The years since 1965 had been a banquet for Hawke. There had been plenty of buffeting in public and in private, but the round of his life, once he had focused upon the presidency of the ACTU, had been a succession of delights. His victory in the leadership of the trade union movement, then three years later the shared victory of a Labor government elected to office, had turned Hawke’s world into an Olympus in which he was, unarguably, a senior god. ‘Next to Whitlam’, he said, ‘I’d done more than any other member of the party to have the government elected’.
Aged forty-three, his early portrait was complete: he had a mane of glossy dark hair, now touched with grey at the temples, his face had filled out, his neck and torso were powerful, his chest a barrel from the years of exercising, in court and on the hustings, the muscles around his lungs. His eyebrows were thick and expressive, the look in his eyes was friendly but sharp. That aura of vitality that had surrounded Hawke since youth had by this time become something more, a furnace blast of energy and a self-conscious awareness of power. He had often a feline expression of secret triumph. In private he frequently dressed in nothing but a pair of shorts; he would swim naked in the pool at home and once scandalised a group of male trade union officials by doing so, then sitting down and chatting to them, still unclothed, while Hazel poured drinks. Room-service hotel waiters became accustomed, over the years, to seeing Hawke without any clothes and journalists to his giving interviews in a swimming costume. In public Hawke dressed with extreme neatness, in off-the-peg suits that verged on flashiness.
When he was drunk, as he was more often now without the pressure of wage cases—he twitched his eyebrows and had a dangerous, slightly demonic look, like an angry cat. He was as lithe as a cat: the gallons of beer he drank had not produced the usual beer-gut, perhaps because his appetite, which had always been small, was diminished by alcohol, and he took plenty of exercise. He could do twenty-five push-ups without puffing and when in high spirits would issue challenges to other boastful men to stretch out on the floor and try to match him. He weighed 76 kilograms and stood 1.80 metres, a good five centimetres of that accounted for by his hair. He was both smaller and stronger-looking than people who had seen him on television expected—‘like a bantam fighting cock’, as a journalist exclaimed. Indeed, Hawke was, as ever, ready for a fight. He was a man who had succeeded dramatically, and yet . . . He had not kept all his promises to himself.
His old dream seemed closer by early 1973; it looked like sunlight standing tiptoe on the horizon, just waiting for dawn. It was a false dawn.
In the middle of 1973 Hawke was offered, and seized, another great prize: he became president of the ALP. ‘I’d earned it. I was ambitious for it. I cherished it’, he said. And so he did: too well, perhaps.
Hawke said, when he took on the second presidency, that he would hold the job for two years. He held it for five, in the teeth of advice from his political supporters who saw the long-term damage he was doing, within the ALP, to his ambitions. Don Dunstan told him, ‘If you want to be prime minister, for God’s sake give up the party presidency. It’s a millstone round your neck.’ Years later, asked if he had made a great mistake in taking on the job, Hawke’s instant reply was, ‘No. I enjoyed it.’
Within days of his becoming president of the ALP, troubles began. They multiplied. In retrospect the whole period from 1966 to 1980 is cleft in equal parts: seven years feast, seven years famine, with mid-1973 as the point of separation. At the conclusion of the time span Hawke looked, when tired, an old man. His hair had turned grey and by 1980 was white in parts; his shoulders hunched; he was shorter for he no longer stood straight; his face, which in profile had become a nutcracker, was marked with lines chiselled by pain and alcohol; his lips had disappeared and what had once been an attractive mouth had become a thin line. The expression in his eyes had changed from sharp curiosity to a baleful suspicion and had that suggestion of emotional damage one sees sometimes in the eyes of intelligent and sensitive men who have been through a war. For Hawke, 1973 opened with joyous enthusiasm and closed with a despair that seemed endless.
He had been in office at the ACTU three years when Labor won the election. In that time he had learned some hard lessons about the limits to power.
Among themselves trade union leaders of the Right had discussed a contingency plan if it should happen that Hawke pressed them too far: they would have him sacked. A president of the ACTU can only be sacked for gross misdemeanour; however, once a powerful group is determined upon removing an enemy there is always something that it can find and exaggerate wildly: an expense account does not add up, an office car has been misused. Nobody who spends the money of others and who is busy is ever safe. Ducker said with a grin, ‘Y’know, if we’d really wanted to . . .’ then added, ‘Hawkey had a law degree—he could have become a judge’, and gave a broad, whimsical smile. In the event it was unnecessary for Hawke’s enemies to do more than play with the idea of deposing him. He respected the position of the Right; he was given freedom to pursue the goals of his campaign platform. At least, in theory.
In practice, the ACTU’s lack of money, the under-financing of the trade union movement as a whole and its many rivalries were to make his task almost impossible. The unions wanted Hawke to carry through the reforms he had promised but only if somebody else would pay.
The problem in Australia was that, except for crises, the idea of consistency in the trade union movement was an ideal rather than a reality; the movement was, and is, as various and conflicting in its parts as the nations of Europe. Outside Europe one may speak of ‘the Europeans’: in Europe, they do not exist—there are only Spaniards and Dutch, Greeks and Germans. The Clerks Union is as different from, say, the Transport Workers as Poles are from Portuguese.
Besides the frequent reminders Hawke had been given during ACTU executive meetings, the 1971 Congress had made him acutely aware of the difficulties of exercising power, of persuading people to pay for what they said they wanted. He had seen the potential danger for a Labor government: like him, it had a broad program of reforms; like him, it could be handicapped in implementing them.
In September 1972, at an ALP federal executive meeting in Sydney, Hawke and Clyde Cameron argued that during the forthcoming election campaign there should be no promise that a Whitlam Labor government would not increase taxes. For years Hawke had been advocating that tax loopholes must be closed, that the rich must be made to pay their share of taxes. He recalled,
By that stage [September 1972] we all believed that we were going to win, so what we were talking about was Labor in government. I was casting my mind ahead and I was quite certain that the Whitlam Labor government would be judged on its handling of the economy, and that it would be a total tragedy if all that happened was that we came to office and were a one-term government, because we would not be able to do things of a lasting nature in one term. I said this at the federal executive meeting, and privately. I can remember almost my exact words: Whatever great social changes and foreign policy changes were made, we would live or die on our handling of the economy, and that I didn’t want to see us unnecessarily constricting ourselves by promising no increase in taxation. Because, if we were to be able to achieve the things we wanted to regarding redistribution of wealth and positive change, and to do that in the least inflationary way, we needed to have the revenue available. The tax system in Australia by 1972 represented twenty-odd years of conservatism, and had been structured in a way which the conservatives regarded as appropriate to their philosophy. I didn’t object to that, because they’d been democratically elected, so were entitled to do what they wanted—for example, to make, through the child deduction system, kids worth more to a bloke on $50 000 a year than to a poor person. But that did not mean that we should say, ‘Oh, just elect us and we won’t change the tax structure and make any greater imposts’. I certainly wasn’t arguing that we hit the poor—on the contrary—but I was arguing that the wealthy and upper-income groups should not regard themselves as sacrosanct, and be allowed to think that a generation of conservatism in regard to imposts would continue with a Labor government. My view was that the Australian community was ready for change, and that we should be direct with the community, that we should not get into a position of saying, ‘Things won’t change regarding imposts’.
What I was saying at the executive meeting was very much related to my concern about the economy, because I believed that the signs were already evident that the economic situation was beginning to change, that we weren’t in the situation of limitless vistas of expansion that had characterised, or had seemed to characterise, the 1950s and 1960s. And my concern was related to wages: that in this coming period one of the issues would be wage justice and wages policy. For us to be able, as a labour movement, to get a situation of wage earners accepting restraint the sine qua non would be a belief on the part of the trade union movement that Australia had an equitable tax structure. In 1972 there was a belief within the Labor Caucus that growth was still continuing. There wasn’t a general perception that the bubble had burst. I didn’t realise that myself. But there was, by the latter part of 1972, evidence around that things were getting tougher—overseas, inflation was starting to roar ahead. And it was quite clear that the electorate would be much more astringent in its judgment about the economic performance of Labor than it would be about the conservatives. Even if one’s perception of the economy was that we would continue to zoom forward, that there would be low inflation, continued full employment, no international problems—whatever the context—I still would have held the view that we must not tie one hand behind our backs by committing ourselves to an unnecessary restriction.
Now, throughout the 1972 campaign, while Whitlam did not promise ‘We won’t raise taxes’, the view was projected to the electorate that we would not. The campaign speeches were carefully written to avoid saying, We Will or We Won’t. But the electorate got the message: We Won’t. And I thought that was wrong.
Labor’s policies on taxation were to be the cause of one of the many rows between Whitlam and Hawke.
During 1972 Hawke had irritated Whitlam by suggesting to him that he should study economics. He said,
My view was that Gough was such an extraordinarily intelligent man, he had a barrister’s ability to get on top of a huge mass of material very quickly, that he could acquaint himself with economics in a couple of months. I offered to arrange for him to have private tuition from economists I knew, who would have made themselves available to him at whatever times suited him. But he wasn’t interested. He made the point, ‘I have economic advisers’. He just would not accept the points I was making: that economics was going to be central, that it is no use having economic advisers if one could not determine the value of their advice, that the man at the top must be involved.
Perhaps the very suggestion was counter-productive. Someone close to both Whitlam and Hawke observed, ‘Bob tried to give Gough advice—and that’s fatal’. And Egerton, reflecting on the ALP federal executive years from 1971 to 1976, remarked, ‘With Whitlam and Hawke, it was the old bull trying to keep the young bull out of his paddock’. The rivalry between them was to become intense.
From early on relations between the new government and the ACTU, representative of the government’s largest constituent, were strained. Things had started well: the new Minister for Labour, Clyde Cameron, had attended the first ACTU executive meeting to be held after the election and announced that he intended to make changes to the Conciliation and Arbitration Act. But within weeks, a row blew up between Cameron and the ACTU.
The president of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, Sir Richard Kirby, had decided to retire. His obvious successor was Mr Justice Moore, a man whom Kirby had groomed for the job for years and who had proved his ability through his handling of scores of wage cases and dispute negotiations. Moore was trusted by the unions and the employers, and was, after Kirby, the most senior member of the Arbitration Bench. Cameron, however, had promised the job to a barrister, John Sweeney, who had devised the legal means that had allowed federal intervention in the Victorian branch of the ALP. There was outrage in the Commission when Cameron’s plan became known. Kirby telephoned Hawke requesting him to persuade Whitlam to tell Cameron to reverse his decision. Moore was appointed. Cameron, however, was so angry that, in the words of Harold Souter,
for a couple of weeks he stopped talking to me. Relations between the ACTU and the Whitlam government set off on the wrong foot because of the row over Sweeney, and they worsened because of the failure of ALAC [the Australian Labor Advisory Council] to hold meetings.
