Postscript

At the time The Show suffered its devastating split in the early 1980s, its decades’ old symbiotic relationship with the CPA was at an end for all practical purposes. The weaker the communists became — as they tore themselves apart in their own splits, stretching over twenty years from the early 1960s — the less reason there was for the NCC to persevere with its anti-communist struggle. By the time the Santamaria–Maynes schism ultimately occurred in 1982–83, after at least ten years of tension and disharmony, the CPA and its two offshoots were so small and divided, their presence in the trade union movement so diminished, and the future of international communism so shaky, it was becoming clear to many observers that the end was nigh for Australian communism.

Shortly after the NCC’s own split, another round of defections occurred from the CPA, with Victorian leader Bernie Taft leading a significant group into the ALP. By the early 1990s, all that remained was a rump party of died-in-the-wool neo-Stalinists with virtually no influence in the wider labour movement. The CPA’s once powerful and large cadre of full-time union officials had, in the main, ceded their control of key unions back to the left wing of the ALP.

SO WHAT WAS LEFT for The Show? As the split hardened in the wake of Santamaria’s purging of its industrial cadres, one of Australia’s most insightful anti-communist intellectuals summed up the crossroads it had reached. Frank Knopfelmacher, an irascible, forceful émigré from Czechoslovakia, invariably found the words to encapsulate the state of affairs in any given political situation. In the aftermath of the Victorian Supreme Court’s interim judgement of October 1982, he forensically analysed the NCC in his heavy, somewhat menacing Central European accent:

My feeling is that one wing — the industrial one — clings to the old verities that the principal battlefield for the committed Catholic trade unionist are the trade unions and the Labor Party, whereas Mr Santamaria, and those who go with him, feel that our society is changing — the industrial working classes … and the trade unions are no longer the decisive agencies of social change and social organisation — and that it is important to exercise influence in those institutions which influence the thinking of the white-collar strata — that is, in universities, in publishing houses, in the mass media, in the press, and so on.

In other words, the Santamaria view seems to be that the principal function of the NCC is an ideological apostolate in favour of traditional, fundamentalist, intelligent conservatism, whereas the old-time wing of the NCC wants to continue the good old struggle in the unions. If the word conservative is to be used in any meaningful sense, I would regard the Maynes wing as being the more conservative in the sense that they want to stick to what is habitual in our world, but Santamaria’s outlook is more oriented towards the new emergent elites, the white-collar, opinion-making, manipulative elites in the media and in the universities and so forth.

May I add … that in my opinion the NCC, in places like the media and the universities, has no future because it has not come to terms with modernity. It adopts towards modern society an attitude which Hans Kuhn [sic], in his famous book on Germany, called cultural despair — they reject modernity. Now, if you want to influence modern people, you cannot reject the basic presuppositions of their existence and their basic assumptions on how to live.1

Knopfelmacher’s analysis and predictions were unerringly accurate.

First, to the Maynes faction. In appealing for financial support from those NCC members whose orientation was to the struggle in the unions, Maynes coined the catch cry ‘Keep the fight going.’ It was defined succinctly as, ‘The work is the fight against left-wing supremacy in unions.’ The problem for this formulation was that such a supremacy was non-existent. As early as December 1952, Santamaria — in his letter to Archbishop Mannix — had declared that The Movement had virtually broken the back of communist control of the unions.2 The left never recovered from the series of defeats it suffered in the period 1945–1954. Put simply, it was the right who exercised supremacy in 1982. So, in claiming — as Maynes did in 1983 — that ‘Constant organisation, vigilance and the grooming of moderate leaders for senior posts are needed to preserve moderate leadership’, he was living in the past.3 The left and right would never again swap the control of unions in bitter election campaigns in the way they had in past decades. Except for the occasional one-off victory — usually in state branches, such as the Victorian and Queensland clerks’ union branches, not federal offices — there would never again be any significant alteration of the balance of forces in the union movement. The strength of the ALP right wing, however, could only be consolidated by what happened next.

For some time, the ALP right in the union movement had foreseen where things were likely to end inside the NCC. They had developed a carefully planned strategy to bring Show-controlled unions back into the mainstream. This involved their re-admittance to the ALP, re-uniting the right-wing forces that had been divided by the Labor Split of the mid-1950s, thus augmenting their numbers so effectively as to permanently wrest control of the Victorian branch of the party from the left wing. By the early 1990s, with a massive campaign of union amalgamations underway, the discernible force of The Show in unions had all but disappeared, as could also be said for the communists. The situation had returned to its normal position before the CPA became a major force in the unions in the decade after 1935: the ALP right ran things.

