Recent articles by Bob
From protest to negotiation: the role of the Greens in the new Parliament
From the November 2010 issue of Government magazine:
It’s a challenge to govern when the numbers in parliament are equal and a cluster of independents determine whether a bill is passed or not. But we’ve had a bit of experience with this at State-level in Australia. I watched as Coalition Premiers Nick Greiner and John Fahey juggled a relationship with independents after NSW Labor won the Entrance by-election in 1992 following a narrow Coalition win after the State election of 1991.
Yet I learnt this: independents are very reluctant to bring a government down. It’s a big decision. They are open to criticism if it’s the wrong call. They could pay a price in their own electorates. They understand the community wants a stable government and there will be a lot of anger in the air if they vote for a handover on the floor of the Parliament or bring on an early election.
It took a corruption finding against Nick Greiner by the Independent Commission Against Corruption to force the issue in New South Wales (a finding later overturned in the NSW Supreme Court) to force this issue in NSW.
In the absence of such exceptional circumstances there is a likelihood that the Gillard Government survives with cross-bench support for its three year term. Certainly business would be wise to plan for this as a strong probability.
This has been a close call for the Green Party. If Abbott had got over the line there would have been no action on carbon pricing for three years. Yet there would have been a carbon price operating in Australia if the Greens had supported Kevin Rudd’s ETS back in December. They held it up in the Senate for a crucial period in which climate change denial took hold of the Coalition and then the Green Party voted with the Coalition to defeat it.
The Green Party supporting a Labor Government will mean nothing if at the end of three years Australia is not pricing carbon.
I believe Ross Garnaut can be recruited at a moment’s notice by Prime Minister Gillard to design an interim carbon price that would satisfy the Greens and pass the Green-ALP dominated Senate; the only question is, would it pass the House of Representatives? Assuming Windsor and Oakeshott support it and Turnbull backs it the answer is, yes – even if Katter were to vote no.
The media might start to report and analyse the Green Party – just for a change. The key story here will be how quickly the party will mature from a party of protest into a party of negotiation, holding its base but compromising as necessary to get legislation through. Making concessions but carrying its own forums – conferences, or councils or collectives, whatever they are. We don’t know because the media and the Canberra press gallery have decided that this is the one political party whose pre-selections and conferences and factions can never be analysed. All the others, quite legitimately, are fair game.
Pricing carbon is one of the big issues for this new more interesting parliament. The other is a tax on mining profits. I’m presuming that Labor will not want to go to the left of what it has negotiated with the big miners. Here, then, is the first compromise required of the Greens: to forgo all their virtuous redistributist talk about a mining tax and to settle for a more modest version. The price for this? I guess lots of bicycle tracks.
The Green legislators will bear in mind the key performance indicator I pointed to above, namely, whether Australia emerges with a price on carbon, either a tax or an interim price set for the opening phase of an emissions trading scheme.
Meanwhile the one question for commentators on NSW state politics is what will Barry O’Farrell do, given that all the opinion polls make him the next Premier by a big margin.
He’s on the record with a commitment to privatise the desalination plant and to franchise out the management of Sydney ferries. It’s hard to see the sort of bold privatisations that many of his supporters might expect. The present Labor government should finish privatising the electricity retailers and the output of the generators by December (output, not the generators themselves – it’s called the “G-trader” model). The government has privatised State Lotteries and is privatising the State-owned waste authority. In my time, the government privatised the TAB, Freight Corp and the state-owned coal mines. Big privatisations, and successful ones.
In a recent interview Barry O’Farrell said he would “borrow against the State’s Triple A rating”. Which is, borrow.
Interesting to have a Premier from a conservative side say his chief policy commitment is to lift state debt when his Federal colleagues have come close to winning a federal election running against Labor’s debt.
It’s a fiscal strategy that deserves analysis.
In this phase there’s not much else in NSW politics to analyse.
The Spectator:
Bob Carr reviews Alan “The Red Fox” Reid by Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt, A New South Book, and The Family File by Mark Aarons, Black Inc.
“Ahh, here’s the apostate.” The voice was a cigarette flavoured drawl from a slight figure with a hat tipped on his head. This, in The Bulletin office in March 1978, my first day as a journalist after six years with the Labor Council – hence the “apostate.” The speaker was Alan Reid, a breaker of tabloid stories most of them harmful to the Australian Labor Party, and, according to Paul Keating, an “infamous Labor hater.”
Labor wasn’t his only victim. John Grey Gorton, Liberal Prime Minister 1968 to 1971, felt Reid had brought him down on Sir Frank Packer’s instructions, crossing the line between reporting party room plots and shaping them. Gorton described Reid as a “slightly built balding man with little darting eyes and an expression of perpetual cynicism…peeping under a drooping eyelid from the corner of one eye….one expects momentarily to be nudged in the ribs with a confidential elbow and given a hot tip for the 3.30 at Randwick.”
