The Throttle Grip Around Labor’s Throat

Within about a year, we fortunate Australians face the constitutional inevitability of a federal election. Today we groan under a government lost in lies, mired in muddle, corruption and incompetence, and led by a shabbily discredited prime minister, frantically clinging to the wreckage of a once-respected high office which she has not merely failed, but soiled.

But we are lucky citizens, in that our basic law provides us with a civil and peaceful remedy for present ills, without violence and revolution.

In idle hours of recent weeks I have been speculating, leisurely and at large, on just what may await us in the months ahead, as election campaigning rises (no doubt unedifyingly) to its climax. My firm conclusion (however useless!) is that anything might happen. I never knew such a time when the long-accepted basics of Australian politics had become so plastic. They seem largely to have been flung into the furnace to be re-forged; but what will emerge from under the new blacksmith’s hammer is obscure. Even the terms of definition are wobbly: Do the expressions “left-wing”, “right-wing” and “progressive” convey anything still reasonably clear? Does “green” connote the old dears in Vaucluse and South Yarra who “adore the magpies singing in my back garden”? Or does “green” suggest authoritarian ideologues, foaming with anti-Semitism and pseudo-fascistic fantasies? You tell me.

We all recall the trade unions’ advertising pitch to the voters in 2007: well timed, cunningly crafted and hugely funded, it undoubtedly played its part in turning out John Howard’s government, and in ushering in Rudd–Gillard. Surely, for the looming stoush, the unions will stand staunch and ready, much as last time?

No such thing! The union movement now pres­ents itself in bitter disorder; treacherous bet­ween its own many internal divisions; Machiavellian in its engagements with the equally slippery factions of the Labor Party caucus; hopelessly tainted in the public eye for frauds and dodgy dealings with the funds of its own rank-and-file members.

The trade unions occupy a curious place in the Australian polity. With the notable exception of some years under Bob Hawke, they have never really meshed in smoothly or functionally with our larger body-politic, in the belly of which they lodge now like a tapeworm, never short of a feed. The many union nominees to official governmental boards and committees are little more than tokenism and opportunism at work. 

The passage of over seventy years has not dulled the sting of rage and disillusion I felt one night in 1942, in a North Queensland port. (I have written elsewhere about this demoralising experience.) I was aboard a troopship carrying my army unit to Port Moresby, which was already under regular bombardment from Japanese aircraft; Kokoda was just working up, and we were sent as part of an effort to strengthen Moresby’s frail defences. In the warm night, we soldiers lined the rails watching the wharfies on the dock below, as by floodlight they loaded sides of mutton to go north as rations for the troops (including ourselves). As their current shift neared its end, we saw that movement of carcases into the ship’s holds had ceased. Instead, with their own knives, the wharf labourers were blatantly carving up the sides into quarters, each to be slipped into a clean sugarbag, and laid neatly in piles on the dock. These would shortly “walk” off the wharves, as so many weekend roasts for wharfies’ families, or as potential stock replenishments for the North Queensland black market.

With a great roar of rage, the troops rushed to the gangways: we’d clean up this racket, quick-smart! Our rush was barred by our senior NCOs, and our commanding officer, whom we liked and respected, addressed us quietly: “Boys,” (and we were only boys) “what you all see down there is disgusting, and every one of them should be shot where he stands. But if we harm a hair on those bastards’ heads, believe me, their union will close down every port in Australia, and that will be even worse for our war effort. Now go below at once, every one of you, and go to bed.”

And we obeyed him.

When, in recent years, the waterside workers were so comprehensively whipped on the Melbourne docks by Patricks Stevedores, I rejoiced with a savage and un-Christian schadenfreude: Serve the bastards right! Theirs was the trade union that stole the food out of the mouths of young soldiers going north, where many fell in the service of Australia. 

A kind Quadrant reader offers us the chance to see (among much else) how our trade unions, and the Labor government which supposedly ran Australia, were viewed and valued by our allies; this benefactor recently sent me a copy of the autobiography of US Brigadier General Elliott R. Thorpe, who was General Douglas MacArthur’s chief of counter-intelligence throughout most of the Pacific war against Japan. Thorpe, an old-time soldier, fought for his country in both First and Second world wars. Though I never met him, he strikes me from his writings to be of judicious temperament—quite unlike some senior US officers who (with justification in some cases) harboured powerful anti-Australian prejudices. His book is titled East Wind, Rain, a reference harking back to Japanese radio code for an impending surprise attack.

His Part Four—“Australia 1942–44”—comprises forty-six pages, not all of which contain material calculated to swell Australian complacency. Any intending reader is warned that the text has faults; perhaps at times the general relied a little overmuch on memory, but my good opinion remains firm of his bona fides and integrity.      

There were, as we say, “no flies on Thorpe”. He promptly assessed as mediocre the quality and the qualifications of most of the ministers serving under Prime Minister John Curtin, but he rated a certain “locomotive driver” highly—a shame he did not name the admirable J.B. Chifley. And he spotted that our Foreign Minister, Bert Evatt, was mad, or heading that way.

