! The trade union movement has fallen to the Left!’ On the eve of the Congress I knew that something was going on; two very senior officers of the ACTU shared my concern that the extreme-Right had done a deal with the Left for its own, undisclosed political purposes. The size of the vote for Geitzelt confirmed my worst fears . . . It also illustrated that there were forces against Souter being very effectively organised.
In a landslide victory, Geitzelt defeated Riordan for a seat on the ACTU executive by 83 to 56. When all the balloting was over there were six new faces on the ACTU executive, five of them Hawke candidates. The News Weekly, organ of the National Civic Council, announced: ‘Left-wing march to power’, a cry that had already been uttered by sections of the mass media. It was malarkey. The slewing to the Right had simply been adjusted; the victory had been for moderates, and could have been greater if Laurie Short, a Right-winger, had not suddenly contested a seat that he had no chance of winning, split the contest between a Left-winger and the moderate Cliff Dolan, and thereby given another executive place to the Left. At the end of the Congress the numbers on the executive were 9–8 in favour of Souter. Hawke had taken the opportunity offered to him to give a rousing campaign speech to the ‘Workers’ Parliament’, as Congress is called. The federal Budget had been brought down a few days before Congress opened and followed upon a survey that showed that one person in sixteen in Melbourne was living in poverty. The Budget had paid scant attention to the poor, as Hawke pointed out.
It is, in many senses, the most objectionable and grotesquely inequitable budget of the whole postwar period. It is a budget of the privileged, by the privileged, for the privileged. It is contemptuous of the plight of the needy and warrants the utter condemnation of this Congress . . . For the tremendous effort of picking up his telephone and saying one word—‘sell’—to his broker [a speculator] would make a completely tax-free capital gain of $37 000. Compare this with the worker in BHP from whom the government demands an increasing proportion of his income by way of tax. In one day alone earlier this month . . . the face value of BHP shares rose by $44 million . . . But this government refuses to tax any part of this unearned income. This sacred right of profit-taking must be protected at all costs for the privileged minority.1
Having roused passions on this subject Hawke moved to the next stage of a leader’s speech—an exhortation for constructive activity to counter the challenge:
There may be a number of issues which divide us. But let us remember that we are a powerful movement. The substance of economic and wages policies being put before you provides the opportunity, I suggest, for wielding our power unitedly, progressively and without friction . . . Let us unite so as to achieve a rejection of the powers of privilege and, positively, establish that which we are all concerned to establish—a society whose resources will be utilised to the maximum and wherein the reward for labour shall be fair and equitable and the needs of the weak and those unable to fend for themselves shall be our overriding concern.2
His had been a star turn: aggressive, logical, compassionate and responsible, a speech structured on the classic formula of ‘agitate, educate, legislate’ and appealing to the deepest emotions of the trade union movement—envy, sense of pathos, altruism. After two years of very quiet planning—Riordan said later he had no idea that Geitzelt was Hawke’s numbers man in New South Wales—Hawke’s challenge for the leadership was now in the open.
Immediately a ‘Hawke cell’ formed on the ACTU executive, meeting in private and with Hawke present, to plan manoeuvres. Hawke, as an employee, was allowed into executive meetings only if invited to speak on a specific issue, while Souter, by right, was present at all meetings. But Hawke was to have two years’ training for running the executive through these private meetings (of which the Right, for some months, remained unaware). During this time he drafted many of the recommendations that his supporters then presented, as their own, to executive meetings. However, before the first gathering of the new executive was held, something happened which polarised the ACTU into bitter factions. Jim Kenny, the senior vice-president of the ACTU (and secretary of the New South Wales Trades Hall) died. Hawke’s supporters proposed that he should be replaced by the moderate Cliff Dolan. The AWU’s representative on the executive, Edgar Williams, arriving at his first meeting and expecting that things would continue as they had in the past, with the odd far-Left dissent from a majority view, recalled:
Now, there must have been an understanding of some importance, some deep appreciation of each other, because a group arrived at the first executive meeting and announced that Cliff Dolan was ready, with his bag packed, to take Jim Kenny’s seat. As soon as they proposed that, the meeting deadlocked eight-all.
Ducker, who had been busy in New South Wales, said with relish, ‘We chopped off Cliff Dolan’s head’. They certainly had: Dolan was never allowed into an official position in the New South Wales Trades Hall and it was four years before he could enter the ACTU executive. From the moment the Hawke cell had shown its nerve in proposing that a non-Rightist step into a Right’s seat, the forces lined up and the ACTU executive was in total deadlock. Every issue, except the most trifling, went to a vote of eight-all. Executive meetings became increasingly acrimonious and irrational, and a cause for hilarity in the press.
