12
The cult of personality
The Movement had only been functioning for a few years before it began to mimic one of communism’s least admirable characteristics: the elevation of its leader to cult status. It was, like so many other aspects of The Show’s development, inevitable that this would be so, as Santamaria had predestined himself for the role when he chose to model it on the Communist Party. But in the cult that he fashioned, encouraged his supporters to embrace, and then accepted — with suitable modesty — he did not merely emulate but surpassed the communists’ cult of personality. Like the CPA’s general secretary, as undisputed leader of The Show he wrapped himself in an aura of infallibility; unlike his communist opponents, this was even to the exclusion of his closest colleagues.
Stalinist leaders like the CPA’s Jack Miles and Lance Sharkey would deliver lengthy keynote reports to the party’s national congress as general secretary, sometimes lasting for several hours. But then other senior leaders — such as national president Dick Dixon, who would deal in depth with industrial and union activities — would deliver substantial reports on major aspects of the party’s work since the previous congress. The general secretary was acknowledged as the ideological and organisational supremo, but only within the framework of collective responsibility, entrusted to the national leadership as a whole.
Not so in The Show.
In May 1992, a conference observing ‘50 Years of the Santamaria Movement’ was held at the State Library of New South Wales. Gerard Henderson — once a protégé of the ‘Great Man’ — presented an acerbic critique of his former mentor. He titled his paper ‘B.A. Santamaria, Santamariaism and the cult of personality’. Henderson recounted the extraordinary events of The Show’s March 1954 national conference, held over five days:
The meeting commenced with an announcement that the [Movement’s] national officers had decided that the entire first two days of the conference should be devoted to the delivery of four papers by B.A. Santamaria … The papers encompassed the whole gamut of the Movement’s work — political, industrial, economic and international.
There was some tension at Santamaria’s almost total domination of the conference. The minutes of the meeting record that eventually a Sydney delegate, Fr Paddy Ryan, moved a resolution to the effect that in future no one speaker should give all the key addresses. During the course of the ensuing debate he said that it was ‘not true’ to claim that ‘no other persons’ were available to deliver talks and that he could name ‘six straight off’ who could do the task. Fr Ryan’s modest suggestion that Santamaria was not the only prophet on the Movement’s land failed to impress. His motion was defeated 30 to 4.1
Just over twenty years later, nothing had changed inside The Show, of which Henderson was then a member. In October 1974, a two-day National Civic Council seminar was convened, as Henderson recalled:
The original agenda, as circulated, listed a total of eight papers to be delivered — two of which were to be given by Santamaria.2 I had a particular interest in this since I was scheduled to deliver A Critique of the Movement. Over previous years I had become regarded as a somewhat irreverent internal critic of the Movement and at last I was to be given my say. Or so it seemed.
On arriving … I received my name tag, meal voucher, draft conclusions and revised agenda. Lo and behold I discovered that my paper had been dropped by the [Santamaria] powers that be. Bob Santamaria was now listed as delivering all the papers except one … For the rest it was to be Santamaria, followed by Santamaria, followed by Santamaria. He justified this format by claiming that, unfortunately, there was no one else capable of delivering the papers in question. It was just like two decades previously.3
So ‘Santamaria spoke all day on the Saturday’, and the ‘same format was repeated up to the early afternoon on the Sunday’. Henderson eventually overturned the ban on his paper and spoke last, delivering a ‘very tough’ critique of The Show. ‘In the discussion period that followed it was made clear to me, by one and all alike, that any criticism of Santamaria or the Movement was out of place.’ As would have occurred in the CPA several decades earlier, it was no surprise that Henderson was expelled from the NCC shortly after.4 But by then the CPA had rejected Stalinism, and manifestations of the cult of personality were looked upon with disdain, while they were still firmly entrenched in The Show. Santamaria believed that only he could deliver the sermons from the mount, and his loyal acolytes — like those of successive North Korean dictators — implicitly believed that ‘The Respected and Beloved Leader’ possessed infinite wisdom.
