Labor wasn’t his only victim. John Grey Gorton, Liberal prime minister from 1968 to 1971, felt Reid had brought him down on Sir Frank Packer’s instructions, crossing the line between reporting party room plots and shaping them. Gorton described Reid as a ‘slightly built balding man with little darting eyes and an expression of perpetual cynicism… peeping under a drooping eyelid from the corner of one eye… one expects momentarily to be nudged in the ribs with a confidential elbow and given a hot tip for the 3.30 at Randwick’.

Reid’s 50-year career reporting federal politics started in 1937 at the Sun. He switched to the Frank Packer-owned Telegraph in 1954. When he died in 1987, Reid was Kerry Packer’s personal emissary in Canberra, his lobbyist, as well as a reporter for the Bulletin and Channel 9. This was a brazen conflict. Yet his professional success subsumed all: he delivered scoops with mischief and relish, and MPs spilled secrets to him like stricken sinners in the confessional.

His most remembered front page appeared in March 1963 and put paid to the ALP’s chances of beating the Menzies government in that year’s federal election. A special ALP conference had met in Canberra’s Kingston Hotel to determine the party position on a US communication station at North West Cape in Western Australia.

Under the then party rules, leader Arthur Calwell and deputy leader Gough Whitlam were not delegates. They were caught loitering, somewhat pathetically, under a street light waiting for unknown union and party officials to arrive at a policy and hand it to them. Reid grabbed a passing photographer and captured the humiliation of the Labor leadership at the hands of what became immortalised as ‘the 36 faceless men’. It was instant political devastation for a profoundly unworldly Labor party.

Reid wrote three books, but none on the affair that sealed his journalistic reputation: the Labor split of 1954 -7. It was Reid, in the Sun, who had unveiled B.A. Santamaria, the leader of the so-called Movement, which was mobilising within the unions and party: ‘…in the tense melodrama of politics there are mysterious figures who stand virtually unnoticed in the wings, invisible to all but a few in the audience, as they cue, Svengali-like … the actors on the stage.’

Reid was fond of the John Curtin-Ben Chifley era of Labor leadership and hostile to Santamaria, whom he portrayed as an ‘exotic’ force. He even advised H.V. Evatt on his 1954 statement attacking the Santamaria forces. The statement provoked the split, but was entirely unnecessary as Santamaria’s influence was containable and, as leader, Evatt should have been able to straddle his party’s factions as Curtin and Chifley had done.

Reid recoiled from ‘the Doc’ as the flailing Evatt resorted to anti-Catholic sectarianism, as reflected in this exchange with Reid, patched together from Reid’s oral history:

Evatt: Alan, you’ve left me… You’re anti-Santamaria but you’re not with me in this campaign… I’ll tell you something Alan, for every Catholic vote I’ll lose I will get two Protestant votes.

Reid: You’re out of your cotton- picking mind, Doc.

In their biography of Reid, Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt refer to Evatt’s ‘rapprochement with communists and fellow travellers in the broader labour movement’. This is a good insight, the key to Evatt’s position through the split. This accommodation of a pro-communist Left was documented by Reid in story after story, especially after he joined the Telegraph and his contempt for Evatt merged with Sir Frank Packer’s fierce conservatism.

When Ross Fitzgerald told me he and Stephen Holt were going to write a biography of Alan Reid, I told him the material would be too scant, the result too meagre. The authors have proved me wrong. They have written an invaluable history of the interaction of the Press Gallery and politicians.

When I launched the book, I quoted the American writer Susan Sontag, who said in 1982: ‘Imagine the preposterous case of somebody who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and somebody else who read only the Nation between 1950 and 1970. Who would be getting more truth about the nature of communism? There’s no doubt it would have been the Reader’s Digest reader.’

The same is true here, I suggested. Through the Fifties and Sixties, Reid and his tabloid insights into Labor, communism and Evatt would have offered more truth than the pages of Meanjin or Outlook.

Reid would have found little to disagree with in The Family File. On the surface this is surprising, because Mark Aarons’ book is the story of four generations of a family of communists. But it is told through the archives of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), hence its unique flavour. The author’s good sense — he let lapse his communist party membership in 1978 — rescues it from being another soft-headed memoir of heroic revolutionaries struggling for peace, workers’ rights and democracy.

As a boy in 1959, Mark Aarons saw a car pulling into the backyard of the family’s Fairfield home and a suitcase being handed to his father, Laurie, then general secretary of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). Opened, it revealed wads of cash: 45,000 Australian pounds from the Soviet Union, he later learned, sent through a Romanian trade union to keep Australian communism afloat.

The book confirms that the Soviet Embassy delivered orders to the leadership of the CPA and, when the party criticised Russia after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the embassy worked with a pro-Soviet faction to create a pro-Soviet breakaway party.

The revelation at the epicentre of the book, however, is the story of the party’s involvement in Soviet espionage. Enter stage left the conspiratorial figure of Wally Clayton who, from 1943 to 1949 and at the direction of the CPA leadership, worked with the Soviet embassy in Canberra. He collected files from party members and sympathisers in the public service in Canberra and delivered them to the TASS correspondent in Kings Cross, Sydney, who was the local KGB man.

After the CPA dissolved itself in 1991, Laurie Aarons, who had been the party’s national secretary from 1965 to 1976, taped an interview with Clayton, by then 90 years old. Clayton admitted in this tape that he delivered material to Soviet intelligence, something he had insolently denied at the Petrov Royal Commission into Soviet Espionage (1954-5), and that he had done it at the request of then party secretary Lance Sharkey. This revelation should nudge Australian historians towards a more benign view of the Petrov Royal Commission, which had been denounced so thoroughly by Evatt and criticised by Labor-inclined historians.