In Hawke, the struggle produced a change, a new seriousness. Ralph Willis recalled,
I had spent an enormous amount of time with Bob at work and after work, but then, from before the 1967 Congress and onwards, our relationship changed, because he had moved on to a new plane of power-seeking. He was on the telephone all the time, steeling the backbones of people to stand at Congress, and then organising them into a united group against Monk and company. One of Bob’s fellows, who was not too brave, worked just around the corner and whenever Bob would see him passing he’d run out and pounce on him. He was doing less and less as research officer because so much of his time was taken up in organising. The phone never stopped ringing, people were popping in and out of our office, distracting me, and Bob had become less fraternal with me. I was intolerant of what he was doing—not because I was doing more of the work—but because I thought he should be concentrating on the area in which he was so outstanding, and which in my view was more important than being president. I guess I was a bit immature.
Willis had five months leave due, took it and went abroad. The option of simply moving away until Hawke had achieved his mission was closed to Hawke’s family. As events turned out, the months they had all passed together in Port Moresby were the last spent in a normal, carefree family manner. Hawke had his job as advocate to continue, his habitual fraternising in the pub, and now the constant need to massage the spirits of his supporters and, increasingly, the press. He was travelling even more than usual, snatching at every opportunity to talk to meetings of rank-and-file unionists. The Right-wing state machines would not allow him in to talk to their members, the officials of unions, so he was forced into the more time-consuming exercise of addressing individual groups of men. When he was home he was exhausted and stressed, for his skill in public speaking did not alter—and was, perhaps, heightened by—the fact that he was highly strung. He had the trac, the ‘nerves’, that most good musicians and actors have before a performance and that afterwards the body can only slowly quieten.
He said afterwards, ‘In that period when I was constantly politicking for the presidency of the ACTU the family suffered dreadfully—Hazel and the kids . . .’ At that stage none of them realised how much greater a price they would pay when he became president.
In late 1968 Hawke was to go to Geneva to attend an International Labour Organization meeting. Before he left, he and Geitzelt discussed the progress they had made and Hawke gave Geitzelt his phone number in Switzerland in case trouble arose. After months of pressure the Hawke cell had succeeded in forcing Bill Brown, secretary of the South Australian United Trades and Labour Council, a Souter supporter, to change sides on the issue of replacing Kenny. Hawke had just arrived in Geneva and was having a shower when Geitzelt telephoned him with the news that Brown had died, and that they now had the chance to replace him with a Left-wing candidate. David Combe’s efforts on Hawke’s behalf, begun three years earlier, were paying off: the South Australian trade union movement, whipped along by Geitzelt and other federal secretaries of unions from outside the state, elected Jim Shannon of the Amalgamated Engineering Union as the new South Australian secretary. There had been a technical reason for the Right to refuse to fill the ACTU’s vacant vice-presidency (created by Kenny’s death) but there was no such technicality to debar Shannon from entering the ACTU executive. He did so in February 1969, the ridiculous 8–8 tie was broken, and from then on the Hawke cell had a 9–7 majority. However, this did not assure Hawke of the presidency; it merely prevented Souter’s appointment as acting president should Monk retire suddenly, and, as yet, Monk had not revealed his plans.
He did so within days of Shannon’s entry into the executive. At a Labour Day dinner in Melbourne on 8 March 1969 he announced that he would step down later that year. (A little earlier the executive, in one of its few unanimous decisions, had adopted a decent superannuation scheme for ACTU officers and staff, and had shown Monk that the trade union movement really did love him—although, during rows in the 1950s, it had called him ‘Scab!’—by commissioning a portrait of him for the boardroom.)
Hawke said, ‘From the moment of Albert’s announcement all the stops were out’.
The next five months were ones of loud and frantic activity in the trade unions, which were already highly stimulated by a different issue: the penal powers of the Industrial Court.
A year earlier, because of a naive decision by the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission following its inquiry into the metal trades award, there had been a huge row between the metal trades unions and their employers, which became known as the Absorption Battle. The employers, with a good deal of vindictiveness, had applied for penal sanctions against their striking employees and had even managed to have unions fined if their members worked normally but refused to work overtime. In the end, after thousands upon thousands of dollars in fines and millions of dollars lost in production, the Commission stepped in, altered its original decision (which had caused the fracas) and thereby awarded victory in the Absorption Battle to the unions. However, this did not solve the problem of the huge costs that victory had incurred; throughout the rest of 1968 and into 1969 the unions were rankling: if they were to obey the law—which the employers had announced they were using as a tool to bankrupt them—they faced fines of more than a quarter of a million dollars, plus towering legal fees.
