By April 27, 1904, the party’s progress was confirmed by the installation of the world’s first national Labor government. Led by Chilean-born J. C. (Chris) Watson, it lasted longer, slightly less than four months.

The Watson government included future prime ministers Andrew Fisher, who had been a member of the Dawson government, and W. M. (Billy) Hughes, who later came to be reviled as a Labor rat for deserting the ranks and forming his own Nationalist federal government in 1916 over the issue of conscription. Watson’s minister for defence was none other than Dawson, by then a Labor senator for Queensland, who a few years later died in Brisbane from rampant alcoholism, isolated and alone.

Some of the above is covered in the plainly expressed and well-illustrated A Little History of the Australian Labor Party by Nick Dyrenfurth and one of his PhD thesis examiners, Frank Bongiorno. Much of the material in the first book also appears, but much less successfully, in the rather laborious and strangely titled Heroes and Villains, which deals with the ALP from its beginnings until 1919. Unlike the engaging little history, it reads like a slightly rejigged doctoral thesis, which indeed it is.

And, annoyingly, although there is no bibliography in this second book, there are hundreds and hundreds of endnotes, which occupy 38 pages of the total of 281. Comparing the one with the other, less is certainly more.

From its genesis, as Dyrenfurth and Bongiorno write, there was considerable dispute about whether Labor’s prime aim was to “civilise capitalism”, to improve the lot of Australian workers and their families, to end or ameliorate the rule of a “cruel and relentless capitalist class” or, more extremely in the case of those influenced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, to nationalise key industries and even install something like a dictatorship of the proletariat. Since its formation in 1920, the latter was one of the aims of the Communist Party of Australia.

However unpalatable it may seem, it is also important to acknowledge that one matter on which, in common with all other political parties at the time, most Laborites and members of the Labor Party agreed, at least up to the mid-1960s, was the promotion and protection of a distinctly White Australia.

The most illuminating chapter in Dyrenfurth and Bongiorno’s fascinating book deals with the period from 1972 to 1995. Headed Old Labor or New?, it canvasses the rise to power of the charismatic Edward Gough Whitlam, who was first elected to federal parliament in 1952, aged 36. Whitlam’s memorable 1972 It’s Time campaign, “with its singing celebrities, hip T-shirts and dazzling leader’s increasingly fluffy mane”, embodied new Labor.

The reality, the authors point out, is that between Whitlam’s election in 1972 and Paul Keating’s electoral demise almost a quarter of a century later, Labor “ruled federally for 16 years — roughly equal to its meagre performance over the previous 70 years”.

It seems indisputable that Whitlam and flamboyant South Australian Labor premier Don Dunstan, who had risen to power in 1970, had much in common. The authors put it particularly well: “Elegant and well spoken, and paying attention to the environment, urban planning, consumer protection, education, the arts, equal opportunity and Aboriginal affairs, Dunstan, as much as Whitlam, epitomised the party’s changing image and policy orientation.”

Prime minister Whitlam and his senior ministers were supposedly progressive but in 1972 not a single woman sat in caucus, let alone in the federal cabinet. As opposition leader, Whitlam had described his leadership style as “crash through or crash”. It is hard not to agree that this phrase applied equally well to Whitlam’s style of governing.

Moreover, like an earlier, short-term, Labor prime minister, Jim Scullin, Whitlam significantly raised expectations about what he could deliver, while confronting a “global economic crisis, an obstructionist Senate and powerful vested interests that were hostile to his agenda”.
Much of this heady material is traversed in Brian Carroll’s Whitlam. But do we need another book about the great man, especially as Carroll’s biography does not seem to contribute anything new?

Nevertheless, there are interesting bits in Whitlam. Carroll writes well about the two-man government of Whitlam and his deputy leader of the parliamentary party, Lance Barnard, which was sworn in on December 5, 1972. Remarkably, they were in charge of 27 portfolios: 13 for Whitlam, 14 for Barnard. This duumvirate abolished conscription, freed all jailed draft resisters, recalled troops still left in Vietnam and applied to the commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission to reopen the equal pay for women case. It also appointed Edward Woodward to begin an inquiry into Aboriginal land rights and “began moves to set up diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China”.

Carroll usefully puts the spotlight on Whitlam’s trouble-prone attorney-general Lionel Murphy, who in March 1973 led “raids” on ASIO offices in Canberra and Melbourne. In his book The Whitlam Venture influential Canberra-based political journalist Alan Reid rightly called Murphy “a political bungler of considerable eminence”.

Although Graham Freudenberg’s magisterial exegesis of Whitlam’s role in Australian politics, A Certain Grandeur, is mentioned in a section on suggested reading at the end of Carroll’s book, it seems strange that there is not one mention of Freudenberg in the footnotes.

Yet as Whitlam’s brilliant speechwriter, close adviser and confidant, the chain-smoking Freudenberg helped Labor to power in that heady year of 1972.

He also was instrumental in keeping in the public eye what he regarded as the main contributions that the short-lived Whitlam government had made to Australian life.

A Little History of the Labor Party, By Nick Dyrenfurth and Frank Bongiorno, New South, 217pp, $24.95
Heroes and Villains: The Rise and Fall of the Early Australian Labor Party, By Nick Dyrenfurth, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 281pp, $44
Whitlam By Brian Carroll, Rosenberg Publishing, 256pp, $29.95

Ross Fitzgerald is emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University. His most recent book (with Rick Murphy) is Austen Tayshus: Merchant of Menace.

If she cannot turn public opinion, it can only be a matter of time before her caucus colleagues remove her from the top job.

Gillard’s ability to recover from her slide in the polls will depend on how well entrenched public opinion is of her and her leadership style.

