BY JIM McILROY
Jim Cairns, the most prominent leader of the mass protests in the early 1970s against Australia's involvement in the US war against Vietnam and standard-bearer of the Victorian ALP parliamentary left of his generation, died on October 12 at the age of 89.
Cairns is now remembered in the corporate media for his controversial role as the deputy prime minister and treasurer who was sacked by then Labor PM Gough Whitlam in 1975 for his part in the so-called "Iraqi loans scandal", and for his much publicised affair with his personal secretary Juni Morosi. But his real legacy to the Australian labour movement rests in his central part in the Vietnam Moratorium Campaign.
According to his NSW Labor left colleague of the time, Tom Uren, as quoted in Greg Langley's book A Decade of Dissent: Vietnam and the conflict on the Australian home front: "During the 1960s, Cairns and I traveled the length and breadth of Australia speaking at universities, public meetings, trade union meetings and you name it.
"In my view, the real architect of the leadership against the war was Cairns. He was a bloke who read extensively on the issue, felt deeply about the question, and understood the problem. He was dogged and courageous, and it was his charisma and his respect within the community which helped strengthen the movement."
Opposed US bombing
According to Uren, Cairns' opposition to the US aggression in Vietnam, and Australia's growing military intervention in support of the US, began early: "The Labor Party was very confused on Vietnam until the middle of 1965. In February 1965, the caucus actually supported the American bombing of North Vietnam.
"What happened was Jim Cairns moved a resolution condemning the bombing. Kim Beazley senior then moved an amendment supporting it; the vote went in his favour. Both [Arthur] Calwell, the leader, and Whitlam, the deputy, supported that motion."
Calwell, despite earlier vacillation on the Vietnam War issue, took a strong position against the commitment of Australian troops to Vietnam in April 1965. He reportedly enlisted Cairns' help in writing a speech calling for the withdrawal of Australian troops from Vietnam.
Calwell took the ALP into the 1966 federal election with a principled position of opposition to conscription and for virtually immediate withdrawal of the troops. Labor was decimated by Prime Minister Robert Menzies' Liberals in that election, leading to Whitlam seizing the ALP leadership and the abandonment of Calwell's policy of calling for Australian troops to be withdrawn from the war.
In 1968, Cairns failed by just four votes to defeat Whitlam in a parliamentary leadership challenge, based on opposition to Whitlam's push to the right.
It was not until 1968-69, when the groundswell of public opposition to the war became more apparent as a result of the continued heroic resistance of the Vietnamese people, and the strenuous efforts of non-Labor anti-war activists, that Whitlam and the ALP leadership as a whole again began to take a somewhat stronger position against the war — sensing that this had now become a potential vote-winner.
Moratorium marches
In Victoria, where Cairns was the most prominent public figure in the Labor left, the ALP began to involve itself in the anti-war movement, and Cairns became the main media spokesperson for the Vietnam Moratorium Campaign in the lead-up to the mass anti-war marches in 1970.
The strength of the ALP left and Cairns' public role played a major part in building the Moratoriums significantly bigger in Melbourne than in Sydney and other cities. An unprecedented crowd of around 75,000 took over the entire centre of downtown Melbourne in September 1970 — a testimony to the massive people's power mobilisation that the Australian and international anti-Vietnam War movement had become by then.
But the strength of Cairns' public role in building the profile of the first Moratorium marches needs to be balanced with his involvement in considerable bureaucratic manoeuvring behind the scenes in seeking to keep control of the organising leadership of the movement in the hands of the ALP and its Communist Party allies.
As the prospect of an ALP victory in the next federal elections grew, the Labor Party and its allies in the anti-war movement sought to limit the exploding power and expectations of the mass movement.
Cairns allied with the conservative forces in the peace movement in attempting to downplay further mass Moratorium actions in 1971. Fortunately, these attempts were eventually defeated and the largest Moratorium mobilisation in Melbourne occurred at the end of June 1971.
Shortly after that mobilisation Coalition PM Billy McMahon announced that Australian combat troops would be withdrawn from Vietnam by the end of the year.
Whitlam government
After the ALP won the federal election in December 1972, riding on the mass upsurge of anti-war and anti-government sentiment, Cairns held various ministerial positions in Whitlam's cabinet, eventually becoming treasurer. After the 1974 election, which Labor again won, Cairns was elected deputy leader.
By 1975, the reforming zeal of the Whitlam government was completely lost under the pressure of international recession and a campaign by the Australian capitalist ruling class for the government to impose a wage freeze. This campaign culminated in the "Canberra coup" of November 11, 1975, in which the Whitlam government was sacked by the governor-general.
Cairns himself had been sacked as treasurer by Whitlam for allegedly lying to parliament about the "loans affair". By that time, any socialist credentials Cairns had professed had been buried in the rightward shift of the Labor government under the contradictions of attempting to administer a capitalist economy in a time of crisis.
The loans affair itself was a futile attempt by resources minister Rex Connor, in collaboration with Cairns, to borrow billions of petro-dollars from the Middle East to build a natural gas pipeline from the North-West Shelf to the eastern seaboard.
After the dismissal of Whitlam in November 1975 by Governor-General John Kerr, and the subsequent heavy defeat of the ALP by Malcolm Fraser's Liberals in December that year, Cairns faded out of Labor politics, retiring from federal parliament in 1977.
He later became involved in the Down to Earth Festival, and other alternative cultural activities, writing three books in an increasingly green-utopian direction: Growth to Freedom, The Untried Road and Towards a New Society.
In his later years, Cairns was a regular fixture at inner-city markets in Melbourne, selling his books from a stall and talking to interested passersby.
Jim Cairns exemplifies the dilemma of the Labor left over the years — even the best mass movement leader becomes entangled in the contradictions of the ALP parliamentary machine, unless they are prepared to directly challenge the pro-capitalist framework of Labor politics.
Cairns was as good as it gets in the ALP. There has been no one since, in the ALP leadership, who has come even close to his national stature being willing to lead mass extra-parliamentary protest actions against the pro-war foreign policy of the Australian ruling class.
With the advent of the Hawke-Keating Labor governments from 1983, the rightward shift of the ALP has become so marked, and the capitulation of the Labor left so complete, that there has been no political base for a prominent left ALP figure to emerge in the country's national political life over the past few decades.
After Cairns' death, Tom Uren commented: "[He] did many great things for the ALP and for Australia, but the real tragedy of Jim Cairns was that he didn't become the driving, creative minister he could have been."
More accurately, the great tragedy of Jim Cairns was that he could not see that in order to achieve the liberation of the peoples of the Third World, epitomised in the struggle of Vietnam against the US and its Australian imperialist junior partner, it was necessary to reject the pro-capitalist straitjacket of the ALP, and build a new party for radical change out of the huge momentum developed during the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.
[Jim McIlroy was an activist in the movement against the Vietnman War and is now a member of the Socialist Alliance.]
From Green Left Weekly, October 29, 2003.
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