And there were other, less obvious, discontents. The drums of the mining boom were pounding by 1969. People who would not have known a blue chip from a Smith’s chip a few months earlier were holding forth on buses, in trams, wherever two or three gathered together, about portfolios of shares and the fortunes they had happened to make that afternoon. The middle classes were wallowing in paper money. But award wages were being kept down (to guard against further overheating the economy) so the working class was again locked out of the party. And everywhere, everyone talked of the war—read of it in the newspapers; heard its explosions over the radio; watched on their TV sets as it consumed screaming children with napalm; saw the boys going off, jaunty, grinning, ready for killing that was, under international law, murder—since there had been no declaration of war. What was known of the ancient conflicts of Indo-China was written by historians, in French. A plague of impassioned ignorance, a virus of unknowing, swept the nation. Conservative governments and the Right of the trade union movement were, by definition, eager crusaders against ‘the march of Communism’; the extreme Left of the union movement was, by definition, prepared for counter-crusade. The rest agonised. Government and its institutions of enforcement became increasingly tyrannical. Young men were jailed for refusing the draft; when war protestors blocked the roadway in front of the New South Wales premier’s car, he ordered his chauffeur to ‘run the bastards over’.
The Right has always rejected ‘political’ strikes; it was holding the line against Left-wingers who wanted the unions to swing behind a gathering revulsion for the Indo-Chinese conflict that, in America, was already cleaving the nation. The Right was also only tepid in its objections to the penal powers of the Industrial Court, and secretly liked them. Nevertheless, Left and Right had suffered together during the Absorption Battle and throughout the country trades halls were arranging meetings and discussions with industrial lawyers to try to clarify the issue of the penal sanctions. That the same people who most hated ‘the war against Communism’ also most hated the penal sanctions was an immense confusion for the thinking of the Right, and this discord revealed itself in gathering paranoia.
Then at 11.40 a.m. on 15 May 1969, John Kerr, QC, now Mr Justice Kerr of the Industrial Court, jailed Clarence Lyell O’Shea, an official of the Tramways Union, for one year for contempt of court. It was eighteen years since a union official had been jailed in connection with his work—and that man, like O’Shea, had been a Communist. When unionists in the courtroom shouted ‘Shame!’ Kerr threatened to jail them, too. The union movement was outraged: here was the ultimate tyranny of the penal powers. In fact, O’Shea’s jailing had nothing to do with the penal powers and strikes. The unions either misunderstood—or misrepresented—the truth; the press from ignorance or mischief misinformed the public; Mr Justice Kerr bumbled the public relations aspect of his job, and a thunder of anger burst. Within hours thousands of Victorian workers were striking and demonstrating and within days the trades halls of Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia had announced 24-hour strikes. The Right was severely embarrassed. In Victoria, where O’Shea was remembered as the man whose defiance of the Cain (snr) government over penal powers had precipitated the Split in the Victorian branch of the ALP in 1954, the secretary of the Trades Hall, Mick Jordan, tried to convince people that the whole affair was a Communist plot. About a million unionists struck work over a period of five days—until a friend of Albert Monk paid O’Shea’s fine and Kerr, discomfited, released him.
At any trade union demonstration the chant, like a sudden choiring of cicadas in high summer, can suddenly swell out: ‘The worKERS uNITED will NEVer be deFEATED!’ It is one of the great truths in democracies—but the workers are, so rarely, united. Over the O’Shea case there had been enough unity to drown the voices, like Jordan’s, of the Right. The government did not dare to try to collect fines and the employers did not dare to seek their imposition again. But despite months of talks with the ACTU the government refused to remove the penal powers from industrial legislation: there was stalemate. Hawke had been among those who, months before the O’Shea jailing, had spoken out against the penal sanctions, arguing, ‘We are prepared to acknowledge that the trade union movement has to justify its wages before a tribunal, provided others do too’. He gave instances of employers (manufacturers) increasing their prices, without hindrance or need for public justification beyond the assertion that a price rise was necessary. ‘Give us the same freedom as BHP—or demand that BHP justify its price increases. Give us equality before the law’, he had said repeatedly. (The argument that market forces controlled manufacturers was invalid in Australia, for by the 1960s there was a system of monopolies and cartels operating: while free enterprise flourished, free competition was a figment.) Hawke’s supporters included those who objected most fiercely to the penal powers; they had no particular interest in achieving a balance in the law; their overriding concern was to do away with restrictions on the right to strike—and devil take the hindmost. Hawke was moving towards power in an age of unreason manifest from London (giggling with Indian messiahs) to Paris (having a ‘revolution’) to New York (where liberals sang the praises of a Stalinist regime in North Vietnam) to China (where children put dunces’ caps on their professors and set them to work in the fields) to South Vietnam (where GIs smoked dope on patrols and were blown away). And nearer home, in Hobart, there was unreason to Hawke, in the form of Brian Harradine of the Trades Hall Council. Harradine was convinced that Hawke was an incarnation of evil. His attacks upon Hawke set the tone of the Right’s campaign against him, a campaign that imposed a terrible cost on the trade union movement, for its bitterness ensured that the movement would lack unity, that the president of the ACTU—whoever he was—would be ineffectual. Years later John Ducker, who had fought shoulder-to-shoulder against Hawke, said wistfully, ‘I wonder what good the Left–Right fight has done us? When someone comes to write a history of the Australian trade union movement, I wonder if they won’t find it’s done us no good at all.’