ALAC1 was the meeting ground between the Labor Party and the trade union movement and leading up to the 1972 election it had convened regularly. It was made up of the four parliamentary Labor leaders; four ALP federal executive members; the president, secretary and two vice-presidents of the ACTU. In the pre-election period ALAC meetings had been the critical area for discussions about how union leaders could defuse potential strikes and how they could defuse the McMahon government’s attempts to explode the ‘law and order’ issue. It was the forum in which, when Labor was in office, wages policy should have been discussed.
Souter continued,
When Whitlam came to office there was one punctual meeting of ALAC, but successive meetings went astray. Once we waited an hour and a half for Gough to turn up and he only arrived when Bob threatened to walk out. We [the ACTU] wrote a letter of protest about the falling away of ALAC. Gough was apologetic and he called another meeting, turned up, then left after about fifteen minutes. It was hopeless. We couldn’t talk to the government, and eventually ALAC just disappeared.2 For the ALP and the ACTU the lack of communication was a disaster. We did have contact through Clyde Cameron but he was an old AWU man and he was always set against the ACTU. In his early days as minister, Clyde would telephone me every Sunday morning and would talk for an hour or more, often not restricting himself to industrial matters, but going on about his political problems. It got to the stage where I dreaded Sunday mornings. So it was a relief when he was in a temper with us, over Sweeney, and left me alone for a fortnight.
When Clyde Cameron was embarrassed over the non-appointment of Sweeney to head the Commission, he appointed him, again without prior consultation with the ACTU, to inquire into industrial relations in Australia. That is rather like inquiring into the sanctity of marriage. Both the ACTU and the organised employers were irritated, and suspicious. Souter recalled,
Clyde introduced a Bill to amend the Arbitration Act in 1973 and we learned of it only when the Bill had its first reading in the House. Clyde’s office then sent us a copy. Frankly, we were better off under the Liberals as far as communications were concerned. If they were going to amend the Act they would show us the draft legislation and, while they would not introduce changes that the ACTU requested, they would not introduce changes of their own if the ACTU raised strong objections. From very early on the ACTU felt a disillusionment with the Whitlam government. Our relations reached a nadir over the tariffs cut, and a terrible disillusion spread, not only through the ACTU, but through the whole trade union movement.
George Polites recalled,
Clyde was a great hater. It was as simple as that. He hated the AWU hierarchy and, hell and high water, he was determined to get them. So he introduced a lot of amendments to the Act which were designed to hurt the AWU, but they hurt as well a whole range of other unions. We tried to tell him—I tried, Bob tried, Harold tried. Clyde would not listen. He had his own views about everything, he lived in the past, he pursued old scores and maintained retribution against old enemies. He thought that because he was labour minister in a Labor government and came from a trade union background he knew everything and nobody had a right to question anything he did. I made a public statement early on that this was ‘a know-all government’, that it just doesn’t want to talk to you, and if that’s the way it’s to go on it will commit bloody suicide. And it did. Personally I got on with Clyde—he’s a most likeable bloke. He would cuddle up to unions whom he thought were politically useful to him—they could see him any hour of the day or night—but everyone else was Out.
By late 1974 wages were running madly out of control; Cameron (and other ministers) appealed to the trade union movement to restrain itself. The government had not reformed taxation; its policies had created unemployment. The unions co-operated to restrain wages on terms that suited the highest paid: they agreed to indexation of the total wage. This was a formula for the well paid to be even better paid in relation to the less well-paid; for tax to eat up a larger slice of the increase; therefore, an encouragement for tax avoidance. And, of course, for a massive wages bill to employers, for unemployment and, in due course, for falling government revenues as the world and his wife learned the tricks, once the sport of the upper middle class, of tax evasion. At the time it was the best deal Cameron could strike with the trade union movement and the arbitration system, and there is no doubt that indexation was preferable to the hysterical scramble for higher wages that was going on: unions were badgering the Arbitration Commission with ambit claims as high as $1000 a week. The treatment, however, while bringing the disease to stability, made it chronic. The problem was, and is, not that unionists are wickedly greedy or that arbitration judges are lunatically extravagant but that the Australian wage fixation system, designed in 1907, had become an inappropriate tool of social and economic policy. Hundreds of people—politicians, unionists, employers and the wage arbitrators themselves—will have to agree before it can be reformed, for it is they themselves who make up the system. However, virtually all members of the system choose to believe differently: ‘I am a bird, look at my wings’, said the bat. ‘I am a mouse, look at my coat’, said the other bat.
Cameron, in an article that was published in Labor Essays 1981 and that when read in full richly confirms the opinions of Polites and Souter, blamed Hawke and the ACTU for the chronic wages mess of the late 1970s. He wrote:
The reforms I made to the Conciliation and Arbitration Act to ensure that elected union officials properly represented their membership . . . were the finishing touches to a struggle I had waged over many years, first as a member, and later as an elected official, of the large and powerful Australian Workers’ Union . . . Some union officials opposed my proposition to outlaw the collegiate system of electing executive officers and for making the embezzlement of union funds an offence against the Crimes Act . . . many union officials disagreed with me. But all of these differences were with union officials over issues on which they, not I, were out of touch with the real trade union movement, ie. its rank and file . . . Tom Dougherty [boss of the AWU] spoke for many of his fellow bureaucrats in the AWU when he used to refer to the rank and file as the ‘crank and vile’. He and some of his yes-men literally despised their union’s membership . . . [When it came to an agreement about wage indexation] I was unaware of Hawke’s plan to bring about an amalgamation between the Australian Council of Salaried and Professional Associations (ACSPA) and the ACTU.3 ACSPA was committed to full indexation of total wages irrespective of how high those wages might be. Hawke was anxious that the amalgamation between the two large organisations should take effect. And for this to happen the ACTU would have to tailor its wage indexation policy to accommodate ACSPA demands . . . I believe that the record of the ACTU, in respect of wage indexation, will be viewed by historians as one of the most shameful chapters in the whole history of labour relations in this country.4
Hawke commented,
It’s just a nasty perversion to explain the ACTU wage indexation decision in terms of Hawke’s plans about amalgamation with ACSPA. We had fought for years for a two-tiered wage system, and we’d lost: the trade union movement was confronted by the fact that the system had been turned on its head, against us. And we then had to face up to that reality, and also to the reality that our constituency was a very broad one. The ACTU executive debated at length the possible applications to be put to the Commission—for flat increases; for plateaus; for percentages. We decided to argue strongly for protection of the minimum wage, and for the value of tradesmen’s incomes to be protected. Cameron suggests that it did not matter at all if tradesmen’s wages were allowed to be eroded. That was not the view of the majority of ACTU executive members. It had nothing to do with ACSPA. Our submissions and theirs were entirely separate and we often had sharp disagreements with them. A reading of ACTU submissions shows that we qualified some of our demands for percentage increases.
Whitlam finally sacked Cameron as Minister for Labour and earned his undying enmity. Unions made polite growls in defence of a fellow trade unionist, while sighing with deepest relief. By then relations between the government and its largest organised constituent, the unions, were in a shambles. Egerton said later, ‘If Whitlam had not been sacked he would have had no option but to have taken the unions on. And I tell you, he would have won, and Hawke would have been finished.’
In early 1973 the public became aware that a Labor government and a trade union movement, while in broad agreement upon ends, do not necessarily agree upon means. The issue was French atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific. The government, Whitlam in particular, wanted the fight against France’s behaviour to be conducted through diplomatic and legal channels; the trade union movement, Hawke in particular, wanted to confront France head on, through a campaign of strikes that would isolate metropolitan France from the rest of the world. Whitlam feared that strike action against France’s communications would put Australia in breach of international law and jeopardise the Australian case that had been argued by the Attorney-General, Lionel Murphy, in the International Court. He sent Hawke a long, friendly, admonishing telegram saying, in part, ‘Having invoked international law against France . . . it would never do if Australia were herself in breach of obligations . . . under international law’, and going on to request the strike action against French communications be halted. Already, without consulting the ACTU, many unions had black-banned French aircraft, shipping, goods and communications, and for once the public was in support of a ‘political’ strike.
Whitlam had first announced Australia’s objection to the tests in January 1973; the ACTU had decided six months earlier to ban French vessels and aircraft, including a planned flight by the new high-speed aeroplane, the Concorde. Public outrage had been gathering. Since the 1960s, when France had begun atmospheric testing in the Pacific, ACTU congresses had called for strike action against France, but in those days the electorate would not tolerate the trade unions assuming a role that was considered properly to be government’s. But in Hawke’s time as president his repeated challenge, ‘Anything that affects our people—and in we go!’ had won, at least in this case, public acceptance. Telegrams and letters poured into the ACTU from June 1972. Some read:
Keep it up, and, as soon as possible, Hawke for Prime Minister!
You are clearly the only one that Australia has with enough guts and determination to . . . stop the French.
Please stop the French.
Australia needs you.
Our Government [McMahon’s] has been gutless. You must act. (signed) Staunch Liberal.
And one:
You are destroying the Labor Party because you want to run this country, (signed) Labor Supporter.
By May 1973 concerned citizens were producing pamphlets that said:
Do you WANT
To have deformed children!
To have leukemia!
To be sterile!
To have cancer!
To risk destroying the earth!
In February 1973 Hawke held talks in Geneva with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) about the possibility of international action against the French. The ICFTU represents 92 million trade unionists, all from non-Communist countries. Its secretary was Otto Kersten of West Germany, who had been a senior official in the DGB, the Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, the largest free trade union organisation in the world. When the DGB speaks, the governments of Western Europe listen.
Hawke and Kersten were friends. Kersten told Hawke that the Finance and General Purposes Committee, the highest executive organ (after the Executive Board, which appoints it) of the ICFTU would be meeting in Mexico in late April. He suggested that if, by April, the French still seemed determined, Hawke could approach the ICFTU hierarchy in Mexico—although the French tests were, superficially at least, of no concern to the majority of ICFTU members, since radioactive particles would not fall on them.