It was not only his own adherents who heaped adulation on Santamaria. As recorded in chapter two, former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott described him as ‘a philosophical star by which you could always steer’ and as ‘the greatest living Australian’.5 His predecessor, Malcolm Fraser, was also a vociferous admirer. Along with over 1,000 supporters of Santamaria’s, Fraser was at Moonee Valley racecourse on 13 August 1981 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of The Movement. He delivered the keynote address, a homily of praise to Santamaria and the organisation he had founded, moulded, and led since its inception:
For one person to have given leadership and guidance of such a calibre to an organisation of this kind for such a long period must surely be without parallel in Australia’s history. It is impossible to talk about the NCC without talking about Bob Santamaria … In Against the Tide, your President says that when he was asked to play a part in the movement at the time of its foundation he was puzzled to understand what practical use was seen in him. I might say that I think that is the kind of modesty that has typified Bob Santamaria throughout his life …
But if Bob Santamaria was puzzled, I think it would be fair to say that if there was any basis for puzzlement at any time, it was not going to last for very long. Without doubt, the first thing to be said about this organisation is that from the beginning it took a stand against communism. It dedicated massive and sustained efforts to the achievement of free trade unions. It worked for the wellbeing of all families and especially the underprivileged in the Australian community, and it emphasised the need for defence and foreign policies which would encompass Australia’s long and short term security …
Let me say that whatever people may think of your President there can be no doubt that through his … tenacity and forcefulness, his foresight and his faith, through his moderation, and through his modesty, he has achieved a substantial place in the history of Australia.6
Fraser was joined by a multitude of adoring fans, including future Liberal prime minister John Howard and several other members of federal cabinet, as well as leading personalities from the business community, the legal profession, the Catholic and Anglican churches, the media, and, of course, the trade union movement that had given birth to The Show.
The presence of Fraser, Howard, and other senior Liberals caused considerable grumbling among those who thought The Show was an integral part of the labour movement, not the conservative side of politics. One disgruntled member wrote a letter to the faithful. Addressed to ‘Longterm Participant’, he highlighted that ‘there is a long-standing principle governing the operation of The Show that the organisation is “as far removed from party politics as it is above party politics”. (The words quoted are Bob’s and have been a governing principle all along.)’7 This was not strictly correct; as seen in chapter three, Santamaria planned to take over the ALP, and, when he failed in this endeavour, formed the breakaway DLP as a party-political operation that was essentially an extension of The Show’s operations.
Nevertheless, this internal critic was horrified that the NCC was being tainted by such a close association with the Liberal Party and that Santamaria’s new ideological direction was opaque to the membership:
Many are worried that Bob is ill-advised by those few national officers physically around him day by day … and by their big business finance connections.
I suggest that there is a problem nowadays for the intelligent interested person associated with The Show who seeks to discover the new policy of a new executive; the problem is how to find out about it. NEWS WEEKLY says nothing about it and supporters are not advised. [Emphasis added.]8
Beyond the discontent with the celebration’s close association with the conservative side of politics, there was another fundamental problem. Allegedly, the celebration was scheduled on the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of The Movement. But was it really forty years? In his 1964 book, The Price of Freedom, Santamaria wrote that:
The initial meeting of the organization, later known as ‘the Movement,’ which was held on 14 August 1942, brought together about twenty unionists from twelve Melbourne suburbs. [Emphasis added.]9
By the time his autobiography was released in 1981 — conveniently, a few months before the date he had personally selected for the celebration — Santamaria had slyly altered this passage:
The initial meeting of the organization, later known as ‘the Movement,’ which was held on 14 August 1941, had only four people present … The next meeting brought together about twenty unionists from twelve Melbourne suburbs. [Emphasis added.]10
This was no minor slip of the pen, or a passing lapse of memory. It was a classic example of historical revisionism, specifically designed for a political purpose. It was yet another example of the lasting effects of Santamaria’s importation of the Stalinist model into The Movement.
The historical timeline clearly demonstrates that the version Santamaria gave in The Price of Freedom was correct as to the year the endeavour began (although the precise day and month cannot now be accurately established, as all the participants are dead). It is impossible that things got moving a year earlier, in 1941, in the manner he claimed in 1981. That would have left a significant political hiatus between the first meeting of laymen to discuss establishing the organisation and Santamaria’s first annual report of early 1944.11 There is no doubt that Archbishop Mannix approved of the idea in late 1942–early 1943. The other members of the Victorian hierarchy subsequently discussed it in late 1943, but there is nothing in the available records indicating that deliberations — by either laymen or bishops — occurred earlier than this.