His 50 year career reporting Federal politics started in 1937 at The Sun. He switched to the Frank Packer-owned Telegraph in 1954. When he died in 1987, he was Kerry Packer’s personal emissary in Canberra, his lobbyist, as well as a reporter for The Bulletin and Channel 9. This was a brazen conflict. Yet his professional success subsumed all; he delivered scoops with mischief and relish and MPs spilt secrets to him like stricken sinners in the confessional.
His most remembered front page appeared in March 1963 and put paid to the ALP’s chances of beating the Menzies Government in that year’s Federal election. A special ALP conference had met in Canberra’s Kingston Hotel to determine the party position on a U.S. communication station at North West Cape in Western Australia.
Under the then-party rules its leader Arthur Calwell, and deputy, Gough Whitlam, were not delegates. They were required, somewhat pathetically, to stand outside under a streetlight waiting for unknown union and party officials to arrive at a policy and hand it to them. Reid grabbed a passing photographer and captured the humiliation of the Labor leadership at the hands of what became immortalised as “the 36 faceless men”. It was instant political devastation for a profoundly unworldly Labor Party.
Reid’s wrote three books but none on the affair that clinched his journalistic reputation, the Labor split of 1954 -7. It was Reid in The Sun who had unveiled B.A. Santamaria, the leader of the so-called Movement, which was mobilising within the unions and party – luridly unveiled him:
“…in the tense melodrama of politics there are mysterious figures who stand virtually unnoticed in the wings, invisible to all but a few in the audience, as they cue, Svengali like … the actors on the stage.”
Reid was fond of the John Curtin – Ben Chifley era of Labor leadership and hostile to Santamaria who he portrayed as an “exotic” force. He even advised H V Evatt on his 1954 statement attacking the Santamaria forces. The statement provoked The Split and was entirely unnecessary as Santamaria’s influence was containable and, as leader, Evatt should have been able to straddle his party’s factions as indeed Curtin and Chifley had done.
Reid recoiled from “the Doc” as the flailing Evatt resorted to anti-Catholic sectarianism – as reflected in this exchange with Reid, patched together from Reid’s oral history:
Evatt: Alan, you’ve left me…You’re anti-Santamaria but you’re not with me in this campaign… I’ll tell you something Alan, for every Catholic vote I’ll lose I will get two Protestant votes.
Reid: You’re out of your cotton picking mind, Doc.
In their biography, Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt refer to Evatt’s “rapprochement, with Communists and fellow travellers in the broader labour movement.” This is a good insight, the key to Evatt’s position through the Split. This rapprochement, or accommodation with a pro-Communist Left was documented by Reid in story after story, especially after he joined The Telegraph and his contempt for Evatt merged with Sir Frank Packer’s fierce conservatism.
When Ross Fitzgerald told me he and Stephen Holt would write a biography of Alan Reid I told him the material would be too scant, the result too meagre. The authors have proven me wrong. They have written an invaluable history of the interaction of the press gallery and politicians.
When I launched it I quoted the American writer Susan Sontag who said in 1982:
“Imagine the preposterous case of somebody who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and somebody else who read only The Nation between 1950 and 1970. Who would be getting more truth about the nature of Communism? There’s no doubt it would have been the Reader’s Digest reader.”
The same is true here, I suggested. Through the 50s and 60s Reid and his tabloid insights into Labor, Communism and Evatt would have offered more truth than the pages of Meanjin or Outlook.
Reid would have found little to disagree with in The Family File. On the surface this is surprising because Mark Aaron’s book is the story of four generations of a family of communists. But it is told – hence its unique flavour – through the archives of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). The author’s good sense – he let lapse his Communist Party membership in 1978 – rescued it from being another soft-headed memoir of heroic revolutionaries struggling for peace, worker’s rights and democracy.
In 1959 as a boy Mark Aarons saw a car pulling into the backyard of their Fairfield home and a suitcase being handed to his father, Laurie, then the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). Opened, it revealed wads of cash; he later learned, 45,000 Australian pounds from the Soviet Union, sent through a Romanian trade union, to keep Australian Communism afloat.
The book confirms that the Soviet Embassy delivered orders to the leadership of the CPA and, when the party criticised Russia after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the embassy worked with a pro-Soviet faction to create a pro-Soviet breakaway party.
The revelation at the epicentre of the book, however, is the story of the party’s involvement in Soviet espionage. Enter stage left the conspiratorial figure of Wally Clayton who, from 1942 and at the direction of the CPA leadership, worked with the Soviet embassy in Canberra. He collected files from party members and sympathisers in the public service in Canberra and delivered them to the TASS correspondent located in Kings Cross, Sydney, who was the local KGB man.
After the CPA dissolved itself in 1991, Mark’s father, Laurie, who had been the party’s national secretary from 1965 to 1976, taped an oral history interview with Clayton, by then 90 years of age. Clayton admitted in this tape that he delivered material to Soviet intelligence, something he had insolently denied at the Petrov Royal Commission, and that he had done it at the request of then party secretary Lance Sharkey. This revelation should nudge Australian historians towards a more benign view of the Petrov Royal Commission into Soviet Espionage (1954 – 5) that had been denounced so thoroughly by Evatt and criticised by Labor-inclined historians.