By 21 April Murphy’s mission to the International Court had, in effect, failed for the French announced that they did not recognise the authority of the Court. Hawke talked to Whitlam, but they were unable to reach agreement upon the proper role of the trade unions. He said to the Prime Minister, ‘We [the unions] are not tools of government. And the obverse is true.’ The Australian trade union movement planned to boycott French cargoes, planes, ships and communications. By itself, such action would be futile: France could hardly be bullied into changing its defence program because of loss of Australian trade and communications. Hawke, however, had devised a grand strategy, an action unique in the history of the trade union movement, not just in Australia, but in the world: through the ICFTU he planned to involve the workers of the world in action against France. He flew to Cuernavaca:
I’d been inundated with requests from people to do something, and had had a lot of heart-rending letters from people saying they’d lost contact with their families in France and less heart-rending ones from people complaining that their goods from France were being held up on the wharves and requesting that they be released. It’s a problem that always arises—somebody gets hurt. You know, they’ve bought a Citroën and can’t see that waiting for the Citroën might be less important than saving somebody’s life. But, overwhelmingly, the public wanted action. A number of scientists had approached me, blokes from Melbourne University and elsewhere, and had offered to tutor me in the scientific and biological questions, so by the time I left for Mexico I had the scientific evidence about dangers to the living and the unborn, and the technical terms pretty well in my head. I’ve got a limited capacity with science, but I’d been able to master the ideas. The structure of my argument in Mexico was this: the tests were dangerous; it was futile to say, as the French were, that there was no danger, because if this were so why weren’t they testing in France? From that base, I went on to argue for international trade union solidarity and demanded that we be given support. It was well received; there was no opposition. But some of the Europeans pointed out that there were legal constraints upon action of the type we talked about. Then others said that, in addition to the ICFTU, we should get the ITS [the international trade secretariats] to make their own decisions to join: for example, the International Transport Workers’ Federation, the International Metal Workers’ Federation, the International Postal and Telecommunications Union. And the ICFTU decided to contact the ITS and ask them formally to support the decision. And that happened. The ICFTU resolved ‘to make preparations to take full and appropriate action against French interests throughout the world’ to try to stop the tests. Then, I went to Geneva, to the International Labour Organization. And there was a tremendous response in the ILO.
The International Labour Organization was established in 1919 as an autonomous institution associated with the League of Nations, its original constitution having been adopted as Part XIII of the Treaty of Versailles. With certain amendments this constitution remains the charter of the ILO today, bringing governments, employers and trade unions together to discuss international labour and social problems. A new declaration of the aims and purposes of the ILO, known as the Declaration of Philadelphia, was added to the constitution at the 1944 session of the International Labour Conference (the ILO’s annual meeting) and this asserted the responsibility of the ILO to combat poverty and insecurity. In 1946 the ILO became the first of the specialised agencies of the United Nations Organization. Over the years the ILO has built up an immense list of recommendations and resolutions about the treatment of workers that its members are required to observe within their own countries. However, unlike the UN, it has no army so it cannot enforce obedience, but it can publicly humiliate disobedient members. If a government withdraws, its workers and employers need not withdraw, for the ILO’s unique tripartite structure gives equal authority to each part of a national delegation: that is, the government, the employers, and the workers. If a government wants to rejoin the organisation it must promise to observe the rules before it will be readmitted. Not to belong to the ILO or to be condemned by it is to declare oneself before the international community to be uncivilised and to weaken one’s potential for bargaining and lobbying in the United Nations and its other agencies, for example, the World Health Organization. The game at the ILO is national pride and avoiding injuries to it. Trade union leaders who cannot, in their own countries, criticise their governments for fear of harassment, can do so in the ILO. The Workers’ Group, of which Hawke had been a member since he became president of the ACTU, is the cutting edge of ILO debate.
Of its very nature, the ILO is volatile and highly political. The people who run it, the members of the secretariat, must be politicians, diplomats and administrators—skills that are reflected in their wages: currently the director-general’s salary plus allowances is approximately $90 000, after tax. The ILO was founded by white Christians and its rules were inspired by Judeo-Christian ethics; the feasibility of persuading the rest of the world to abide by those ethics and the laws they have formulated is problematic.
When the USSR was expelled from the League of Nations in 1939 it ceased to attend the ILO, but on Stalin’s death in 1953 the USSR applied for readmission, which was granted the following year. Then in 1970 the ILO director-general, David Morse, decided that it was unrealistic to be without a Communist in the secretariat. He appointed a Soviet diplomat as an assistant director-general. Morse’s action, just before his retirement, precipitated for his successor, Wilfred Jenks, what became known as ‘The Crisis of 1970’.
Like some other international organisations, the ILO is heavily dependent upon the USA for finance. It was unfortunate, therefore, that George Meany, the boss of American labour and a man noted for his fanatical anti-Communism, had flown into a rage over the appointment of a Russian—for Meany had much influence with the US State Department. The American government drastically cut its financial contributions to the organisation. Hundreds of employees had to be sacked; much of its research work curtailed or abandoned.
Hawke, in 1970, was attending the ILO as a workers’ delegate for the first time. The organisation’s legal adviser, Francis Wolf, said, ‘Bob took a systematically courageous line in defending the director-general and in working behind the scenes to soften the anger of the USA. He helped to overcome the Crisis of 1970.’ It was particularly difficult for Hawke to work behind the scenes, for George Meany, who was instructing the American workers’ delegation, was still convinced that the new president of the ACTU was no better than a Communist. A further problem was Hawke’s style—especially for Meany, a devout, moralistic Roman Catholic, whose prejudices were all confirmed by Hawke’s swearing, boozing and womanising. There are many cocktail parties for ILO delegates and these were potentially disastrous occasions for the wild colonial boy in those days. Australian diplomats posted in Geneva have anecdotes about muscling a roaring drunk Hawke outside and into a limousine. The story ran like fire that, on being introduced to the director-general of the ILO, whom others addressed as Mr Jenks, Hawke had said, ‘G’day, Wilf’, and later in the evening had caused his host, an ambassador, to turn pale, by saying ‘That’s bullshit, Wilf! And you ought to know it!’ The Europeans considered his accent outlandish, while some of the more formal ones, especially the French—and nobody is quite as formal as a genuine French mandarin—referred to him as ‘the barbarian’.
However, even the most formal acknowledged, ‘He was something extraordinary’. In the words of Francis Wolf, ‘One was struck by his energy, frankness, dynamic approach, his quick understanding and spontaneous friendliness. He was one of the highest elements, intellectually. And then we saw he had courage.’ For his defence of the director-general, Hawke had won respect and gratitude in the secretariat. The following year he won the admiration and affection of the African delegates for his efforts in Australia to prevent the Springbok tour. Hawke’s status with the black African delegations—not only of workers, but of governments and employers—was to be important in later ILO dramas. By 1973 he was an identity in the ILO, still a newcomer, but a man who had aroused the interest of those who had met him. However, he had not yet addressed the conference, where governments, employers and workers all attend, and it was only in the Workers’ Group that he was well known.
The International Labour Conference is held annually, in the Palais des Nations on the shores of Lake Geneva. Bold hearts had constructed the Palais des Nations as the meeting place for men whose discussions would save the world. However, the imagination and humanistic optimism of those who founded the League of Nations and had the Palais built somehow escaped its architects. It is a huge, austere building, entirely lacking in charm, the cream and green marble columns of its halls soaring ten metres to unadorned ceilings. There are some vast, ugly murals of ‘Mankind’, executed in socialist realist style. On a clear day you can stand on the terrace and look across the lake to Mont Blanc, curved like a giant meringue, riding in the sky. The main conference hall seats 2000; architecturally chilling as it is, its sheer austerity is awe inspiring.
The most daunting of those who regularly spoke in the conference hall of the Palais des Nations was a Frenchman, Alexandre Parodi, leader of the French government delegation. Parodi was a septuagenarian by 1973, and a hero. He had been a leader of the French resistance during World War II; when Germany surrendered, France had been handed to Parodi, who became president of the transitional government until de Gaulle could arrive back from exile. Parodi had been close to de Gaulle, who made him Minister for Labour. He had presided over the ILO at its first postwar session in 1945, and was a man of intimidating formality and dignity. At casual weekend gatherings, when others wore sports clothes, Monsieur Parodi dressed in a dark suit and tie. Respect for him was such that nobody in the ILO could remember an occasion when someone had publicly argued with Parodi. Then in 1973, to the thrilled disbelief of the delegates, Hawke leapt to his feet and accused Parodi of hypocrisy in the matter of the French nuclear tests. Hawke did not use that word—his language was suitably tactful—but he conveyed his meaning clearly.
A Spanish delegate, Jose Aguiriano, recalled,
It was electric. Nobody had ever spoken like that to M. Parodi. People were stunned . . . Hawke was the soul, the engine and the spirit of the international trade union action against the French tests. The French had been using delaying tactics, so that the nuclear testing issue could not be raised in conference. But Hawke brought on this very high-level controversy.
For several minutes there were sharp exchanges between Hawke and Parodi. Then, as Hawke had already arranged, when the French Minister for Labour rose to speak, 200 workers, with a noisy shuffling of papers and stamping of feet but not a word said, walked out.
Aguiriano, who was a director of the Geneva office of the ICFTU, said,
It was the first time ever that a world trade union boycott had been planned. Our boycott failed, because the French exploded their bombs. But for the first time the trade union movement had brought to public awareness, particularly in France, the danger of nuclear testing. And that was all Hawke.
On 21 July 1973 the French exploded a nuclear device, a second on 29 July and a third on 19 August. On 31 August the French Minister for Defence hinted that future tests would be underground. They were. Two senior French officials—one from the Quai d’Orsay, another the French consul in Noumea—later told Hawke that the world trade union reaction had accelerated the change in French policy.
Meanwhile Parodi and Hawke, predictably, had become friends. Hawke said, ‘I had a great affection for the old bloke. He was a most elegant opponent and we came to respect each other and to have a very very warm friendship.’ Parodi, who had referred icily to Hawke in 1973 as ‘an interesting man’, was soon afterwards calling him, ‘my most honourable opponent’. An ILO bureaucrat remarked, ‘The French stopped saying, “Monsieur Awk is a barbarian”. They said, “Well, he is a strange fellow, but he is a brave fellow”.’
Hawke loved attending the ILO. He is strongly attracted to the cosmopolitan and the ILO provided a marketplace for ideas. In later years he loved, too, the anonymity he had in the streets of Geneva and would say, ‘It’s a beautiful feeling to be able to go into a shop or a restaurant and not have people staring at you’. In 1972 Hawke had been appointed to the governing body of the ILO and had to go to Geneva three times a year for meetings.
