REMEMBERING BRIAN HARRADINE – KEITH HARVEY

Brian Harradine was an Independent Senator for Tasmania from 1975-2004, and a former Labor stalwart and trade union official. Expelled from the ALP before entering parliament, he showed just what an independent can achieve. Harradine made governments stop, think and consult before they could legislate and act. Now his life has been recorded by Keith Harvey in Brian Harradine, as part of the Australian Biographical Monograph Series. Keith Harvey retired as a union organiser in 2011. His Memoirs of a Cold War Warrior was published by Connor Court in 2021. On Wednesday 29 November 2023, The Sydney Institute held a launch for Brian Harradine, with The Hon Tony Abbott. Due to weather disrupting flights from Melbourne Tony Abbott was not able to be there. However, Mr Abbott’s words for the proposed launch have been published in this issue.

REMEMBERING BRIAN HARRADINE

KEITH HARVEY

Thanks Gerard. And thank you, everybody, for coming tonight. Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation as traditional custodians of the land on which we are meeting tonight and pay my respects to their elders past and present.

Now, I’m not sure and I can’t remember whether acknowledgments of country were common when Brian Harradine was in public life, but I think he would approve of them. In the book, I’ve quoted a speech he made on reconciliation in 1988, when the federal parliament was meeting for the first time in its new building, the opening of which was timed to coincide with the bicentenary of European settlement of the continent.

Senator Brian Harradine then said, “Meeting in this new place, it is fitting that we acknowledge the fullness of human history in this land. This motion will stand as a statement of our commitment to national and individual reconciliation with the descendants of those who have suffered dispossession and dispersal in the wake of European and other settlement in 1788.” The view Brian had then, permeates his attitude and his dealings on the question of the Native Title legislation giving effect to the Wik decision.

My second job tonight was going to be to thank Tony Abbott for launching the book – but unfortunately, he has been prevented from getting to Sydney. But I would still like to thank him for his willingness to be here. I was surprised when Gerard suggested that he would be the appropriate person to do the launch. But there’s a lot of merit in that idea. Brian Harradine and Tony Abbott had similar views and were in the Parliament at the same time. And, of course, it’s an honour for any writer to have a former prime minister prepared to launch their book. It was also a mark of respect from Tony towards Brian Harradine, that he was prepared to do that.

This was going to be my best joke, but it’s not going to work at all now. Brian Harradine was expelled from the Labor Party in 1975, in some very unusual circumstances. It is also true that members of the Labor Party did tend to be subjected to expulsion from the party if they stood on what was called unity tickets, mainly in union elections – unity tickets between ALP members, and either members of the Communist Party or members of the DLP. My big joke was going to be that I was hoping to avoid expulsion from the Labor Party for being on a unity ticket with Tony Abbott here tonight.

But, for all that, thanks to Tony Abbott for being willing to launch the book. We’ll have to blame the Sydney weather rather than the Melbourne weather for his delay.

I would also like to thank Gerard Henderson for suggesting to me some time ago that I write this book. I didn’t really think I had a biography, even a modest one, in me. I was a little reluctant to commit myself to the project, but once I got into it, I found that the job was worth doing. I did know Brian. But as I got into my research, I thought, “Yes, this is a life really worth recording.”

I couldn’t find any life of Brian Harradine having been recorded in total, anywhere else – just bits and pieces written about him in various places. But nobody had sought to bring his life together from the earliest days, when he wrote to a Catholic magazine in South Australia at just six years old. The editor of the children’s page from that magazine said, in the words they used those days, “Our new king has obviously got a wonderful future, you should see how well he’s written his letter at the age of six.” So, Brian was active and interested in the world outside him from a very early age.

Brian Harradine’s life warrants a longer biography, but as biographies tend to be lengthy these days at around 600 pages, they are hard to get through for busy people. This Biographical Monograph series attempts to do it in capsule form, to make the essentials readable and provide an overview in a very accessible way. I was I was pleased to be able to do this.

I’d also like to thank Anne and Gerard for hosting tonight. One more thankyou is to Connor Court for publishing this series, and particularly the editor of the series up to date Scott Prasser who is with us tonight. Connor Court and Scott’s commitment to publishing this series of books and Scott’s unstinting efforts to edit all of these – free gratis and for nothing as I understand – is commendable.

Returning to Brian Harradine, as we should, he was an absolutely genuine Independent. Nobody controlled his vote. He was born in South Australia, in the regional town of Quorn. He emerged onto the public scene when John Maynes from the Clerks union, who had a dual role as an officer of the National Civic Council, asked him to work for the Federated Clerks Union in Tasmania in 1959, which Brian did. He took up that job with gusto. He was also, at one stage in the small state of Tasmania, an official of no less than 17 different unions. Tasmania was that sort of place.

Brian, however, was not just interested in Tasmania, or his life in Canberra, he was interested in the fate of peoples throughout the world. I did know Brian a little bit. And I’m going to tell you this story if you don’t mind me indulging a little. I did have a few interactions with Brian.

The first one that I remember was in 1982, when Brian was appointed as the chair of a Senate Committee of Inquiry into certain industrial relations legislation that the then Fraser government was seeking to put through the parliament. Some of the provisions of that legislation concerned, in particular, the Federated Clerks Union – the union in Tasmania Brian had first worked with and the union I was working with at the time, reporting to John Maynes, the national president of the Federated Clerks Union. We were concerned about some of the provisions of that legislation because it promoted industry-wide unionism, whereas the Clerks Union was a craft or an occupational union. John Maynes was attempting to leverage his personal relationship with Brian Harradine. None of which was improper, I assure you. But we thought we had a bit of an in there, and we were going to be able to, hopefully, influence Brian.