After the commission, Laurie Aarons claims he terminated any dealings with the Soviet embassy that may have fed intelligence to Soviet spies. Mark Aarons quotes him as saying: ‘The thing about spying is that it’s a very dangerous thing to have alleged against you.’ True indeed. Yet Mark Aarons reports that a first secretary of the Embassy, Ivan Skipov, was to beat a path to Bill Brown, a CPA leader and later a leader of the pro-Soviet breakaway party, who gave him the names of sympathisers. To people like Brown, the Soviet Union was the country of the mind, the object of their patriotism.

For Labor party people, the most arresting material in Mark Aarons’ book is the confirmation that the CPA recruited and managed dual ticketholders, that is, left-wingers who held secret membership of the communist party while they held office in the ALP. The big fish here was Arthur Gietzelt, eventually a minister in the Hawke government. This practice, of course, magnified the influence of a relatively tiny Marxist-Leninist party, giving it a say — how much of a say can be debated — at ALP conferences.

Some leftists have said in reference to Aarons’ book: ‘Big deal. Everybody knew it.’ Maybe. But we’ve never had a combination of ASIO file notes and a member of the Aarons family laying it down for the record. Moreover, no dual ticketholder has ever admitted it; Gietzelt continues to deny it. And historian Stuart Macintyre in his writings on the history of the CPA never revealed it.

A book is now being written on Gietzelt and research taking place on others on the Labor Left who may have held dual membership. A number of ALP leftwingers could be revealed as long-term CPA plants. As a result, some leftist activism could be exposed as less indigenous Labor radicalism and rather emanations and diktats emerging from a Marxist-Leninist party that could never poll one per cent at a general election under its own name.

This has implications for the historiography of Australia in the Cold War era. It strengthens the indictments of Evatt and Calwell because they accommodated what we can probably now objectively define as a pro-communist Left and thus made Labor close to unelectable. It elevates Gough Whitlam’s role as the leader who broke the power of the Victorian ALP executive and prevented Jim Cairns becoming Labor leader. In acres of speeches and writings on foreign policy by Cairns, a single criticism of the Soviet bloc would be a discovery of gem-like value. Perhaps not a dual ticketholder, he wore the appellation ‘fellow traveller’ like a second skin.

The revelations are also a historic justification for the existence of a NSW-based Labor Right with a lineage embracing Premiers McKell and Cahill (the later warded off both Santamaria and Evatt forces as his government of 1952-59 became the only state Labor government to survive the split) and machine man John Ducker, who blocked a Gietzelt-led takeover of the ALP’s biggest branch in 1970-71. Gietzelt-led? Knowing what Aarons and his ASIO files have confirmed one can write, rather, communist-led. Paul Keating took over from Ducker when control in NSW Labor again wobbled in 1979-80. From his time in Young Labor, the hard Left have always been ‘the comms’ to Paul Keating.

Gietzelt’s wife Dawn was once overheard saying she ‘did not care which labour party her children favoured’, and clearly meant the CPA was to be regarded as another labour party. Obviously no reader of Solzhenitsyn, she — like the ALP Left of her generation, including Cairns — could never see the difference between the totalitarian and democratic brands of socialism. I always suspected their spiritual homelands were the ‘people’s democracies’ of Eastern Europe, and was inclined to imagine some of our lefties as members of an Australian Politburo, wolfing pork and caviar at banquets for visiting Soviet delegations and, with a bark or two, despatching social democrats and liberals to the Gulag.

Aarons is blunt about these forces in his dad’s old party. Other communist memoirs cast a rosy hue over the comrades, idealistic fighters for the rights of workers and Aborigines. Of course, idealism is never a defence. Isaiah Berlin identified the desire of idealists for a ‘rational reorganisation of society’ as the very source of totalitarianism. ‘The search for perfection,’ he wrote, ‘does seem to me a recipe for bloodshed, no better even if it is demanded by the sincerest of idealists, the purest of heart.’

Former Tribune editor Rupert Lockwood once told me that in a lifetime in the CPA he had met people perfectly capable of lining enemies against a wall and machine-gunning them.

ASIO penetrated the CPA comprehensively. Its agents were present at every meeting and even worked as full-time staff. If this were overkill, then the espionage of the Forties, now confirmed, provides the justification. I find myself hoping that ASIO now demonstrates the same spycraft as it infiltrates every Islamist cell that harbours the faintest enthusiasm for blowing us up. And I’m struck by ASIO’s restraint. After all, a leaked copy of Gietzelt’s ASIO file could have killed Labor’s chances at any number of elections.

I know one journalist who would have torn a half-proffered copy from an agent’s gloved hands. He, above all, understood the implications. The adjective ‘explosive’ or the noun ‘time bomb’ would have been in the first par of his Telegraph exclusive.

Bob Carr on two new books that reveal the extent of the Labor Left’s overlap with the Australian Communist Party during the Cold War.

Bob Carr was Labor premier of NSW from 1995 to 2005. Alan ‘The Red Fox’ Reid: Pressman Par Excellence is published by University of New South Wales Press, price $49.95. The Family File by Mark Aarons is published by Black Inc, price $34.95.
Spectator Australia, 17 July 2010

The book’s author, Mark Aarons, came under the “adverse notice” of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in early 1965 when he was only 13, while his father’s ASIO files began when he was 14, in the early 1930s. Indeed, one of the great strengths of The Family File is the extensive use made of the detailed reports of the many ASIO agents who successfully infiltrated the communist movement in this country, and especially the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and its many and varied offshoots.