There is, in fact, a wealth of evidence demonstrating that work on forming The Movement actually began in late 1942, not one year earlier. For example, in early 1959, Norm Lauritz (Santamaria’s ‘first “recruit”’ to The Movement and the founding national secretary),12 gave a detailed, tape-recorded speech to a gathering of NCC members, recounting the organisation’s genesis, in which he had personally participated:
In about the end of 1942 and the beginning of 1943, a small group of Catholic laymen met as a research group into Communist activities in Australia … We compiled this report and we submitted the report to the Archbishop [Mannix]…
The Archbishop naturally then said to us … ‘Well, what do you propose to do about it?’ And in the rest of the report we submitted a suggestion that we should begin an organization based on the whole set-up of the Communist Party …
The Archbishop then gave us permission to set up an organization in Melbourne in 1943.13
Lauritz also stated that Mannix subsequently approached the bishops of Ballarat, Sandhurst, and Sale, who, in late 1943, agreed to establish The Movement in their dioceses, effectively transforming it into a Victoria-wide organisation. According to Lauritz, it was these bishops who recommended to the September 1945 extraordinary bishops’ conference that it be endorsed as an official, national organisation.14
Lauritz’s recollections — recorded more than twenty years before Santamaria chose 1981 to celebrate the ‘fortieth anniversary’ — are confirmed by the official minutes of the May 1943 meeting of the Episcopal Committee on Catholic Action (comprising a small group of bishops), which considered a report prepared by Santamaria. The minutes contain a specific reference to ‘the special work [Santamaria] has been undertaking in the last six months’. [Emphasis added.] As one well-informed Catholic historian has noted, ‘“Special work” was one of the euphemisms used for the Movement.’15
Virtually the same terminology appears in Santamaria’s first annual report of early 1944. As discussed in chapter one, in mid-1944 Father Harold Lalor provided Ron Richards of the Security Service’s Perth office with a copy of that report, in which Santamaria referred to ‘an earlier memorandum’ outlining ‘the reasons for the special action which has been taken since’. [Emphasis added.] Although I have not been able to locate this earlier document (undoubtedly the report to Mannix, referred to by Lauritz in his 1959 talk), its timeframe is explicit from Santamaria’s 1944 report. ‘It was obvious from the general trend of Communist policy’, Santamaria wrote, ‘that 1943 was intended to be the vitally important year.’ This indicates that the ‘earlier memorandum’ was written from the perspective of late 1942–early1943. This is reinforced by the content of Santamaria’s report of early 1944, which, after recounting developments during 1943, lays out the ‘programme for 1944’. There is no mention of activities conducted in 1942, which would have been expected if the organisation had been formed in 1941, as Santamaria claimed almost forty years later.16
In fact, Santamaria’s second annual report — considered at the bishops’ September 1945 extraordinary conference — explicitly dated the organisation’s establishment to mid-1943. On page one, in paragraph one, Santamaria wrote:
In presenting the Second Annual Report on the anti-Communist Campaign, I believe that it would be best to direct attention again to the salient features of the Report that was presented a year ago. In that Report it was pointed out that the organisation dealing with this work was brought into existence in the middle of 1943 to face a critical situation which threatened the conquest of every major trade union in the country by the Communist Party. [Emphasis added.]17
There is no trace of a document specifically headed ‘First Annual Report’. From the publicly available material, the logical conclusion is that Santamaria’s report of early 1944 is the same as the one he labelled the first annual report, especially as it was headed ‘Report on anti-Communist Campaign’, using precisely the same terminology as for the second annual report. In handing this report to Richards, Lalor explained it was ‘a summary of the proceedings of a [special] conference of Roman Catholic Bishops which was held in Melbourne towards the end of 1943’.18
The available documents — corroborated by a critical eyewitness account — leave no doubt about the timeline for The Movement’s formation:
The sequence of events also indicates that it took a few years for The Movement to solidify into the organisation that it eventually became — an unexceptional process, given the political climate and logistical problems in the midst of World War II, and the enormity of the task. As Gerard Henderson pointed out in his 1992 paper, yet another Santamaria account — published in the Institute of Social Order’s magazine Social Survey in 1960 — probably provides an accurate version, asserting that The Movement evolved during 1942 and 1943, rather than having been ‘formed’ on a particular date.20 If there was to be an official, fixed date, it probably would be 19 September 1945, when the bishops extended their official imprimatur at their extraordinary conference in Sydney.