After the Commission, Laurie Aarons claims he terminated any relationship with the Soviet embassy that may have fed intelligence to Soviet spies. He’s quoted by Mark saying, “The thing about spying is that it’s a very dangerous thing to have alleged against you.” True indeed. Yet Mark Aarons reports that a first secretary of the Embassy, Ivan Skipov, was to beat a path to Bill Brown, a CPA leader and later a leader of the pro-Soviet breakaway, who gave him the names of sympathisers. To people like Brown, the Soviet Union was the country of the mind, the object of their patriotism.
For Labor party people the most arresting material in Mark Aaron’s book is the confirmation that the CPA recruited and managed dual ticket holders, that is, left wingers who held secret membership in the Communist Party while they held office in the ALP. The big fish here was Arthur Gietzelt, eventually a Minister in the Hawke Government. This practice, of course, magnified the influence of a relatively tiny Marxist Leninist party, giving it a say – how much can be debated – at ALP conferences.
Some leftists have said in reference to Aarons’ book, “Big deal. Everybody knew it.” Maybe. But we’ve never had a combination of ASIO file notes and a member of the Aarons family laying it down for the record. Moreover, no dual ticket holder has ever admitted it; Gietzelt denies it now. And historian Stuart Macintyre in his writings on the history of the CPA never revealed it.
A book is now being written on Gietzelt and research taking place on others in the Labor Left who may have kept dual membership. A number of ALP leftwingers could be revealed as long-term CPA plants. As a result some or much Left activism could be exposed as something other than indigenous Labor radicalism – more like emanations and diktats emerging from a Marxist Leninist party that could never poll one percent at a general election under its own name.
This has implications for the historiography of Australia in the Cold War era. It strengthens the indictments of Evatt and Calwell because they accommodated what we can probably now objectively define as a pro-Communist left and thus made Labor close to unelectable. It elevates Gough Whitlam’s role as the leader who broke the power of the Victorian ALP executive and prevented Jim Cairns becoming Labor leader. In acres of speeches and writings on foreign policy by Cairns a single criticism of the Soviet bloc would be a discovery of gem-like value. Perhaps not a dual ticket holder, he wore the appellation “fellow traveller” like a second skin.
The revelations are also a historic justification for the existence of a NSW – based Labor Right with a lineage embracing Premiers McKell and Cahill (the later warded off both Santamaria and Evatt forces as his government 1952 to 59 became the only State Labor government to survive The Split) and machine-man John Ducker who blocked a Gietzelt-led takeover of the ALP’s biggest branch in 1970-71. Gietzelt-led? Knowing what Aarons and his ASIO files have confirmed one can write, rather, communist-led. Paul Keating took over from Ducker when control in NSW Labor again wobbled in 1979-80. From his time in Young Labor the hard left have always been “the comms” to Paul Keating.
Gietzelt’s wife Dawn was once over-heard saying she “did not care which labor party her children favoured” and clearly meant the CPA was to be regarded as another labor party. Obviously no reader of Solzhenitsyn, she – like the ALP Left of her generation including Cairns – could never see the difference between the totalitarian and democratic brands of socialism. I always suspected their spiritual homelands were the “peoples’ democracies” of Eastern Europe and was always inclined to imagine them as members of an Australian Politburo wolfing pork and caviar at banquets for visiting Soviet delegations and, with a bark or two, despatching social democrats and liberals to the Gulag.
Aarons is blunt about these forces in his Dad’s old party. Other communist memoirs cast a romantic hue over the comrades, idealistic fighters for the rights of workers and Aborigines. Of course idealism is not ever a defence. Isiah Berlin identified the desire of idealists for a “rational reorganisation of society” as the very source of totalitarianism. He wrote, the:
“search for perfection does seem to me a recipe for bloodshed, no better even if it is demanded by the sincerest of idealists, the purest of heart.”
A former Tribune editor Rupert Lockwood once told me that in a lifetime in the CPA he had met people perfectly capable of lining enemies against a wall and machine-gunning them.
ASIO penetrated the CPA comprehensively, its agents were present at every meeting and even worked as full-time staff. If this were over-kill then the espionage of the 40’s, now confirmed, provides the justification. I find myself hoping that ASIO now shows the same spy-craft as it infiltrates every Islamist cell that harbours the faintest enthusiasm for blowing us up. And I’m struck by ASIO’s restraint. After all, a leaked copy of the Gietzelt’s ASIO file could have killed Labor’s chances at any number of elections.
I know one journalist who would have torn a half-proffered copy from an agent’s gloved hands. He, above all, understood the implications. The adjective “explosive” or the noun “time bomb” would have been in the first par of his Telegraph exclusive.
