8.
Queensland: Battles with Bjelke
Perhaps Malcolm Fraser's aggressive new right wing politics came as less of a shock in Queensland, where most people were already acclimatised. They had long lived under a Country/National Party government so rock-ribbed that the rest of the country often thought them a bit peculiar: a maverick State, populated by politically backward “banana benders” who chose a crank, Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, to rule them. These rather offensive stereotypes helped in turn to sustain a political myth that the government was somehow unique in its reactionary politics -- even “fascist” -- making Petersen impossible to defeat or dislodge. We shall seek to penetrate the myths, to grasp the Premier's real strengths and weaknesses, and to show how Queensland workers could have considerably shortened his reign. The first step is to ask just how different this State was, and why.
Queensland's economy rests more on agriculture and mining than Australia's as a whole, and is politically and economically decentralised. Brisbane dominates less than other State capitals, since rival port cities have grown up along the coast, equipped with secondary industry for processing primary products. The railway system does not radiate from Brisbane. Instead spur lines run inland from the coastal towns.
The State's Brisbane-based commercial and banking capital remains too weak to dominate industry, while profits from mining and agriculture flow to Melbourne and Sydney, or abroad. Economic ownership is less concentrated than in the southern States. Manufacturing remains underdeveloped, and with it the industrial working class. The weakness of the local bourgeoisie, in turn, has meant that foreign capital is more influential than in other parts of Australia. These features, distinctive throughout the 20th century, became more pronounced in the sixties and early seventies:
After a series of clumsy and unsuccessful attempts to encourage manufacturing investment … Queensland eventually experienced its own foreign investment boom -- but in mining, not manufacturing. In 1963 the total value of mineral production in Queensland (excluding gold) was $109 million … in 1976 it totalled $1136 million. Foreign controlled firms dominate the mining sector in Queensland, and account for 85 percent of value added [which] compares with the Australian average of 58.9 percent.
This peculiar economic structure helped ensure that the National Party was stronger than its Liberal coalition partners, as well as having a decisive impact on the Labor movement. The fragmentation of capital made parliamentary Labor the natural governing party up to the mid-1950s, yet Labor rule was no threat to capital. Outside Brisbane the dominant force in the industrial movement was the arch-conservative Australian Workers' Union, which largely set the tone inside the ALP.
“Given the rural bias of the Queensland economy,” writes Ross Fitzgerald, “Labor grew from a combination of early bush workers, shearers, cane cutters, miners and itinerant railway navvies”, becoming therefore essentially a rurally-based, politically conservative organisation. The weakness of manufacturing meant fewer overseas migrants were drawn to the State in the postwar decades, making for a somewhat insular culture.
Sections of the working class were capable of very militant struggles, for example in the 1948 rail strike, but this aspect of the labour movement had little resonance in the upper levels of the ALP. It had been a Labor government whose police had attacked the railway workers. ALP governments were just as right wing in other fields. In 1941 Labor Premier Forgan Smith had compromised Queensland University's independence by stacking the University Senate, and he had campaigned demagogically for “States' rights” against Canberra. ALP governments had kept Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in a state of semi-slavery for decades, and in 1954 the then Labor Premier Vince Gair had created the Literature Board of Review with its extreme censorship powers. Thus the typical characteristics of the Bjelke-Petersen regime were largely inherited from parliamentary Labor.
It was also the ALP which had introduced a gerrymander favouring rural electorates. When the great Labor split of the fifties brought the conservatives to power, the latter were able to turn this to their own advantage, assisted by a historic decline in Labor's traditional mass base in provincial areas due to mechanisation of rural industry. The gerrymander's main victim had always been the Liberal Party, representing the Brisbane bourgeoisie and middle classes, whose political clout was modest.
In the seventies Labor remained as conservative as ever. Attempts to launch a Socialist Left faction (SL) ran into bureaucratic repression from the party's leadership. The SL then looked to federal intervention to help it put the ALP on a more progressive course, but while the federal leadership did intervene in 1979 to revamp the Queensland branch, it was the centre faction rather than the left which benefited. (For Hayden, modernising Queensland Labor was primarily a matter of style and organisation rather than politics; politically one could argue that Hayden, in pushing the federal party steadily rightward in the late seventies and early eighties, was bringing it into alignment with its Queensland branch.) The State ALP was an obstacle to every important struggle, though sections of the Labor left played a very valuable role at times.