If the public decides it has seen enough of this Prime Minister to pass judgment, it will be very difficult, although not impossible, for her to redeem herself.

Given the circumstances in which she attained the leadership and her relatively short time in the role, it is open to question whether the public has fully grasped the fundamental essence of Gillard’s character and what she stands for or what she hopes to achieve.

Gillard’s convictions and her policy agenda lack the clarity and coherence Australians have come to expect of their leaders. As has often been said of past leaders, love them or hate them, at least we know where they stand.

The reality is that what the Prime Minister has revealed of her personal beliefs paints a deeply confusing picture. For example, when and why did the outspoken feminist activist and founding member of Emily’s List Australia, who was committed to its socially progressive agenda, transform into a traditionalist social conservative who rejects gay marriage?

To add to the uncertainty, Gillard has not developed her own signature policy or reform agenda. Recent prime ministers were able to establish their political character through an embrace of reform, backed by clever political skills, which garnered respect. One of the challenges for Gillard to overcome is that she came to the job of Prime Minister without a positive reform agenda.

Her claim on the job initially rested on an ambition to fix the three issues on which she declared the Rudd government had “lost its way”: the asylum-seekers policy, the resource super profits tax and the carbon pollution reduction scheme.

She faces a credibility gap on all three issues.

First, when in opposition she was primarily responsible for drafting the framework on asylum-seekers, which was subsequently adopted by Rudd in government.

Second, Gillard was one of the Gang of Four responsible for the implementation of the mining super profits tax.

Third, along with Wayne Swan, she convinced Rudd to dump his emissions trading scheme.

However, the greatest challenge confronting Gillard is the perception that she cannot be trusted. For the voting public, the critical tests of her honesty are her successful toppling of Rudd for the leadership and her election promise that she would not introduce a carbon tax. Despite declaring repeatedly that she was a loyal deputy, likelier to fly to Mars or play full forward for the Bulldogs AFL team than mount a challenge for the leadership, challenge she did.

Rudd’s continuing popularity in the polls suggests the public is still smarting from the fact Gillard denied it the opportunity to pass judgment on him.

More disturbingly, Gillard has not yet adequately explained the contradictions between her claimed long-term support for a price on carbon, her urging of Rudd to drop his scheme to price carbon and her statement six days before the election last year that: “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.”

This is the prism through which her actions and pronouncements are judged.

In July last year Gillard announced that East Timor would host a regional processing centre for asylum-seekers. When it attracted criticism, she attempted to retreat from the announcement, but when confronted with her own words she promptly re-embraced the policy. It made her look, as the Nine Network’s political editor Laurie Oakes said at the time, “silly and slippery and slimy and shifty”.

During the last sitting week, as Labor attempted to claim the moral high ground on sexist remarks in parliamentary debate, Gillard denied that she had ever referred to Christopher Pyne as a “mincing poodle”, lecturing journalists to read the Hansard record of her comments.

While it is true that she did not use the phrase “mincing poodle”, she did refer to Pyne as “mincing” and a “poodle”, and did not deny that was what she meant to call him when asked about it at the time. A small issue, perhaps, but it was disingenuous at best and fed into the perception that she is often too clever by half with the truth.

Another challenge for Gillard is to explain how Labor, and she in particular as opposition spokeswoman at the time, railed against the Howard government’s Pacific Solution to process asylum-seeker applications on Nauru. Gillard argued that as Nauru was not a signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees it could not be trusted to treat asylum-seekers with appropriate respect and that their human rights were not guaranteed, ignoring the fact Australia provided resources and staffing to the island nation to oversee the process.

It beggars belief that Gillard now argues it is preferable to trade asylum-seekers, including children, with Malaysia, a nation that is not a signatory to the UN Convention and that is notoriously harsh in its treatment of asylum-seekers.

There has been no credible justification for this hypocrisy and it provides further damning evidence that Gillard will shred any conviction, or walk away from any principle, to cling to the job of Prime Minister.

Further insights into the Gillard psyche were provided mid-way through last year’s election campaign, when she announced a change to her re-election strategy. No longer would the public be presented with a scripted, managed persona presumably based on what her minders believed would appeal to the public. She promised we were to see the “real Julia”, explaining: “I’m the Prime Minister. I’m the leader of the party and I obviously take responsibility. It’s about me.”

A senior Labor source said: “What she’s saying is that they will now see the Julia that people wanted to be PM.”

Back in 2005, a magazine feature quoted Gillard as saying she would “cheerfully kill several hundred people” for the opportunity of being prime minister. Taken metaphorically, it was a clue that she would not flinch at political kills on her way to the top. She certainly did not flinch in removing Rudd in a cunning coup d’etat. But it takes more than naked ambition to be a successful leader.

Gillard’s policy shambles gives the impression of someone who wakes up every day asking: “What do I have to do today to stay in power?” After all, as she declared during the election campaign last year: “It’s about me.”

Meanwhile, Rudd – and possibly Simon Crean – are waiting in the wings to see if an already wounded PM takes even more hits.

The Weekend Australian – 18-19 June 2011

The volatile northern state has been a graveyard for Labor Prime Ministers over the years and 2013 is likely to be no different. Yet the ALP is doing nothing about it.

According to Newspoll, Tony Abbott’s support in Queensland is among the strongest of any state in the nation and this will be a problem for Labor if it allows the current political position to continue. After the demolition of Labor in NSW on Saturday, the ALP has to start thinking differently federally, or face a long stint in Opposition.

Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan represents the Queensland seat of Lilley but is not a vote winner for Labor in his home state or any other part of Australia. His public profile is adequate for a treasurer but not a positive for Labor.