Even before Monk announced his retirement, Harradine in November 1968 had reported to the Tasmanian Trades and Labour Council that an article Hawke had written for the Federal Law Review about the total wage was contrary to ACTU policy, and undermined the trade unions. (Monk had read and approved publication of the article.) In December 1968 Harradine had laid a complaint about Hawke to Monk; involved the press in the issue and instructed an industrial advocate to raise Hawke’s article unfavourably in a Tasmanian Wages Board case. The upshot had been a story in the Hobart Mercury of 25 January 1969: ‘ACTU Man Employers’ “Weapon”: Arguments of Advocate Used Against Unions’, its headline said. The national news media picked up this juicy morsel. At the ACTU meeting of March 1969 the executive, by nine votes to seven, censured Harradine for using the press to attack Hawke, noting, ‘The basis for the attack on Mr Hawke is so unfounded that the only conclusion to be drawn is that Mr Harradine deliberately chose to manufacture a public controversy to further his own purposes within the Labor Movement’. Then on 26 March News Weekly ran a headline: ‘As deadly as the Mafia’, over an assertion from Harradine that ‘pressures exerted by certain Left-wing and Communist opponents of Souter contributed to the deaths of two trade union secretaries—Jim Kenny’s and Bill Brown’s’. Two days later the Mercury ran an almost identical story and, the following day, so did the Age. Harradine appeared on television and spoke of the ‘psychological murder’ of Kenny and Brown. Charlie Fitzgibbon, Jim Shannon, and Ray Geitzelt3 demanded that Harradine publicly name them as the men whom he was calling ‘psychological murderers’, so they could sue him. Harradine declined. The Catholic Worker of April 1969 wrote of ‘the lengths to which Mr Brian Harradine . . . and those associated with him in the extreme Right-wing of the Labor Movement are prepared to go in their desperate attempts to disparage Mr Hawke’ and referred to Harradine’s ‘despicable’ assertions about mafias and murderers. Hawke circularised friendly unions with copies of the Catholic Worker story, together with a handwritten note that said, ‘This is the best possible source as far as we are concerned to combat the Right-wing hysteria about a pro-Communist alliance front. If you can do with more copies please let me know and I will get them to you immediately.’ He signed it ‘Bob’. His note was soon leaked to the press and there was further scandal, with headlines asking who had written the note (anybody who had ever seen Hawke’s handwriting could recognise it), who was ‘Bob’, what was going on, and other mysterious foolishness.
Then on 5 June Mick Jordan, the secretary of the Victorian Trades and Labour Council, died. Jordan had declared that Hawke would become president of the ACTU ‘over my dead body’. The claim was not made in writing, or on television, but the implication that the Hawke forces had now psychologically murdered Jordan—who happened to weigh twenty stone (127 kilograms), and was a medical miracle in terms of delaying a heart attack—was everywhere.