He states (on page 96) that “the Australian Labor leaders gave lip service to supporting the war effort, but also with the first thought of protecting trade unionism from any losses”. The Australian government made General MacArthur agree that US troops would never load or unload ships in Australian ports: this in wartime, with deadly peril just across Torres Strait! Many ships lay idle for days. When the US provost marshal in Brisbane acted against serious looting of cargo (including, on a single occasion, 800 cartons of cigarettes intended for serving American troops) the wharfies turned to sabotage for their revenge. Four modern fighter aircraft, desperately needed for the protection of Port Moresby, were being carried as deck cargo. The waterside workers smashed them all to useless scrap.

Union hold-ups were not confined to the waterfront. There was a strike of steelworkers in Newcastle, over a girl employed in a local butcher shop. Her tender attention to the needs of many a steelworker left little time for her actual job, and the butcher sacked her. Strike!

No more steel would be produced until the butcher re-hired her, which he did, after a nervous cabinet minister made a special trip from Canberra to “smooth things over”. After all that, three days later, the girl chucked her job, and moved to Sydney.

A strike on the coalfields by some 400 miners followed the unexplained disappearance of one miner’s pair of pants while he was underground. An offer by the mine management to provide a new pair of pants was rejected, then shortly afterwards accepted. Thousands of tons of coal vital for our war needs had been lost.

Thorpe gives no account of business (as opposed to trade unions) disgracefully and disloyally rorting wartime conditions to feather their own nests, extorting outrageous profit from the nation. One who did was Sir Frank Beaurepaire, known chiefly as a philanthropic Olympic swimming champion and genial Lord Mayor of Melbourne. His Olympic Cables company was a major supplier to the forces of copper wire, used in prodigious quantities for field telephone communications. The prices charged by Olympic were found to be unconscionable, and the government appointed R.R. Sholl QC to investigate and report. (Sholl was later appointed a judge of the Victorian Supreme Court.) His report into the Olympic Cables matter was never released officially, but I have seen it, and read it very carefully. For reasons of “wartime morale” it was resolved that no formal proceedings such as criminal charges should be laid, but the Beaurepaire interests “voluntarily” disgorged a vast sum of millions of pounds in compensation to the Commonwealth.

One of the most trying jobs that regularly confronted a serving field signalman was “running out” yet another reel of “sig” wire, heavy and awkward, up (say) a steep New Guinea mountain ridge, knee-deep in mud and beset by the jungle’s mosquitoes. Years later, in the eponymous Beaurepaire pool at Melbourne University, an old soldier mate said: “I get one back on Beaurepaire every time I swim here. I piss in it.” He had been a sig.

But back to trade unions.

I am no hardnosed union-hater, and early saw for myself that workers often need protection from the boss. Only later did I realise how often some of them needed protection just as much from their own rapacious union officials.

Upon discharge from the army in 1945, I worked as a labourer at Starvation Creek sawmill, high in the Victorian Alps above Warburton, and sixteen miles distant from any vehicular road. Naturally, I joined the Timber Workers Union, reflecting that, before he became prime minister in 1941, my revered John Curtin had led this union.

To a place so remote and so painful to reach, it was small wonder that the government boiler inspector could miss an inspection, and then perhaps another visit … But our dedicated local union organiser kept them to their duty. An explosion of the donkey engine’s boiler could have reduced our crew of about twelve to mincemeat, and it needed to be shut down and cooled off to permit internal inspection at regular intervals—a vital safety measure; our union saw that it happened. The mill owners never showed the slightest interest in such measures. 

Anyone who contemplates voting Labor in the coming election should understand that they are voting also for the trade unions; like it or not, you can’t have one without the other. The unions created the Labor Party back in the nineteenth century, with a built-in iron throttle-grip around the party’s throat. The hold remains, despite Simon Crean’s earnest but only partly successful efforts to reform the relationship during his term as Labor leader.

The noxious nature of the nexus is perfectly illustrated by the earlier activities of our prime minister. As a young lawyer already holding keen ambitions of a Labor parliamentary career, she worked on trade union business in the large Melbourne law practice of Slater & Gordon. At her appalling press conference in Canberra late in August, she described part of her work: she set up for trade unions “re-election funds, slush funds, whatever …”

What?

That insouciant “whatever”—you know, any old odd jobs the unions wanted fixed—is typical of Julia in spin and fudge mode. But, for decades, “slush fund” has had a clear, unambiguous (and blunt) meaning and definition, to be found through a series of fine, authoritative Oxford dictionaries. Let me quote verbatim from the Compact Oxford English Dictionary—that chunky little desk-mate that should never be more than inches away from any writer’s (or politician’s) fingertips:

Slush fund [noun] a reserve of money used for underhand or dishonest purposes especially political bribery. 

So that’s OK for our prime minister, is it?

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of that whole bizarre and disingenuous press conference was that not one of the press poodles in the gallery sprang upon Julia’s confession that “underhand or dishonest purposes” were simply part of her daily bread.

Maybe there is an even gloomier conclusion, drawn from every day’s paper. Younger journalists increasingly use words which, from the contexts, it is clear that they do not understand. Let us conclude this already sombre piece with one final, despairing and even deeper dive: “educated” under decadent modern principles (“no evil rote learning here”), they don’t know how to consult a dictionary?