Swan, a heavy Australian Workers’ Union factional player, often appears as a rather bland politician who from time to time puts his own interests ahead of the Government. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has significantly more support than Swan in Queensland, but Rudd is much more interested in strutting the world stage than working to ensure Labor wins the next federal election and to keep Julia Gillard as Prime Minister. In reality both Swan and Rudd are too busy to give Queensland the attention it deserves. They are also bitter enemies as Rudd, correctly, believes that Swan as the architect of the mining tax should have taken some responsibility for its incompetent implementation. Instead, he was promoted to deputy Prime Minister. That burns at Rudd every day and makes it virtually impossible for them to work together to improve the vote in Queensland. Also Rudd’s feeling of betrayal towards Gillard makes it realistically unlikely they can work together on the Queensland vote. In short, the Queensland federal campaign is in a mess and unlikely to be fixed any time soon.

Now that the LNP is getting its act together behind former Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman, brand Labor has real problems which neither Rudd nor Swan can solve. Newman has caught the imagination of Queenslanders by running for the Labor-held seat of Ashgrove and obtaining the leadership of the party at large from outside the one-house Queensland Parliament.

By doing it the hard way, Newman might have assured himself of the ”Aussie battler” image, provided he has the support of the majority of the Parliamentary Liberal National Party and can neutralise ex-deputy LNP leader Lawrence Springborg’s attack on his credibility. Newman is a tough and effective political player with a long family Liberal history who (like Anna Bligh) performed brilliantly during the floods. One prime result of the audacious move of making Newman LPN leader in Queensland could be that what was thought to be the electoral advantage to Bligh of playing ”flood politics” at the forthcoming state election may have been in some way undermined. This could mean that the electors of Queensland may again concentrate on the many inefficiencies of Bligh’s state Labor Government, particularly in relation to health and to running the Queensland economy.

At this stage, Gillard may not realise the political threat that Newman could potentially pose to her Government. If he does succeed in beating Bligh, Newman will be in a powerful political position from which to help campaign against the Gillard Government. In such a scenario, Newman’s political effectiveness would leave Rudd and Swan in his shadow while Tony Abbott would have the Newman firepower backing his federal coalition team.

Despite her promise not to call an early election, it now seems highly likely that Premier Anna Bligh will very soon go to the polls in the hope that the election occurs before the Newman-led LNP gains momentum throughout the rest of Queensland. Yet if Bligh does call an election early, Queenslanders may well punish her for this and, as the campaign moves on, Bligh may well return to being the politician who before the floods had a popularity rating of only 30 per cent. If this or something like it were to occur, Bligh would be an electoral liability for federal Labor a number of whose national colleagues deeply regret making her federal president.

If the ALP is serious about winning the next federal election it must improve its electoral appeal in Queensland. The only way to do that is by trying to persuade one or two of its Queensland Labor heroes to run for a coalition-held seat at the next election or go into the Senate. These days, Labor is lacking ALP heroes. In Queensland there exist only three: former Premiers Peter Beattie and Wayne Goss and former Brisbane Lord Mayor Jim Soorley. Goss turned 60 in February and would be 62 at the next Federal election. He has successfully pursued a business career after going through a serious health scare and is unlikely to be interested in returning to parliamentary politics. Soorley will also be 60 on April 8 but has not lost any of his fire. The hugely popular former premier Beattie is the youngest of the three having just turned 58.

It makes excellent sense for Beattie (and Soorley) to be co-opted into federal parliament using their talents to lift Labor’s vote. Both Beattie and Soorley won four elections as leaders. Indeed Beattie won the most ever seats in the Queensland Parliament for Labor – 66 seats out of 89. Gillard should persuade at least one of them out of retirement into either the Senate or marginal coalition seats. Labor’s Arch Bevis lost the seat of Brisbane to the LNP in 2010 after holding it for 20 years so it is a perfect seat for either Beattie or Soorley. Unfortunately for federal Labor, this move to co-opt Beattie and Soorley would meet fierce resistance from Swan and Rudd as neither would want to share the political limelight.

If Gillard can’t persuade Swan and Rudd to support these two Labor heroes in Queensland then maybe the weakened NSW party should in particular use Beattie, who was born in Sydney, to stand for a federal seat in NSW. If this occurred, it would be following the precedent of other extremely talented reformist Queensland premiers T. J. Ryan (1915-19) and E.G. (”Red Ted”) Theodore, who each successfully stood for a federal seat in Sydney.

Too often Labor politics is determined by personal hatreds rather than what is good for the ALP so there may well be severe resistance to a Beattie and Soorley move back into parliamentary politics. Their ages effectively rule them out of any leadership positions outside the ministry, so they will not be the political threats they once were. The real challenge for Labor will be to convince Beattie and Soorley to return to public life. That may be harder than getting the ALP to support them.

The ALP may well lose the next Federal election because of Queensland’s poor performance. If Gillard doesn’t start thinking about winning Queensland soon, then all her work on the carbon tax and mining tax will have been wasted.

Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at Griffith University, Ross Fitzgerald is the author of 33 books, most recently My name is Ross: An alcoholic’s journey and the co-authored Alan (”The Red Fox”) Reid.
The Canberra Times, March 28, 2011

This was until the January floods and Cyclone Yasi allowed Anna Bligh to show some political leadership for the first time. Her performance was impressive but it took more than three years for Bligh to act like a premier. And it remains to be seen whether her improved personal ratings, coupled with a revamped cabinet, will carry over into electoral support and save her government in the long term.

On March 21, the Bligh government will celebrate the second anniversary of its election in its own right following the hand-over of the premiership by Peter Beattie. While Bligh’s personal approval rating has dramatically improved, her government still trails the opposition in both the primary vote and on a two-party-preferred basis. On the latest figures her government would still be defeated.