When Monk had made his Labour Day retirement speech he had referred to ‘disruptive elements in the trade union movement’. The Souter camp, which had already decided upon a fear campaign, seized upon this reference and the following day, 10 March, Souter issued a ‘Declaratory statement . . . on behalf of the non-alliance members of the ACTU executive supporting President Monk’s warning to combat disruptive elements . . .’ Souter wrote of ‘the inherent dangers of the opportunist “alliance front” of the so-called “New Left Movement”, which seeks to control the Trade Union Movement to the exclusion of the fundamental inherent rights of trade unionists’. He continued:
This opportunist front is seeking to gain control through dictatorial pressure tactics by dissident groups rebelling against democratic decisions and self-imposed discipline of the Trade Union Movement and attempting to impose conditions to obtain minority control. Therefore, the situation has reached such proportions that we would be failing in our duty . . . not to alert the unions . . . to take effective counter-action . . . Anything done to destroy or assist to destroy the Trade Union Movement . . . is . . . the enemy of the Trade Union Movement . . . Our great Movement cannot be allowed to be fragmented by this senseless thrust for power for individual or sectional gain . . . We therefore call on individual members and union officials to take a more direct and responsible part in union affairs to achieve the objectives of the Trade Union Movement along planned and organised lines determined by the ACTU and its State branches.4
It was hardly a frank statement by Souter, for in the full text of 400-odd words he did not mention anywhere that he happened to be fighting for the presidency of the ACTU and that references he made to ‘considerable personal sacrifice and hardship over years’ and ‘planned and organised lines’ were covert advertisements for his qualifications for the job. The next day Hawke issued a statement that said:
The [question] has now publicly arisen of who will succeed Albert Monk as President of the ACTU. It seems the main contenders will be Mr Souter and myself. My opponent has seen fit in these circumstances to issue a statment to the Press, and he refers to a ‘pro-Communist alliance front’ which seeks to take over the trade union movement. I expect I will receive the support of the Left wing of the movement. I know I will receive the support of many unions not normally classified as being on the Left. I expect Mr Souter will receive the support of unions, or branches of unions, under the control of the extreme Right-wing, including the DLP. I don’t expect he will reject that support. Nor do I think the fact of that support says anything about his capacities or incapacities relative to my own for the position of President of the ACTU. I hope that the trade union movement will make its decisions on the basis of assessing our respective capacities. I have always regarded the technique of guilt by association and the tactic of the smear as abhorrent, and I refuse to resort to it myself.5
He did refuse. His campaign was straightforward, expressed in a press release he wrote:
Father was a Congregational minister. Hawke is a Socialist by belief, by intellect and because he believes that equality of opportunity should be more than a political slogan. ‘If the Australian worker doesn’t fairly partake of what he produces then hard work doesn’t make any sense to him.’ He sees the future of the ACTU as ‘unlimited’, with closer working-relations between the traditional ‘white-and-blue-collar unionists’, with scope widened to include all the real needs of the worker. ‘There should be no dividing line in the trade unions. We are there to help the worker, so—anything that constitutes discrimination or hardship and in we go.’ Hawke holds strong feelings about: Educational opportunity, the Penal provisions of the Arbitration System, Equal Pay for women, shorter working week and the obvious penalties imposed on a low-income family by the exorbitant hire-purchase interest rates on homes and consumer durable goods. Once we broaden into the areas of environmental development, the quality of urban development and town planning, the combined forces of the white-collar movement and the ACTU will have a social significance. We will be better able to make an impact with our combined resources.6
He expanded on these themes in public addresses: while socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange was the ideal of the labour movement (and the single objective of the ACTU Constitution),
we have to concentrate on the here and now. We must try to achieve the highest possible living standards for the Australian population . . . The trade union movement has an immense reserve of power. If we are to use that power to improve living standards, we must expand our horizon, broaden our thoughts. We have a responsibility in the here and now to improve things in the society we have.
He called for no campaign against the Vietnam War, nor for the nationalisation of industry. He talked only of improving the lot of the ordinary worker and his/her dependants. However, his opponents could not be persuaded that he meant what he said. Above all, they feared a loss of their own power—which, in theory and in fact, they used, if in a blinkered way, for the same causes he espoused. Ducker, who by now was assistant secretary of the New South Wales Trades and Labour Council, recalled:
You see, the Communist Party thought it could use Bob. Felt at the very least he was going to smash the Right-wing control of the ACTU. And they were using Bob as an instrument. So it was a fight against Communist Party influence, and against its being increased. And, at that time, it was a legitimate fear. There was a sincerely held belief that a Hawke victory would mean an increase in Communist–Left-wing influence. You couldn’t really say that Bob was a Communist, or anywhere near it—although one night I’d got drunk with Hawkey, around the time of the Chinese invasion of Tibet. And he and I had a slanging match about that. He said it was a CIA plot to suggest that the Chinese had done what they did. I said he was just a bloody front-man for the Communist Party. So there was that bit of history between Bob and me. But, looking back, Bob stood on a policy of reform and modernisation. And there’s nothing particularly Left-wing about that.
