The Life and Career of Ray Evans

The political campaigner Ray Evans, who died in June, was best known for his dry economic views. He had a diverse group of acquaintances who inhabited interlocking networks, many of which had been created by Ray himself.

In the early 1960s Ray was part of a loose Melbourne grouping of people in their mid-twenties who were either doing late courses or still mixing in university circles. He was a young engineer who on weekends ran an open house in his large rambling abode in North Carlton. He and his wife Marion had a young family with lots of children. People with political and affiliated interests would drop by to chat in a relaxed way about their current passions, Barry Jones being among the regulars. Many were centre-right members of the ALP trying to dislodge the dominant but unrepresentative Bill Hartley-Socialist Left cabal, a necessary precondition for Labor gaining office at federal and state level. Though a graduate engineer, Ray became a member of the Fuel and Fodder Workers Union so he could participate as a delegate at annual ALP and Trades Hall conferences. But when the Federal ALP Member for Batman, Captain Benson, was expelled by the Hartleyites, Ray pulled up stumps on the ALP (and as it turned out on a party political career, with the exception of a tilt at the state seat of Bellarine for the DLP ), and formed a breakaway Independent Labor group to help Benson retain his seat. This was I think the first of many organisations Ray formed as the need arose.

Ray first came to general prominence when he joined the Western Mining Corporation, writing Hugh Morgan’s speeches and providing the company with a particular media and public relations strategy. Before this he had worked as an engineer in the State Electricity Commission in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley. This gave him an insight into a workplace in which bosses and workers had set up a cosy, closed-shop arrangement where overmanning practices and inflated salaries were endemic, all at the expense of the public. He had then moved to the Gordon Institute at Geelong which morphed into Deakin University; here he witnessed featherbedding and rent-seeking activities (his terms) and other forms of self-protection from measurable, real-world criteria. In a talk on Ray Evans’s career David Kemp pointed out that these experiences contributed greatly in turning Ray into a pioneering dry in the later 1970s, at about the same time as Gerard Henderson, Wolfgang Kasper, John Stone, Des Moore and others.

At the time Bob Hawke was getting almost daily media coverage and adulation as he bagged big business and pushed the union barrow as President of the ACTU. Big corporations like the mining companies, which were contributing mightily to our national prosperity, had no public voice. Ray devised the strategy of getting Hugh Morgan, CEO of Western Mining, to make a series of provocative statements (that came easily to Ray) on mining, the economy, Aboriginal matters and Australia’s place in the larger scheme of things. These talks were designed to elicit howls of outraged protest from the various anti-progress lobbies, which they did. Hugh Morgan gained as a result a high media profile and had to be included, as the authorised “voice from the Right”, so to speak, in all subsequent controversies in these areas. Other mining companies noticed the success of this campaign and formed with Ray a small working group to expand the strategy, and other sectors of industry followed the lead. This was a significant achievement.

Emboldened by this success, Ray went after bigger fish. The basic wage formulated by Justice Higgins in the Harvester case is embedded in our patriotic DNA as the institutionalisation of our notion of a “fair go”, and as Australia’s unique contribution to industrial relations on the world stage. In a perceptive piece of historical analysis Paul Kelly in The End of Certainty saw it as one of the pillars of the Deakinite settlement arrived at during the first decade after Federation, a consensus that lasted till the 1960s. Ray was determined to pull one of those pillars down by arguing that the Harvester decision inaugurated an industrial relations system where determinations were arrived at by top-down tribunals rather than by market forces, and where unrealistic awards and regulations proliferated to the detriment of the overall economy. The minimum wage weakened the employment prospects of the most needy workers, thus defeating its original intention. Ray became a full-blown dry, advocating smaller government, less regulation, freer trade and an end to protective barriers. At this stage Bert Kelly MHR, the Modest Member from rural South Australia, was his mentor and hero. Kenneth Minogue later filled the role. By that stage Ray’s critique had gone well beyond industrial relations—self-interested lobbies and politically correct bureaucrats were in his view clogging the public arteries by distorting debate across the board.

After leaving the ALP, Ray became a campaigner rather than a political activist. He didn’t protest against deformations in the political realm, he acted to correct them. When an issue arose he formed an organisation designed to correct the problem. He understood that organisations were more powerful than individuals can be; the media, politicians and other public figures had to take notice of them, as they represented segments of organised public opinion. By the end the number of organisations he founded was as long as your arm. The following come to mind, and this list is not complete: the Galatians, the Australian Council for Educational Standards, the Bennelong Society, the Turks Head Club, the H.R. Nicholls Society, the Samuel Griffith Society and the Lavoisier Group. He was a man for all seasons except climate change.