The Petersen regime was the high point of National Party rule. Probably the main thing distinguishing the Nationals from preceding Labor governments was their close links to multinational capital, but since these were mostly mining companies this was consistent with the earlier pattern of domination by rural industries. The government did achieve significant economic development, but again largely within the framework outlined above: bauxite mining at Weipa and an aluminium smelter at Gladstone, with runaway property development on the State's south eastern coast representing the closest thing to real urban development. Because Joh based himself on these rural, mining and real estate interests, he had a certain independence from the urban bourgeoisie and the more progressive political life of the capital city.
At the same time, however, this base was narrow enough to make it somewhat fragile. As long as politics remained largely electoral, the gerrymander gave him power based on a rural electoral rump, but when faced with social or industrial struggles, Petersen could become politically isolated. And he faced a series of such struggles, partly because economic development did have some flow-on effect in Brisbane, resulting in a growth of the working class and the liberal middle class. These groups carried much of the resistance to Petersen in the seventies and eighties.
In some ways the industrial and social protest campaigns of the era were broadly similar to those in the southern States: workers fighting union-bashing, Aborigines demanding land rights, women defending the right to abortion. Even the most distinctive issues, civil liberties and the right to march, were tied to national politics because one of Petersen's aims in banning protest marches was to combat the anti-uranium movement which had grown so strong in the south. What made Queensland struggles distinctive was partly the Premier's autocratic and repressive style of government and partly an underlying vulnerability because of his minority electoral base: when a big campaign took off, you felt it could finish him. And for both these reasons, when people began to fight they tended to become radicalised. Queensland was the only place where the revolutionary left grew during the Fraser era. In those years, it was both the most reactionary and the most radical state, a case of “combined and uneven development”.
One consequence was that both left and right in Queensland showed some potential to exercise leadership nationally. In his various political and industrial adventures, Petersen had objectives extending beyond the State, including a hunger to establish himself as the leader of the national political right -- a goal that became explicit much later in the “Joh for PM” fiasco of 1987. Queensland was something of a social laboratory for extreme right wing policies. Had Petersen enjoyed more unambiguous success in the period 1975-82, it might have strengthened Fraser's hand; conversely, to fight Petersen was to strike a blow against the right nationally. Had the left been able to decisively defeat the government, something that looked possible more than once, this might have set an example for, and even revitalised a labour movement which was in decline Australia-wide. In this complex sense, too, Queensland must be understood as part of rather than “different to” the rest of the country.
Which is not to deny Petersen a certain distinction. Joh was certainly a character. He championed quacks like the “cancer specialist” Milan Brych, he was incoherent and he was autocratic: we joked that Queensland didn't have daylight saving because “the sun shines out of Joh's bum, and he's not getting up early for anyone”. But Petersen was no fool. He had a great talent for political polarisation in which he used his idiosyncrasies to great effect.
He polarised Queenslanders against southerners and the provinces against the capital, counting on the fact that any electoral backlash would occur in Brisbane, where it would merely weaken his hapless Liberal coalition partners. Over his years in power he gradually reduced them to an impotent fragment, finally ruling without them. As Liberal backbencher Rosemary Kyburz complained: “The Premier uses us to give him the numbers to prop up his own rural rump. But we are nothing more than dogs running after bad meat.” In the Whitlam era Petersen had liked to agitate against the “socialists” in Canberra, an endeavour at which he excelled, but Whitlam's fall in 1975 presented a dilemma. The arrival in the Lodge of a tough-talking fellow conservative deprived him of a target to polarise against, so he turned his attention to the streets of Brisbane.
The ban on street marches
Civil liberties and the right to march were not new issues in Queensland. Although the coalition had come to power in 1957 promising to rectify Labor's poor record in protecting civil rights, they had defaulted on these promises when the 1960s anti-war protests brought clashes between police and anti-war demonstrators. In March 1966 the police arrested 26 people for violating the Traffic Act, which required protesters to seek a permit to march, hold meetings, or display placards on any road. In response, staff and students from Queensland University held an illegal march, ensuring further confrontations that ran broadly parallel to civil liberties struggles in the south, such as the mass hand-outs of illegal leaflets in Melbourne in 1968-69 which won the right to distribute literature in the streets.