As the 1969 Congress approached the cries of ‘Communist takeover’ and ‘Red dupe’—that is, Hawke—became more frequent and shrill. The abuse edged perilously close to breaking the male code of honour and self-defence that tabooed public references to a man’s sexual life, when an epithet for Hawke, ‘Communist lover-boy’—with its neat double entendre—was reported in the press.
While Hawke and, after his initial faux pas, Souter, behaved with dignity and sense, both camps engaged in what Ducker later described, with a sigh, as ‘gutter fighting’—for the question of who would be the better man to lead the ACTU had been lost in the shouting and it was now a Left–Right brawl, such as had not occurred for twenty years. It may seem senseless to outsiders, but it should be remembered that trade union officials are politicians and therefore a warrior caste: they love fighting.
There were many small unions that had never bothered to affiliate with the ACTU; they were encouraged—through cajoling and threats—to join it and thereby add their votes to one side or the other at the 1969 Congress election. Unions habitually understated their membership so they could reduce their affiliation fees to the ACTU. But the more members, the more Congress votes: suddenly unions discovered they had hundreds more members than they had thought. Workers who had been retired for years, it was realised, were technically still members if they had taken out life tickets. (In the Hawke camp Fitzgibbon was the first to discover the benefits of this technicality, his attention drawn to it by a circular that Souter had issued.) Intra-union rows that had seethed for years abruptly stilled on the promise of a vote—and, when promises were broken at the Congress, new feuds began. In 1981 there was still resentment in the AWU against two groups of its delegates who had ‘ratted’ and given Hawke twelve votes. Ducker said: ‘There was standing over people. Threatening them with dismissal. Threatening them with being defeated [as union officials]. A bit of persuasion that life could be better for them.’ (For example: preselection for a seat in federal or state parliament, or membership of ‘Australia’s best club’, the Legislative Council, part-time parliament with a gold pass for travel. A Hawke man who switched allegiance later entered the New South Wales Legislative Council. In Victoria, there were jobs in the Melbourne Harbour Trust to be awarded to the helpful.) Ducker continued,
It was said that it might be possible to organise a trip abroad . . . Ray Geitzelt was determined to win and whatever it took, whatever way, that was legit. To some degree it was a fight between me and Ray Geitzelt, and that was an inducement for me: I had the blood in my nostrils.
Geitzelt’s opinions of Ducker’s tactics are, under Australia’s libel laws, unprintable, but along the same lines. Ducker said, ‘Ray would say, “John’s a twister, a turner, devious—don’t trust him!” It was no afternoon-tea party.’
Ducker is a man of dextrous intelligence and notable charm which, combined, were to make him the colossus of the New South Wales ALP machine for a decade. He could perform small miracles of persuasion: once, for example, he convinced the New South Wales ALP Left to waive its claim to a Senate seat, for reasons that seemed lucid when he explained them but which later nobody could quite understand. He created the Labor government of Neville Wran in New South Wales, when he realised that Wran, although close to and promoted by Geitzelt, was a winner. Geitzelt tried to chop off Ducker’s head—as Ducker had ‘chopped off’ Dolan’s and was later, in his own words, to ‘do everything, and I mean everything’ to smash the political career of Geitzelt’s brother, Arthur. Geitzelt moved for federal intervention into the New South Wales ALP and Ducker, with breathtaking nerve, immediately seconded his motion. And survived. Only Ducker’s Yorkshire accent debarred him from playing a far more public role in Australian politics. At the ACTU Congress of 1969 he was to use ‘every bit of influence and persuasion I could’ in pressuring waverers to vote for Souter. The Hawke camp received 51 fewer votes than it had been promised, in part thanks to John Patrick Ducker.
His and other Right-winger’s fears about Communist influence on Hawke were not without foundation, for many of Hawke’s most active organisers were Communists. One was George Seelaf, then secretary of the Victorian branch of the meat workers’ union and among Hawke’s warmest friends. Seelaf was a man of boisterous high spirits—‘Look! A butcher’s canary!’ he shouted when a blowfly rumbled past—and shone with the boyish optimism that is so often a characteristic of old-guard Communists. He had been instrumental in arranging the publication of Power without Glory and was a friend of its author, Frank Hardy, whom he introduced to Hawke. Seelaf and Hawke were working closely during 1969 on the Equal Pay Case. At one of their celebrations the proprietor of Jimmy Watson’s, a popular Melbourne wine bar, locked them and a meat industry employer in a back room because of their loud singing of revolutionary songs. Years later, when Hawke had come to detest Communism, he would insist, ‘George isn’t a Communist. I never thought of him as a Communist. He just calls himself one.’ Seelaf said of his part in the presidency campaign:
We got the list of delegates for the 1967 Congress and analysed their politics. The committed Right and committed Left we put aside. What remained was a list of eighty or ninety people. We then got to work to lobby them: found out all we could about their political attitudes, who their best friends were, if they were Catholics or Masons. We then chose the most appropriate people to do the lobbying. I don’t like to raise the sectarian issue, but if we were dealing with a Catholic, we got a Left-wing Catholic to do the lobbying; if a Mason, we got a Hawke-committed Mason. I burnt the files, afterwards.