I prepared some 70-odd pages of submissions to send to Brian to help him with background information on this. But we were running late to get the information to him, and somebody said we should use the latest modern technology to send it. The latest modern technology in 1982 was, if you remember it, the fax machine. But we didn’t have one. Brian’s office in Canberra didn’t have one either. But we did know somebody who had a fax machine, and another senator in Canberra was prepared to receive this information and pass it on to Brian.

So, I prepared 70 pages worth of information and took it off to be faxed, only to find out that it took about three to four minutes per page to fax. It would have taken about four and a half hours to fax all that material to Brian. And a flight from Melbourne to Canberra took 50 minutes.

I do remember, later on, talking to Brian in the corridors of Parliament House about the inquiry and how it was going. It all came to nothing of course. The legislation wasn’t preceded with before the Fraser government was defeated, and Hawke came to power in 1983.

One of the most critical things about Brian is that he occupies a particular place in the political spectrum. In my opinion, it’s an appropriately balanced place. As John Howard said, both at his funeral and in his memoirs, Brian Harradine was at all times a Labor man. He found himself expelled from the Labor Party in very unusual circumstances, which I can’t go into tonight, but it is in the book.

But he was excluded from the ALP National Executive as early as 1968, for declaring that the friends of the Communists were trying to keep him from his seat. And that prediction came true. And he was kept off the executive even though the Tasmanian branch of the party kept electing him to the position. But he wasn’t allowed to serve on that body from 1968 to 1975, when he was expelled. But he was a Labor man at all times.

As I relate in the book, Brian Harradine was elected to the Senate in 1975 – as you know, in “The Dismissal” election. The parliament opened in February the following year. Of course, the first thing that happened was the Governor General’s speech, the Governor General being Sir John Kerr. The Labor Party boycotted his speech. So, there was going to be nobody sitting on the opposition benches. Brian Harradine took it upon himself, as he considered himself to be the only Labor person in the in the chamber, to go and sit in the opposition leader’s seat in the parliament. He thought that was appropriate.

Brian was a Labor man and committed to looking after the interests of the less privileged in society. The most classic example of that was his opposition to the introduction of the GST, despite all the incentives that the prime minister and the treasurer at the time could offer him on that.

He was a committed anti-communist, he was completely pro-life in his approach, and supportive of the family as a cornerstone of society. And, in particular, the right of people everywhere in the world to form families as they saw fit in accordance with their conscience. He was particularly concerned about the one-child policy of the Chinese Communist Party government, which often involved forced abortions. And there’s a story about that in the book as well.

In the book, I have tracked how important his vote was. It’s been referred to as the balance of power. An email that came to The Sydney Institute tonight from somebody who used to work for Brian as his chief of staff, pointed out that Brian said this was not the balance of power but a balance of responsibility, which he obviously took very seriously.

I have looked at the big issues where Brian’s vote was critical – he never approved the full privatisation of Telstra, opposition to the GST, in addition, as Brian saw it, a correct response to the Wik Native Title legislation. For a lot of people, the last is one of the most controversial positions Harradine took. It’s remained so today, even though the agreement between then Prime Minister John Howard and Brian Harradine has stood the test of time and nobody has sought to change it even while it was extremely controversial at the time.

Brian Harradine was a conviction politician. He wasn’t a horse trader, although he was prepared at times to do the best deal he could for the state of Tasmania and the people of Tasmania, and he did win major concessions from various governments for the Tasmanian people.

I’ll finish by considering how you might assess the political legacy of an individual senator. Harradine occupied the interesting position, occupied by very few people in the federal parliament. He was centre-left on industrial and economic issues, but on the right on a range of social and moral issues. It’s difficult to assess overall what his full impact was. He was in the Senate for 30 years and a number of governments had to deal with Brian Harradine one way or the other. It’s also worth pointing out that when he was first elected in 1975, there were hardly any Independents in the Senate. Labor’s Senator Arthur Gietzelt told him, the day before he gave his first speech, that it was a waste of time what anyone person said in the Senate. Nobody took any notice of the Senate.

Well, that’s changed today. The Senate is now critical to getting every bit of legislation through because most governments, in recent times, have not had a majority in the Senate. And they have to deal with the Senate. So, Brian Harradine did teach people how important the Senate could be, and how important it was to deal with the crossbenchers. A small number when he went there, but progressively larger over time.

But how do you assess the overall impact of somebody who was an Independent, and only ever had one vote. And when he ceased to be an Independent, where is his legacy? When Brian Harradine retired, the group that supported him in Tasmania didn’t run another candidate. The Greens picked up his position at the next election. And they obviously appeal to a different constituency from Brian’s.

But for 30 years in the Senate successive governments had to learn to deal with Harradine. He was never a minister. He was never a member of any government. He had a sole and single vote to play with and to leverage any influence that he might have.

He did he use Senate Committees extremely well where he spent a lot of time closely questioning departmental officials and ministers about any policy issue that he was interested in. He probably drove them mad at times. But he was persistent, he was consistent, and he was passionate about the issues that he wanted to pursue.

The only way we can ultimately assess his legacy is by asking a simple question – did he operate in accordance with the values which he said he went to the parliament with, as expressed in his first speech and reflected on in his valedictory speech. The answer to that is clearly yes, he was true to his values. He played a completely independent role. He fought the good fight as he saw it, all the way to the end. So, Brian Harradine’s life is worth recording. I’m happy to have been able to do it.