He also had to attend regional meetings of international union organisations and he travelled interstate frequently, often at short notice. He was absent from the ACTU office for a total of six months each year. In early 1973 the executive complained that the president’s office was running poorly. One man, Geoff Gleghorn, had been doing the job of two people, working as the ACTU press officer and as Hawke’s personal assistant. The press office work in itself was nightmarish because Hawke’s policy of being available to the news media at all times meant that ‘every journalist in Australia knew his private phone number’ and Hawke would make statements or give interviews whenever requested, without first checking what other arrangements might have been made. Gleghorn had put in his resignation; the executive decided that two people would be needed to replace him—another journalist and somebody to be personal assistant to Hawke and Souter. The new press officer was Graham Hardy, a young man who had worked on country newspapers. The personal assistant chosen was Jean Sinclair.
Sinclair was as exotic an employee for the ACTU as Hawke had been himself. She was English-born, the eldest daughter of a comfortable Melbourne family, had attended Merton Hall, one of Australia’s best private girls’ schools, had an economics degree from Melbourne University and was a director of her family company. She had earlier worked for an investment counsellor, Jim Cowan, analysing the stock market for investors, and later in Australia and the USA, for Rod Carnegie of McKinsey & Co. Her manner is that of a woman not to be trifled with: firm, pleasant, well organised and very quick witted. She and Hawke came to dote upon each other. When Sinclair was on leave Hawke would complain constantly, ‘Where’s Jean? Where are things? I don’t know where anything is. We’ll have to wait for Jeanie.’ Sinclair became a sort of devil’s advocate, scolding him roundly, for example, for appearing on television drunk or giving ill-prepared press interviews. She would sometimes emerge from his office with her lips pursed, saying, ‘We have had words’.
Everyone who has ever been close to Hawke has felt the necessity to give him advice or to criticise him—Hazel said, ‘All Bob’s life people have been telling him what to do’. It is as if the ‘constant teaching’ of his childhood has made Hawke an eternal pupil, and yet one who is selectively stubborn. At times, Hawke is deaf; at others, as impressionable as a boy. Since he will not reveal the details of his inner thoughts and what system they follow, even his closest friends do not know in advance how he will react to advice.
Souter interviewed Sinclair for the job, which had appeared as ‘a tiny advertisement in the Age, saying, “Assistant to President and Secretary of the ACTU”’. At one point Hawke came in and asked, ‘Do you know anything about trade unions?’ Sinclair replied, ‘No’.
I thought that would be the end of my chances. I’d given them in writing the details of my background, thinking, ‘They’ll accept that or they won’t’. During the interview Harold had not explained what I was meant to do, so I asked the president, ‘What is the job?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m away half the year, so you’re sort of to look after things’. I didn’t see him for the next six weeks . . . A couple of days later I reported for work. Harold took me to a room where there was a Clifton Pugh painting of a naked woman on the wall. He waved at the picture and said, ‘Don’t worry about that, we’ll have it removed’. Then he left. What I found was incredible! It was beyond description. There were boxes all over the floor, papers and letters piled up, files which had no indexes and when I opened them there might be inside a letter and a shorthand book with two pages of notes, or just an unused shorthand book. Mail was arriving for the president literally by the bagful each day and there was no system for filing it, or answering it . . . There was no airmail paper; the secretaries had typewriters with different typefaces, so that it was impossible to divide, for example, the typing of a report between them. The telephone system, which was new, was useless—I couldn’t switch a call through to the president’s office.
About 5000 people knew the president’s private phone number, and would ring him direct, so if he were away I’d have to run into his office to answer the phone and half the time it would be some racing friend who had a hot tip, or someone who had met Bob at a party last Thursday and wanted help from him . . . In McKinsey all senior staff were Masters of Business Administration. There were office managers. Efficiency ruled, naturally, because the motive was profit. The ACTU was not stimulated by the profit motive, so nobody had given any thought to efficiency. To get airmail paper, and save on the postage bills, an official request had to be written to Harold. The secretary of the ACTU was in charge of the stationery! And he had a separate filing system; in seven years I never did discover what was in it. Letters from unions about disputes would arrive and I’d file them, then weeks later discover that the rest of the correspondence was in Harold’s files. If we’d had four or five more secretaries we might have been able to answer the correspondence which arrived each day.
There was an incident, very early on, which on reflection, best illustrated what working for Bob was like. He had to address a lawyers’ dinner in Geelong, something which Peter Redlich [a president of the Victorian branch of the ALP] had arranged. I looked at the invitation in the morning and noticed that the dinner was black tie. There was going to be no time for Bob to go home and change, so I said, ‘Shall I send a taxi to Sandringham to collect your dress clothes?’ I was rather taken aback when he said, ‘I haven’t got any’. He frowned and added, ‘I’ll look a bit funny—can you fix that up?’ I presumed he meant would I hire him a dinner suit. So at lunchtime I went to a bridal wear shop and picked out a jacket, trousers, shirt, studs and so forth. Bob is an odd size—his chest is much larger than normal for his height. I had a guess at what might fit, thinking that he could try it all on in the afternoon, and I’d have time to change it before the evening. I was young and foolish in those days. Some union discussions went over time, then without warning Bob decided to hold a press conference, so by the time that was over it was past five o’clock and too late to change the clothes. Peter Redlich arrived looking magnificent; Bob saw him and said, ‘Gee, you look great! Where are my clothes?’ and went off to have a shower. [Hawke’s new office, above Bourkes, had a private bathroom.] He reappeared in the trousers, which fitted perfectly and the shirt, which fitted perfectly, and said to me, ‘Tie the tie thing, will you?’ So I did, then he put on the jacket, and it was extraordinary—the whole outfit could have been made to measure. He said to Peter Redlich, ‘Now I’m as pretty as you’, and off they went. The next morning I said to him, ‘Weren’t you surprised about the dinner suit?’ He said, ‘No’. I said, ‘Well, I picked it out without any idea about the sizes, and it all fitted—weren’t you surprised?’ Bob stared at me for a minute, then replied, ‘I asked you to fix it, and you fixed it. Why should I be surprised?’ . . . It was all like that. You were expected to know intuitively what to do. And somehow it worked.
Sinclair became Hawke’s fourth arm, in constant battle with what she called ‘Bob’s third arm—the telephone’. When he was abroad once she had his private number changed, and gave the new number out to
about thirty people with whom he needed to be in contact. But within a month he had given the new number to most of the Australian population, not to mention people overseas, and I realised it was no use arguing: when he needed to have a conference in his room, uninterrupted, I would simply unplug the phone. But it was marvellous fun. I’d set out for work in the morning wondering, ‘What crisis will we have today?’ A lot of the time we used to get through on laughter.
Hawke returned from the ILO drama about French nuclear tests and had to leave within days for the ALP biennial conference at Surfers Paradise. Just before he left for Queensland he met George Seelaf, who said, ‘Don’t you take on the presidency of the ALP. The trade union movement has no class conflict, but the ALP does. It’s a two-class party. You’ll have nothing but conflict if you become president of the Labor Party.’ Seelaf parted from Hawke in the belief that he had taken this advice.
There was already some underlying strain in the relationship between the government and the trade union movement, but the conference heard none of this. It was the happiest ALP conference anyone could remember, rather too happy for some, who expressed their joy at Labor’s return from exile by celebrating in the Pink Elephant Bar. Part of the get-together was a crying-and-singing Irish wake for Arthur Calwell, who had died while the meeting was in progress. Ministers gave speeches about their magnificent achievements during a mere few months in office, and the wonders that were to come. There was altogether too much sunshine, too much thirst-quenching, too many loud shirts and ringing hurrahs. ‘We were like kids let loose in the lolly shop’, John Ducker said.
Hawke was giddy with euphoria over his election, unopposed, as president of the party. Sinclair, who had barely seen him since she had begun working for him, recalled the mood when Hawke returned from Surfers Paradise and came into the ACTU office with Hazel. ‘They were on a cloud. They were drinking champagne in Bob’s office and telephoning people, calling everyone darling. Hazel was laughing, Bob was laughing. They phoned darling Jack Egerton and darling this and darling that.’ Ellie, having heard the news, exclaimed, ‘The prophecy of Isaiah has been fulfilled!’
Hawke saw his job as president of the ALP as a powerful symbol to the trade union movement of bonding between it and the Whitlam government. In a radio interview he said
I was prompted to accept the post by the untidiness of relations between the political members of the socialist movement and the trade union movement . . . Lack of communication, gaps, helped defeat the Wilson government in the UK. I want to bridge those gaps.
This desire to bridge the gaps, to reconcile opposites, has been a major shaping force throughout Hawke’s life: hymn-singer and boozer; family man and philanderer; mate of the manual worker and the millionaire. Sinning saint. But in view of Hawke’s longer term ambition—to be prime minister himself—it is difficult not to agree with George Polites: that taking on, while president of the ACTU, the presidency of the ALP, was ‘Bob’s greatest mistake. He attempted to straddle two things which simply could not be straddled.’
Within days it became obvious just how difficult life was going to be for him. One morning a couple of weeks after his triumphal return from Queensland, Sinclair entered Hawke’s office to find him glaring. He roared at her, ‘Get me fucking Whitlam!’ Without any warning to the president of the ACTU, Whitlam had announced a 25 per cent tariff cut, which would, the Prime Minister asserted, combat the inflation that had been troubling Australia since the days of the McMahon government. Hawke was outraged: as he knew, the tariff cuts would cause unemployment. He suspected, too, that they would not reduce inflation. He and Whitlam had a heated discussion on the telephone.
That afternoon Hawke, wearing both presidential hats at once, released a tortured press statement:
. . . any unemployment effects of the tariff cut will be offset by such factors as the upsurge in consumer demand and export demand, increased government expenditure, the existence of unused tariff and the fact that there is ample room to squeeze the profit-competing producers in Australia.5
Of course, a good barrister can assemble arguments to justify anything. But Hawke, while he could produce a defence of the government’s action, could not conceal his bad conscience in arguing for something in which he did not believe. The Bulletin reported: ‘Hawke was nervous, made simple mistakes and gave the impression of somebody trying to sell an unroadworthy used car’.6 He admitted to the news conference that he had been ‘stunned’ by Whitlam’s announcement. He added that he had spoken to the Prime Minister, who had promised him that anyone put out of work would not be obliged to seek alternative employment at a lower rate. This undertaking in due course was to cause further trouble.