Another Communist Hawke-man was Alec Macdonald, secretary of the Queensland Trades and Labour Council. Macdonald was a man of extreme gentleness, beloved in the union movement. The AWU aside, he delivered the Queensland vote to Hawke, but died a week before the Congress and Hawke, in the midst of victory, was also in mourning for him. He had loved Macdonald with the extravagant affection he feels for all close friends and years later said that the high edge of excitement in triumph had hurt, because Macdonald was not there to share it.
While Hawke’s agents were eliciting votes, his job was to do that at which he excelled: establish rapport with great numbers of people, to project himself as the corporeal form of their hopes. For while the Left would support him, willy-nilly, and sincerely if mistakenly believed that he was their captive—Pat Clancy of the Building Workers’ Industrial Union described Hawke as ‘a very strong, positive Left force . . . he made many fiery and inspiring speeches . . . and at that stage he was very amenable or susceptible to collective consideration of matters’—it was the large centre ground that would decide the issue. To the centre and, most importantly, to industrial journalists, Hawke had an unacknowledgeable appeal to snobbery: a Rhodes scholar, a middle-class white-collar man proposing a New Deal for the working class. By 1969 the rush of manual workers’ children to the universities was in train. It was still forbidden in trade union circles to admit that middle-class status and values were attractive, but all the behaviour of the working class revealed its yearning. ‘Bob had been a Rhodes scholar—and there’s snobbery in everyone’, Egerton remarked later, when he had been expelled from the ALP for his own vulnerability to the glitter of status. ‘The Rhodes had a big effect on trade unionists.’ This was especially relevant, because a decline in blue-collar unionism had already occurred (and was growing) since, with technological change, the workforce had moved away from manufacturing into service industries. Blue was fading into white, and the white-collar sector was little unionised. Union officials knew this, and recognised that Hawke had the social appeal to create regrowth in unionism, among white-collar workers. He talked constantly of the need for the ACTU’s 1.5 million affiliated members to be joined by the half million public service unionists—a proposition to which both Monk and Souter, and the Left, were opposed. To them, the white-collar public service employees spelt corruption of working-class values. Hawke’s committed supporters, when they actually listened to what he was saying, discounted his ideas as the rhetoric of campaigning. And the Right, which had many white-collar members, did not listen at all. From the outset, Hawke was to be at cross-purposes with many of his most ardent admirers, while appealing, increasingly, to the centre ground. And again, it was a problem of style: Hawke was fiery: when speaking from a platform he used the gestures, the body language, that in Australia, at that time, announced ‘Left’, and it was necessary to stand at a distance and pay attention to his long, Latinate sentences to understand their meaning. Many did. On 27 June the Age, in an editorial headlined, ‘The New Unionists’, wrote:
Mr Hawke is articulating, in concrete terms, the problems which will face the trade union movement in the 1970s. He is also proposing solutions to them. Many of Australia’s more conservative trade union leaders may be suspicious of his proposals because they call into question all the traditional assumptions about the role of trade unions in society. But the time has come when assumptions must be questioned, when new directions must be sought, if unions are to have an effective future. For this reason alone, Mr Hawke is doing the trade union movement an invaluable service.
Hawke himself knew his appeal was more practical:
I’d been the wages advocate for ten years and had helped change a situation whereby the basic wage had declined in real value by 5 per cent, to one where, by 1967, it had increased in real value by more than 6 per cent. For that, I had the overwhelming support of the rank and file.
