Communism and the Labor Movement – Bob Carr

On Tuesday 24 May 2011, former NSW premier Bob Carr joined writer and former political adviser Mark Aarons to address The Sydney Institute for a discussion on the left’s involvement in the history of the Labor Party, in particular the influence on Labor and development of the Australian Communist Party. Bob Carr, Premier of New South Wales from 1995–2005, has been a member of the Australian Labor Party since he was sixteen. Bob Carr’s long study of politics and his well recognised lifetime of reading led to his recent successful book My Reading Life.

COMMUNISM AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT

BOB CARR

This is extraordinary. We’re a group of people in the heart of Sydney, reflecting 60 years after the event on things that were so passionately real to the Australians of the 1940s, 1950s and the early 1960s.

We are talking tonight of what were most important issues in the lives of many over those decades. For example, a committed member of the Communist Party of Australia seeking to have a Socialist Australia, a worker’s Australia; or perhaps a member of the National Civic Council, who was beginning to become infected with the notion of small rural land-holders and building Catholic political action to prevent a Stalinist Australia. Their battleground very largely was a sprawling entity, an invention of the 1890s, a ramshackle, improvised entity, the Australian Labor Party.

These ideological battles were being fought out because Labor was a trade union party. Not a Social Democratic Party but a Trade Union Party where 70 per cent of the delegates at its conferences came out of the trade union movement. These unions would be controlled by the Communist Party secretary, or by a committed opponent of the Communists who may have been a member of B A Santamaria’s movement. This was a conflict that occupied the living thoughts of Australians of that era and now it’s faded.

I joined the Australian Labor Party when I was fifteen, in 1963. I joined a little branch called the Malabar South Matraville branch. It met in a Malabar primary school. The events we’re talking about today are as far from us as something happening in 1903 would have been to me, as a fifteen year old, joining Malabar branch. It’s nice just to reflect on the tricks and the distortions of history.

What happened in that cataclysmic Labor split of the 1950s is explained by some stand out factors. We’re indebted to Mark Aarons for writing what might have been at times a painful account of his family’s history. We’re indebted to Mark for making it very clear that the Communist Party that we’re talking about was absolutely wedded to the Soviet Union. Read his book, it’s fascinating; it’s part of the history I’m trying to summon up. So much so, that in one episode in Mark’s book, there was a car arriving at the back yard of the family home in Fairfield, loaded with Australian currency, but sent via a Romanian trade union on instructions from Moscow, to keep the Communist Party of Australia going as an entity.

The CPA was bolstered with funds handed out from Moscow. Now if I said this in another context, Labor party people would be saying “Carr must have been influenced by Santamaria.” But this is the truth of the matter. The CPA was a Stalinist party in that it was taking money from Moscow. And Mark is absolutely candid and clear eyed about this as well.

In the 1940s the CPA was embedded in Soviet espionage activities in Australia. From Mark Aarons and other sources we now know that those activities were significant. There were communist spies in the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra. They were getting material to the KGB representative in Sydney, in his guise as a TASS (Telegraphic Agency of the Soviet Union) correspondent he had an office in King’s Cross and there were members of the Australian Communist Party helping the process along. One of them was a figure in Australian literature, Katharine Susannah Prichard. There were others as well. This is significant. The most important part of Mark’s book is the account of his late father sitting down with Wally Clayton with a tape recorder – the tape was nearly lost. It’s a fascinating story about getting Wally to more or less admit that he, as a member of the Communist Party of Australia, was linked into espionage for the Soviet Embassy.

This is a very important part of Australian history because it represents a vindication of the Petrov Commission. It suggests that Menzies, perhaps against all his instincts, was not an opportunist. In fact, he was more right than wrong in what he said about Soviet espionage in Australia. Labor-inclined historians are wrong to say the Petrov Commission was a creation, a manipulation by Menzies. Menzies certainly would not have regretted it. But not even he could have expected the Labor Party to have played the issue as appallingly as Labor’s leader at the time, Dr Bert Evatt, did.

It was a Marxist-Leninist party which means there was no democracy within the Communist Party, and it was very influential. All of the histories, no matter what side they come from, point to the significant degree of Communist leadership of the Australian Trade Union movement. It reached a peak in 1945 but continued in strategic industries long after that. So you’re looking at a different era, something that Australians now can’t envisage.