Knopfelmacher, however, was correct in another sense. At the time of the NCC schism of the early 1980s, membership of trade unions in Australia represented roughly half of the workforce. By 2017, the figure had slumped to 15 per cent, with membership in the private sector down to 11 per cent. As Knopfelmacher analysed the situation in 1982, ‘The trade unions are no longer the decisive agencies of social change, and social organisation.’ Today — with the industrial and manufacturing sectors of the economy in seemingly terminal decline — they barely survive at all.

The only notable former Show-controlled union with any political clout in the 21st century is the shop assistants’, which — bloated by sweetheart agreements with major retailers that provide a version of compulsory unionism — exercises disproportionate influence in ALP policy-making. Its main preoccupation is negative: to resist what Knopfelmacher referred to as ‘modernity’ and to attempt to revive a conservative, traditionalist form of Catholic social policy.

This union’s obsession with such issues— including same-sex marriage, abortion, stem-cell research, and in vitro fertilisation— has often come at the expense of its members, many of whom are low paid and young. In industrial deals with food chain McDonald’s, and retail giants Woolworths and Coles, for example, the union has sold out the people who pay their dues (often as a condition of employment), depriving many of penalty rates and in some instances agreeing to hourly payments below those legally required. On the other hand, employers have received stern correspondence from the union opposing their public support for same-sex marriage.4

Despite Santamaria’s disingenuous claim that ‘trade unions would remain [the NCC’s] main area of work’,5 the NCC never again played an influential part in union affairs — apart from a quixotic, expensive, but unsuccessful attempt in the early 1980s to unseat Laurie Carmichael, one of the last prominent CPA union officials left standing. Santamaria’s indifference to the fate of his once-mighty industrial army was summed up in the overt encouragement he gave to the idea that it should re-unify with the ALP — the once-hated enemy from which he had withdrawn the unions he controlled in the wake of the Labor Split to pursue the fight against the CPA and international communism, and to advocate for Cold War defence and foreign policies.6

The priority that Santamaria allocated to trade union work in the 1980s was made clear in his paper ‘The Movement into the Eighties’, distributed with the invitation to the ‘fortieth anniversary’ celebration in August 1981:

Apart from the normal daily responsibility of maintaining the existing base we hold within the trade union movement, our major responsibility in the immediate period ahead will be to defeat the attempt to destroy the uranium industry in this country, an operation ultimately organised by the Communists and their allies …7

As John Grenville ironically commented, ‘It must be very, very comforting for all those chaps in the industrial wing to know that for the ’80s their role will be to defend the barons of industry via the uranium industry.’8

Santamaria’s new priorities were enunciated in this paper. He did not long dwell on international communism — his obsessive preoccupation of bygone decades — merely asserting the proposition of ‘the clear danger … of the imposition of Soviet hegemony as a result of the growing political/military superiority of the Soviet Union’.9 By the early 1980s, exactly the opposite was the case: the communist economic and political system was sclerotic, on the verge of disintegration, and its military technology, especially in nuclear weapons, was light years behind the West. But as far as Santamaria was concerned, the danger was even greater than in previous years.

His real focus, however, was not on the communist enemy, but on the ‘enemy within’. He headed his treatise ‘the West’s “schism in the soul”,’ which took as its motif the collapse of Western civilisation caused by ‘corruption from within’. According to this assessment, the ‘fundamental cause’ of this development was ‘the true Cultural Revolution of the late ’sixties and of the ’seventies; not the shoddy but brutal political power play which Mao inflicted on the Chinese people, but the profound moral transformation which came about within the Western world itself’.10 His worldview was informed by the history of failed civilisations:

No truly great civilisation, as that of the Christian West once was, ever collapses as a result of external attack. If external attack appears to be the immediate cause, it has been preceded by long decades, sometimes even centuries, of corruption from within. Of the various types of corruption, none is more profound in its effects than the loss of intellectual clarity as to the ultimate truths and principles by which it is worth living, or for which it is finally worth dying. It is around these truths only that the cohesion of societies, as small as the family, as large as the State, can finally be built …11