It is likely that Prime Minister Julia Gillard will face hostile state governments in all but two states from early 2012. This would be a shot in the arm for Tony Abbott’s ambitions to become Australian prime minister and provide vital firepower for the federal Liberals and the Nationals.

The fate of the Queensland Labor government is unlikely to be as devastating as NSW Labor’s, but it’s too early to tell and will depend entirely on Bligh’s ability to continue the momentum after her positive flood performance, and recent cabinet reshuffle, which is perhaps why Bligh has said an early election would be “wrong”. This is code for the government needing more time to rebuild electoral support.

Prior to the floods Bligh’s poor performance had managed to drag the ALP primary vote below 30 per cent and she was facing a thrashing at the poll. The core problem for the ALP in Queensland is that, while there has certainly been a huge spike in support for the party as a result of the floods, Bligh’s ability to run a competent government is still in question.

That will be her real challenge and will become more obvious when, as is certain to occur, the media return to more objective reporting of Queensland politics: this will especially apply if the large-scale plans for reconstruction don’t proceed as promised.

Examples of recent state government incompetence are already many and varied. As Queensland was recovering from the crisis, the health department was demanding proof such as photos from flood-affected health workers before they could claim absent days; aspects of help to flood victims were means-tested; and there are suggestions that poor management of the Wivenhoe dam considerably worsened the flood damage to Brisbane.

Plus the fact that, for more than three years, the Labor government failed to build the promised cyclone shelters along the Queensland coast. If the government’s poor track record continues, then unfortunately for Queenslanders the rebuilding could become a serious problem.

Adding to the long-term difficulties for the Bligh government is the growing perception that, by a succession of enterprise-bargaining deals with its workforce, it has squandered the strong financial legacy it inherited from Labor and conservative governments alike. These deals have undermined the state’s budgetary position and made a significant contribution to putting the Queensland budget in the red.

This is one of the reasons Queensland lost its AAA credit rating and has fallen behind other states economically. While Bligh cleverly hid this incompetence behind a wall of asset sales by highlighting the virtues of privatisation, the state’s financial weakness will take years to repair.

Former premier Peter Beattie, who was so dominant a leader, may not admit it publicly but he must be privately shaking his head in disbelief at the current state of the Labor government. His strong fiscal and economic legacy has been squandered.

Before the floods, Queenslanders were waiting with sledgehammers to dismantle the state Labor government at the first opportunity. In nine months many voters may well revert to their previous position.

The Bligh revival may turn out to be the worst of all worlds for the ALP. It may have saved Bligh herself but prevented Labor from getting a new leader and a real fresh start, not just a reshuffle.

The Labor Party believes the Queensland government will get re-elected if Bligh can bleed the floods and cyclone for as much political gain as possible.

This is why Bligh has spent time governing from North Queensland and is being profiled in TV variety shows and by colour magazines, including Women’s Weekly. However, the absence from cabinet of the wily, Rockhampton-based Robert Schwarten can only make Bligh’s task more difficult.

Unfortunately for Bligh, her poor polling at the end of 2010 strongly reflected resentment by Queenslanders that she went to an early 2009 election without telling voters of her privatisation plans. The catastrophic floods may not wash away this loss of trust and if Bligh should call another early, opportunistic, Queensland election before it is due in June 2012 this would backfire on her badly.

Deputy Premier and former failed health minister Paul Lucas is widely regarded as one of the reasons for the government’s poor electoral standing after the health department’s (Queensland Health’s) new computer system was publicly shown to be incapable of paying Queensland’s health employees properly.

Public sympathy will always be with nurses and other health workers when they are up against government. This is certainly true when these crucial workers can’t even be paid correctly.

This expensive, drawn-out, administrative debacle should have seen Bligh sack Lucas but she has been too weak to overcome her long friendship with Lucas that started at the University of Queensland.

Bligh should have made Lucas accept responsibility for the mismanagement and removed him from the ministry. Instead, in her recent reshuffle he was moved to Attorney-General, Minister for Local Government and Special Minister of State.

The Liberal-National Party opposition believes it can win the next Queensland election on the health issue alone. Notwithstanding that there is now a new Health Minister — former education minister Geoff Wilson — the anger and disillusionment among health workers towards the Bligh government will not easily be forgotten.

Opposition Leader John Paul Langbroek has understandably slipped behind Bligh as preferred premier because he did not play politics on the floods. But together with experienced and extremely capable former opposition leader Lawrence Springborg and talented opposition treasury spokesman Tim Nicholls, the state LNP contains the nucleus of a credible alternative government.

February 17 was the tenth anniversary of Beattie’s landslide election in 2001 when the ALP won 66 of the one-house state parliament’s 89 seats.

There has been no acknowledgement of this by Bligh or Queensland Labor. The last thing Labor wants to do is remind the electorate of past victories. The Bligh government’s chance of re-election is almost totally dependent on playing flood politics and, to achieve this, there can be no distractions.

The Weekend Australian, March 12 -13, 2011.

This act determines where the line is drawn on various categories and forms of media. It legislates different levels of “intensity and explicitness” in images and words, setting out what can be accessed by various age groups in Australia. It designates whether different media can be viewed in private (for example by a couple in their home) or in public, such as at a movie theatre.

The Classification Act is primarily concerned with what we commonly call entertainment, news and information. More than any other federal act, its success relies on accurately gauging public opinion, and it is one of the main pieces of legislation that defines “Australian morality”.

Julia Gillard’s government is asking the Australian Law Reform Commission to undertake the review, with submissions being sought throughout this year.

