According to some commentators, the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975 and Labor’s subsequent poor electoral performance prompted a shift in the Australian labor movement, wherein the ALP and union leaders ‘drew right-wing conclusions about how to win reforms within the system’.1 This rightward trajectory has in turn been presented as an explanation for why, in the 1980s and 1990s, federal and state Labor governments combined with union leaders opposed to Gallagher and the BLF to dismantle that union and incorporate its members into rival organisations.2 Whilst such contextualisation of BLF hi story is sound, its potency has been weakened by a failure to extend it beyond allusion or to explain the contribution that embourgeoisification of the ALP made to relations between Labor, Gallagher and the BLF.3 By examining the ways in which embourgeoisification of the ALP pushed the party to the right and by juxtaposing that trend with the direction in which politically active left-wing unions such as the BLF were moving, this chapter will provide a context in which later conflicts between Labor, Gallagher and the BLF can be better understood.
The middle-classing of the ALP was a process most obvious during the 1960s.4
By reflecting on that decade through a number of lenses, it is both possible to trace the embourgeoisification of the party, and to see how a pattern was established in which obstacles to the creation of a new Labor order were removed. These lenses are: the Vietnam War, unity tickets and State-aid for non-Government schools. A brief reference to the White Australia policy is also useful. The use of such lenses is, of course not new. However, they have not previously been amalgamated to form an overall picture of the
1 For example, Ross, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!, p.69.
2 Jaensch, The Hawke-Keating Hijack, p.77; Ross, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!, pp.69-82.
3 The term ‘embourgeoisification’ has been used by Jaensch to describe what he understood to be the middle-classing of Australian society through ‘years of unprecedented growth and prosperity’ in the 1950s and 1960s. According to Jaensch, the ALP of the 1950s and 1960s ‘remained firmly within its labourist style and mode, expressing, and appealing to, the declining number of the “working class” at a time when the working class were absorbing middle-class values and pursuing middle-class ideals. Jaensch, The Hawke-Keating Hijack, pp.32-3. In the context of this thesis, the term ‘embourgeoisification’ is used to describe what others have pointed to as the middle-classing of the ALP.
4 John Daniel Fitzgerald, Federal intervention in the Victorian Branch of the Australian Labor Party, 1970, MA thesis, Department of History, La Trobe University, 1975, p.65
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ALP as a party moving inexorably towards the kind of movement that would willingly amputate a living component of its own form in order to safeguard its electoral success and advance Australia on the road to neoliberalism.
That Labor’s embourgeoisification ultimately led to the destruction of impediments to what the party now represents was articulated by Jenny Hocking in her biography of Gough Whitlam.5 Referring to Whitlam’s intervention into the affairs of the Victorian branch of the ALP in 1970, she argued:
Events in Victoria illuminated the way in which the new political agenda created by Labor’s policy work of the previous decade was intricately linked to the party’s restructuring and the influx of a broader membership with modern social concerns.
Because the ‘Old Guard’ – the Victorian Central Executive (VCE) and the militant trade unions that underpinned it – had little time for the ‘modern social concerns’ associated with ‘the influx of a broader membership’ – a euphemism for the influx of middle-class members that occurred under Whitlam – it had to be eliminated. Demonstrating that Gallagher and the BLF had to be removed from the political and industrial landscape lest they derail a later step in the transformation of the ALP is a central argument of this thesis. The legitimacy of such an argument rests on parallels being drawn between the elimination of the BLF and the dismissal of the Victorian branch in 1970. It can also be done by extending the link that historians and others have identified, between the events of 1955 and the sacking of the Victorian branch in 1970 to the elimination of Gallagher and the BLF in the late 1980s and early 1990s.6
The 1960s: Labor’s changing face
Having been split asunder in the previous decade, the ALP entered the 1960s with a new leadership team, an opportunity to heal old wounds and, following its narrow defeat in
5 Jenny Hocking, Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History: the biography. Vol. 1, Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2009, p.356.