During the 1971 Springbok tour, Petersen declared a state of emergency and police implemented it with dispatch, provoking Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod to criticise the “shoot low and lay them out approach” of the government and his own cops. In 1976 Whitrod again fell out with his associates, ordering an investigation into the nationally televised bashing of a demonstrator, only to find himself overruled by the Premier. Finally a gung-ho police raid on the hippie commune at Cedar Bay near Cooktown forced him to quit, warning that Queensland showed signs of becoming a police state.
In September 1977 Petersen was ready to provoke new storms. He announced that demonstrators refused a permit to march would no longer have the right of appeal to a magistrate. You could only appeal to the police commissioner, now the hardliner Terry Lewis. The proposal had come from Liberal front-bencher Charles Porter, but the Premier embraced it with relish. Political street marches, said Joh, were “a thing of the past”:
Nobody including the Communist Party is going to turn the streets of Brisbane into a forum. Protest groups need not bother applying for permits to stage marches -- because they won't be granted … You can shout yourselves hoarse in [King George] Square. Don't bother applying for a march permit. You won't get one. That's government policy now.
Petersen's announcement came in a political climate already laden with conflict. In August his government had made an unprecedented direct appearance at the national wage case to oppose wage rises for “militant unions”. Storemen and Packers' organiser Ted Zaphir was on trial for alleged pressure tactics while seeking to enforce a union shop, and the unions were outraged. The Premier, attempting to build on his Cedar Bay “triumph”, announced a stepped up anti-drug campaign. Opponents of uranium mining had brought to Brisbane the same protests that were gripping southern capitals. The campuses, to be sure, seemed relatively quiet: Australian Broadcasting Corporation general manager Talbot Duckmanton told a Brisbane conference that students were no longer as “revolutionary” as they had been a decade earlier. But Joh Bjelke-Petersen was about to stir them up.
His immediate goal was to polarise the electorate around law-and-order sentiment for the State election planned for later in the year; in addition, he hoped to crush the local section of the anti-uranium movement in the interests of his mining industry backers. Finally he aspired to leadership of the conservative political push which had gained momentum nationally since 1974. Petersen did succeed in partially deflecting the anti-nuclear agitation, but at the cost of creating a new protest movement.
It began at Brisbane's two universities. Shortly after the shock announcement, students met to plan their response and on 7 September, hundreds attended campus rallies followed by a brief, token march. While there were no arrests or confrontations, that was soon to change. On 15 September the government rammed its legislation through parliament, with Labor leader Tom Burns complaining he'd had only one minute to study it after the first reading. (At one point Burns shouted “Sieg Heil” at Petersen, who retorted: “He sticks up for the revolutionaries.”) On 22 September, 21 people were arrested as police prevented an attempted march through the centre of Brisbane. Again on 12 October the students tried to march, and when stopped, filtered through to King George Square, where they sat and linked arms. Amazing scenes ensued:
A student was addressing the police with the megaphone, saying that murderers and rapists were going free while police were standing around uselessly … As police hands grabbed for the megaphone, the students passed it to friends and it was tossed among the massed students like a basketball. A heavyweight policeman trampled over the seated students after it. Students grabbed his ankles and he went down, collecting punches on the way. Other police rushed in to rescue him. He was dragged bodily from a struggling mass of students who still held on to his ankles. Angry police then moved in on students who had assaulted the man. Students linked arms and refused to let him go. Police grabbed a girl student by the hair and flung her aside.
At the height of the melee, Queensland University lecturer Dan O'Neill called to the police: “You've done something important for Queensland tonight. You've just radicalised a whole new generation of students.” This was more than mere phrase-mongering. The civil liberties movement produced a political ferment unprecedented since the Vietnam war, and not just among students. John Minns recalls how “the small Brisbane left suddenly found itself in organising meetings of hundreds which went on until the middle of the night, and it was able to mobilise thousands of people -- all in the course of a few weeks.”
Petersen's response was to red-bait the movement's leaders, many of them well-known campus leftists such as Dan O'Neill, whose history dated back to civil liberties struggles in the sixties. The Premier also warned against that “well-known Communist Graeme Grassie” along with his comrade Carole Ferrier, “an extremist, revolutionary type of individual and a well-known member of the International Socialists.” Joh's red-baiting did touch on a real feature of the movement: a layer of activists not only moving rapidly leftwards, but some of them becoming Marxist revolutionaries.