SANTAMARIA HAD A particular reason to backdate his own conception of the date. The purpose of his resort to historical revisionism was simple: to get the fortieth-anniversary celebrations out of the way before he engaged in yet another Stalinist manoeuvre — a good old-fashioned purge of dissidents.
This occurred in August 1982, exactly at the time the fortieth anniversary should have been celebrated at Moonee Valley racecourse. It involved the purging of Santamaria’s long-time deputy, John Maynes, and his key supporters, including their removal from their elected positions and from full-time NCC employment. This purge of veteran cadres was conducted with the type of brutal efficiency that once accompanied the exercise of Stalinist power in the CPA. It demonstrated the Bolshevik principle that he who holds the levers of power can exercise them decisively at any time against those who are the nominated enemy. In this case, it was a simple formula: power was held by the NCC’s national president (Santamaria) and national secretary (Peter Westmore), and was exercised against Maynes and his group, who did not have their hands on the administrative levers or control a majority of the carefully handpicked delegates of national conference.
The bitter split between the two sides was quickly brought by those purged before the Victorian Supreme Court, where the NCC’s dirty linen was aired in public. John Grenville had been predicting just such a major schism since 13 May 1975, when he had complained to Santamaria about Maynes’s dictatorial behaviour in the clerks’ union. Unprompted, Santamaria informed Grenville that his own problems with Maynes were even worse. In 1975, Santamaria had not acted upon his assurances to Grenville and John Forrester that he would back them in their confrontation with Maynes. In 1982, he acted decisively.
When things eventually split asunder in October 1982, Grenville had a hunch that the documents filed by the two parties in the Supreme Court would be surreptitiously removed from the registry as soon as the case was concluded, unless an early effort was made to obtain them. Fortunately, he did just that, applying for and obtaining copies of some of the key documents before they mysteriously ‘disappeared’ — presumably removed clandestinely at the behest of one (or perhaps both) of the parties who wanted to cover up the mess as far as possible. It is a toss-up whether this was Santamaria or Maynes, who pointedly was not among the five plaintiffs, instead hiding in the shadows behind his supporters, who instituted the case.21
What emerges from the surviving documents is revelatory.
The immediate causes of the split first surfaced in August 1980 when, according to the Maynes group, Santamaria informed other senior members of his ‘view that there were tensions in the organisation which were affecting the way in which it was working’.22 In notes distributed to his hard-core supporters at this time, Santamaria indicated that the ‘entire disturbance in the organisation’ arose from the refusal on the part of Maynes and his group ‘to accept legitimate authority’, by which he meant their alleged ‘insubordination’ in the face of his self-declared right to run the organisation unhindered, wielding the powers of a supreme leader.23 Santamaria traced the causes further back in the past, in an official statement claiming that ‘The original difficulties went back beyond 1975, and have been the subject of repeated attention by the various national bodies of the organisation’, confirming what he had told Grenville in 1975.24
While not explicitly stated, the inference can be drawn that, by 1980, Santamaria had finally had enough of Maynes: there simply was not sufficient room in one organisation for two authoritarians with giant, competitive egos, each adamant he was correct on all issues. As discussed in chapter nine, Santamaria had demonstrated considerable insight into the motives of individuals engaged in bitter factional disputes, concluding that they were often caused by ‘personal issues’ as much as matters of ‘principle’. This could now be applied to his own organisation and to himself.