It will be unable to report to the government until at least mid-2012 and the government most likely won’t be able to act on the recommendations until 2013 — close to another federal election. Hence it could be 2014 before this review bears any fruit.

At the same time, there are four other reviews of the Classification Act, or aspects of it, being undertaken by various agencies.

In an appalling waste of resources, the Senate committee on legal and constitutional affairs has also announced an “inquiry into the Australian film and literature classification scheme”.

This owes much of its existence to its deputy chairman, Liberal Party senator Guy Barnett, a man as driven on the censorship of sexual material as was his right-wing Tasmanian predecessor, former independent senator Brian Harradine.

Barnett’s comments during Senate estimates hearings last year on young adults appearing in erotic material revealed he seems overly concerned with the fact such material is available in Australia at all. It would not be surprising if this inquiry was dominated by issues of teenage sexuality and may be fundamentally flawed before it even starts.

Barnett claims the National Classification Scheme is not working — a view shared by his detractors. But what does he propose? He wants to extend the act to include art, billboards and music videos. The terms of reference for this committee read like an ambit claim from the Soviet information ministry where it is forbidden to say or print almost anything about sex.

Second, the beleaguered Minister for Communications Stephen Conroy is also calling for a review of one of the classifications within the act, namely the Refused Classification. This is being done to ensure his benchmark classification for the internet filter does not take out too much material that is legal in the real world. This would include references to safe drug use and to euthanasia.

Third, the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy is calling for a review of the effects of so-called convergence in media and entertainment in Australia. This is ultimately the reason why the ALRC is being asked to review the act in the first place, so why couldn’t they be combined into one inquiry?

Fourth, the Attorney-General has announced an inquiry into billboard advertising.

The internet and the convergence of media have rendered many parts of the Classification Act obsolete. In 1995, when the act was introduced, a magazine in a newsagency, an X-rated film in an adult shop, a TV program shown after 9pm, or an early website on dial-up were relatively separate entities.

Now they are all potentially available on a mobile phone in a matter of seconds. In 15 years the changes have been exponential and if it takes three or four years for these reviews to be completed, the accelerating rate of change will have rendered many recommendations out of date.

If we wait until after the next federal election — which Labor may well lose — any recommendations will be based on outdated technology.

All these inquiries need to align Australian censorship law with genuine public opinion and morality. Yet, remarkably, since 1988 the federal government has not conducted a professional opinion poll concerning the controversial issues involved in the Classification Act.

This has been left to industry clients of the Classification Board, which is upset that the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General has ignored public opinion in censorship decisions.

A 2005 survey by Bond University showed that 88 per cent of Australians supported an R18+ classification for video games. This classification has been debated for more than six years and seems to have been stalled by SCAG, which is caught between public opinion and a bias towards placating religious lobby groups.

Since 1988, the X-rated film industry has commissioned more than a dozen national polls that show a consistent support rate of 72 per cent for legal sales. It’s quite legal to buy an X-rated film over the internet.Yet, time and time again, SCAG has refused to address the discrepancy between state and federal laws, which in some states has seen some vendors of X-rated material sent to jail and bankrupted. The federal government accepts this disingenuous situation and continues to claim we have a uniform classification scheme in line with public opinion.

At present, the Classification Act is skewed towards minority religious and right-wing groups. It does not reflect the morality of those attending an Aussie barbecue, a suburban shopping centre, a sporting event or art gallery.

It certainly does not reflect the morality of most Europeans and Americans, or even New Zealanders. Australia’s prurient attitudes to sex and adult themes in films and computer games are a mystery to Europeans, who have been painting X-rated masterpieces for centuries and hanging them in the best galleries in the world.

Americans have freedom of sexual and adult ideas enshrined in their Constitution through the First Amendment. Many can’t understand why Australian adults don’t litigate for the freedom to watch X-rated films and play R-rated games. The fact is we can’t, because we don’t have a bill of rights. The US First Amendment protects free speech unless it is obscene. This forces American courts to consider the meaning of obscenity. But with our Classification Act, Australian courts have to accept what our politicians have enacted.

It’s significant that the review of the act has been called in the name of both McClelland and O’Connor. Since becoming Attorney-General, McClelland has demonstrated little interest in censorship issues, and his presence now may be a response to the many individuals and industry groups who claim the classification scheme is broken and unworkable. However, a proper repair job needs more than input from Labor’s right-wing faction.

The two federal Labor ministers intimately concerned with the review would do well to draw on the philosophies of earlier reformist attorneys-general, including Gareth Evans, and other civil libertarians such as Australian Democrats founder Don Chipp.

The Weekend Australian, February 12, 2011

In rhetoric reminiscent of Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Peter Beattie and other long-serving premiers, Labor and conservative alike, Bligh’s answer to the conundrum of how to be optimistic and survive this natural disaster was crystal clear. We are, she said, lips aquiver, “Queenslanders. We’re the people that they breed tough, north of the border. We’re the ones that they knock down, and we get up again.”

Similar patriotic, even jingoist, sentiments are expressed each year during the State of Origin rugby league series between Queensland and NSW, when the cry “Queenslander!” resounds from Suncorp Stadium, or Lang Park, as locals still prefer to call it. That stadium, too, suffered inundation recently but it also stands as a symbol of the Queensland spirit embodied by the Maroons, its rugby league team. Many television commentators and reporters have done their stand-ups beside the statue of league great Wally Lewis, dubbed the Emperor of Lang Park. The statue survived the flood: a good omen, according to the pundits, that all will soon be well.

Bligh’s main metaphor, expressed at her sombre but stirring press conferences, evokes partisan State of Origin passions: a powerful yet simple division of them and us. Or, more subliminally, them — the aliens from, in particular, the southern states — as against us, dyed-in-the-wool Queenslanders.