What Santamaria was railing against, as Knopfelmacher had correctly noted, was modernity itself. What he favoured was a return to the past — a past in which Catholic social, moral, and religious precepts formed the basis of the kind of society and economy that contained ‘the ultimate truths and principles by which it is worth living’. What had replaced this and had now to be overturned was the victory of ‘the humanist revolution’ caused by ‘the assault on the principle of authority’ and the corruption of the legal and educational systems. The moral issues he identified were ‘abortion, divorce, homosexuality’. But married women in the workforce was the demon that had opened Pandora’s Box, handing education to the corrupt secular world and changing society’s ‘view of normality — and morality’, especially as they related to things such as ‘lesbianism, abortion, contraception, pre-marital sex’, and imparting ‘a new, and quite deliberately anti-Christian morality under the pretext that you are teaching biology’.12

These types of ideas were at the core of Santamaria’s new direction for The Show and, as he explained:

This why this Movement has made such a heavy investment of personnel, time and resources in the struggle on the university campus and in teachers’ unions in defence of sound educational philosophies and against the abuse of the classroom; why it has worked against Modernist and Marxist influences within the Christian churches, whose purpose … is to empty the supernatural content out of religion.

We have not, and will not abandon the trade union and political struggles which brought us into being. But there is more to it than that. The ’eighties are not the ’forties, and our responsibility is to be present, not where we would like the action to be, but where the action really is.13

In this, too, Knopfelmacher was correct. Maynes represented a conservative view of where the battles of the modern world were being — and would continue to be — fought, whereas Santamaria favoured fighting on the battleground where his traditional, fundamentalist conservative ideology was under threat of demolition. As Santamaria summarised his position at the end of his paper, ‘There is no point in fighting the battle in the unions … unless we simultaneously impose a check on the forces which underly [sic] the disintegration of the family.’14 The Movement’s failure to make any ground in this struggle since he expounded this position has simply been due to its inability — as Knopfelmacher saw clearly — to connect with people who live in and, most importantly, want to live in the modern world, not in the semi-mediaeval world idolised by Santamaria. For example, in the thirty-five years since Santamaria’s paper was distributed, many Catholic women have behaved like their sisters of other Christian faiths. More sophisticated and tertiary educated, they have entered the workforce in greater numbers, planned smaller families, and largely eschewed the church’s most conservative social doctrines.

Never was the title of an autobiography more apposite: Santamaria was battling ‘against the tide’ of modernity.

As the 1980s progressed, the tide became bigger and much more powerful. The Hawke–Keating governments’ economic reforms took society further away from Santamaria’s idealised past. He suddenly found himself in sympathy with many of the ideas of old foes who, like him, clung to vanishing verities. For example, he found he could have a friendly dialogue with long-time Victorian communist leader Bernie Taft. As their interlocutor wrote in his report of their meeting, ‘What intrigued the two old enemies was the extent to which their economic and social views had converged since the collapse of the Soviet system and the rise of fundamentalist free-market economic orthodoxy throughout the English-speaking world.’15 Much to Taft’s amazement, Santamaria veered towards a Marxist view of class, which would have been condemned in earlier years as anathema to basic church teachings:

I am very sympathetic to Marx’s view that unless we are very careful we will find that the State is run by the dominant class. At the moment I have no doubt at all that the State in Western society is run largely by the multinationals and the great investment banks whose economic power exercises a veto over the authority of the State, and that their policies suit a particular group of people.16

At the end of his life, Santamaria reflected on the bitterness of his failures, although he insisted that at over eighty years of age he had no regrets, and still worked ‘as hard as I ever did for the ends that I want to see realised’. But, he said, ‘My honest belief is that I have achieved little or nothing at all. The things that I have been deeply interested in, and worked very hard for, are more remote today than when I started.’17

John Forrester, who joined The Movement in 1951 and worked for Santamaria’s cause for twenty-five years — much of that time as a secret member inside the ALP — echoed this verdict. ‘In the long term we lost’, he declared. ‘Overall I don’t think we Christianised society. I think the ideals and the aims were not achieved — and many of them perhaps shouldn’t have been achieved. But certainly we failed in that area. We didn’t produce this Christian millennium in Australia.’18 Forrester, however, lamented that, under Santamaria’s leadership, The Show had abandoned the church’s core principles: ‘We ended up — and this is why so many of us are disillusioned — we ended up over with the Tories in the political establishment, in the capitalist establishment, and the church social teaching we were brought up on wasn’t on about that.’19

The Catholic Social Studies Movement that Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria founded under direct church control in the 1940s — precisely to protect and promote the church’s social teachings — but renamed the National Civic Council in 1957, when he decided to defy that same church control, continued his work after he died in 1998. Outside the conservative, traditionalist Catholics who continue to look to it for guidance, it has little wider political influence. It persists with the same ideology and policies that saw Santamaria — King Canute-like — commanding the tide to reverse its inexorable flow.