Remarkably, ASIO’s surveillance files on Laurie Aarons – a “professional revolutionary” born in August 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution and three years before the founding of the CPA, amounts to a massive 85 volumes, while that of his third son, Mark, boasts nine volumes of text and photos – up to the time when such ASIO files could be officially “released”.

There are at least two important revelations in The Family File: the first concerns the radical Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett and the second the Soviet Union’s Australian spymaster, Walter (Wally) Clayton.

The fact is that throughout his life, Burchett, who developed a close friendship with Ho Chi Minh and leading revolutionaries throughout the world, repeatedly claimed not to be a communist. Yet Mark Aarons’s communist grandfather, Samuel Aarons, who met Burchett when he boarded a ship in Noumea on the way to Europe to “try his luck”, puts paid to this. Samuel Aarons clearly stated that “Burchett had previously applied for membership of the CPA in Melbourne, but claimed he never received a response”. Burchett later wrote with considerable warmth about his time on board a ship with Samuel and his wife Esme. The author simply puts the situation thus: “It is possible that Sam finally recruited Burchett to the party on the voyage.”

The other crucial revelation in The Family File concerns an interview that Laurie Aarons taped with Wally Clayton shortly before the latter died in October 1997. This makes it crystal clear that Clayton not only admitted to be the senior CPA member who co-ordinated the KGB’s operations in Australia, but that he was also entirely unrepentant about being the key spymaster, identified by ASIO and MI5 officers as “KLOD”.

The Family File contains an excellent black-and-white photo of a bespectacled, gaunt and harried-looking Wally Clayton at the time of his appearance in March 1955 at the highly explosive Royal Commission on Espionage. As the book makes clear, in 1943 Clayton was recruited as the Soviet’s Australian spymaster.

Throughout his crucial undercover career, Clayton handed over highly classified Western secrets to his KGB handler in Australia for direct transmission to Moscow.

One crucial weakness in Mark Aarons’s important study is that the book contains no endnotes or footnotes. This means that it is utterly impossible to trace and check the many sources he has relied upon for the hundreds of quotations that grace The Family File. Annoyingly, the contents page contains no chapter titles, and no chapter breakdowns. Whether this is deliberate or a typesetting mistake is unclear.

As the narrative proceeds, it is illuminating to be told the names of key Australian politicians who were, at least for a time, “dual members” of the Australian Labor Party and the CPA, and also for it to be demonstrated just how many ASIO spies had penetrated the communist movement in this country.

Even more so than in the Labor Party, deeply acrimonious “splits” were common among Australian communists. Indeed, towards the end of their formal existence, there were up to eight communist groups or parties co-existing at the same time. It is worth remembering that, even today, there is still a Communist Party of Australia that was largely formed from the largely Russian-oriented Socialist Party of Australia. In 2010 the CPA produces its own newsletter and, perversely, seems flushed with funds.

In The Family File, Aarons deals with honesty and aplomb about the many and varied weaknesses of the CPA and, perhaps even more so, in the other communist parties in the country. Yet he also chronicles how dedicated “communist revolutionaries” played a useful and important role in the anti-apartheid and anti-war movements, as well as helping to promote indigenous self-determination, green bans, feminism and the independence of East Timor.

As he points out, militant communists were at the forefront of promoting workers’ rights in Australia, as well as successfully lobbying for improved wages and conditions. Thus until the 1980s many ALP supporters regularly voted for communists in trade-union elections. This was because card-carrying communists were “often effective unionists, immune from bribery, prepared to fight the bosses and use effective tactics to win concessions for union members”.

The Family File, Mark Aarons, Black Inc, #34.95
Review by Ross Fitzgerald in The Sydney Morning Herald, 24 July 2010

It is a bizarre irony that the former minister for education, Julia Gillard, succeeded Kevin Rudd as prime minister when it is the waste and mismanagement of a program she is entirely responsible for that seriously damaged the Rudd government’s credibility and contributed to his downfall.

Given what we know about Gillard’s abilities, it is not surprising that, during the first few weeks of her administration, the wheels have fallen off her solution to stop the influx of asylum-seekers, and that she is looking decidedly shaky on the mining tax deal.

Over the past 2 1/2 years there hasn’t been an education policy that hasn’t been partially or entirely bungled in some way, shape, or form by the former minister for education.

Putting that aside for the moment, it is worth considering the new Minister for Education and the possible reason he was chosen for the job. Gillard did not decide to go with a young up-and-comer or a firebrand visionary type who could reignite the portfolio of education, which is historically considered one of Labor’s greatest strengths. Instead she opted to go with Simon Crean, trying to shore up problems and inoculate the huge deficiencies in the portfolio in the hope they can quietly sit out the election.

Despite Gillard’s comments this week, Labor simply cannot afford to fight the election on education because of her record of failure in the portfolio. With the effective and energetic Christopher Pyne as shadow education minister, Gillard couldn’t risk putting the portfolio in the hands of a novice.

The opposition now has the opportunity to offer innovative and carefully targeted education policies that can outflank the government, whose record of waste and failure is monumental.
Last week Tony Abbott and Pyne announced the Coalition would redirect school-hall funding directly to schools to manage, thus cutting across Gillard’s continuing complaint that the Coalition would cut school funding.

It is well documented that the grandiosely named Building the Education Revolution has been tainted by chronic waste and mismanagement and reports of systemic rorts, price gouging and collusion in the construction of school halls and other facilities.