Ray also came to wield considerable influence through his constant dealings with a wide range of influential figures. He was not a backroom operator nor an eminence grise (he wanted his views to be widely known), but rather a partisan who utilised to the full the opportunities available to all citizens in a free and open polity. The narrator in Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby realises that he knows only one or two sides of the hero’s multi-faceted activities. Similarly when dealing with Ray on a specific issue, you realised that to him this was only one passion among many, and you sometimes by chance happened to get a glimpse of other worlds of his well beyond your ken. He shared this particular trait with other Melbourne figures such as B.A. Santamaria, Dinny O’Hearn and Brian Buckley. All of us saw Ray’s world from a very limited perspective.

Ray was not so much a driven person, as one whose drive, his pre-eminent characteristic, was internally generated. He could rev himself up for the tasks he constantly allotted himself. He had a completely formed ideological worldview which he deployed with great energy. Though it seemed to us that he operated in many diverse areas, to him it was all one. As a result he was confident and assertive in his ideas, and seemed to have few doubts. To say his approach was direct is an understatement—he often aimed for the knockout blow as a first resort. Many people thought him an extremist, but in fact he had the intellectual capacity to take his views to their logical conclusion. In this sense he was a purist, and an idealist. This made him on any particular issue basically unsatisfiable. For instance he used to say: “I too disagree with John Howard’s WorkChoices—he didn’t go nearly far enough!” He thought many of his acquaintances who generally shared his views but didn’t go all the way with Ray wimped out on the crucial issues.

His confidence made him at times brusque in argument, but he was decent and never to my knowledge aggressive. He encouraged many people early in their careers to take the plunge, to publish their perhaps unfashionable views, and to face the music, as he had. He was extremely courageous, in that he knew his views would be treated with ridicule by large sections of the so-called thinking public. Ostracism didn’t knock a feather off him, nor diminish his drive.

He was a self-starter in another sense too. He seemed to have worked out all his ideas from scratch, from experience. In promoting his dry economic views, for example, he hardly ever made reference to Friedman, Hayek and other greats in that field. Ray was not troubled by the “anxiety of influence”. Any field these days has a massive intellectual genealogy, which can be enlightening but also a burden to those who come after. Ray did not fish in these waters. This made him an original figure, with a combination of talents which fitted no category and was not seen in others. In his later years his fierceness did not lessen; he was looked after with great attention by his second wife Jill, and as his health declined he liked to have long sessions of elevated gossip recalling epic battles of the past, unusual characters he had come across, and memorable incidents. In this mood he could be quite genial.

Though known to his friends and adversaries for his economic and political activities, Ray was au fond a person with a religious disposition and cast of mind. Unlike in politics, where after the ALP he never joined another party, he undertook a lifelong pilgrimage searching for a religious home, moving by stages from the Methodism in which he had been reared to Anglicanism, and then to Anglo-Catholicism. His recent misgivings about the Anglican Church could be summed up in two words: Rowan Williams. He was contemplating in his last years moving on to the new Catholic Ordinariate set up for dissatisfied Anglicans, but never took the final plunge. Ray would have admired the way the Catholic Church conducts its own industrial relations. Its priests are paid below the minimum wage for their training and qualifications, they get no penalty rates though most of their work is at weekends, they are un-unionised, they can’t down tools and stop saying Mass on days when the temperature creeps over thirty-five degrees, and they can’t sue their employer, as it is not entirely clear who their employer is. This situation should have been paradise enough for Ray, and reason for embracing the Catholics, apart from any religious considerations.

Ray set up a group, the Galatians, to give succour to traditionalist Protestant ministers of religion who, though in the majority in their congregations as far as their views went, were being marginalised by trendy clerics who had grabbed control of the ruling organs of their denominations. Ray retained from his Methodist background a strong dissenting strain in his personality, and an evangelical zeal for converts to his political crusades. About such people it is common (and easy) to say they have secularised their initial religious formation, but remarkably in Ray’s case he remained a deep practising Christian, so his original religious drives were not so much displaced as augmented. He was an ideal type of Max Weber’s Puritan who strives for worldly success as a token of hoped-for salvation.

Ray’s political and economic analyses were often underpinned by religious explanations. In his last great crusade, against the fashionable position on climate change, his basic interpretation was that the warmists, as he called them, were driven by a religioid apocalyptic fervor. (Mind you, Ray himself was no slouch when it came to painting apocalyptic scenarios.) If you look at his speeches and articles, time and time again he ransacked books like Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium documenting chiliastic heresies in Medieval and Reformation times, in which he saw the seeds of current madnesses. When Ray was giving a talk it was a benevolent joke among his friends to wait for his inevitable invocation of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which settled the wars of religion. That pact, thought Ray, was the crucial turning point in what was, to him, our recent history.

Ray leaves us with his reputation enhanced, and our understandings enhanced by his intellectual firepower.