When importers and retailers learned of the tariff cuts they immediately telexed and telephoned exporters and manufacturers in South-East Asia and South America, bought cheap and sold dear in Australia. So prices did not fall; Australian manufacturers went broke; their employees were sacked; there was anguish in the trade union movement and much merriment among those over whom the government had inadvertently poured gold. By 1 August Hawke, again wearing both presidential hats at once, was warning that importers and retailers who did not pass on the tariff cuts to consumers would face industrial action. Meanwhile, an income-maintenance scheme of $25 million had been hastily devised for those who would suffer on account of the tariff cuts. The government decided that people thrown out of work would be paid at their rate of average weekly earnings. But these were swollen with overtime money, so, unemployed, they earned more than others whose jobs had been saved but who had lost the potential for overtime earnings. Result: the employed resented both their unemployed former workmates and the government. The unemployed resented the government. Manufacturers resented the government. Trade union officials were furious with Hawke for publicly defending the tariff cuts.
And there was more disillusion about ‘their’ government in store for the trade union movement. The August Budget increased indirect taxes, which hurt the poor, but not direct taxes, which affect the rich. Hawke wore his ACTU hat and publicly condemned the Budget. Result: anger in the Caucus and hilarity in the Opposition parties, the news media and among other wicked people who had a sense of humour. Meanwhile, row number three between the Hawke–union camp and the Whitlam–Caucus camp was brewing. The ACTU executive had asked the government to take the measure that would have made the tariff cuts work. It had requested that the government gain power, through a referendum, to control prices. But the Caucus, without consulting the ACTU or discussing the matter in ALAC (which by now was dead anyway, except in name), decided to hold two referenda: one to gain control of prices and one to gain control of incomes. In the trade union movement control of incomes has one meaning: a wage freeze. If the government had set out to insult and unnerve its largest single constituent it could hardly have done a better job. The ACTU executive decided to campaign against the income referendum, so again the nation was treated to the ironic spectacle of the president of the ALP opposing the policy of the ALP government. Campaigning went on over several months and in December 1973 the electorate overwhelmingly rejected both referenda. By then relations between Whitlam and Hawke were at their nadir.
The trade union movement never forgave Whitlam for the tariff cuts and Hawke and others on the ACTU executive had to argue vehemently soon afterwards to secure an invitation for the Labor Prime Minister to address the Congress that year.
Meanwhile, Hawke’s second presidential hat had caused other problems. It had increased his workload but he had not been given extra staff with which to cope with the extra responsibilities. There were more demands from the news media for interviews; more requests for Hawke to be a guest speaker; more letters from a public already used to treating Hawke as national ombudsman; more lobbying from business and other groups; more meetings to chair, more travelling. More worries. More attacks to field, for Hawke’s wearing of the two hats was disliked not only within the ALP Caucus, but also within the trade union movement. Sinclair said,
At first there was euphoria. Then this began to change to frenzy. Things became more and more frenzied. It was as if a car had been parked on a hill and the brakes had gone—it began running downhill, slowly at first, then faster and faster . . . We didn’t even have the paper for Bob to answer letters to him as ALP president. I had to demand ALP stationery from the federal secretariat, in the end. I was paid by the ACTU, so I could not do ALP work in ACTU time. I would do it after hours, and think of it as a donation to the party. You could criticise the way Bob chose to play the role of ALP president, that he was very high-profile, but you couldn’t criticise him for being half the time in a blur. The workload was intolerable.
Within weeks of the row over the Budget, the 1973 ACTU Congress opened, on Monday, 3 September, in Sydney. Just beforehand the Communist Party ran a banner headline in its weekly Tribune asking, ‘Can Hawke’s Wings Be Clipped?’, for now the rupture between Hawke and his erstwhile far-Left supporters was out in the open. After fifteen years of accusations about being a Communist or a crypto-Communist, and all the weary mischief that had caused, he was at last free of that particular problem. But he faced a new one because the extreme Left of the union movement and the extreme Right had formed an alliance against him: smiling hard and, no doubt, holding their ideological noses, the Clerks and the AMWSU hopped into bed together. The 1973 Congress was to see another major challenge to Hawke’s personal position in the ACTU.
Things could have been worse for him if the alliance had been more disciplined but the strength of the extreme Left was undermined by external events. Within Communist ranks there had been fraternal strife waged quietly, for more than a decade, when in 1972 China had emerged from its long period of weakness to reissue that challenge to Moscow that dates back to Ghengis Khan. Australian Communists reacted immediately and at the ACTU Congress of 1973 the supporters of the Middle Kingdom and those of Mother Russia fell to spirited fighting with each other. The result was that Pat Clancy, a Moscow-line Communist, was deposed from his ACTU executive seat by a Mao sympathiser, Norm Gallagher. Gallagher’s first act was to refuse to attend the traditional dinner of welcome for new executive members.
Thanks in part to the disarray and misalliances among Hawke’s enemies at the Congress, he won handsomely on the personal issue of the ACTU economic enterprises. But he lost disastrously on the personal issue of an executive vice-president for the ACTU.
Hawke had barely managed to convince his faction on the executive that such a position should be created and that Charlie Fitzgibbon was the man to fill it. He saw a Fitzgibbon vice-presidency as having two functions: to bring administrative order to the chaos of the ACTU office; publicly, to promote Fitzgibbon as the next president. He said,
Charlie was the man who would stand up to me and argue. It was, well, easy for me to establish dominance over a lot of people and I valued Charlie’s refusal just to go along with my ideas. And he was immensely capable. My concern was for the good of the ACTU, at the time and in the future.
Fitzgibbon commented,
I thought it would be good for the ACTU: Bob has no application for administration. And Harold Souter is not a good administrator—although he is almost incomparable in certain areas: dealing with government employment; knowledge of the various Acts; negotiations. I thought I’d end up with a good relationship with Harold. I’d have taken over the pure administrative work and would have provided a link to industrial areas where we could have taken a tougher line—for example, in campaigns and demarcation disputes. Bob would have had more time for the publicity functions . . . All the signs were there that he would eventually want to move from the ACTU to parliament, but that was not something he and I discussed in relation to the vice-presidential idea. He didn’t need to talk openly about parliament: it was obvious. There was a wide spectrum of trade union movement people who didn’t realise that Bob had a desire to enter the parliamentary arena. My colleagues weren’t very perceptive.
With Fitzgibbon established as dauphin, Hawke would have been able to abdicate from the ACTU with a minimum of fuss, at a time of his own choosing.
It was not to be.
There was no question that the trade union movement could bear another Left–Right brawl for the presidency like that of 1967–69, so Hawke’s failure to secure the succession for Fitzgibbon meant that he would be unable to leave the ACTU for years.
That things turned out this way was in part Hawke’s fault, for he failed to try to persuade. Pat Clancy of the Building Workers’ Industrial Union, one of Hawke’s champions throughout the presidency campaign and later, on the executive, said, ‘Bob began to show a lack of understanding for the trade union movement. Increasingly, his approach was a top-level one.’ Clancy is a classic-style trade union leader, and is a man of impressive personal dignity and decency. By 1981, when this interview with Clancy took place, he had come to feel betrayed by Hawke, because of Hawke’s support for what Clancy termed, ‘that rapacious, bandit government of Israel’. He talked with regret rather than bitterness:
Bob seemed to have developed a concept that if he proposed something, it would be instantly clear to everyone that what he was saying was quite right. And if there were misunderstanding, and debate revealed that misunderstanding and opposition, in reply he would clear it all up. He’s a brilliant debater and certainly a brilliant replier to a debate. In the tactics of the trade union atmosphere, if you can give a good, powerful reply you’ve got a lot on your side, especially if you hold the position of leader. I think that Bob became deceived by this, thinking that he was all powerful.
By 1973 Hawke was already severely overstretched and it was years since he had known solitude or contemplation. He had no time to reflect, no time to consider problems. He was becoming a human pressure-pack: push the button, and Hawke would give a statement or rush into action. Everyone who worked in the ACTU knew what a maelstrom it was.
A few weeks before the Congress, Hawke had his inspiration about Fitzgibbon, who recalled,
I was unwilling, but Bob got me at a weak moment. We sat down over a bottle of Greek brandy—I had the most terrible hangover next day—and at some stage during the night I agreed that I’d do it. I did not want to move from Sydney, I knew my wife would be unhappy, but . . . well, Bob talked me into it.
Hawke then went into an ACTU executive meeting, rode down opposition—Souter, for one, was sharply against the proposal—and secured from the executive a recommendation to the Congress that Fitzgibbon be elected. Union officials heard of the plan only days before Congress opened. Grumbling began immediately. Hawke had been high-handed, in the opinion of executive members, and they passed on this view to other union leaders. There were also objections to Fitzgibbon himself—industrial and personal. Fitzgibbon has an acute intelligence and a cold manner, and says of himself, ‘I can be a very rude man’. Many had felt the lash of Fitzgibbon’s sarcasm over the years, and resented him. There was, too, envy of his ability. And complicating everything there was a network of industrial grudges. Fitzgibbon was a moderate. More than a decade earlier he had won the leadership of the Waterside Workers’ Federation (WWF), once one of the biggest unions in the country, from a Communist. Some of the big Right-wing unions had supported Fitzgibbon’s campaign to become federal secretary of the WWF, and when he had been travelling around the country to gather votes, at certain places AWU employees, for example, would be waiting to meet him, ready with a car to drive him about. Edgar Williams, the national president of the AWU said, ‘We felt, after he was elected, that Charlie didn’t show the gratitude he might have for the fraternal help we gave him’. Fitzgibbon had become the leader of the waterside workers in 1962, during a period of rapid technological change on the waterfront, an upheaval that, in 1982, is still working itself out. The introduction of mechanisation for bulk-loading had been diminishing waterfront work since the 1940s; the trend increased in the 1950s and by the 1960s the WWF was faced with a disastrous novelty: containerisation. Unions, like businesses, thrive or decay according to their adaptability to new products and new processes. Containerisation had fearsome effects upon the WWF: overnight it wiped out the jobs of thousands of wharfies. Before the war there had been 80 000 members of the WWF; by 1956, 27 000. By 1973, five years after the introduction of containers, there were officially 16,000, although other union leaders put the figure at 12 000. Fitzgibbon had adapted the federation to this dramatic assault upon it: the WWF was very lean, but very tough. He had won for his shrunken membership excellent rates of pay, and job security—something that had not existed in the old days, when wharf labourers had been treated like cattle for auction and overseers would pinch men’s biceps before saying, ‘OK. You’, and giving a day’s work. Fitzgibbon stayed on the alert for recruits to the WWF and the union’s award made his invitations enticing. Edgar Williams said,
Charlie was not the beau ideal of everybody at the 1973 Congress. He had just gone through an exercise of accepting a reduction in the WWF workforce all round Australia and a helluva lot of his people were getting the golden handshake. The membership was right down. Now, in Western Australia, we [the AWU] used to have all the northern ports. And Charlie tried to thieve them off us. When he couldn’t do it, he got Clyde Cameron, the Minister for Labour, to refuse to pay the AWU members appearance money. But if they became WWF members, Cameron would have their appearance money paid. So, in their own interests, we had to let them go. Then, on top of that, Charlie commenced his drive to take members not just from the AWU all around the ports in Australia, but to body snatch from every other union he could. He took 160 off his mates in Melbourne. Even the AMWSU. He hooked in and took their members. So, he wasn’t exactly a pin-up boy with everybody, he was unpopular even with his so-called friends. And he got knocked over.