From the outset the guidelines for the program were deeply flawed, sending billions of taxpayer dollars directly into the hands of state governments.

State education bureaucracies were entirely ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of the roll-out, so projects were contracted out to developers, who have reportedly been charging exorbitant prices for substandard buildings.

Principals and school councils were largely shunted from the process, told by officials what they would be receiving, whether they liked it or not.

In contrast, the non-government sector has self-managed projects and achieved value for money. The comparison is simply staggering.

It is obvious the quick fix is for the government sector to be treated like the non-government sector and self-manage projects. However, the federal Labor government never entertained the notion that government schools could be trusted to manage projects themselves.

The Coalition has a strong case to prosecute when it comes to its alternative plan of allowing schools to self-manage projects, and the policy announcement has been very well received by the sector.

Leonie Trimper of the Australian Primary Principals Association was reported as saying the government sector was envious of the non-government sector’s ability to self-manage projects, and the notion that principals and schools should self manage infrastructure should become standard practice.

Given that the former Howard government trusted schools to self-manage projects under its Investing in Our Schools program, it is hardly a revolutionary idea. However, the really clever part of the Coalition’s plan is that schools will be given an extraordinary incentive to self-manage their projects and focus on making savings. This is because schools will be entitled to retain any savings made to use for other priorities on their wish list. These funds are now sent back to the same state governments that mismanaged them in the first place.

This could be a very significant amount of money. If estimates are correct then government sector projects should be coming in at two-thirds of what is presently being spent. Hence some government schools with a $3 million grant could save as much as a $1m for other projects.
Imagine what needy schools could do each with a lazy million, without any caveats on how it must be spent. Some of these schools have been neglected for years by the state governments that have primary responsibility for their infrastructure.

This is precisely the source of the growing anger and disappointment about this program. Rather than closing the gap between government and non-government sectors, it is now wider than ever, courtesy of the Australian taxpayer.

Parents aren’t stupid; they drive past the local non-government school and see the excellent buildings under construction and have a clear comparison to the often prefabricated buildings peppering the government school sector.

No two ways about it, the Building the Education Revolution has been a crime against the taxpayer. And it is not going to stop under this newly minted Gillard government because it was the PM’s program. Crean’s response to the idea that schools should be entrusted with funds directly is strange from someone tasked to properly administer taxpayer money. He accused the opposition of potentially opening up the government to litigation from cancelled contracts, leaving buildings half finished.

But surely if a school is not getting value for money, or indeed is being outrageously ripped off, then it is necessary for the government to immediately cancel contracts and initiate litigation: something the Gillard government wants to avoid at all costs.

Crean and the taskforce his predecessor established to investigate waste should be hauling contractors and state governments into the courtroom to extract compensation for schools that have been ripped off blind, not to mention the rest of us taxpayers.

Assuredly if the government wins the next election then this matter will eventually disappear from the public consciousness, as such things eventually do, while the judicial inquiry into the program promised by the Coalition will obviously never occur.

Australians will never know for sure how much money was lost in this program or who is
responsible, and Gillard will have escaped unscathed.

But rest assured, if Labor wins this coming election, there will be more mismanagement to come from the Gillard government and we will all be paying the price.

The Weekend Australian, July 17-18, 2010

His name is Ross and he’s an alcoholic. Don’t blame me. He outed himself in his own book. He can thank the Almighty God that no one reads any more or everyone will be pointing at him. On the other hand he has no one to blame but himself. He doesn’t even believe in God so he adds “Please” before the Serenity Prayer so it goes “Please God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Professor Ross Fitzgerald is a name I hear all the time but I can never put my finger on him. He leaves parties as I arrive. He exits dinner tables at will if I am late, as usual.

Two clients for whom I recently appeared in court in difficult circumstances both sent me copies of Fitzgerald’s book, My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey, while I was deciding what, if anything, I should charge. They are gifts that keep on giving – and are probably all I will get. In reality, I received infinitely more than my few hours of court appearances.
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Fitzgerald has written 32 books, fiction and nonfiction, but none is as important as the two I have. At 25 he took his last drink and pill. He is now 65. As an alcoholic, writing an autobiography is the stalking of yourself. Old schools of thought suggest Alcoholics Anonymous should live up to its name and remain the best kept secret in town.

At AA meetings, you were more likely to come across a satanic orgy than a meeting of yearning people trying to get or stay sober. Practising alcoholics tend to be loners during practice sessions and unless there are neon signs, electronic walkways or valet pick-up services, they might never hear of AA.

It is no use waiting for alcoholics to hit the gutter, the shelter or the morgue before they are allowed in on the secret. Fitzgerald speaks at high schools about his journey, disabusing the romantic dream world that teenagers naturally are attracted to in the world of excess. A drunk I met at Rogues Nightclub one night told me he was never going to go back to those Alcoholic Unanimous meetings. There was no room for anyone debating the virtues of the drink. And so it is …

My Name is Ross is a very timely book for me. The trouble with alcoholism and attending meetings of AA is that there is no graduation class, no diploma that allows you access to the world without returning to the halls of meetings. You have to go to the school of AA for the rest of your life, one day at a time. There is a tendency to drop out of this school. “How much more can I learn?” says one of the debating society living in your head, next thing you are a dry drunk, white-knuckling on a raft without a paddle.

AA is not a self-help group but depends on others helping each other. There is something in the human spirit that responds to storytelling and the DNA of AA is storytelling. One at a time, a speaker addresses the meeting with an outline of where he was, how he stopped drinking, drugging or whatever and where he is now. Many times it is like a stand-up comedy night. Sometimes it is a wake. There’s never a meeting that you don’t carry out a germ of an idea or a skerrick of helpful information. Meetings begin and end on time. Alcoholics need strict routine. You can always tape Underbelly, if there is a clash.