6 For connections between the Labor Party split of 1955 and federal intervention in Victoria in 1970, see, for example, Hocking, Gough Whitlam, p.356. Hocking traced the genesis of federal intervention into the affairs of the Victorian branch in 1970 back to ‘the unresolved divisions of the split that had been deeper, more polarised and more irreparable [in Victoria] than in any other state.’
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the credit squeeze election of 1961,7 the promise of better times ahead.8 H.V. Evatt – the source of so much unrest in the party – had made a dignified exit from politics to take up his position as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of NSW.9 In his stead, Arthur Calwell
and his deputy, Edward Gough Whitlam, gave Labor an anchor to its proudest traditions and a link to the future. Together, they provided the ALP with the gravitas and energy necessary to new beginnings and new opportunities.10 By 1970, however, this optimism had withered in the face of a bitter leadership struggle between Calwell and Whitlam, and the party, beset by a series of divisions on issues as diverse as the White Australia Policy, State aid for non-government schools, unity tickets and the war in Vietnam, appeared as divided as ever. In almost every instance, it was Victoria, where the consequences of the split had been most severely felt – and where BLF power was concentrating and expanding – that the lines along which Labor continued to divide were most apparent.
Formed as a mass party to express the aims and interests of the organised working class, the ALP has always rested on the twin supports provided by union affiliation and local membership branches, with the former traditionally playing a much greater role than the latter.11 Whilst Labor had never been a party exclusively of the working class, its
reliance on the electoral and financial support provided by workers and their unions has never been in doubt.12 In financial terms, for example, affiliated unions provided on average almost 75 per cent of Victorian ALP income between 1957 and 1970. Across the same time period the average financial contribution from branches was under seven per
7 For a discussion of the ‘credit squeeze election’ of 1961 and Labor’s campaign for power, see, for example, Colm Kiernan, Calwell: A Personal and Political Biography, Melbourne: Nelson, 1978, pp.217- 34.
8 Laurie Oakes, Whitlam PM: a biography, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1973, pp.92-3, suggested that Calwell and Whitlam enjoyed a productive relationship in the first few years of their partnership, when the older man evidenced a protective attitude towards the younger; Hocking, Gough Whitlam, p.196, argued that ‘the pairing of Arthur Calwell and Gough Whitlam brought renewed optimism. In its personal contrasts it reflected the party’s own transition from the riven party that had existed sicne the split to a party poised to at last follow Ben Chifley’s advice, “Accept your humiliation and we can go forward.” It was a dynamic of old and new that for a time worked well.’
9 John Murphy, Harvest of Fear: A history of Australia’s Vietnam War, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993, pp.129-130, noted that many in the Labor Party described Evatt’s departure as ‘the end of a nightmare.’ 10 Ross McMullin, The Light on the Hill: The Australian Labor Party, 1891-1991, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991, p.291, noted the ‘favourable notice’ initially given to the ‘smooth blend of contrasting attributes’ that Calwell and Whitlam embodied.
11 Ibid., pp.9-69.
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cent.13 Whilst union contributions steadily increased in this period, however, the percentage of union officials on the Central Executive/Administrative Committee declined from 74 per cent to 45 per cent.14 Nor can this be related simply to a
restructuring of the party in Victoria in 1970, since the percentage of union officials on those bodies had already declined from 74 per cent in 1956 to 52 per cent in 1968. Moreover, this decline in union officials on the Central Executive occurred at a time when professional/business representation rose from four per cent to 26 per cent.15
The dichotomous character of Labor’s underpinnings – its affiliated unions and the apparently less than democratic nature of their influence over the party on the one hand and the seemingly more democratic but less effectual nature of the local branches on the other – provided in the 1960s what was to be an overarching framework for many of the party’s internal battles. An early, though by no means quickly resolved example of these battles was the struggle over the party’s White Australia Policy. As Sean Brawley has demonstrated, that struggle serves as an excellent lens through which the increasingly bourgeois character of the ALP can be seen. At one and the same time, it captured tensions in the party between the Old and New Guards, the traditionalists and modernisers, the blue and white collar memberships, the unions and the local branches, the working and middle-class memberships, the intellectuals and anti-intellectuals, the inner cities and the suburbs and, of course, between Calwell and Whitlam as the personifications of the Old and New Guards.16 It was, therefore, a struggle informed by generational shifts and conflicting visions about Labor’s future, a struggle between those
13 James Jupp, ‘Victoria: Left, Right and Centre’ in Andrew Parkin & John Warhurst (eds.), Machine
Politics in the Australian Labor Party, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1983, p.76. 14 Ibid.