When the issue of Fitzgibbon’s vice-presidency came before Congress on its second day, Souter spoke strongly against it and was joined in his opposition by the Left’s best orator, John Halfpenny of the AMWSU. Hawke, whom observers noticed had been on edge throughout his opening address to Congress, intervened in the debate and ‘seemed uncharacteristically nervous’. In response to charges of undue haste about the proposal, Hawke snapped at the 700-odd delegates: ‘Aren’t you sufficiently mature and intelligent and in touch with your members to make up your minds?’ They voted 432 to 352 against him.
On the final day of the Congress, however, Hawke had his victory. The ACTU enterprises were at stake. Throughout 1973 Hawke had made frequent announcements about planned joint ventures: cheap housing, a holiday village, an insurance company. There had been immense publicity. The enterprises were glamorous in a period when glamour was more than usually attractive, and they seemed to be just around the corner. However, the far Left had turned sour on the idea of enterprises; the far Right had never liked it. Fortunately for Hawke the moderate Right and Left were still enthusiastic. On Friday morning he reported to Congress about the progress of the enterprises. He was confident, but low-key. The numbers men had done their work and despite the alliance of far Left and far Right, Hawke knew he had the votes. During the debate that followed, John Maynes of the Clerks (far Right) and John Halfpenny (Communist) spoke in opposition. Then Hawke exercised his right of reply, and in his first sentence—‘Comrades, don’t some debates throw up some strange bedfellows?’—launched into assault upon his enemies. Professor Ross Martin of La Trobe University, whose field is the trade unions, wrote:
All the stops were out as he soared into a savagely personal attack upon Mr Maynes and Mr Halfpenny, in turn. Delegates were rapturous. The applause was deafening. Yet it is doubtful that many, or any, votes were swung as a result. The big delegations at least were already committed . . . This is not to say that the speech with which Mr Hawke wound up the economic enterprises debate was pointless. It was in fact highly important because it ensured, beyond all doubt, that Congress’s favourable decision on the issue would be widely interpreted as a highly personal triumph . . . But, resounding as the triumph was, it could not in the end obliterate memories of the vote three days earlier [about Fitzgibbon] when the President suffered his greatest, though not his first, Congress defeat. Nor was his prestige helped by the confused outcome of the executive elections. On balance, it would seem that Mr Hawke personally lost rather more than he gained . . . 7
The press reported that the 1973 Congress was ‘cynical, even by the standards of the trade union movement’. The far-Right–far-Left alliance was clearly cynical, but there was more to it than insincerity. From the moment that Hawke opened the week-long meeting, reading his speech, trying to pull applause, nervous—he had been threatened with death by a man purporting to represent the Black September movement a few days earlier—there was a tense undercurrent of disappointment in his audience. It was exactly nine months since Labor had been elected and, strangely, the millennium was not turning out in the way the trade union movement had imagined it would. Indeed the government, taking its lead from the leader, had a style that appeared unnervingly middle class. Ministers all had advisers and press officers; the press officers and advisers were party faithful who, in their new jobs, were earning unfamiliarly high salaries. They lunched not in pubs or from brown paper bags but in restaurants where they drank champagne. There were many opinions and many loose tongues. Increasingly Canberra was resembling a nouveau expense-account School for Scandal.
Hawke devoted much more than half of his presidential address to the ‘implications for the trade union movement’ of the Whitlam government. He spoke of the policy areas in which he saw benefits in line with trade union wishes, placing particular emphasis on the abandonment of the penal clauses; the government’s intervention on the side of the unions in a recent national wage case; the ‘re-creation of full employment’; and the government’s intention to provide ‘advanced facilities’ for trade union education. He then turned to the central problem, saying:
One thing must be made perfectly clear at the outset and whatever may be said by the—of course—dispassionate observers about my various head-gear, I have no difficulty making it. However large the part played by our individual affiliates and by the ACTU itself in the election of the federal Labor government, that does not put us in permanent political check to our colleagues in government. The price we were paying for the occupancy of the Treasury benches by an anti-Labor government was extraordinarily high—but no higher price could be paid than the absolute loss of integrity involved for the industrial movement in its becoming the automatic guarantors and endorsers of every action and policy decision of Labor in government. Such a position should be degrading for us, and dangerous for them.8
Hawke then elaborated on the differences of opinion over the Budget; the tariffs; and the amendments to the Conciliation and Arbitration Act. Later in the Congress he was able to take a more positive stance, telling delegates of promised government help for the ACTU enterprises and the possibility of government help with research costs incurred by the ACTU in connection with hearings on tariff bodies and the Prices Justification Tribunal. But on the whole Congress tended to harp upon the dangers and difficulties in the relationship between the unions and the government. One man, a timber worker, was fierce in his attack upon the lack of consultation and the tariff decision, shouting bitterly about the loss of jobs in the timber industry—‘and this from a Labor Government I worked my guts out for!’9
A few hours later Whitlam strode into the hall, to a standing ovation. They had loved him so much. They wanted to love him. When he showed himself to them they could forget the bad times and relive the ecstasy—for the time being.
Delegates’ support for the enterprises had been so great that opponents had not even bothered to demand a vote for or against them. Hawke now had a mandate to move quickly. For more than a year before the Congress he had been devoting much of his time to discussions with businessmen and state and federal governments about possible enterprises, and earlier in 1973 had established a second joint venture, ACTU–New World Travel. The partnership was with Thomas Nationwide Transport, whose managing director (later chairman) was Sir Peter Abeles. Abeles was one of the most intelligent industrialists in the nation, and by 1982 was one of the richest. He was a big man—over 1.88 metres—and smoked big cigars. He spoke softly and moved with that unexpected lightness of step that big men sometimes have, while his smoothly plump face revealed little of a complex personality and a sophisticated mind. He wore heavy-framed spectacles, and behind them his dark-brown gypsy eyes were alert, worldly, and passionate. In conversation Abeles described himself as ‘a romantic’ and ‘just a truckie’. Indeed, his suits are drab and so crumpled sometimes that it seemed he might have thrown them on the floor the night before; his hair looked often as if he had mislaid his comb. Abeles was born in Budapest in 1924, to a wealthy, totally assimilated Jewish family. His father was a steel merchant. His mother was an excellent pianist, and as a child and youth he studied music and Italian art, though his heart was set, he says, upon becoming a doctor. ‘My father was a very strong personality and was all business . . . I had the idea that one could not be a businessman and stay a human being’, he said. Abeles’ father had insisted that he learn a metal trade. But before he could enter medical school, the war broke out.
He recalled,
I survived, at first, because of the trade: I was a specialist welder, so although I was a Jew I got an exemption and was employed in the garage of the German military staff. Then we were all conscripted and put into Jewish labour battalions in the Hungarian army, under German control. A lot of people in our camp were killed. We lost quite a few during bombing attacks, for instance, because we were not allowed into shelters but were left in the open. And later on it became even worse. But I was young, and I didn’t have any notion that I’d perish. We worked very hard, repairing rail lines and doing work behind the troops. While we were not in a concentration camp and weren’t behind wire, we were still always under German control, so there wasn’t much future in it.
The Hungarian Jewish battalions did not wear uniforms, except for the yellow armband. When, in 1944, the Russian army overran the Hungarian–German-held position in Czechoslovakia where Abeles was working, he and many other young Jews took their chance and escaped. Officially they were deserters. Abeles’ mother tongue was German; physically, he did not resemble the Nazi stereotype of the Jew. He removed his yellow armband and, speaking German, hitched rides back to Budapest with German and Hungarian Gentiles. His family managed to find their way back to Hungary and after the war Abeles’ father got his steel business back. Abeles said,
In 1947, when it was clear that the Communists would take over, I decided to leave Hungary. I had a permit to go to the United States, but in Australia I had some relations, an uncle and a grandmother from my mother’s side. I decided to go there first, and have a look. My father gave me £4000, which was a lot of money in those days. I had married in 1947, so I had to work. I thought I would work for a while, then go to medical school.
European migrants in the late 1940s were like gold from heaven for Australian shysters: a Sydneysider had managed to relieve Abeles of a quarter of his capital within a few weeks of his arrival. Abeles, who was a born entrepreneur, assessed his possibilities and decided to become a salesman. He bought 50 000 paperback novels—remaindered detective stories and westerns—and sold them to Gordon & Gotch newsagencies. He made a profit of £400. He then began to sell knitwear, and was still selling pullovers and cardigans when, in 1950, a Hungarian friend arrived in Australia. This was George Rockey, whose family had owned one of the biggest forwarding agencies in Hungary. Rockey was eight years older than Abeles and had been the particular friend of Abeles’ father, with whom he played poker. Rockey, too, had suffered during the war when the authorities had discovered that one of his grandparents was Jewish. He had been brought up as a Catholic. He was an officer in the Hungarian army but on the discovery of his Jewish grandmother, ‘my uniform was stripped from me’, he said. Rockey worked in his father’s business before the war, rather unwillingly. He was a social democrat, in rebellion, he said, against ‘the way I was brought up. As a child I was not allowed to fetch a glass of water for myself; I had to ring a bell for the maid’. He, too, had hankered for a medical career and described himself later as ‘a frustrated psychiatrist’. At the end of the war he went to Vienna, ‘and had a complete Jungian analysis’, which took about three years. He arrived in Sydney with £150, moved into a boarding house in Neutral Bay and contacted the one friend he had in Australia, Abeles. Abeles said,
In those days a lot of migrants bought a truck. I said to George, ‘Tell me. You know transport. Don’t you think we could do something in transport? I’ve heard if you buy a truck you make a good living.’ So we walked around and we finally bought two trucks. They cost £6000 each, and as a deposit I put down all the money I had. But we didn’t know much. George knew forwarding and shipping but not trucks, and within two months the trucks were out of commission, and we were both broke. And we still had to pay off the trucks. So, we decided to become contractors. We got the trucks repaired and hired people who could drive them properly.
