The Money Men Chris Bowen (the red fox clan .txt) 📖

him into the new party. Keon’s very considerable local machine then went into action in his defence. There was even some violence between the two Labor groups on election night. Nonetheless, Cairns was declared elected by 791 votes. Keon was not gracious in defeat, calling Cairns’ win ‘a victory for the communists’.9

The election that brought Cairns into federal parliament took place on 10 December 1955, almost twenty years to the day before the tragic election of 1975.

An Academic in Parliament

Cairns entered federal parliament at one of the lowest points in the Labor Party’s history. Split asunder for the third time, Labor suffered a 5 per cent swing and the loss of six seats. It was a demoralising defeat, particularly after the ALP’s good result in the 1954 election, in which it had won a majority of the two-party preferred vote and picked up six seats. These gains, which had seen it come within seven seats of office, had been reversed within eighteen months.

Cairns’ maiden speech consisted of an attack on the Menzies government’s economic record. As his biographer Paul Strangio notes, his ‘deadpan delivery style and scholarly content could not obscure the moral passion that underpinned Cairn’s politics. His ethical distaste for capitalism and its morally corrosive values was undisguised.’10

Cairns was able to combine his parliamentary work with further academic studies in support of the traditional Labor approach of nationalisation, planning and control. Cairns had not yet completed his doctorate when he was elected, but his thesis would make it clear where he stood in the debate that was raging in both the Australian Labor Party and the British Labour Party about the role of left-ofcentre parties in the post–World War II environment. Cairns was not for modernising. He believed the role of left-wing governments was to nationalise the commanding heights of the economy to smooth the way for a socialist society.

In Great Britain, the battle over labour ideology was being waged by two giants: Tony Crosland and Aneurin Bevan. Cairns’ thesis indicated that his sympathies were with Bevan. Cairns the Doctor of Philosophy clearly had the same views as Cairns the backbencher, who wrote to Bevan to invite him on a speaking tour of Australia to talk in defence of traditional nationalisation policies. Cairns’ support for Bevan over Crosland meant he would be very much on the wrong side of history.

Crosland, a revisionist and a moderniser, articulated his vision for the future of left-of-centre politics in his 1956 work The Future of Socialism. Nearly sixty years later, this work stands the test of time. Crosland argues that the British Labour Party should focus on the ‘ends’ of a better, fairer society and drop its obsession with the ‘means’ of government ownership and control. In many senses, Crosland’s work could be called on to defend and justify the approach of the Hawke–Keating and Tony Blair – Gordon Brown governments that followed several decades later. But Cairns chose not to reference Crosland’s work in his thesis. Instead, he favourably referenced Bevan’s treatise In Place of Fear, which had been published in 1952. Bevan’s work is a much more traditional defence of government intervention and ownership. It is also a much more forgettable book than Crosland’s impressive work.

Although Cairns was a stout defender of orthodox socialist approaches to the economy, he also used his parliamentary role to promote much more forward-looking approaches to questions like Indonesian independence, engagement with Asia and the White Australia policy. Strangio nicely describes Cairns’ approach:

Amid the complex ideological and generational configurations in the Labor Party room … Cairns was akin to Janus—he looked both forward and back. On the one hand, he was a traditionalist in respect of upholding the party’s democratic socialist ideals, but he was removed from the old guard of the party on social issues like White Australia.11

In 1959 Cairns argued that Australia should recognise communist China, regardless of the views of the United States. This was a full twelve years before Whitlam engineered a major change in Labor policy to do just that. He also used the platform of parliament to express his support for other progressive causes. Cairns was a great joiner: throughout the 1950s he had signed up to an array of organisations (many originating at the University of Melbourne) that promoted peace, justice and human betterment. And he was singularly unconcerned that some of these groups had close links to communists or were likely to be communist front groups. One of the groups Cairns had joined was the Immigration Reform Group, which in 1960 issued a pamphlet strongly condemning the morality of the White Australia policy. Cairns praised the pamphlet on the floor of the House of Representatives just months after the election as Labor leader of Arthur Calwell, a strong supporter of the White Australia policy. Cairns then reluctantly resigned from the Immigration Reform Group when the federal executive of the ALP ruled that membership of the group was not consistent with being a Labor member.

Cairns was elected to Labor’s front bench in 1960, but he was not re-elected in the Caucus ballot following the 1961 election. Many of the right-wing Caucus members had a deep mistrust of Cairns, most notably Kim Beazley Senior and Fred Daly. This mistrust was heightened after Cairns moved a Caucus resolution in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco—the failed, CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba—that called for United Nations intervention and implied support for the Fidel Castro regime. Cairns was to show much better judgement on the defining issue of Australian politics in the 1960s: Australia’s involvement in Vietnam.

The Vietnam War

Many Australians remember Jim Cairns just as much for his role in opposing Australian involvement in the Vietnam War as they do for his time as treasurer. The Vietnam War was a tortuous issue for Labor, and Australia, in the 1960s. Cairns, though, took a clear and strong stance early in the debate. He rejected the domino theory of progressive communist domination of Asia that spurred US intervention in the war,