Then, following her largely controlled yet emotionally appealing response to such a large-scale catastrophe, the Warwick-born and Queensland-educated Bligh said something of which Bjelke-Petersen and populist Pete would be proud. Evoking the deeply held notion of Queensland as the frontier state, and of Queenslanders as brave and bold frontiersmen and women fighting against the odds, Bligh in a very human touch announced: “This weather may break our hearts, but not our will.”

Bligh’s imagery tapped into deeply held folk memories of other Queensland floods. Thus all the Premier needed to do, once or twice, was to articulate the fact that the January floods were rivalled only by the Australia Day weekend deluge in Brisbane in 1974, which itself evoked vestigial memories of the two great, and even more deeply destructive, floods of February 1893 that, among other damage, washed away Brisbane’s Victoria Bridge.

In the Bible, the Talmud and the Koran, central to the story of the flood is the notion that it was only the God-fearing Noah who could negotiate the great deluge and thus save, for the world, humanity and all the animals. Similarly, the telegenic Queensland premier’s key statements about last month’s deluge implied some sort of unconscious notion of Bligh (whose forebears include William Bligh of mutiny on the Bounty and Rum Rebellion fame) and Queenslanders as the chosen people who can struggle against the odds and come out alive and somehow land on top. On a metaphorical Mt Ararat, as it were.

There seems no doubt that, in some important respects, Queensland is different from other states, with the possible exception of Western Australia. Queensland is by far the most decentralised mainland state. Its economy is built on agriculture and, like WA, on mining. To this is connected the fact that manufacturing in Queensland is much less important than in all southern states and that the professional class is much less important than in Melbourne, Sydney or Adelaide. Many Queenslanders are so remote from Brisbane, situated in the far southeast of the state, that they can’t relate to it as their capital at all. Also, until relatively recently, Queenslanders were less well educated than their southern counterparts.

What is it about the inhabitants of the sunshine state that, for a week in December 1899, they led the way in reforming politics by electing the world’s first Labor government, headed by Anderson Dawson from the dual electorate of Charters Towers? And that they elected, and re-elected, Australia’s only communist member of parliament, Fred Paterson, who was the state member for Bowen from 1944 until his seat was redistributed out of existence in 1950, and who, on St Patrick’s Day 1948, was bashed senseless by a plainclothes Queensland policeman, most likely on the direct orders of the autocratic, long-serving Labor premier E.G. (“Ned”) Hanlon. Plus the fact that in 1922, Labor premier and later federal treasurer, E.G. (“Red Ted”) Theodore managed to persuade a “suicide club” of 12 male members he appointed to the upper house to vote for the abolition of their Legislative Council and thus make Queensland the only mainland state with a unicameral parliament.

But those who want to argue that in 2011 Queenslanders are substantially different have to grapple with some unpalatable facts. Perhaps most important is the huge internal migration to Queensland. This means that up to one-third of citizens on the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast and Brisbane have moved from Victoria and NSW. And they bring with them their own sets of ideas and attitudes, only some of which may blend into those of born-and-bred Queenslanders.

Until the overthrow of Kevin Rudd by the then darling of the Victorian Left, Julia Gillard, some commentators argued that Queensland was the new centre of political gravity in Australia. Indeed, in spring 2008 a whole issue of the ‘Griffith Review’ was dedicated to this rather grandiose claim. It was largely predicated on the fact that the prime minister (Rudd), the federal Treasurer (Wayne Swan) and the Governor-General (Quentin Bryce) all hailed from Queensland. But since Gillard’s coup the political axis has markedly changed, with much of the fulcrum perhaps now situated in Victoria.

Just like the once prevalent myth that Australia was a land of virile and egalitarian bushmen who supported the underdog (when, in fact, women comprise more than 50 per cent of our population, most of us live on the urban eastern seaboard, and the gap between rich and poor has never been more marked), so too the notion that Queenslanders are fundamentally different contains much more myth than reality.

Yet it wasn’t so long ago that Bjelke-Petersen headed overseas on a trip to “sell Queensland” in which he and his very capable Liberal deputy premier, Llew Edwards, made it clear that first and foremost they were Queenslanders rather than Australians. The same applied to the gargantuan “minister for everything”, Russ Hinze, who had once boasted, “Let me draw the boundaries, Joh, and we’ll be in power forever!”

As the deeply flawed but passionately Queensland-centric Bjelke-Petersen so often said, not just to Queenslanders, but to Labor premiers and to Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam in particular: “Don’t you worry about that!”

And even though the Bjelke-Petersen regime has long gone, largely as a result of Tony Fitzgerald’s powerful inquiry into police and governmental corruption, politically at least, in our federated form of government, until the not so distant past senior Queensland politicians thought that there still remained some mileage in running a “Queensland for Queenslanders” and a Queensland v Canberra line. But since Labor has been in government federally, this hasn’t had anywhere near as much cachet for Labor premiers in Queensland as it used to for the New Zealand-born Bjelke-Petersen and his conservative forebears, including Country Party premier “Honest” Frank Nicklin.

As for Bligh, she’d probably be horrified by comparisons with infamous Country-National Party figures of the corrupt and authoritarian past. However, if not in public, she may nevertheless have been a closet admirer of their passion for the Sunshine State and for all things Queensland. Right now, she is rallying Queenslanders the way Bjelke-Petersen did when he regularly fed the chooks, and the way the hugely successful and media savvy Beattie did immediately before he handed Bligh the Queensland premiership on a platter.