Yet, as in the case of the CPA splits, ‘struggles of principle’ also lay at the heart of the NCC schism, with Santamaria determined to change course, while Maynes clung to past verities. According to the Maynes version of events, ‘In April 1980 … Santamaria called for the removal of the industrial staff from the NCC payroll and for their transfer to union jobs.’ This proposal was not accepted by the Maynes group. So, in June 1980, Santamaria demanded that the NCC be formally divided into two separate bodies. This was also rejected.25 In July, news of Santamaria’s manoeuvres was leaked to The Bulletin:
The proposal, reportedly, is for the organisation to drop those of its 30 organisers concerned with full-time union work and to have them re-employed on the staff of sympathetic unions. This would mark a shift in emphasis in NCC work — away from direct involvement in unions and towards organisation on issues such as family policy, university activism, women’s questions and defence and foreign affairs.26
In August 1980, Santamaria, Maynes, and their respective supporters among the NCC’s officers came to an accommodation — of sorts — and signed a formal agreement.27 This divided the organisation into two practically separate political operations, but still united under the NCC banner. One was defined as those people ‘performing or attached to the industrial, women’s and youth work’, and the other to those ‘performing the work of News Weekly, the Family Association, the Universities’.28 The ideological division had been clarified: Santamaria had effectively ceded control of trade union work — the original catalyst for establishing The Movement — to Maynes. As one disillusioned ex-member said, ‘To Santamaria it’s no longer communism in unions that’s the enemy, it’s unions as such. His attitude is that we wallowed too long in industrial relations.’29 Santamaria wished, instead, to concentrate on Catholic moral, social, educational, and propaganda issues.
The separation was not just political. The personal element of the struggle was starkly illustrated by the agreement’s provision for a physical separation of the two factions, with the industrial operatives relocating from NCC headquarters in central Melbourne and transferring to Carlton, with similar arrangements established in other cities.
The agreement was specified to run for two years, from the date it was unanimously ratified by the NCC’s national conference (3 September 1980) until 3 September 1982. As is usual in such bitter splits, the organisation’s assets — property, money, files — were uppermost in the dispute. The agreement provided that if unity and full reintegration were not achieved during those two years, at its conclusion ‘the income of the NCC for the next succeeding 2 years would be divided as to one-third’ to Maynes’s faction ‘and as to two-thirds’ to Santamaria’s, and subsequently the dissidents ‘would be allocated one-third of the NCC’s assets’.30 This, not ideological disputes or personality clashes, was at the core of the court case brought by Maynes’s supporters: they wanted their ‘fair share of the loot’ that, they implied, they had spent years helping to accrue.
It seems that Santamaria’s plan all along was to dud them. The 1980 national conference had endorsed personnel changes as part of the deal. One of these was that Maynes’s most senior supporter, Gerald Mercer, relinquished the administratively powerful position of national secretary to Santamaria supporter Peter Westmore. Santamaria was re-elected as national president, and Maynes as national industrial officer. The Maynes group was adamant that the NCC’s constitution provided that such elected positions were for a term of three years, at which time the subsequent national conference would convene and new elections would take place.
However, having gotten the fortieth-anniversary celebrations out of the way a year earlier than should have been the case, Santamaria sprang his trap just before the expiry of the two-year agreement. As is so often the case in such schisms, each side gave wildly different accounts of what had occurred, finely calibrated to appeal to each faction’s core supporters and to achieve maximum influence on waverers.
The Maynes faction claimed that, ‘As the two years drew to a close, officials from the Industrial Headquarters sought discussions with … Santamaria about reunification. He said that “tensions” (between officials) had not abated, and that reunification was not possible.’ They claimed that he also rejected their plan for a further two-year interregnum, aiming for a phased but ‘complete reunification’. In this version of events, ‘Santamaria’s sole proposal was that all staff would be “re-employed” by the NCC, on condition that they gave a signed undertaking to accept his sole authority as to the work they would in future undertake.’31
Santamaria’s version, in a masterfully crafted letter to NCC members, claimed that the division of property and income provided for in the 1980 agreement applied only during ‘its currency … After the expiry of the limited period of the Agreement, the right to invoke these provisions expired’. According to Santamaria, he provided Maynes with six weeks’ notice of his intention to terminate the agreement at a national conference to be convened at that time. ‘The six weeks’ notice was to give him … ample time to invoke the separation clause before the Conference, and before the Agreement’s expiry date.’ Neither Maynes nor any of his supporters did so, Santamaria reported. ‘Their reason was obvious,’ he wrote. ‘No supporter would long continue to subscribe to an organisation split in two. Invoking the Agreement would thus achieve no practical result.’32
Which begs the question: what was his purpose in signing the agreement? If he believed that invoking the property and income clauses ‘would achieve no practical result’, was it not disingenuous to sign it in the first place?