Fitzgerald writes that alcoholics are like pod people and can somehow pick each other out in a crowd. I don’t know about that but at meetings we are like fingerprint experts, pointing out similarities and dissimilarities in our groves and whorls. At times in reading Fitzgerald’s book, I suspected he accessed my computer files. His home truths were my home truths. The half-truths he told in drink were my half-truths.

He is however a far more matured human being than I would ever be, even if I lived as long as Methuselah. Fitzgerald had so much electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) before they used general anaesthetic that it wiped out many potential chapters in his book. He could ask surviving friends or relatives to write in and publish the lost years that way. Drinking and depression go hand and gland. He soared at school, university and in academia while sipping from rum bottles planted in cisterns during exams. He lived counter-intuitively and occasionally on liquid counter lunches.

Like many alcoholics, he is a hypochondriac who will outlive everyone. He won a Fulbright Scholarship to America where he spent much of the time in saloons, mental homes and in the arms of women who took mercy on him.

A psychiatrist told me I had an almost supernaturally excessive need for nurture. I spent much of my life hoping to be rescued from myself by women. Women are no longer attracted to shipwrecks who love the relentless rocks. I once snuck a glance at a referral from my GP to a new psychiatrist, “Charles, is a difficult customer with a lot of baggage.” It is little wonder our sessions didn’t work out with such a sordid letter of introduction.

So it is not on the couch that we alcoholics try to get well but on the hand chairs in church halls or school auditoriums. We respond to the sound of many hands cupping. I envy the meetings in Los Angeles in the 1970s when sobriety reignited the sex organs of men and women, who had meetings in spa pools naked, at least according to James Ellroy. AIDS wiped out nearly everything.

Fitzgerald’s book is far deeper and wider and funnier than the picture I paint. He has a prodigious memory, not corrupted by ECT or alcohol or drugs in the past 40 years. He gives us the highlights, the lowlights and the spotlights in a razzle-dazzle of words and characters. Alcoholics who are out he names. Others are called Broken Hill Jack, Cast-iron Kate, Under-the-Stars Len and so on. I remember some of them.

Anonymity guaranteed, Fitzgerald’s past did not condemn him to it. AA helped him not to live in the wreckage of the future. Long before the Power of Now, AA practised it a day at a time.

There are some quaint hangovers, so to speak, from the strictly anonymous early days of AA. Members of the fellowship would swap or pass on tape recordings of especially gifted speakers whose identification talks were sometimes electrifying. I got a plastic covered tape with Sir Anthony H on the white sticker on the side. His voice was unmistakably Hannibal Lecter’s slimy tongue-licking brogue. Yet we nod to each other as we pass back the tape as if the secret is safe with me.

Anyway, shout Ross Fitzgerald’s name form the steps of the Town Hall. He has come to free us, to free us all.

By Charles Waterstreet

This concisely written, effectively illustrated “history from below” focuses on all those rebels and political malcontents banished by British authorities to the ends of the earth in the Antipodes.

Death or Liberty: Rebel Exiles Transported to Australia 1788-1868 usefully adopts the historiographical approach of the leading 20th-century scholars E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude to understand and elucidate the forces producing rebellion in the mother country. As Moore explains, studies by these and other progressive historians have demonstrated “how the uprooting of Britain’s agrarian communities by the forces of capitalism, industrialisation and urbanisation and the expansion of the empire led not only to class division, social breakdown and crime, but also to revolution, riot and organised resistance”.

Moore clearly argues in the early chapters of this fine book that Thompson, Hobsbawm and Rude have successfully recast many so-called “political criminals” as democrats and progressive reformers who were transported to Australia as a penalty for the “advance of self-determination, universal suffrage, free speech and assembly, workers’ rights and social justice”. Indeed, it is hard to resist the conclusion that transportation removed political threats from “home” in England and elsewhere in Britain and at the same time intimidated other potential rebels who might have contemplated active dissent and revolution.

Death or Liberty cogently examines the continued use over nearly a century – from 1788 to 1868 – of this “system” by successive British governments. It had the specific aim of suppressing radical political movements by means of exiling rebels to what Robert Hughes so tellingly called “this fatal shore”.

This thoroughly researched, thematic, social and political narrative has chapters dealing with different groups of political prisoners. They range from the Scottish and Tolpuddle and Young Ireland Martyrs to the Canadian Patriots, the Chartists, the United Irishmen and the Fenians. Perversely, with the conspicuous exception of the Irish rebels, while many of these other radical political exiles are now honoured in their countries of origin, there is still relatively little “to commemorate their time on our soil or contribution to our history”.

As Moore points out, this book has been written so that 21st-century readers, and especially the young, might learn the stories of “the rebels, radicals and protestors” who can be seen as sacrificing their own liberty to help achieve the egalitarian democracy we enjoy in Australia today.

Transportation to the British colony of New South Wales, Moore powerfully argues, was invented to “soak up the wave of criminality caused by the tectonic shifts in traditional British social relations”. But very soon after the arrival in Australia of the so-called First Fleet, transportation was embraced as “the best way to excise from the body politic both radical malcontents who wanted to import foreign systems of government like republicanism, and dissenters from the lower orders who threatened the King’s peace and property”. Indeed, by the 1790s transportation was also seized upon as the solution to Irish lawlessness and the “habit of rebellion”.