15 Ibid; Ian Ward, A “new look” ALP?: the middle classing of the Victorian branch of the ALP 1961-1982, PhD thesis, Monash University, 1987, p.7.
16 Sean Brawley, ‘Long Hairs and Ratbags, The ALP and the Abolition of the White Australia Policy’, in A
Century of Social Change, Labor History Essays, Vol. 4, Sydney: Pluto Press Australia in association with the New South Wales Branch of the Australian Labor Party, 1992, pp.202-14. Brawley credited the local branches with responsibility for the push for reform of Labor’s immigration policy. It was in the branches, too, that Whitlam, the foremost champion of reform, drew his support. For a discussion of the tensions between traditionalists and modernisers, see also McMullin, The Light on the Hill:, p.309. McMullin noted that ‘nearly all traditionalists disliked and distrusted intellectuals, saw trade unionists as the hallowed core of the party, and advocated a continuation of vigilant machine control over potentially expedient MPs.’ Moreover, they regarded the modernisers as ‘opportunists hungry for office.’
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eager for the change they knew to be inevitable and those who hoped their party could be insulated from that change.17
The fault lines thrown up by White Australia were similarly in evidence where the issue of State aid for non-government schools was concerned. But whilst NSW had provided the strongest resistance to changes in Labor’s discriminatory immigration policy,18 it was the Victorian branch of the ALP that presented the greatest resistance and paid the highest price in its struggle to protect Australia’s secular education system. The events leading up to and including federal intervention in Victoria and the way in which State aid became the trigger for intervention will be discussed in greater detail later in this chapter. For now, it is sufficient to note that the process was one in which the embourgeoisification of the ALP was not only clearly evident but had reached a point at which it would become critical to the future of the ALP and the labor movement more generally.
Middle-classing the ALP
Discussion of the ALP’s increasingly middle-class character had, prior to Ian Ward’s sociological analysis of the Victorian branch, been largely anecdotal and/or limited to the public face of the party where the phenomenon was most apparent.19 Political scientist, L.F. Crisp, for example, observed how his local branch in NSW had changed dramatically in the decades following World War II from having a handful of white- collar members essentially under the control of blue-collar office bearers to the situation in the 1980s when its membership was overwhelmingly white-collar and middle-class.20
If Crisp’s experience in a branch whose locale had in the intervening years become even more heavily blue-collared was repeated across the country, and he provides anecdotal evidence that this was the case, declining local branch membership in Victoria, as
17 Brawley, ‘Long Hairs and Ratbags’, pp.205-13. 18 Ibid., p.206.
19 Ian Ward, A “new look” ALP? : the middle classing of the Victorian branch of the ALP 1961-1982, PhD thesis, Monash University, 1987.
20 L. F. Crisp, ‘The Labor Party: Then and Now’, in Gareth Evans & John Reeves (eds.), Labor Essays
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described by Allan and Jupp,21 may have been at least partially a response to the arrival of more articulate, white-collar, professionally-trained members with interests and agendas altogether alien to the branches’ traditional blue-collar membership.