With negotiations stalled, Santamaria gave formal notice on 11 August 1982 of a national conference to be convened ten days later. The principal purposes of the meeting, according to both sides, were ‘Recission [sic] of the resolution carried at the 1980 Conference ratifying the Agreement of September 3 1980’ and the election of a new national executive and national council — twelve months before they were due.33 Despite Maynes’s several letters opposing the agenda and his vociferous objections at the meeting itself, Santamaria had the numbers by a wide margin — more than three-to-one, or 37 to 11 on the critical vote.34 A new election therefore resulted in Maynes being removed from his decades-old position as national industrial czar. Santamaria was in complete control of the organisation, which he considered he had always owned.
The next move was simple: issue the dissidents with conditions of continuing employment that Santamaria knew they would never accept. When they inevitably rejected his demands, they were sacked by vote of the national council, ordered out of their offices, and instructed to return official property and files.35 Maynes’s supporters cloaked their court challenge with justified allegations of substantial breaches of the NCC’s constitution and denial of natural justice. The nub of their purpose, however, was simple: they wanted orders reinstating them, or else the payment of damages, which, in their dreams, involved obtaining their one-third share of the organisation’s assets and one-third of its income for the subsequent two years, as had been agreed in the 1980 document.
Santamaria’s letter to the dissidents of 26 August contained one condition that revealed the depth of his Stalinism. As Mercer stated in his affidavit filed in the case:
The condition which required [Mercer] (and other officials) to accept direct responsibility to the President [Santamaria] according to a resolution passed in 1966 which purported to give him powers not subsequently incorporated in the 1970 revisions to the Constitution, was in my view unconstitutional, and unreasonable, and amounted to requiring an open-ended commitment of loyalty to one man. I find his request morally repugnant.36
Santamaria claimed that, ‘No such undertaking has ever been demanded of anybody. It would be utterly unconstitutional. It would be both unprincipled and irrational. Not one single official would give it if any President were sufficiently irrational to demand it.’37 In fact, he had done precisely this: his letter insisted that if Mercer wanted a continuing role on the NCC’s payroll, he had to accept ‘direct responsibility to the National President [Santamaria] … and to no other person’.38 In denying this fact in his letter to NCC members, Santamaria was simply lying. He muddied the waters by hiding behind decisions taken by national conference and national council to request every officer to accept direction about how they were to be deployed and what duties they would be assigned. But, as he candidly admitted, as ‘chief executive officer finally responsible for carrying out the decisions of National Conference and Council, I must actually implement the decisions of those bodies’.39
Father Paddy Ryan would have been muttering ‘I told you so’ from Heaven, reminding all and sundry of his own purging as chaplain to the Sydney Movement in 1953, and of his complaint aired at the 1954 national conference that Santamaria had dominated, speaking for two whole days when Ryan believed others could have delivered the papers just as well. Then, as in 1982, Santamaria’s cult of personality held sway and, more importantly, on each occasion he had the numbers against those impudent enough to dissent from his self-obvious greatness.