While in the past few decades interest in Australia about Irish rebel traditions has grown, it does seem passing strange that – at least until the advent of this brilliantly conceived, chronologically based narrative history – there has been little official and even historical acknowledgement of the debt our democracy owes to our varied and diverse political convicts, ranging from the Chartists and the machine-breakers and the North American patriots, through to both the Scottish and Tolpuddle Martyrs. It is pleasing to report that Moore has gone a long way to remedying this unfortunate situation.

As it happens, he was awarded the NSW History Fellowship by the NSW Government and Arts NSW to help research and write Death or Liberty. In the opinion of this reviewer, it was money well spent.

Review of Death or Liberty by Tony Moore. Review by Ross Fitzgerald in The Sydney Morning Herald, July 10, 2010

Reid was already a legend of Australian political reporting. In the 1950s he’d been the first to expose the activities of B.A.Santamaria and his ‘groupers’. In the 60s it was his ‘36 faceless men’ scoop that helped keep Menzies in power but also eventually allowed Whitlam to break the unions’ grip on parliamentary Labor. When I returned to Canberra a decade after my first meeting with Reid (to work for the ABC), he still commanded his favourite lookout spot in King’s Hall, and the same desk in the Telegraph office. More than any other gallery journalist, The Fox embodied both the history and standpoint of political reporting in Australia.

Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt have now written an admirable account of Reid’s journalistic career. He was a notoriously private man who – perhaps wisely – culled many of his personal papers in retirement. But while the domestic details of his life are scant, this survey of his 50-year innings reporting federal politics is impressive. The book uses the great events of national affairs from 1930 to 1985 as its chronological framework, with Reid’s involvement as a reporter the constant sub-plot. What’s remarkable to learn is how often this esteemed journalist was prepared to sprint ahead of history’s footprint in an attempt to change its course.

Reid, like so many gallery tragics, was fascinated by power, not policy. (It’s no surprise that he named the alter-ego character in his unpublished novel about politics “Macker Kalley” – Machiavelli.) Almost everything he wrote, or later said on TV programs such as Meet the Press and Federal File, was concerned with leadership, threats to leadership and winning or losing elections. From the earliest days of his Canberra career with The Sun (1937-53), plots and conspiracies – indeed any form of conflict or melodrama – were his perennial themes. He was a tabloid man, through-and-through. Policy development and the legislative work of government rarely interested him, even as a commentator for The Bulletin in the last few years of his working life. For Reid, politics boiled down to who held power and who wanted to grab it from them – the rest was inconsequential fluff.

But despite his legendary status, he didn’t always get it right. Three times he was on the wrong side of major defamation actions prompted by damaging stories he could not substantiate sufficiently. At least twice he attracted the attention of the House Privileges Committee for breaches of parliamentary convention or confidence. And his habit of sometimes drawing an exceptionally long bow on the basis of unsourced quotes or information – and then splashing that speculation across the Telegraph front page – earned him a reputation for poisonous cunning. Paul Hasluck dismissed Reid as “a competent though somewhat venal purveyor of political gossip”, while Arthur Calwell called him “the lowest thing to crawl around this House”. (Reid was a good hater: he castigated Calwell at every opportunity for the next 20 years.)

At the centre of this book (although not specifically explored in any depth) is the most contentious issue of national affairs journalism: to what extent – if at all – should we tolerate the intrusion of a gallery correspondent’s personal views, or the interests of their proprietors?

Reid, almost every time he sat down at his typewriter, crossed what today would be recognised as the threshold where opinion begins to seep into straight political reporting. Fitzgerald and Holt document scores of occasions on which he not only wrote from a plainly biased standpoint, but actively inserted himself into events with the avowed intention of influencing their outcome.

So addicted was Reid to the processes of political power that for more than 40 years he acted as much as a participant, go-between and adviser – often even conspirator – as he did as a reporter. Yet despite his staunch and lifelong membership of the Australian Journalists’ Association it appears he never recognised the ethical obligation of disclosure in these situations. It was as if he believed the men’s club of Parliament House conferred on him a cloak of mutually-agreed invisibility.

Worse, at least to my mind, were the frequent occasions on which Reid took, and carried out, direct instructions from his Daily Telegraph proprietor, Frank Packer. These went well beyond the customary subtle indications from Head Office as to which policies or politicians might be favoured in tomorrow’s news report or column. Packer expected his man in Canberra to toe the company line unquestioningly, and often to take an active role in precipitating events (for instance, the undermining of Gorton’s prime ministership and ludicrous championing of Billy McMahon in his place).

The patient historical research of Fitzgerald and Holt confirms what any half-aware journalist of his period already knew: Reid pushed plenty of private agendas, but in the end he always did what he was told by Park Street. It’s disheartening that a man whose lifelong socialist sympathies were formed during the Depression (and often called his mates “comrade”) could have so comprehensively sold his soul to one of the most unprincipled buccaneers in Australian media history. As Laurie Oakes remarks in his judicious Foreword to this book, Reid “combined the best and some of the worst aspects of political journalism”.

Reviewed for The Walkley by David Salter. David Salter has been an independent print and television journalist for more than 40 years. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of THE WEEK magazine.

Professor Ross Fitzgerald’s speech about ALAN (“THE RED FOX”) REID at Dalton’s Books, 54 Marcus Clarke St, crn Rudd Street, Canberra, Wednesday June 30, 6 pm.

Thanks indeed Laurie (Oakes). As recent events here in Canberra demonstrate, in the ALP the faceless men and the factional warlords certainly live on! In many ways, the tiny Machiavellian world of Alan Reid is virtually the same world that made Julia Gillard PM.