And it’s doing Bligh no harm. Almost all commentators and the general public agree that she has been an outstanding leader at a time of monumental crisis. With Julia Gillard’s performances during the floods coming a long second to Bligh, many tweets have called for her to become the next prime minister and almost everyone in the nation has been inspired and moved by her defiance and compassion in the face of adversity. She has fought back tears to declare that Queenslanders may be down but not out and, in the process, radically turned around her personal popularity rating which, immediately before the floods, stood at 28 per cent and was significantly lower than that of Opposition Leader John Paul Langbroek, who has been all but invisible during the flood crisis.

Thus, although Bligh may not have definitely saved the good ship Labor for next year’s state election, her resolutely Queensland-centric approach has certainly ensured that there will be no challenge to her leadership, which was the talk around Brisbane’s George Street immediately before the floods.

Perversely, at least as far as the Premier’s parliamentary career is concerned, this colossal and continuing human and fiscal-economic crisis has proved to be a godsend.

Bligh’s consistently first-rate performance during the great deluge may have been politically astute, although it seems clear that there was, and is, little or no contrivance involved. It has been a positively Churchillian stand, coming straight from her heart and head, unmediated by spin doctors or party political media monitors. Cometh the hour, cometh the woman.

As a 21st-century, Queensland-based Boadicea, Bligh has tapped into the fundamental myth, however wrongly based in fact, that Queenslanders are a breed apart, a far-flung tribe that can reclaim the promised land despite all and any adversity. This is a mythology various peoples have developed over the ages to reassure and inspire themselves. Its stirring stuff and can also be claimed to exhibit the spirit of the Aussie battler, the Anzac ethos, the spirit that supposedly embodies the best of us all.

It’s our modern myth. And right now, in the vast state of Queensland, in what was previously a politically divided state, the citizens far and wide are united in their belief that, with enough grit and determination, they can overcome catastrophic natural disasters and any other adversities.

For now, we can sympathise with Queensland and Queenslanders and lend moral support to their visionary self-belief. In the future, psychologists and philosophers will see the events of January 2011 as a case study of humans in extremis and how they can survive catastrophes. Who knows to what use we may have to put this knowledge in the brave new world of the 21st century?

The Australian Literary Review, Wednesday February 2, 2011

Both these diaries – from the lead-up to the 2010 federal election campaign to its nail-biting finale – are based on notes that each author made every night and day during this fascinating period of Australian political history. Both books in large part deal with the replacement of Rudd as Labor prime minister by the supposed “darling of the left”, Julia Gillard, and the pivotal role in Rudd’s overthrow by factional heavyweights in the trade union movement and the Australian Workers Union in particular. Indeed, both diaries focus on the crucial role of Paul Howes, as national secretary of the AWU, in engineering Rudd’s demise and replacing him with Gillard.

It is fascinating to compare Bob Ellis’s insightful account with that of Howes. On Lateline, the AWU boss was the first to appear in the media saying that he and the other leaders of his powerful union “took the decision this afternoon that we should throw our support behind Julia Gillard for the leadership of the party”. Ellis claims that on that night, Howes “changed history, changed it incontestably”. In contrast, Howes (wrongly in my opinion) underplays his role in the whole affair. “Would that I had such power,” he writes. “The truth is, I do not. The power was in the hands of the caucus, and they wielded it, not seeking or needing any individual’s imprimatur.”

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While both these revealing diaries cover the intimate details of the election, both keep circling back to Rudd’s role and what might have been had he remained as prime minister and hence as Labor leader.

At the outset, Howes concedes that he does “not have Bob Ellis’s flair for narrative, nor his feel for prose”. Maybe so. But, then again, he doesn’t suffer from Ellis’s meandering narcissism, which often makes Suddenly, Last Winter so Ellis-centred and self-absorbed.

Unlike Ellis’s tome, Howes’s book is simply written and often extremely funny. The title harks back to a time when Alan “The Red Fox” Reid engineered the famous March 1963 photographs of then Labor leaders Arthur Calwell and Gough Whitlam standing under a lamppost outside Canberra’s Hotel Kingston, where the federal Labor Party conference was meeting, waiting to be told what was crucial Labor Party policy. A large part of the reason that Robert Menzies won the 1963 election was because of a constant reference by the conservative coalition to the ALP being run by “36 unelected faceless men”. In fact, there was one woman – from Tasmania.

Unsurprisingly, in 2010 the federal coalition also made much of the parliamentary leadership of the contemporary ALP being in thrall to a group of largely “faceless men” who were little known to the citizenry at large. Both Ellis and Howes give some credence to this claim. Both deal with the highs and lows, the leaks and monumental strategic blunders that characterised Labor’s campaign. And both, for different reasons, seem genuinely affectionate towards the silver-haired, hugely hatted independent maverick from North Queensland, Bob Katter.

Ellis is kinder to Rudd and much more critical of Gillard than is Howes, who seems more sanguine about the immediate future of Labor under Gillard. Ellis adroitly highlights the wayward course of a beloved party founded in 1891 as a result of the failure of direct action by the striking shearers. Yet at the heart of both diaries is the question of whether a federal ALP under Rudd would have performed better against the highly focused Tony Abbott than did Gillard. For many commentators, the jury may still be out. But for my money, the answer is clear and in accord with the blunt assessment of a former Labor premier of Queensland, the popular Peter Beattie.

As recorded in Confessions of a Faceless Man, on election night, over an alcoholic drink or two, Beattie and Howes dissected what had gone wrong with federal Labor. Speaking of Rudd, Beattie unambiguously told the AWU powerbroker that “that bloke stuffed up the Goss government, stuffed up his own government and during the election did his best to stuff up Julia’s government. No one should ever forget the damage that he has done.” The fact that Rudd couldn’t garner more than 20 votes out of a caucus of 119 demonstrated, Beattie said, “the lack of faith that the parliamentary party had in him”.