In the early stages the government was tempted to suppress protest in King George Square itself, which the demonstrators were using as a rallying point (Charles Porter reportedly wanted to declare it a public thoroughfare.) The police sent plain clothes officers into the crowds to stir up trouble; TLC president Harry Hauenschild charged that they had voted for march resolutions, then begun arresting those next to them. After the November 11 rally the Courier-Mail reported this exchange:
A young bearded man smoking a pipe told police in a foreign accent that he had been a policeman in Germany, but at least the police in Europe were thinking people. A plain clothes policeman replied: “You're a Nazi”. The young man said: “If you call me a Nazi I'll call you a pig.” Police then said: “That's it” and arrested him.
Most government MPs didn't seem to mind police thuggery, for example front-bencher Bill Knox was to say in 1978: “If people show anti-social behaviour, they should be checked out. Police should be given a free hand. If it means shooting people on the spot, it is excusable.”
The official union movement showed little concern at first. When they held a general stoppage and 5000-strong rally for Ted Zaphir, the union officials made no attempt to link union rights with other civil liberties, and actively discouraged any suggestions for a street march. Initially the campaign was carried by students, with the first three rallies preceded by marches from Queensland University. However the movement's composition began to change from 22 October, the date of a major anti-uranium rally. This was the first of many occasions where people concerned with other issues found themselves forced to confront the march ban. The uranium issue had aroused considerable interest among organised workers, especially in the maritime unions. When a large crowd attempted to march from King George Square, another drama unfolded:
In a military-style operation, hundreds of police massed in position … As the marchers pressed forward and chanting grew stronger, police [called] on them to disband … The chant grew stronger: “What do we want? The right to march. When do we want it? Now!” Dozens of people ran towards Queen Street and senior police acted: “Get in and arrest them.”
With left wing Senator George Georges among 418 arrested, these events had a sensational impact in parts of the labour movement. By this time, too, the State election was approaching. The election atmosphere brought to the surface a lot of working class anger towards Petersen and the political right. Civil liberties activists called another rally for November 11, the day before the election and the second anniversary of the Kerr Coup. It proved to be the biggest rally of this stage of the campaign, and of the 197 arrested, most gave blue collar jobs as their occupations. Eleven days later, one of several people arriving to spend time in jail after refusing to pay fines told reporters: “We regard ourselves as political prisoners.” They later said the other prisoners had given them “a tremendous cheer” on their arrival.
These workers were not following any lead from the ALP or the Trades and Labor Council. Terrified of an electoral backlash, both Tom Burns and the TLC had opposed the rally and march, with the TLC devoting itself instead to a tame indoor meeting. Petersen promptly pounced on their timidity, saying that “the TLC decision to hold its next protest in Festival Hall was a wise one. With the Zaphir case protest in the Roma Street Forum, it made the second time Trades Hall had proved the Government's point that street marches were unnecessary.”
But the size of the 11 November mobilisation and the participation by significant numbers of unionists embarrassed the Trades Hall executive, while the State election brought a substantial swing against the government, disproving ALP fears of a voter backlash. The TLC now felt obliged to deal with the campaign's leaders -- organised in the Civil Liberties Co-ordinating Committee -- and Trades Hall agreed to co-sponsor a rally on 3 December for both the right to march and trade union rights. A delegates' meeting in late November demonstrated considerable enthusiasm on the part of union activists, who defeated their leaders' efforts to rule out a march or open platform by 55 votes to 45.
Unfortunately most union officials were again spooked by the prospect of confrontation, doing little to build the rally on the job, so the crowd was smaller than on 11 November. Still, an important precedent had been established. Civil liberties and union rights were now seen as linked, and the right to march had become a union issue. Left wing activists in the campaign, seeing the importance of union involvement and recognising that it would have to be built independently of Trades Hall, had already begun visiting workplaces. In six months they addressed over 100 job and union meetings.
While the TLC and ALP leaders deplored Petersen's repression, it was another eight months before events obliged them to give even token support to civil disobedience, but the 1978 May Day march (a traditional, and therefore legal event) showed that a movement was continuing to grow outside their control. The leftist “Red Contingent” formed the core of a 5000-strong unofficial section of the march, constituting perhaps a majority.
Debating strategy
Arguments also raged within the civil liberties campaign itself. The most left wing position, as described by two of its leading advocates, saw the ban as “one aspect of the assault on the democratic rights of those groups which most needed the streets to express solidarity and protest: women's liberation, blacks, anti-uranium activists and the organisations of the working class … we argued that by pursuing a militant course -- marching and if necessary getting arrested -- the issue could become a focal point for anti-State government sympathies.” In addition they emphasised the importance of the working class, and opposed subordinating either militancy or class politics to appeal to “moderates” such as the Young Liberals or the churches.