On 21 October, the court made an interim judgement, concluding that the Maynes group had established a prima facie case that the elections held at the 1982 national conference were unconstitutional and, consequently, that the national council which had dismissed them was not properly constituted. It also found that a prima facie case had been established that they had not been afforded natural justice.40 Maynes and his supporters had won a moral victory. However, the orders they had sought — demanding reinstatement — were refused, because the judge concluded that in the event that the Maynes group won the case when it came to full trial, an award of damages would ‘be adequate’ compensation. In so concluding, the judge also resorted to his acute understanding of realpolitik:
I am also influenced by the fact that the defendants [Santamaria and his supporters] have what might be described as ‘the numbers’ so far as the members of the Council of the N.C.C. are concerned, and, it would therefore seem unlikely that in the end result the plaintiffs [Maynes’s supporters] will again be employed as paid officials of the N.C.C.41
In effect, the Maynes group failed to obtain reinstatement, but had substantially dented Santamaria’s moral standing by demonstrating his refusal to abide by the NCC’s constitution and to follow a fair process in sacking them. The full trial would finally determine the merits of the case and, perhaps, award them substantial damages. The case, however, did not proceed to trial. Instead it was settled by consent between the two factions, with ‘Orders that each action be dismissed without any other Order being made’.42 No other details were forthcoming at that time, but it is now known that the settlement included providing the Maynes group with ‘sufficient funds to set up an organisation’.43
So it did not bring peace. On the contrary, both sides now resorted to an increasingly vituperative propaganda campaign. The Maynes faction resigned from the NCC as part of the settlement, but immediately formed the Industrial Action Fund (IAF) to continue its trade union work, while leaving the NCC ‘to do its work of commenting on public issues through “News Weekly” and “Point of View” and in the Australian Family Association, and amongst University Undergraduates’.44
In appealing for funds from NCC members and supporters, the IAF made many allegations against Santamaria, who, in order to silence them, instituted defamation proceedings against key dissident figures, claiming their publications had labelled him ‘dishonourable … untrustworthy … a thief … who refused to honour a promise … who has betrayed … the ideals of the National Civic Council … who has led the … National Civic Council away from the ideals which were established within its Constitution for his own personal ambition’. It was an attempt to stand over his former colleagues, and it largely worked. The writs against the various Maynes supporters were not actioned; but, as most of them did not have the means to defend a lengthy defamation trial (having worked for many years on the meagre salaries paid by The Movement, similar to those of CPA functionaries), the proceedings had the effect of frightening them into refraining from further public criticisms of Santamaria. This was obviously his intent.45
‘Bitter’ would be an understatement of what had come to pass between Santamaria and Maynes, who had been intimately associated in the anti-communist cause for thirty-five years.
More than three decades after these tumultuous events, two sets of allegations made by the protagonists endure. Despite Santamaria’s lengthy, nit-picking, point-by-point rebuttal of Maynes’s accusations, he did not specifically deny two damaging quotes attributed to him from June 1980, when the agreement between the two factions was under negotiation:
I regard it as absolutely dishonest for any group of persons regardless of the side which they have adopted in a situation of fundamental division to attempt to possess themselves of all the assets of the organisation facing those who might not wish to work with them with enforced compliance or resignation.46
And:
I would regard any attempt to appropriate all the assets of the organisation by any single group, on the specious basis of offering employment to those they know will not accept it, as attempted theft.47
If accurate, these statements indicate that Santamaria regarded what occurred in 1982 as being ‘absolutely dishonest’ and ‘theft’. Presumably, if he felt confident of his facts, he would have specifically repudiated the Maynes group’s attribution of these words to himself.
Santamaria had his revenge. In his letter to NCC members, he outed Maynes, who for decades had publicly denied that he was a full-time official of The Show. This was one powerful reason he had not put his name to the court case seeking the reinstatement of paid officials, of which he was one of the longest serving. In a letter to members, Santamaria exposed Maynes’s fraud:
The payout to those who left … was $73,735.63! The Movement had to go into debt, from which it will take a long time to recover. They received full superannuation payments at the highest discretionary level permitted by the Superannuation Trust Deed. For instance, Mr Maynes’ superannuation payment amounted to $56,000 the highest ever paid to any individual official of the organisation. What more could be done in the interests of equity? [Emphasis added.]48
To rub salt into Maynes’s wounds, Santamaria concluded by comparing his erstwhile comrade’s ‘mendacious leaflet’ unfavourably with the old enemy:
In all the years, not even the Communist Party or any of its members has said that of me. I did not expect to see it said by once-trusted colleagues.49
After almost four decades of shared struggle in the anti-communist cause, it had come to this: Santamaria was branded by his own words as ‘absolutely dishonest’, and Maynes had sunk to a dishonourable level that not even the communists would stoop to.
The Show was over.