According to Crisp, the influx of white-collar members and the greater visibility of women in the party so altered the nature of the branches that discussions which had traditionally revolved around issues immediately affecting the branch membership were marginalised by topics of national and international scope.22 The laborist emphasis once synonymous with local ALP branches had been usurped by a range of radical, big ticket concerns, such as the environment, women’s issues and the nuclear debate.23 Implicit in this change in emphasis was a rise not only in the affluence of the members coming into the party, but also in their educational standards, both of which were echoed at the parliamentary, ministerial and party leadership levels. Whilst the number of Federal Labor politicians with tertiary qualifications had only increased from four to 17 per cent between 1901 and 1941, the following 40 years saw an increase from 17 to 55 per cent. This dramatic change in the educational standards of ALP parliamentarians coincided with a sharp increase in the number of Labor politicians with professional qualifications – up from 11 to 40 per cent between 1901 and 1981 and an even sharper decline in the representation of blue-collar backgrounds from 63 per cent in 1901 to 39 per cent in 1941 and just 12 per cent in 1981.24 This pattern of embourgeoisification, which was to become even more pronounced in later decades, was repeated amongst those who climbed to ministerial and party leadership levels, with two out of the four men who led the party between 1951 and 1977 having qualified as barristers and another (Calwell)
21 Lyle James Allan, A Party in Disarray: Victorian Labor after the split 1955 – 1965, Masters Thesis, University of Melbourne, 1981, p.67; Jupp, ‘Victoria: Left, Right and Centre’, p.71.
22 Crisp, ‘The Labor Party: Then and Now’, pp.71-3. 23 Jaensch, The Hawke-Keating Hijack, p.50.
24 Crisp, ‘The Labor Party: Then and Now’, p.74; Narelle Miragliotta & Wayne Errington, ‘Occupational Profile of ALP, LP and National MHRs 1949-2007: From Divergence to Convergence’, Refereed paper delivered at Australian Political Studies Association Conference, Brisbane, 6-9 July, 2008, pp.1-17, available at http://www.polsis.uq.edu.au/apsa2008/Refereed-papers/Miragliotta%20and%20Errington.pdf
accessed 30 June 2010. This survey of the pre-parliamentary occupational profiles of Federal Members of Parliament (House of Representatives) for the period 1949-2007 suggested a narrowing range of and convergence between the occupational backgrounds of Labor, Liberal and National Party parliamentarians. Moreover, it suggested that whilst blue-collar workers entering parliament had fallen from ten per cent in the 1949-69 era to just one per cent in the 1991-2007 era, most of that decline had occurred between 1970 and 1990.
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having been a state treasury officer. By contrast, those who led the party prior to 1951 had worked in a variety of decidedly non-professional jobs.25
Analysis of Victorian ALP membership records for the years 1961, 1971 and 1981 confirmed a substantial influx of middle-class, tertiary educated professionals.26 Moreover, not only had blue-collar worker representation in Victorian ALP membership dropped from 57.3 per cent of all members in 1961 to 27.3 per cent in 1981 – a decline not mirrored in the changing Australian workforce – but the greatly increased white- collar and professional membership – up from 14.8 per cent in 1961 to 51.8 per cent in 1981 – had dramatically exceeded the rate at which they had come to be represented in the Victorian workforce.27 Closer examination of the records indicated that whilst professionals had increased their membership of the ALP from 8.4 per cent in 1961 to 38.4 per cent in 1981, their presence in the Victorian workforce across the same period had only risen from 8.52 per cent to 14.23 per cent.28
If Ward has illuminated the middle-classing of the ALP as a phenomenon of the 1960s, others have pointed to Gough Whitlam as the individual most closely connected to if not responsible for that phenomenon.29 Nor did Whitlam shy away from the perceived
25 Crisp, ‘The Labor Party: Then and Now’, pp.75-6; Jaensch, The Hawke-Keating Hijack, pp.51-2; Bramble & Kuhn, The transformation of the Australian Labor Party; Hocking, Gough Whitlam, p.273. Jaensch observed that by 1981, ’80 per cent of the Labor Caucus was middle-class’ with professionals accounting for ‘40 per cent of the members.’ He noted further, that whilst professionals occupied 26 per cent of places in Ben Chifley’s government, the number had risen to 66 per cent under Whitlam and, under Hawke it rose to 71 per cent. Bramble and Kuhn argued that ‘Until the election of Gough Whitlam in 1967, all national Labor Party leaders, apart from H.V. Evatt, had experience as workers at some stage before entering Parliament.’ Even Evatt, they argued, ‘came from a working class family.’ For Bramble and Kuhn, ‘The election of Whitlam marked the advent of a new generation of Labor leaders.’ Hocking noted that with the election of Whitlam in 1972, Lance Barnard was the odd man out in a leadership team comprising