And just in case anyone thinks the huge backlash against Labor in Queensland was primarily because Rudd was replaced so rudely, it is important to realise that the swing against him in his Brisbane-based seat of Griffith was more than 9 per cent. Not much sympathy there. Yet as Ellis so often repeats in his sometimes infuriatingly indulgent book: “And so it goes.”

Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at Griffith University, Ross Fitzgerald is the co-author of Alan (“The Red Fox”) Reid.

CONFESSIONS OF A FACELESS MAN: INSIDE CAMPAIGN 2010
Paul Howes
Melbourne University Press, 250pp, $24.95

SUDDENLY, LAST WINTER: AN ELECTION DIARY
Bob Ellis
Viking, 392pp, $32.95

Spectrum, SMH, 4 December, 2010

In the main, this four hundred page political biography of d’Alpuget’s silver- haired husband is well written and even handed. A hagiography it isn’t, which means that, as well as his achievements, a number of the PM’s mistakes are highlighted. These include the blatant ministerial mistreatment, after the 1990 election victory, which he largely engineered, of the NSW Right numbers man, Senator Graham Richardson, who as a result then became a strong supporter of Paul Keating’s long-held aim of supplanting Hawke in the Lodge.

Actually, d’Alpuget reminds us that, for all his personal and political weaknesses and venalities, Richardson was a fine, and passionately committed, Minister for the Environment, who after helicoptering “over some of the Tasmanian forests that both the Liberal and Labor parties in Tasmania were keen to log”, had been convinced by the conservationist (and later Greens senator) Bob Brown of the urgent need to protect them. By the time they arrived back in Hobart, the Senator was a convert, intending to become a warrior for Brown’s cause. In his memoir, ‘Whatever It Takes’, Richardson wrote: “That was a bad day for the logging industry in Australia but a very good one for me, the environmental movement and the Labor Party. It didn’t take too long to work out that we had a perfect convergence: what was right was also popular.”

Indeed it was Richardson who realised that, by the time of the 1990 federal election, electoral politics had to be done differently and in a particular way, namely that the votes to win were the green preferences. According to d’Alpuget, this election would “collect people’s dreams and unconscious wishes, as elections always do, but quietly, in marginal electorates. Slowly and silently, the tens of thousands of people in ‘the holding paddock’ of the marginals were about to push the (Hawke) government back into office by voting Labor second.”

d’Alpuget is spot on in her analysis of Richardson who “always promoted himself as a tough operator, which the Left took at face value, and loathed.” But, she argues, there was “a softer, genuinely empathetic side to him”, best seen when he was Minister for Health and became, in the words of the head of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Mike Codd, “passionate about Aboriginal health. Genuinely passionate. He could have achieved an awful lot in that portfolio, but he had to resign.” His resignation was due to scandal and, as d’Alpuget aptly concludes, “the shadow of scandal seemed to be Richardson’s kismet, pursuing him into his seventh decade.”

Although she cannot hide her sympathies, it seems to me that d’Alpuget is extremely insightful comparing Hawke and Keating – the self-described ‘Placido Domingo of Australian politics’. It is hard to disagree with her contention that much of the latter’s problem as a politician was his introversion. Thus while with intimates Keating was “warm, affectionate and funny, with strangers he was shy and even nervous.” d’Alpuget tellingly recounts how a journalist, walking with him through a crowd, heard Keating mutter, ‘Don’t make eye contact! Don’t look at them. Just keep going.’
By contrast, Hawke was “forever eager to meet people, to stop, shake hands, tell a joke, ruffle the hair of a child. He loved ‘the mob’ and exuded the disarming conviction that every stranger would like him.” In contrast, Hawke believed that, for many years, Keating “not only did not love the Australian people, as he, Hawke did, but actually rather despised them.”

It is a sign of the power of her analysis that d’Alpuget convinces this reviewer that Hawke’s huge strength as PM was that he deeply loved the Australian people, and believed in their goodness. At the time, this was reciprocated in spades. Thus even during the economic crisis of 1986 he was still so popular “that at one Sydney shopping centre a crowd gathered in such a surge that a Hawke staffer feared there had been an accident.” Inquiring what had happened, the staffer was simply told: ‘We’re here to see the Prime Minister!’

When asked to explain Hawke’s great election victory in 1987, the s unrivalled Labor Party chronicler and speechwriter , Graham Freudenberg, remarked that “there’s never been a prime minister who enjoyed the job, had sheer joy in it, as much as Bob. He exuded the spirit of fun and sheer zest for it.” Freudenberg explained it thus: “I don’t mean having power and the appurtenances, which of course he enjoyed, he loved. But just the sheer joy of being prime minister for THIS PEOPLE. The Australians.”

In this rivetting book on Hawke, there are the occasional inaccuracies. For example, in chapter 7 Douglas Sturkey, a long-time member of the diplomatic staff of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, who in 1990 succeeded Sir David Smith as Official Secretary to the Governor-General of Australia is wrongly referred to as Doug Sterkey.

More than balanced against this is that d’Alpuget’s biography is a genuinely fine read. Fittingly perhaps, some of the best writing in ‘HAWKE: THE PRIME MINISTER’ concerns the fundamentally ludicrous Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen for PM campaign. d’Alpuget deftly explores the way in which Joh and his ‘white shoe brigade’ played right into the PMs hands and against the fortunes of John Winston Howard who, in a later incarnation, was to rival Bob Hawke’s populist appeal.

Blanche d’Alpuget, ‘HAWKE: THE PRIME MINISTER’, Melbourne University Press, 2010, 401pp, $54.99.
By Ross Fitzgerald, Sydney Morning Herald, August 7-8, 2010, Spectrum pp 32-33.

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