Abeles and Rockey founded Alltrans on 11 December 1950. In 1954 they opened Sydney Coal Merchants as well and began to encroach upon the market of the coal giant, Sir Roderick Miller, undercutting his prices. Abeles approached Miller and asked if they might not have agreement about prices, in return for which Sydney Coal Merchants would have one-third of the city’s coal market. Miller responded by sending Sydney Coal Merchants and Alltrans broke: he bought every mine that was supplying Sydney Coal. Abeles recalled, ‘I am not being facetious: it was only the fact that neither George nor I could read a balance sheet that saved us from going out of business altogether. We’d lost everything we had and everything we didn’t have.’ Fourteen years later Abeles bought RW Millers. He said, ‘Sir Roderick always thought it was my vengeance, to such an extent that one day he sat down with me—we had become friends—and said, “Tell me, how did you plan this? For how long did you plan it?” And truly, I had never considered vengeance: I just saw RW Millers as good business.’ In the mid-1960s Abeles moved in on Thomas Nationwide Transport. By the end of the 1970s he had a transport empire stretching around the world.
Until his business interests grew too vast Abeles himself had managed the industrial relations of his various companies. When Hawke became president of the ACTU, Abeles asked for an interview but on the day of the appointment Hawke was ill with one of his respiratory tract infections. Abeles went to Sandringham, where Hawke was in bed playing rummy with Rosslyn. Abeles said,
He was completely different from what I had expected—I had imagined he would be just an aggressive man, but here was a very human, very nice man. I think we formed an immediate rapport. I think we became friends soon after, and we began to be together a lot. We became trusted friends, and the thing I especially liked—it is best expressed by the German writer, Stefan Zweig, who wrote: There is nothing more beneficial than two people with goodwill towards each other having an argument. Well, Bob and I have been arguing ever since, but always with a feeling of friendship. Bob shows his emotions, and more than his intellect, more than arguing, I find that most attractive about him. It is only the Anglo-Saxons who say a man cannot show his emotions, but I am a European. When I’ve had personal problems, I cry. If I’ve had problems with my children, Bob will listen to me. And I will do that for him.
Abeles, in fact, was Hawke’s friend in time of need when, in 1976, there was a family crisis.
The idea of an ACTU–TNT joint venture grew quickly after this initial rapport had been established. In the ILO Hawke had picked up many ideas about the possibilities for trade union enterprises that confirmed the view he had held for years, that the ACTU had been blind to opportunities for improving services for its members. In West Germany and in Israel he had seen the magnificent achievements of trade union organisations that provided womb to tomb security, plus holidays, housing and other credit, entertainment, education and sporting contests for their members. There was a big difference, however, between the West German and the Israeli trade union movements and the Australian one: Hitler had destroyed the German unions and, reborn, their unofficial motto is ‘Never Again’. Similarly, every citizen of Israel has this motto engraved on her or his heart. On Hawke’s invitation representatives of both West Germany’s DGB and Israel’s General Federation of Labour (Histadrut) visited Australia in early 1972 to study and advise on the possibilities here for trade union enterprises. Both groups expressed very cautious optimism, but offered to help the ACTU if they were asked. The Israelis were astonished that Hawke had such public power—one of the Histadrut delegation said, ‘He was treated like a prime minister, people felt honoured when he spoke to them’—yet, because of the structure of unionism in Australia, so little real power: ‘He is the prisoner of the national leaders of your big unions’. Both DGB and Histadrut pointed out that the dispersion of capital among the Australian unions was an immense problem for any ACTU undertakings. Abeles had capital.
He recalled of the ACTU–TNT venture:
It was a case of Bob’s and Peter’s over-optimism. There is no doubt that the ACTU’s affiliated unions represent an enormous market. TNT was inexperienced in travel, but we knew everything about transport and, at the time, that seemed enough. Bob and I talked about it for weeks and weeks and sold the idea to each other more and more. We started to dream and by the time we had finished, we had a huge dream . . . TNT had good industrial relations with all the unions; George and I were very friendly with Bob. We began to see something fantastic in such a joint venture.
At the ACTU executive meeting of August 1972 Hawke reported on his discussions with Abeles about a joint-venture travel company that would provide travel and holiday packages, general travel and, later, holiday accommodation for trade unionists and their families—all at slightly cheaper than normal rates. The executive, still enthusiastic about ACTU enterprises (with the exception of the far Right), was edgy. Earlier in 1972 Abeles had attempted to take over Ansett Transport Industries but the Premier of Victoria, Sir Henry Bolte, had obliged Sir Reginald Ansett and had had the law changed in Victoria to thwart the takeover. This had been a cause célèbre for months. Abeles had also been knighted that year. Soon afterwards a very senior business knight had drawn him aside to say, ‘Now that you’re one of us, you really should stop being seen around with that Hawke fellow’. (Sir Roderick Carnegie had similar warnings when it became known to his colleagues that he and Hawke were friends.) Whatever the misgivings at that end of the political and social spectrum about a relationship between Hawke and Abeles, at the other end, in the labour movement, they were much deeper. Lionel Revelman had been one thing: he was a businessman battling bigger businessmen. Abeles was a big businessman and by definition for the trade union movement, big businessmen are enemies. One can form non-aggression pacts, even have alliances with them, but beneath politeness and expediency there is fear and often its cousin, hatred. The Brotherhood of Man is a limited concept in the labour movement: it is the Brotherhood of Us. Hawke had been bewitched by this idea himself when younger—there had been his swaggering contempt for the rich that had so embarrassed Kirby in the 1960s—but at the same time, creeping through his consciousness, there had always been a fascination with the Other Side. Abeles fascinated him: he was subtle, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, immensely wealthy, a foreigner—his English was good, but non-idiomatic and with Hungarians he spoke their own language—and had suffered tribulations that Hawke could only guess at, sympathetically. Hawke’s refusal to reject Abeles’ friendship, despite many warnings from his political colleagues that it was viewed as consorting with the enemy, was to cause him massive political damage. Abeles’ companies donated handsomely to Labor campaign funds; he also gave fund-raising dinners for the Liberal Party, one of them unhappily timed, for it took place within days of an announcement by Hawke that the ACTU and TNT were in business together.
A decade after Hawke had formally told his executive that he had a personal association with Abeles, that he wanted the ACTU to have a business association, and that Abeles was waiting outside, ready to enter the boardroom and address the executive himself, people still remembered the frisson that this created. ‘I think Sir Peter found it easier than we did’, Ducker recalled. At first some executive members objected to receiving Abeles, but others overrode them. It was, however, a weird moment when ‘the very personification of big monopoly capitalism’, as one executive member, speaking for many, described Abeles, entered the room. (Abeles himself dislikes being labelled a capitalist and says, ‘I am not big capitalism—that is the government of Russia. I am big free enterprise.’) Ducker recalled, ‘There was a great deal of suspicion and unease’. And Pat Clancy:
I objected to the idea of linking the ACTU with really big business. And I objected to the man. I was all for the enterprises. But I think on the arrangement with Sir Peter Abeles, Bob had moved ahead too quickly, without giving time for proper consultation with the unions, and without understanding the trade union movement. I was the only one opposed outright to the proposition of an ACTU–TNT joint venture. But since the proposal had to go to the labour councils for endorsement I said, ‘All right, I won’t record any vote against it’. And I think my judgment in doing that was wrong.
Abeles recalled, ‘At first I found the executive members sceptical. But they did not seem hostile. Anyway, after about twenty minutes I found them most co-operative and I was surprised by the goodwill they showed and the friendly reception I got.’ Ducker commented, ‘I always wondered if Sir Peter were not buying himself a bit of industrial relations insurance’—a sentiment voiced by some other executive members also.
ACTU–New World Travel began business in March 1973, as a travel agency. The next step would be a holiday village. From the outset, the enterprise failed to thrive. Right-wing union officials whose members were low paid objected to it because holiday travel was a luxury beyond the means of their members. The AMWSU and other Left-wing unions objected on various ideological grounds: the ‘big capitalism’ argument; rejection of any association between the unions and capitalism, big or small, except in a master–servant relationship. Abeles said,
The Left never felt comfortable with the idea. What should have happened was that we concentrated a lot of energy into it, to make it a success quickly, because if we didn’t do that, the Left would say, ‘There’s proof it can’t work’; and then they would begin to make sure that it would not work. Well, we didn’t go about things in the right way. I am very critical of TNT, not so much of Bob. TNT was inexperienced in travel, which is a very different industry from transport, as I learned over the years. So, there were unions against us, and travel agents against us. And we did not put the time and energy into it that was necessary. One day Bob told me that Jetset [Australia’s largest travel agency] had visited him officially, proposing that it could do things better. So we climbed out.
In 1978 ACTU–Jetset replaced ACTU–New World Travel and was from the beginning a success. The chairman of Jetset, Isi Leibler, is also a successful businessman but he does not have a diverse empire of companies. He had begun work in his father’s diamond importing business and, from frustration with the way travel agencies had mismanaged his trips, had founded Jetset. He had none of Abeles’ instincts for an Alexandrian sweep through the business world; his major preoccupation, since student days, was the plight of Jews in the USSR. By the time Hawke was preparing to leave the ACTU it was cash flow from ACTU–Jetset and, to a lesser extent from ACTU–Solo, a joint venture founded in 1975 with an independent petrol retailer, David Goldberger, of Solo, that was keeping the ACTU afloat.
