Taking on the bovver boys
Cleary, Independent
By Phil Cleary
HarperCollins, 1998. 298 pp, $19.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
Phil Cleary, a product of a Christian Brothers schooling, could have been expected to know all about human sin and divine retribution, but his student days could not have prepared him for the mortal political sin he was to commit in 1992, when he won, as an independent, the federal seat of Wills in Victoria from the ALP.
Wills, the seat of Bob Hawke, was regarded as ALP property, its working-class profile a sure guarantee of safe passage to a parliamentary career for the ambitious ALP member.
Retribution followed hard. Cleary was cursed as "an enemy of Labor" by Keating, the "Centre Unity warlord" Robert Ray and the "ALP's right wing bovver boys" who operated on a moral plane not much higher than the tattooed, FJ-revving Coburg hoods or the on-field thugs of the Victorian Football Association of Cleary's youth.
Cleary was gerrymandered and dirty-tricked out of office in the election of 1996, the retaking of Wills by the ALP a pathetic victory amongst its national annihilation by the Coalition.
Cleary's electoral adventures are the centrepiece of his autobiography.
Cleary seemed destined by his family heritage to fight his battle for the working people of the northern suburbs of Melbourne. His grandfather, the "grey-eyed Fenian seafarer" who revered Joe Hill, Lenin, One Big Union and one language for all, Esperanto, was only one of the long line of Cleary's feisty Irish relatives, who had fought British imperialism from Cromwell's times, who had offered haven to the IRA's Michael Collins and who had shunned the Church's excursion into anti-working-class politics in Australia.
Cleary was born in 1952, the year that the anticommunist DLP, the ALP splinter party, won 25% of the Wills vote. Fortunately, Cleary did not belong to one of those Irish Catholic families which had joined "the lost generation of working class defectors who deferred to the bishops and sought spiritual security in the DLP".
The DLP luminaries had begun to look decidedly "patriarchal and bigoted" by the time of Cleary's university stint during the political cobweb-clearing years of the late '60s.
After the ALP's Accord had pummelled the living standards of its working class voters, Cleary, the working-class radical, took up the parliamentary cudgels for his class. Cleary was initially hesitant: "I'd followed Jim Cairns along Swanston Street in the anti-Vietnam War days, been hypnotised by the ideas of the Marxist warrior Doug White at University, and taught students about Henry Lawson and the strikes of the 1890s. But being 'bumped into Parliament on next election day' wasn't really my idea of politics".
He relented, however, and seized the day in the 1992 by-election.
The electoralist world he entered was a strange, mad, farcical, fantastic land that would have stretched the imagination of Lewis Carroll. Mad Hatters sprung up initially from two of the defeated candidates for Wills, who challenged Cleary for breaching an antiquated clause (Section 44 (iv) — Office of Profit Under the Crown) of an undemocratic constitution which specified that public servants had to resign from their employment in order to contest elections.
A teacher on two years' leave without pay at the time, Cleary was done over by sore losers, pedantic High Court judges and the ghost of the English tyrant who had sore oppressed his ancestors — Section 44 (iv) was a 17th century "Cromwellian-inspired clause designed to stop the English King stacking the Parliament with his own paid officials", now exhumed to deny public servants their democratic rights.
This tragicomic interlude ended when Cleary won Wills again in the 1993 federal election. Here he pondered the depressing goings-on in the land of parliament, like Gulliver set down in a strange land.
Keating and Hewson, he observed, "were both unapologetic devotees of the free market ideology which infested Parliament". The "wooden conservatives" and "silvertail millionaire squatters", and the new ALP tenors of the economic rationalist choir, took part in a "laughable mock war" whilst the working folk of Coburg and Brunswick suffered unemployment of up to 30%, their TCF industries dying in the polluted rivers of "international competitiveness".
As the 1996 election nears in Wills, the petty power struggles, double dealing and career plotting of the "tawdry ALP soap opera" cranks up, deploying "multiculturalism" — "a tool with which to exploit ethnic groups in order to secure pre-selection victories".
Meanwhile, out on the footy paddocks, Cleary (200 games for Coburg in the VFA) laments how the mass participation game, rooted in the suburbs, falls victim to an acute attack of market forces, becoming "a mass spectator game fashioned by the logic of television and the imperatives of the consumptionist entertainment industry".
The behaviour of a judge, who turns Cleary's sister, brutally murdered in 1987 by her husband, into a provoker and her husband into the victim, also angers and depresses Cleary, reinforcing his antagonistic view of the courts as an arm of the bourgeois state, preserving property relations both capital and personal.
Cleary's political life has been a colourful one, pleasing to the working-class eye but with some discordant hues.
Cleary may have inhaled more of the fumes emanating from the university Maoist sects than is useful for political analysis. Class lines blur and political strategy wavers when Australian independence from "the Yanks", economic and cultural nationalism and Cleary's policy favourite, tariff protection, hit the streets.
Cleary's disgust with the Coalition parties and with Labor's drift to the right also propels him towards the anti-party panacea — only independents "can fracture the system of policy-bankrupt political machines". All parties are caught up in Cleary's dragnet against the "soulless regimentation", careerism and unprincipled opportunism of the major parties of Australian capital.
Cleary's hymns to independents can lead to moments of praise for some quite toxic politicians merely because they occasionally break ranks with the party on some votes in the house. Working-class parties, however, that are structured on "democratic centralist" lines, with freedom of debate and binding decisions from the bottom up, can be lively, open and effective.
Cleary's spirited book, like his spirited life — forthright, suffering no fools or rhetoric whether from the patrician right or the ALP — stands in stark counterpoint to the acres of dull platitudes, gossip, special pleading, parliamentary fetishism and political myopia that fill the biographies of yesterday's has-beens from the establishment parties of the ruling class political duopoly.
Cleary's story is told with humour, and with deep sorrow and furious indignation about the wrongs visited on the people of his class by capital.
As the football writer, Martin Flanagan, wrote of Cleary after his 1996 election defeat, he is "the same argumentative, compassionate person that he ever was", and, unlike so many of his ALP peers, "his political trajectory ended with the people with whom it began". Unlike the ALP players, Cleary kicks goals for his own side, the working class, not for the opposition.