In his excellent review of ALAN (“THE RED FOX”) REID in ‘The Canberra Times’ (June 12, 2010,p.25) the formidable Jack Waterford claims to have heard, although he does not name, “an altogether more believable story of the identity of the photographer of the “36 Faceless Men” episode” than the one provided in our book.

However in an earlier email Waterford says it was a photographer working for the Canberra Times.

Also, Peter Rees, who started his journalistic career as a copy boy on the Daily Telegraph in 1966, says that the late Peter Hardacre told him that he, Hardacre, had taken the photos. At the time, Hardacre was the staff photographer for the Daily Telegraph in the press gallery.

Without wanting to take Waterford or Rees to task, Stephen Holt and I maintain that there is reliable evidence that the famous 1963 photographs of what became known as the ALP’s 36 “Faceless Men” (and which at the time Reid termed “36 virtually unknown men”) were taken by a Canberra friend of Alan Reid’s named Vladimir Paral – known as Val – who was a scientific photographer at the John Curtin School of Medical Research.

As ALAN (“THE RED FOX”) REID makes clear, Reid got Vlad, who lived in south Canberra, not far from the Kingston Hotel, to take the photos, develop them in a dark room at the John Curtin School of Medical Research where he worked, and they were then dispatched to Frank Packer for publication in ‘The Daily Telegraph’. Reid never revealed Paral’s role to protect him – the use of ANU property for political purposes was highly irregular – but Val Paral can be named because he is no longer in the land of the living.

The 1963 photos of then ALP federal leader Arthur Calwell and his ambitious deputy Gough Whitlam waiting in the dark under a lamppost outside the Kingston Hotel in Canberra, where a special ALP party conference was in session, and which Calwell & Whitlam were not allowed to attend, significantly helped the Liberals win the next two federal elections.

With regard to finding the source of the photos about the Night of the Faceless Men, my appeal for information about Alan Reid in THE AUSTRALIAN newspaper’s STREWTH column flushed out the story about Paral from Mr Ralph Westen of Canberra who had worked with Val Paral at the same dark room at the John Curtin Medical School in 1963. Mr Westen (who is here tonight) saw the developed photos when he turned up to work on the Thursday morning. When asked, Paral, who told Western about the previous nights events, said he had taken them for his fishing mate and nature-loving pal, Alan Reid.

At page 111 of his book ‘The Gorton Experiment’ Alan Reid wrote that “the man who took the (Faceless Men) photos was an amateur, not a professional (press) photographer”, which would rule out a photographer from The Canberra Times, as it would also rule out Peter Hardacre – a professional photojournalist who worked for various Packer publications. Hardacre died in 1979.

All the available evidence, we submit, strongly suggests that the amateur photographer in question was Reid’s friend and fellow angler Vladimir Paral.

In The Gorton Experiment there is a photograph of Reid and Paral together at a fishing campsite. Reid would have told Paral about the special conference and Paral attended either as a spectator, or in his capacity as a part-time taxi driver – according to Alan Reid Jr, who is also here tonight. It was certainly no accident that Paral was there to photograph what became known as the “36 Faceless Men.” Paral’s presence was a direct result of Alan Reid’s request and the rest, as we say, was History!

In fact, at the ALP’s special conference at the Kingston Hotel there were 35 male delegates, and one woman – Mrs Phyllis Benjamin MLC – a member of the delegation from Tasmania, whose Edna Everage look-a-like photo is shown below.

But in the 1960s “36 faceless persons” wouldn’t have had the same cachet & lasting media power as “the 36 faceless men”, if you get my drift.

Later in 1963, Australia’s first televised election results featured Creighton Burns, then a lecturer in Political Science at Melbourne University, armed with a state of the art computer. The 9 Network telecast began at 8pm. A mere ten minutes later, Alan Reid, wreathed in tobacco smoke, announced, “The government’s back in.”

At 9pm, despite Burns continuing to announce that Calwell still had a good chance of winning the election, Reid reappeared in the telecast in front of a news-board, which proclaimed “MENZIES WINS”.

The wily pressman opined: “Menzies is back with a majority of about thirteen.” Confident that his man Reid had bested the machine, then and there Sir Frank Packer ordered Burns’ computer to be removed from the telecast!

As many of us here would know, this was the very same Creighton Burns who later edited The Guardian on the Yarra i.e. The Melbourne Age – from 1981 to 1989.

Thank you all for coming here tonight.

Ross Fitzgerald is a writer, broadcaster, historian and political commentator who contributes a regular Weekend Australian column for Inquirer. He has published 33 books, most recently ‘My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey’, also published by New South Books.

FYI – to check for verification, but not for general publication, here are Mr Ralph Westen’s phone & email details:
02-6292 4992 riejac@hotmail.com

Mrs Benjamin MLC from the Tasmanian delegation was the one ‘faceless’ Woman amid the 35 ‘faceless’ Men.

Surname: BENJAMIN
Given Names: Phyllis Jean
Title and Honours: Mrs, AO, MBE, Hon (12 August 1976)
Qualifications:
Date and Place of Birth: 30 August 1907 – Mosman, NSW
Date of Death: 6 April 1996

Legislative Council: 10 May 1952
Electorate: Hobart
Party: ALP
Positions Held: Leader for Government 1968-69
Date of Departure: 22 May 1976
Reason for Departure: Retired.

AS the dust settles over the prime ministerial demise of Kevin Rudd and the hype surrounding Julia Gillard subsides, the questions remain: who is she and what does she stand for?