Others wanted to concentrate on the single issue of the right to march, while favouring more cautious tactics such as letters to concerned groups and a few rallies, preferably off the streets. Most ALP members in the campaign and union officials such as Hugh Hamilton of the Building Workers' Industrial Union supported variants of this approach initially, as did the Communist and Socialist Workers parties. Debates on whether to march illegally preceded every rally until March 1978, polarising one group of activists after another. The resistance to marching steadily lost ground, because it was continually voted down at civil liberties meetings and the rallies themselves. This reflected the rapid process of radicalisation. “Given that the Labor left and the Communist Party opposed marching for some time into the campaign,” says John Minns, “it astonished everyone (especially us) that the I.S. and a few independents consistently won the votes to march.”
There was also a pacifist current, which thought the campaign's greatest strength lay in winning over the churches; they favoured disobedience but didn't want it to be militant, preferring small “guerilla marches” to mass confrontations which they saw as “mindless knee-jerk leftism”. However the pacifists seldom won these arguments among the activists, who mostly recognised that only a movement prepared to polarise right back at Petersen had a chance of defeating him.
The first half of 1978 was comparatively quiet. When police prevented the Concerned Christians from singing gospel songs in April, the government was embarrassed, and when an April Fool's Day rally voted not to march, the massed police looked rather foolish. A Bundaberg dentist marched at 2:45 am down a quiet street with his dog Jaffa (illegally, for he and Jaffa had been denied a permit) giving everyone a good laugh. In June, Griffith University students outflanked the cops with an unannounced march. But such pin-pricks couldn't move the government. Only a return to mass struggle could do that.
In July, the ALP squandered a perfect opportunity to get the masses back in the streets. When the party applied for a march permit for 8 July the government called its bluff and granted one, but after two days of panic Labor cancelled the march, advancing comical excuses. It was believed “two busloads of gay rights demonstrators would come from Sydney”, apparently a mortifying prospect; alternatively Tom Burns suggested the permit application had been “a ploy”, though he could not explain the point of this tactic. More likely the ALP leaders were haunted by memories of the large unofficial contingent at May Day and the invasion of the official May Day platform by various protesters including women angered by sexist remarks; they feared that in the event of a new mobilisation they would once again be challenged by militants to their left. In any case, Petersen profited a second time from the cowardice of organised labour's official leaders. As the Courier-Mail put it:
The Labor Party has made itself look idiotic … Indeed, its belief that there might have been disruption of the march by militant groups goes part of the way towards supporting what it has declared to be insupportable -- the principle of banning street marches which could lead to street disorder.
The ALP's retreat emboldened the government and its police, who promptly took the offensive, arresting 31 people at a women's liberation demonstration on 22 July. There had been no attempt to march, so the police attacked the crowd of 250 on the grounds that the use of “obscene language” could have upset passers-by. However the protest movement struck back one month later with an illegal march attempt following an anti-budget rally, and as the anniversary of the march ban rolled around Queensland was entering a new season of unrest, with a new organisation taking the lead: the Civil Liberties Campaign Group (CLCG) led by Senator Georges and based on the Labor left, which was attracting up to 200 people to its meetings.
The high points of the second round were two mass mobilisations on 31 October and 7 December. By this time, because of the growing involvement of trade unionists and the Labor left, Petersen was facing a movement of national importance. ALP politicians and leading union officials of various political hues were turning up to march, even including the right wing NSW TLC secretary John Ducker. Queensland maritime unionists were by now strongly committed. The march on 31 October featured a 7 metre long banner reading “Unionists: Defend Democratic Rights.” When seamen were jailed after refusing to pay fines, their union shut down Queensland's ports, forcing shipping companies to pay the fines anonymously. The maritime unions stopped work for the 30 October rally, then held a 600-strong mass meeting to demand another, union-based mobilisation for December. These events coincided with mass picketing by meatworkers against the export of live cattle which led to brawls with police, and with a prolonged brewery strike. Then with the general temperature rising, the TLC voted for a march on Thursday, 7 December to be backed up by a stopwork.
By now Bjelke-Petersen was feeling the heat. Angus Innes, a Liberal well known for his opposition to the march ban, won the Sherwood by-election with the National Party coming fourth. The financial cost of enforcing the ban (cops, courts, jails etc) was also mounting: over two years it was conservatively estimated at $5 million. There had been attempts by the Liberals, and even some National Party backbenchers, to retreat during the previous year, but the Premier had shrugged them off. Now Petersen himself felt obliged to make a concession. Even though the TLC had not applied for a permit, the police offered one for Saturday morning.