The Communist Party was very powerful. It was a Marxist-Leninist party, with no democracy within the party. It was a Stalinist Party, in the sense that it was wedded to leadership from Moscow. Moscow was the source of power, of instructions and of control. And by 1945, as Mark Aarons said tonight, it couldn’t believe it was winning the battle for the support of working class with the Australian Labor Party.

Frank Hardy wrote a propagandistic novel Power without Glory. This novel is pure CPA propaganda of this period, but a very compelling read. And I take Hardy seriously as a writer. In the book, there’s a small conversation between someone coaching a young recruit. The Communist is saying to the young recruit, “The day will come, when all the workers will support the Communist Party, and the Labor Party becomes the party of reaction and the Conservative Party will no longer exist.” A moment’s thought suggests what lunacy, what fantasy this was. As if the bourgeoisie, to use Marxist terminology, in the eastern suburbs of Sydney or on the leafy North Shore would say, “Well that’s it, the Australian Labor Party is the party for us, the old Conservatives fade away, we’d better get out there and support Evatt and Calwell battle off the Communists.” It was fantasy. But that was the old world, the old Australia that I’m trying to summon up tonight,. A different world, one hard for us to imagine.

The Labor Party was the battleground for both this Communist bid for power, and a certain Catholic reaction to it. Now we’ve got here tonight the expert, Gerard Henderson, on B A Santamaria and the Santamarian phenomenon – Santamaria’s ambiguous relationships with aspects of the church, their ambiguous relationships with him. Gerard’s reminded me that Santamaria did not control those anti-Evatt Labor members of the House of Representatives, whom Evatt took on. Therefore the split was avoidable. Santamaria wasn’t pulling those levers within the Labor Party. And Evatt drove those people out and wreaked his party entirely unnecessarily.

I’ll come to what that says about Evatt’s leadership in a moment. But this is what the whole episode says about the Australian Labor Party. Robert Murray in his book The Split, is very astute in summoning up this era. I recommend it to you. He talks at the start of the book about what the split says about the nature of the Labor Party; he says the Labor Party of the 1950s looked like, “a party not at home with its era”. He wrote of the human failings of nostalgia and pique. At branch meetings I can recall someone saying, “It’s just like the workers. We do everything for them, and they go off and become little capitalists. And they don’t vote for us.” At a branch meeting in that Malabar Primary School classroom, reflecting on the election defeat of 1963, someone with a non-English speaking background (Yugoslav actually), said, “They’re brainwashed, they come here and they think there’s only the party of Menzies.” Murray sums it up as “a party of nostalgia and pique”. After the defeat in the election of 1963, Les Haylen, the colourful Member for Parkes, said, “Young people don’t support us. They’ve been corrupted by rock ‘n roll and soda pop. Inebriated by soda pop and rock ‘n roll, they’re madly pro-American.” Pique and nostalgia captures it accurately.

Robert Murray, in The Split, goes to say that Labor despised intellectual discourse and doctrines, and believed in the efficacy of feeling in the pit of the stomach for social reform. It was a party without doctrine, and famously Labor. But, being without an ideology itself or even a coherent set of ideas, the Australian Labor Party was prey to intrusions by those who did have doctrines. The Marxists coming in from the Left and, in patches, the Santamarian forces trying to work up a reaction and to capture the Labor Party for aspects of Catholic social doctrine. Murray goes on to say that the occasional penetration of new ideas mostly from the Left, but occasionally from the Right, is apt to have had a more damaging effect than it deserved because of the hollowness of the centre.

The moderate base, the AWU, the people in cabinet in the old New South Wales, Queensland and Victorian Labor governments of those years didn’t have an ideology of their own. It’s not as if they were social democrats who knew that they were fighting for social reform, maybe a Marxist vision but imbued with democracy. On the other hand, fighting against Marxism-Leninism because their forebears had been on the streets of Berlin doing just that, did not make social democrats. Murray gets it right when he says Australian Labor’s style is overwhelmingly “rhetorical and emotional”.

I remember a state Labor Party conference where Arthur Augustus Calwell (Labor leader from 1960 through to Whitlam in 1967) stood on the lectern at Town Hall and said, “We are Labor because we are Australian, and Australian because we are Labor.” And we roared, we loved it. It used to summon up images of Curtin, Calwell and Fisher, and we stand with Britain until the last man the last shilling and every bit of Labor mythology.

