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

and the support of this effort by successive Australian liberal administrations. Cairns did not see the Vietnam War as being primarily a case of North Vietnam attacking South Vietnam, but more as an expression of independence and revolution by the South Vietnamese people in the face of an incompetent and corrupt South Vietnamese regime. As such, he did not think the war could halt the rise of the communists, and regarded it as a futile loss of life. In Cairns’ words, he believed ‘the war cannot be won, that force cannot succeed’.12

Cairns did not engage in high-blown rhetoric in opposition to the war. Rather, as Calwell and then Whitlam struggled to determine a calibrated response, Cairns developed into the leader of the anti-war movement, a position that he came to believe was more important than his role as an increasingly senior Labor MP. It rapidly increased his national profile. He attended and spoke at more than six hundred anti-war meetings between 1964 and 1966.13 He became a particularly popular figure at university campuses, where much of the anti-war movement had its genesis.

In typical Cairns’ style, his thinking and activism inevitably resulted in the publication of another book, Living with Asia, in 1965. In many ways, this book was a synthesis of Cairns’ writings and thoughts over many years. It argued for the support of independence movements in Asia, outlined Cairns’ arguments about the underlying causes of the revolutionary and communist movements, and condemned the White Australia policy and Australia’s treatment of its Indigenous peoples. Cairns fundamentally argued that Australia needed to become a better society as a precursor to engagement with Asia.

The argument over how Labor should respond to the war in Vietnam played out over several years, and saw Cairns pitted against both Calwell and Whitlam as Labor leaders. When the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred in 1964, which resulted in a resolution being passed by Congress that would open the door to US involvement in Vietnam, Calwell and his deputy Whitlam made it clear that they accepted the US version of the event—namely that the USS Maddox had been attacked by several North Vietnamese torpedo boats, and that it had fired on the boats in self-defence. Cairns, on the other hand, made it clear how cynically he viewed this explanation. His cynicism was eventually vindicated (a declassified National Security Agency document would later reveal that the US warship had appeared to fire first, and that a so-called second confrontation in the gulf never actually occurred).

In 1967, new Labor leader Gough Whitlam sought a nuanced resolution from Labor’s National Conference concerning the policy on Vietnam. Cairns, however, argued for a stronger position against the war, and his view carried the day. Whitlam was heard in an aside to complain that ‘It’s bastards like Cairns who stop me from becoming prime minister.’14

Cairns was increasingly of the view that the battle against Australian involvement in the war would best be waged and won on the streets, out in the community, rather than within the party. He was active in organising community rallies and protests, including one outside Melbourne Town Hall at which he was arrested for handing out pamphlets in breach of a Melbourne City Council by-law banning the distribution of such material. While he was not charged following his arrest, the protest was successful in having the by-law unanimously repealed a few days later.

All of this, however, was merely a precursor to the moratorium movement, of which Cairns became the leader. The movement was conceived to mobilise the disparate anti-war groups into one coordinated and huge civic protest movement. To that end, it worked.

Cairns was elected chair of the Victorian Moratorium Committee in 1967. He issued a call for ‘workers, students and citizens to stop work and occupy the streets of Melbourne and Victorian provincial towns on May 8’.15 Cairns added to the furore by telling a meeting at the University of Melbourne that the protest should not be violent, but that it need not necessarily be lawful. The idea of a national lawmaker encouraging the breaking of the law infuriated the conservative sections of the press. The resulting march exceeded Cairns’ wildest expectations, with between 70 000 and 100 000 people occupying the streets of Melbourne. Future rallies would be smaller, and the moratorium movement would always be Melbourne-centric, but Cairns’ name would now be forever connected with this remarkable civil protest movement.

The March to 1972

Whitlam and Cairns were both highly intelligent and extremely ambitious men, both men of principle, but they were of different backgrounds and different temperaments, and they had very different visions for their party. It was almost inevitable that they would be rivals and would periodically clash in battles over the future of the ALP.

Whitlam saw the role of the ALP as winning office to improve the lot of Australia and the people who relied on Labor for social progress. He knew this needed compromise. ‘Only the impotent are pure,’ he warned as leader when arguing for organisational and policy modernisation. Cairns, on the other hand, saw Labor as a social movement, an agitator for change that did not need to be in office to achieve its goals. He thought it was better to adhere to long-held principles than to compromise these to win votes. So while each election defeat in the 1950s and 1960s was a spur to Whitlam to modernise and adjust to the aspirations of contemporary Australia, Cairns saw them as indications that the Australian population was shallow and materialistic and in need of education in the benefits of socialism. Whitlam saw parliament as paramount, an ideal that endured throughout his life. Cairns’ views on the efficacy of parliament ebbed and flowed during his career, but there was always an underlying cynicism about it being a vehicle for Labor to pursue its reforms. This, of course, makes it questionable that being a Labor MP was the most productive career path for Cairns to take.

For much of the second half of their