The more conservative elements at Trades Hall were attracted to this offer but Georges, the CLCG and the maritime unions opposed accepting it, arguing that other, weaker groups were being systematically denied march permits so the unions must show solidarity. Also, a weekday stopwork and rally would have far more impact. Their views prevailed, and despite desperate appeals from Petersen, who booked a series of radio and TV spots, Brisbane saw its largest civil liberties rally: 4000 participants, 383 arrests, with most of those arrested being blue collar unionists. There were also illegal marches in Rockhampton, Mackay and Collinsville.
The first half of 1979 was again relatively quiet. It appeared that the burden of court cases following the mass arrests had combined with the steamy Queensland summer weather to bring a lull. Even so, March saw one portentous event: when police arrested three protesters on International Women's Day, constable Michael Egan threw his hat into the air and went to a demonstrator's aid. “I knew I'd had a gutful and didn't want to be a copper any more,” he said. Egan revealed that “most of the violence in the early days [of the campaign] was police provoked”, and confirmed earlier claims that in addition to the intimidating presence of the Queensland Special Branch, the police had sent provocateurs into the crowds of protesters to “stir them up”.
In July, a confidential National Party report recommended ending the march ban, which it acknowledged was “seen by a large section of the public as provocative”. When July also saw another round of mass arrests, apparently presaging a new Spring of unrest, the writing was on the wall. The government would have to manoeuvre carefully to retreat without admitting an embarrassing defeat. When the Campaign Against Nuclear Power sought a march permit for Hiroshima Day the police knocked them back, but they then granted one for a Nagasaki Day march at 6 pm. It was the first authorised protest march in Brisbane since September 1977. On 13 September, the police allowed 250 students to march against Fraser's failure to raise tertiary allowances. The permit limited the numbers and prohibited placards with sticks or metal rods; marchers with red flags had to put them away.
Thus Queensland remained a repressive State with civil liberties circumscribed. But Joh Bjelke-Petersen's attempt to drive dissent from Brisbane streets had failed.
Tom Burns' inept handling of the issue sealed his fate as Labor leader but his replacement, Ed Casey, was no improvement. Casey came from the ALP's traditional rural base and his politics showed it. When he proposed an electoral redistribution it retained the gerrymander; he voted for the Justices Act which granted virtual immunity to State MPs; he condemned strikes in support of the 35 hour week. And the abortion issue allowed him, for a fleeting moment, the satisfaction of stealing a rightward march on Joh Bjelke-Petersen himself.
The campaign for abortion rights
In the realm of social mores, Queensland's conservative status was well established. The government reaffirmed the point quite conspicuously in 1976-78 when right wing pressure groups wrecked two education projects. Encouraged by the sacking of four teachers on minor drug charges in 1976 and the subsequent persecution of gay teacher Greg Weir, a coalition of fundamentalist Christians and other rightists led by Mrs Rona Joyner took the offensive against a primary school social studies course called “Man: A Course of Study” (MACOS). Joyner, who believed that “children don't go to school to learn to think,” saw MACOS as an attempt to socially engineer children into dangerous social views, and ultimately into socialism. After some honourable resistance in a few schools, the education system abandoned the course.
By now Joyner had turned her attention to the Social Education Materials Project. Her two organisations, STOP and CARE, objected to discussion of unmarried mothers, divorce, alternative lifestyles and homosexual marriage, and to the “secular, humanist, socialist philosophy” behind it. Bjelke-Petersen, who knew a bandwagon when he saw one, promptly joined the attacks. He added, for the benefit of dissenting teachers: “They have been warned and already 700 of their colleagues are unemployed in Queensland.”
Queensland's abortion laws matched this repressive climate. Whereas in other States, changing attitudes and women's growing social power had forced through reforms after 1969, Queensland continued to ban abortions. There was a degree of toleration in practice as the police turned a blind eye, but most importantly the pressure for law reform was alleviated when Children by Choice organised to make referrals interstate a simple procedure, giving women in Brisbane, who would have been the heart of any campaign to change the laws, the option instead of a quick trip to NSW in case of pregnancy.