Every ACTU executive meeting during 1973 discussed the enterprises and Hawke maintained enthusiasm for them by constantly publicising the progress of plans. Hot on the heels of an announcement about travel, Hawke would be talking of holiday villages, insurance, cheap housing, consumer credit. Throughout 1973 and into 1974 the news media carried stories of wonders about to be unveiled. Cliff Dolan, the man who succeeded Hawke as ACTU president, said:
Personally, I thought we were trying to do too much in a hurry, and I didn’t completely agree with Bob’s enthusiasm. I felt he was forgetting that the trade union movement is very conservative and that there is as much conservatism in the Left as there is in the Right. On the other hand, it was no fault of Bob’s that some of the schemes didn’t get off the ground: the superannuation and general insurance ideas, for example. We looked long and hard at those and the executive as a whole believed they were goers. But unfortunately, the companies we were dealing with weren’t substantial, to put it mildly.
In mid-1973 Hawke was severely embarrassed when, having announced that the ACTU would go into joint venture with an insurance company, journalists told him the company was under investigation for malpractice. Sinclair, who was unaware of the proposal and had many contacts in the Melbourne business community, said, ‘I nearly had a fit when I heard Bob’s announcement. I’d been hearing stories about that particular company since I was a schoolgirl. People told you on the tram.’ An hour after announcing the ACTU insurance venture was on, Hawke had to announce it was off, saying blame for the error was entirely his. He repeated this explanation to the 1973 Congress. Dolan continued:
The housing scheme was different. We were to go into partnership with Lend Lease and the MLC. It was a real goer—and I know this, because I finally did the negotiations, and the bloke who stuffed it up was Tom Uren [Minister for Urban and Regional Development in the Whitlam government]. Uren would not give us the land for the housing scheme, which would have provided good, cheap houses for trade unionists. I think it was just incompetence in the Department of Urban and Regional Development. Tom Uren blamed other people—he said it was Lance Barnard’s [Minister for Defence in the Whitlam government] fault, because the land was part of an old ammunitions complex, at St Mary’s, west of Sydney, and was still under the control of the Department of Defence. But the real problem was inside the bureaucracy, and largely DURD’s. Lack of expertise within the ACTU was not an issue because Lend Lease was handling all the expert decisions and had Tony Powell, later the chairman of the National Capital Development Commission, in charge of things. The plans were all drawn up and Lend Lease spent a helluva lot of money. Then Uren and Barnard got cold feet about that particular block of land and offered us some scrub over towards Liverpool, and the Lend Lease people were most unhappy. They pointed out that they would have to entirely redesign. So we went back to Uren and said, ‘For God’s sake!’ One of the other problems was that Gough had made the initial promise of granting land to us, but by then we didn’t have very good relations with Gough, so we could not go to him and say, ‘Get the whip on to Barnard and Uren’. And he had other problems and wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. Then we lost government, so that was the end of the housing.
On the holiday village, Bob was dealing with Askin [Liberal Premier of New South Wales] and a bloke up at Tweed Heads, and I think they both let Bob down. I told him not to trust Askin too far, but Bob seemed to think there was no real problem with Askin, despite political differences and personal differences, and that Askin would come good on his promise. But he didn’t. There was never any decision not to proceed—the holiday village just drifted away.
Then there was the plan for developing a complex in Lygon Street. We owned the old ACTU building there and the idea was we would buy the corner pub [the Lygon] and the building next door, owned by the Builders’ Labourers. Bob and Harold were both very keen. But there were problems right from the start. For one thing the Builders’ Labourers were snaky and there were doubts that they would sell, and Bob’s best mates on the executive were very unhappy about the idea of the ACTU being a pub owner. Bob and Harold argued that we wouldn’t be going into the hotel trade, that we would buy it for the real estate, and keep the pub for just a couple of years, then redevelop the whole block. But we said, ‘Oh, no. We won’t agree to going into the pub business at all.’ And then a certain union heard about the idea and made the publican a bigger bid, which we could not match.
The union’s action seems to have been made to undermine the ACTU plan, for when the ACTU rejected the idea of buying the Lygon the union withdrew its bid.
Souter and Hawke, whatever their other differences, were in accord on the need for the ACTU to have enterprises. Souter knew, much better than Hawke, that the ACTU’s financial situation was desperate, and in the 1950s had tried to persuade Monk to begin enterprises. Although a teetotaller, he had always been in favour of buying the Lygon Hotel. Hawke said,
When I first went to work in the ACTU I realised that it was pathetically weak financially, but that it had undoubted potential resources. It seemed to me absurd that the unions were pouring money into the Lygon—it was the union pub and an awful bloody place, though full of character—and getting, as it were, no return. If the ACTU bought it, the money could be recycled into the union system, and we could make it a better pub. There was also a garage in Victoria Street, across the road from the Trades Hall, which was used by the ACTU and a whole lot of trade union people. I went to Albert and suggested that we should buy both those things. The publican wanted only £30 000, which made the Lygon an unbelievably good investment. But Albert flatly refused. It was never my idea, then or when I became president, that the ACTU should be financed in its traditional areas by income from enterprises, because that would be trade unionism on the cheap. If the union movement wanted the ACTU to function effectively, and if individual members wanted their unions to function effectively, they would have to pay for that. I saw the enterprises as providing better services and cheaper services to unionists and the income for extra activities: like scholarships for kids. My attitude was not a matter of ‘socialism in action’, as was sometimes reported; it was functional.
At the ACTU Congress of 1971 the executive had recommended that union members pay 1 per cent of their wages as membership fees, to try to overcome the general problem of under-financing of the whole movement. Short-sighted self-interest won the day. Many large unions were holding elections for their leadership positions at that time and, as Edgar Williams put it, ‘Nobody was willing to say, “Vote for me and I’ll put up your membership fees”’. The recommendation was rejected. At the 1973 Congress the ACTU again recommended it, this time successfully—in theory. In practice, the majority of unions refused to demand higher fees from their members. A constant fear for union officials is that if fees are too high, their members will resign. ‘Union shop’ awards are their protection against defection, but there are few union shop awards in Australia and those that exist have been won only after battles with employers and other unions.10
Hawke said,
Until the unions themselves have an adequate fee structure we cannot get the ACTU into financial shape. My error, and there’s no point saying it was anything else, was that I did not understand quickly enough that the ACTU’s resources were so pathetic that it was unrealistic for us to try to do more than one or two things. What we needed was a department within the ACTU which would do nothing but run the enterprises: it would have needed a staff of lawyers, economists and finance people. And for too long I was unwilling to accept that we were incapable, because of our limitations, of responding to the opportunities and challenges that arose. We were inundated with proposals, and I worked tremendously long hours on them—and Harold did an immense amount of work, too, but . . .
By 1981 the trade union movement had accepted the principle that 1 per cent of wages was a reasonable membership fee and consequently was willing to increase financial support to the ACTU. Also, the concept that unions should expand their horizons and shift, for example, into superannuation, had been established. Hawke had been a decade too soon, far too optimistic and much too publicised—for when the movement turned against the enterprises, the main reason given was that they were ‘all Hawke’s ideas’ and that, as years earlier with International House, ‘Bob hogged the limelight’.
With Hawke’s two hats, publicity was becoming a disadvantage.
A few weeks after the 1973 Congress a Liberal MHR resigned, opening the way for a by-election in the seat of Parramatta. The Liberals had only just managed to hold the seat in 1972; with the new government still on its honeymoon with the electorate, Labor was confident of winning. Indeed, the Whitlam government needed to win the seat to confirm its ‘mandate’. But suddenly Cabinet performed a miracle of bad timing: it announced that Sydney’s second airport would be built at Galston, close to the Parramatta electorate.
Hawke went campaigning in the Parramatta by-election. He recalled, ‘I was at a meeting there just after the federal government’s announcement of the Galston airport. People rushed up to me and complained bitterly about it. They were talking of nothing else.’ When asked by the news media for his views, Hawke said that to make such an announcement in the middle of a by-election was ‘political insanity’ and ‘an act of imbecility’. The Liberal Party won Parramatta with a 6 per cent swing and Hawke, again wearing his ALP president’s hat, commented,
I think the parliamentary party and the Cabinet have got to be more finely attuned to the electorate. They are becoming removed from the realities of day-to-day politics. They should be keeping their ears open a bit more. They are not keeping in touch with what is happening at the grass roots.
Caucus and Whitlam were irate. Hawke had swallowed his conscience publicly over the tariff cuts, but now, in just a couple of months, he had reverted to form: liberty of conscience is the very foundation of puritanism, and Hawke was, again, exercising it with vigour. The ALP has been for decades a hybrid beast. With Whitlam as its leader and Hawke as its president it began publicly to resemble something monstrous: a two-headed calf. The Caucus was beginning to hate Hawke, to reject his criticisms of its actions as wilful embarrassment, even traitorous. Other party faithful disagree. David Combe, the federal secretary, said,
Bob was the bloke who had the courage to stand up and make a bastard of himself by pointing out how crazy some of the government’s decisions were, and trying to get Caucus to change its mind by making a fuss. You would not believe how difficult it was for people who were responsible for the Labor Party to get a hearing from either Caucus or Gough. They just would not listen. After the Parramatta by-election I called on Gough, as secretary of the party, to voice my concerns about how we were performing politically, that we’d just had a disastrous by-election, it need not have been a disaster, we could have won the seat, and tiddly-dum. Gough was lying full-length on his settee, reading papers and throwing them over his shoulder as he finished them while various senior public servants danced attendance. He heard me out, still prone. Then he sat bolt upright and stared at me. He said, ‘David. You have often told me that this government has one thing going for it. You are wasting its time!’ That was the end of our interview. In the whole three years the Caucus never once met as a political caucus, to discuss how it was performing politically.
On 3 November 1973 Whitlam aired his displeasure with Hawke when, at a National Press Club luncheon in Canberra, in reply to a question about Hawke’s opinion that income tax should be increased to help combat inflation, the Prime Minister said: ‘Mr Hawke’s advice was not sought. It will not be sought . . . The president of the federal executive of the Labor Party does not determine such matters—is not consulted in such matters.’ As he sat down Whitlam made an aside to journalists, along the lines of ‘That will show the little runt’.
He had spoken too soon. A few weeks earlier there had been a dramatic development in international events and on the issues that arose Hawke and Whitlam were to be in disagreement not merely about method—a perennial problem in any reformist party—but about principles. War, said Marx, is the locomotive of history. The Vietnam War had helped to drive Labor in to office; it had showered the nation with gold and good times and good causes. On 6 October 1973, Judaism’s Day of Atonement, a period spent in prayer and communion with God, when no fires may be lit nor cars driven nor work performed, the armies of Egypt and Syria invaded Israel for what later was called, after the Hebrew name for the day, the Yom Kippur War. And in five weeks the world was changed.