The Labor style was emotional and rhetorical. Murray adds that it was also a party for the people of words and passion not carefully thought out, of conformity in the name of unity rather than original ideas. And, unlike the best ordered of the world’s electorally successful social democratic parties such as the Swedish social democrats or the Israeli Labor Party, the Australian Labour Party had little ability to absorb intellectuality into the social forces driving it. So the Communist Party ended up having more resonance in the ALP than it would otherwise have done. And this was a problem.

I have been criticised after raising Mark Aaron’s book for revealing that there were prominent Labor Party MPs who had tickets in the Communist Party. But this is significant because the CPA and its members have never admitted to this before. It is significant because Mark Aaron has produced the ASIO documents that confirm this. And it is significant because it shows the weakness of the ALP Left, and the failure of an indigenous or nativist left in Australia.

Take Jim Cairns. I read his speeches as a kid and was very excited when he appeared at the University of New South Wales ALP Club. I was going to listen to a celebrity at the Roundhouse speak at lunchtime about Vietnam. It quickly became clear to me that Jim Cairns was taking all of his material straight from the CPA. His line on Vietnam was that this was a civil war. It was not a civil war within Vietnam, only a civil war within south-Vietnam. The Cairns’ take was preposterous. Cairns praised Mao, Stalin, and Lenin as the leaders of world socialism. In one of his writings, Cairns referred to the elimination of the landlord class of Eastern Europe. The elimination of class? The elimination of the landlord class? This is a defence of gulags; this is a defence of mass graves. We now know this to be the case, but that’s the language Cairns used. You would not find, in Jim Cairns, a criticism of the Marxist-Leninist position.

I see Jim Cairns as a simple man. And ill-equipped to come so close to the leadership of Australia. Something that would have been acutely embarrassing for Australia was Cairns heading a Labor government at a time when the Communist Unions had locked Australia – into a so called nuclear free southern hemisphere. A nuclear free southern hemisphere, what does that mean? It means that American ships are prevented from entering the Southern hemisphere. It means the sort of crisis that had New Zealand out of its alliance with the United States. It means no US ships in our ports. This was rammed into ALP policy by the left in the early 1960s. The combination of that with a Cairns leadership of Australia, is a troubling alternative history. It didn’t happen. And why not? The person responsible is 95 and might not be with us much longer. I’m referring to Edward Gough Whitlam.

People forget what Whitlam’s role was in the 1960s. It was to stand up to the Victorian central executive of the Labor Party. To say you’ll not control this party. He was to defy Joe Chamberlain, the national secretary of the ALP, and take him on. And Whitlam had made it impossible for the party to expel him, as the left wanted to, because he kept going to Queensland and winning by-elections. And coming back and saying to the party, you kick me out and there goes your chance of electoral success. Some people controlling the Queensland ALP said yes, he’s right, and voted not to expel Whitlam when he was deputy leader.

As we contemplate the state of the Labor Party and the revelations that Mark Aarons has put on the record, we should upgrade Whitlam’s historical reputation because he ended left union control of large parts of the Australian Labor Party by those with secret tickets to the Australian Communist Party in their back pockets.

I’ll conclude by saying this. As we review this history, it’s a vindication of Whitlam, and the NSW Labor Right. Overall, you’ve got to say the NSW Labor Party was right, and it did earn its place in history by turning up at ALP conferences from 1955, and through the 1960s into the 1970s, and voting down people whom we now know had secret membership of the Australian Communist Party. The NSW Right said, to these secret CPA members, you will not run the NSW Labor Party. That was John Ducker’s historical role. And he can be very, very proud of it, and so can the NSW Labor Right. Without that moderate balance in the Labor Party, in the mix of circumstances, the Communist Party energised factional influence would have had enormous power.

The whole Labor Party split of the 1950s represents a weakness in leadership. A political Leader has got to be able to straddle differences. A political leader has got to be nimble footed. Parnell was able to lead Irish Nationalism by being an advocate of independence in Ireland, and an advocate of home rule for Ireland when he was in the British Parliament. He straddled the irreconcilables. Franklin D Roosevelt was able to be acceptable to the White Supremacists of the South and to the city machines. He straddled the irreconcilable. That’s part of leadership. Sadly for the Australian Labor Party, in the 1950s, we had Doc Bert Evatt.