The Petersen government had no pressing desire to upset the status quo, but two developments prodded it into activity. The activities of Greenslopes Fertility Clinic, which had performed abortions since 1977, became widely known in 1979. This was around the time the anti-abortion Lusher motion was before federal parliament, so the Right to Life probably thought it should show the flag in Queensland; in August its best known member, Ed Casey, produced a petition demanding the clinic's closure and declaimed about the “massacre of the innocents”. Petersen and his more rednecked ministers like Russ Hinze could not bear to be outflanked on the right by Casey, so they sent Health minister Bill Knox off to draft amendments tightening up the legislation. Alison Anderson records:
After several months of secrecy and rumours, the draft Bill finally reached the joint parties for preliminary discussion. Liberal MP Rosemary Kyburz caused a sensation by leaking its contents to the press. Proposed clauses included long jail sentences with hard labour for doctors, nurses, social welfare workers or even friends who helped a woman to get an abortion; restriction of all abortions to public hospitals, with compulsory notification of all occurrences to the Department of Health; the only grounds for a legal abortion were to be the imminent death of the woman concerned.
Public outcry forced the government to allow three other grounds for abortion (rape, incest, and proven deformity of the foetus) but even these were still hedged about with restrictions.
Pro-choice campaigners began gathering their forces after Casey's August speech. There was plenty of potential support among the public: Labor MP Bob Gibbs tabled a petition with over 3,000 signatures calling for free, safe legal abortion on demand. But whereas the Right to Life had a well-oiled machine, the new Women's Campaign for Abortion (WCA) had to start from scratch. It remained fairly small for several months, partly because of doubts that the Bill could really be as bad as was rumoured.
Others were also active. The Labor Women's Organisation, unlike Casey, stood on party policy and opposed the Bill, as did Children by Choice. These organisations also called for repealing the existing law, subject to conditions of medical supervision and conscience rights. Others opposed the Bill as being unenforceable or too restrictive. WCA distinguished itself partly by its stand for medically safe abortions, freely available and free of charge. However its most distinctive features were its militant tactics, along with its emphasis on the rights of women as workers and its orientation to the trade union movement. Through WCA's efforts many unions passed motions against the Bill or affirming women's right to choose. Some donated money, joined pickets or arranged jobsite meetings. Some union leaders endorsed, though they did little about, the argument that this was an industrial issue just like the right to work. When WCA called a picket outside parliament in December, thirteen union officials endorsed it. The TLC passed a motion opposing the Bill, and gave its assent to formal liaison between WCA and the Working Women's Charter Committee.
This was useful preparation, but the struggle first took on greater proportions in March 1980, as the first reading drew near. The National Women's Advisory Council passed a pro-choice motion by a large majority, and 600 people joined Brisbane's International Women's Day march which was dominated by the issue. The demonstrators defied police instructions by unfurling large banners 200 metres before the end of the march. 50 also marched in Townsville. Unmoved, the conservative parties pushed through a motion calling on the government to “make sure the lives of unborn Queensland children are protected”.
On 17 April a crowd of women students rallied outside the parliamentary annexe, then sent a delegation inside to seek discussions with several ministers and with Rosemary Kyburz. Of the ministers only Llew Edwards agreed to see them. Labor member Kev Hooper also spoke to them; one of the delegation, Judy McVey, reported he had called them “broken down lesbians and man-haters”. The Queensland branch of the Australian Medical Association meanwhile warned that the Act threatened a “grave infringement of human rights”, though the rights of doctors seemed to weigh at least as heavily in their considerations. They were alarmed at provisions which allowed for doctors to be struck off for advising patients in ways that might frustrate the Act, even if they were not actually breaking the law. On 28 April the Women's Electoral Lobby called for a boycott of Queensland if the Bill proceeded. And at the end of the month there was another demonstration outside the parliamentary annexe, where police grabbed three protesters when the crowd pushed into the forecourt.
By this stage some leading conservatives were already uneasy about the Bill. National Party State President Sir Robert Sparkes announced he was against it “in its reported form”, while Russ Hinze remarked: “I don't think it's got a hope in hell of getting through.” Some of the Liberal backbenchers were getting increasingly unhappy as they read the mood in their electorates, and by the end of April four had indicated they would oppose it.
The first weeks of May saw further cracks in the government's facade. The Liberal Party's State organisation demanded that the Bill be scrapped. Party president Yvonne McComb said more than 40 executive members were “very unhappy”. Then on 17 May, as 2000 people packed the Town Hall to show their hostility to the Bill, the National Party management called for a secret ballot of MPs. It had become clear that a majority of Joh's own party opposed the Bill. In a public vote, he could hold the line; in a secret ballot he would be rolled.