The fact that Gillard was parachuted into the job of prime minister by the largely “faceless” union backroom boys has led to the inevitable claim that she is a puppet of the union movement. Gillard recognised she needed to move quickly to counter that impression and declared at her first press conference: “I would defy anyone to analyse my parliamentary career and find that I have done anything but made up my own mind.”

Gillard’s biography would lead one to conclude that she is a committed member of the Labor Left. Her student activities included president of the Adelaide University Union, president of the Australian Union of Students in the early 1980s, and a campus convenor of the Socialist Forum at Melbourne University.

In her first parliamentary speech in 1998 she spoke of her time in the student union: “It inspired me to spend eight years as an industrial lawyer defending trade unions and working people.” And she declared: “I will remain fiercely committed to working with unions.”

Gillard was given her first real opportunity to live up to that commitment when she produced the workplace relations policy for Labor in opposition in May 2007. The original document was widely believed to have been crafted by the unions, as it was much more pro-union than John Howard’s laws were pro-employer.

The alarm bells rang within Labor’s sensible centre, whose leading parliamentarians predicted a battle with employer groups over her hardline provisions, which initially banned all individual agreements, with only collective employment agreements seemingly available.

The lack of detail in Gillard’s policy as to the proportion of employees that could force employers into negotiations with unions led to the conclusion that if only one employee among 200 requested union representation, the union automatically became a party to the workplace agreement with open access to all non-union employees, including their wage and employment records.

Such was the level of concern raised by Gillard’s policy that Rudd drafted a replacement document that significantly watered down the union influence in time for the 2007 election.

Gillard was rumoured to be humiliated at the time. Her message was clear, however, when she suggested that employers could get “injured” if they opposed her workplace reforms. Later dismissed as a joke, it had all the subtlety of Rudd’s joke to the miners that in opposing the mining tax, they should remember Labor has “a long memory”.

As education minister, Gillard initially supported unprecedented union influence, endorsing the right of unions to enter schools and recruit students as young as 14: “I think it is important we are getting information to young workers about what their rights are in the workplace . . . it is important for secondary school students to have information on the rights of workers,” she said.

However, at least since last year Gillard has sought to reposition herself more towards the Labor Right. There was an effort to distance herself from the teachers’ unions with a faux fight about the MySchool website. It was not lost on the unions that the information from the national tests used to establish that website resulted from reforms of Liberal education ministers Brendan Nelson and Julie Bishop.

Gillard’s makeover from Left to Right included the embrace of a number of the Coalition’s education and industrial relations policies. Key elements of the Coalition’s education platform for the 2007 election, including a national school curriculum and greater autonomy for school principals, were part of Gillard’s education revolution.

The Coalition’s blueprint for capital funding of government and independent schools has been followed, with the fatally flawed exception that Gillard decided to put the federal funding for government schools in the hands of state governments and not school communities, which led to massive waste and rorting.

In workplace relations, Gillard retained the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner, established after a royal commission instigated by Tony Abbott. The unions loathe the ABCC and Gillard trumpets this decision as proof of her independence from union influence.

Her biography on the parliamentary website does not mention the word “union” once, which may itself be a sign that she will try to govern from the centre if not from the Right.

Yet it is hard to imagine that Gillard’s skirmishes with the unions had much substance, given that the unions have now thrown their support so comprehensively behind her.

Lest there be any doubt about who made the decision to dump Rudd and install Gillard, the precocious but talented Paul Howes of the Australian Workers’ Union gave a running commentary on the evening of the coup.

To understate the case, the unions clearly believe Gillard is not hostile to their interests.

The point of all this is that the public should know what values and beliefs will underpin the new Prime Minister’s policy decisions and who or what are her greatest influences.

The still unanswered question is whether Gillard is the left-wing activist who entered parliament to fight for union interests, or has she now changed her focus to that of the broader national interest?

Former Labor leader Mark Latham has said that Gillard was committed to her left-wing values and ideals, but that she changed after the 2007 election and became a pale shadow of Rudd.

Latham has been rightly criticised for his leadership of the Labor Party, but he can and does provide invaluable insights into the inner workings of the Labor machine.

Moreover, before he became leader, when he and Gillard were close, Latham engaged in some inventive policy work, although whether these ideas, especially about the importance of nurturing communities, rub off on the new prime minister is unclear.

Gillard claimed that she needed to replace Rudd because the government had lost its way and therefore it was in the national interest that she did so. When pressed for an area of policy differentiation, she identified population policy as a key difference, insisting that any population growth had to be “sustainable”.

Her case rested on the false premise that Rudd had unquestioningly endorsed a much larger population of at least 36 million people by 2050. While Rudd did give one interview supporting a “big Australia”, the opposition used it to verbal Rudd, claiming he supported an unrestricted population growth.

To counter this claim, Rudd appointed Tony Burke as minister for population.

His role was to develop a comprehensive population strategy that took into account challenges and opportunities, including the social and economic infrastructure and the roads, housing and service delivery network needed, the impact on regional towns and communities and the impact on the environment, water, and urban congestion.

In other words, Rudd’s policy was based on sustainability.

Prime Minister Gillard, in adopting the opposition’s misrepresentation of Rudd, merely changed Burke’s title to Minister for Sustainable Population, clearly already part of his brief. In fact, there was and is no policy schism with Rudd.

It seems likely that Gillard will call an election for sometime in August. The Australian public thus has only a matter of weeks to find out whether she is a true believer from the Labor heartland, a true centrist, or just another politician practised in the art of spin and ultimately beholden to the unions who put her there.

The Weekend Australian, July 03, 2010