By the eve of the Congress, which opened on 8 September in the grey, echoing Paddington Town Hall, Sydney—a larger than usual assembly hall was necessary, for, such was the increase in membership and affiliation that there were 101 more delegates than in 1967—the Hawke camp was confident of victory. Again, the support of Geitzelt was critical, because the services group of unions had the largest Congress vote and Geitzelt had them counted to the last one. Meanwhile, the Souter camp knew they would be hard pressed but believed, from promises made to them, that they still had a 50–50 chance. Until a week beforehand George Polites—and all the employers—had been convinced that Hawke could not succeed. In the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, which was watching events with professional interest, only Sir Richard Kirby had long believed that Hawke would win, ‘and my own reason for belief was that Bob was so insistent to me that he would’. Hawke told the press he would win by 100 votes and, obligingly they reported this. He stood in the doorway of the Paddington Town Hall, hugging his supporters, smiling at and handshaking the uncommitted. To his old mentor, Jock Innes, he murmured, ‘You’ve stood by me for twelve years. Stand by me now.’ The voting was still three days away. Whips had been appointed to organise the factions on every issue that might, before the election, divide the Congress. The uncommitted would be watching every division on the floor, to calculate in which direction power was flowing. The big unions had marshals for the elections, for they did not allow their delegates to vote according to individual preference, but forced them to vote in accordance with instructions, and the marshals were present to ensure that instructions were followed. Any delegate defying policy could expect to lose his union job. ‘We had no slippage’, Geitzelt remarked with satisfaction, afterwards; Fitzgibbon said, ‘When you asked them later, everybody had voted for the winner’.
On the afternoon before the next morning’s election Monk announced that Hawke would speak, as research officer, reporting on economic policy, and would be followed by Souter, who would move the adoption of the executive’s official economic policy statement. Both candidates were therefore to have a chance for a last appeal to the electorate. Hawke’s address was rousing and fluent (he attacked the latest federal Budget), and lasted exactly thirty minutes. He returned to his seat, Souter took over the microphone—and what happened next was extraordinary. Souter gave up.
As if bored, he stood at the microphone and read out the policy statement, a copy of which every delegate already had, then, although he still had minutes left to rally support, he made a perfunctory gesture—and sat down. The Hawke camp was incredulous. The hall had been silent when Souter began, but after about ten minutes a hum of conversation arose that became so loud that twice Monk had to call the delegates to order. One thing that everyone was talking about was that Hawke had written the economic policy statement, which Souter, instead of speaking to, was reciting. The four-year campaign was over.
Next day Hawke was elected president of the ACTU by 399 to 350.
Over in Washington George Meany, the boss of American labour, heard the wire-service news, ‘and nearly had a heart-attack. “The Aussies have gone Communist!” he said.’7
It is doubtful that any of the delegates gathered in the Paddington Town Hall and shouting with joy fully understood what they had done: they had created the Australian hero of the 1970s.
When Hawke bounded to his feet to accept victory he moved towards the conclusion of his speech with the declaration:
Let me make it abundantly clear that I will not be the president merely of those who worked for and voted for me. I will be the president of the whole of the ACTU—equally of those who exercised their democratic right to work for another result. My door will be as open to you, Ralph Marsh, as to you, Jim Shannon. I will seek genuinely to work in harmony with all sections of this movement.8
The Right thought he was lying; the Left that he was giving a victor’s magnanimous flourish. Their disillusion was to be intense. They spoke later with the sadness of suppressed anger, or made excuses: Hawke was gregarious, he socialised with capitalists and was led astray; he was prepared to be kind, when he should not have been; he was naive and did not understand how vicious the Right was; John Ducker was the complete political animal, and had seduced him; Hawke became bewitched by politics and abandoned the workers—this from the spokesman of the workers of the world, Joe Morris, a Canadian, who had groomed Hawke to succeed him. The Communists said he was a middle-class opportunist all along, who took some time to reveal his true colours. And the National Civic Council, which had thought Hawke a ‘Red dupe’, said the same thing. Or it was said that he was a Jew. Or that his wife was a Jewess . . . The explanations were as various as the people who gave them. Unionists have always been agreed on one thing; that Hawke is unusually truthful, but they chose to believe that he was not really telling the truth about himself.
The fact was, as Hawke had repeatedly said, he wanted to exercise power and to do so in a way that he defined as being in the public good. It was all he had ever wanted and if, to achieve that, he had to do deals with the Right or with millionaries or with conservative politicians, or Communists, he would. He had been a fundamentalist Christian ideologue at nineteen; he had been fed on ideology with his mother’s milk; he had lived and breathed the beliefs of the Second Coming, when the righteous dead would rise from their graves to walk in glory with the Lord. And twenty years later, when he became president of the ACTU, he by then believed that a socialist Australia was as distant as the millennium; that what mattered was the justice of the here and now. He had no inner need for the direction to life that ideology gives. He was free. He thought he had been grandiosely enabled to realise his dreams.
As they gathered their papers and prepared to leave the Paddington Town Hall, Cliff Dolan said to Hawke, ‘Don’t rush things, mate. The trade union movement is really very conservative, you know.’
It was years before Hawke would acknowledge the defeats foreshadowed by that acute observation.