On 19 May some 5000 Right to Life supporters marched through city streets, but few politicians were fooled by this apparent show of strength -- the Right to Life crowd, bussed directly from church, was passive and not really representative of widespread public sentiment. Even as they marched, there were rumours that 12 Liberal backbenchers and four ministers were now against the legislation. Finally on 20 May a pro-choice crowd marched on parliament following a rally in King George Square.
The pro-choice campaign had been consumed by a debate over militancy, with some arguing that “violence” would alienate ordinary people while others thought a militant campaign would build momentum. The 20 May action proved the fears of the “moderates” to be groundless as Vicki Spiteri, one of the demonstrators, recalls: “Groups from the office buildings joined the march. Many of these women had never been to a demo before. There they were in their high heels, straight from work, and they wanted to attack Parliament House.” The Courier-Mail reported:
Demonstrators chanting pro-abortion slogans stood for four hours outside the gates … Arrests began as demonstrators attempted to tear down the gates.
Inside parliament Bjelke-Petersen put on a confident face, but after two Liberal ministers announced they would vote against the Bill, Russ Hinze set to work counting heads. He found the government might fall short. Overnight the phones ran hot, and the next morning Bill Knox had more bad news for Bjelke: on instruction from Liberal members, he was no longer moving the legislation as a government Bill. He would only move it as a private member's Bill. This freed ministers from the dictates of cabinet solidarity. When the vote finally took place, nineteen government members voted against, including four Liberal ministers and four National backbenchers. Ed Casey, meanwhile, had decided that “loop-holes” in the legislation were a pretext for opposing it after all!
As in the civil liberties conflict, militancy in the streets had built the struggle. It had not only shown the movement's determination but, contrary to the fears of the faint-hearted, had also helped to attract support from a wider range of working class people.
Land rights and the Commonwealth Games
Earlier disputes had shown what an intransigent foe Aborigines had in the Queensland Government. Bjelke-Petersen was implacably hostile to land rights: to him they were “pure Alice in Wonderland” and if implemented they would lead (nightmarish prospect!) to an independent black state in the Northern Territory, while the Northern Land Council “could hold mining companies and the entire nation to ransom” Not that the Premier was always this lucid. In a 1981 confrontation, a member of the Queensland Aboriginal Advisory Council told him: “That was our land since time began, even before the first Europeans landed here.” Petersen replied: “But if you didn't have the American soldiers in the last war none of us would be here. You wouldn't be here. I wouldn't be here. You can't always use that argument indefinitely.”
The State's race relations were a national issue because in this as in everything else, Petersen sought to give a lead to the political right throughout Australia. They became an international issue with the approach of the September 1982 Brisbane Commonwealth Games, as calls mounted for a boycott. South Africa's exclusion from the Olympics offered a precedent for politicising the Brisbane event, and Fraser's call for a boycott of the Moscow Olympics following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan undermined the conservative parties' traditional “keep politics out of sport” arguments. Plus it was a classic protest opportunity, with TV crews arriving from around the world.
In 1981 Aboriginal representatives visited New Zealand to talk with anti-apartheid groups and in April 1982 the national Federation of Land Councils sent Les Malezer and Bob Weatherall to Africa to “convince Commonwealth countries that Queensland has a racist government.” But the Aborigines soon discovered that African governments were no more principled than our own. The black states decided to come to Brisbane on the grounds that Australia had been “a leader in opposing South Africa's apartheid policies”, missing the point that one purpose of Malcolm Fraser's forays into African affairs was to distract attention from the racism in his own country. However the boycott campaign did stir up political interest. It also prompted a certain amount of right wing hysteria, with accusations that Libya was backing Aboriginal terrorists with a secret Maori army, trained in Cuba, somehow involved. (One unfortunate Maori, Raymond Renatta, was deported in March 1982 amidst this agitation.) The claims were a classic beat-up, but they created the climate for further propaganda labelling black protests as “blood in the streets terrorism”.
This in turn laid the political basis for draconian “security” measures under the Commonwealth Games Act. The Act gave the police virtual siege powers in large areas of Brisbane, including both university campuses and a 42 kilometre marathon route, as well as carte blanche authority to protect a wide range of “notified persons” (VIPs). This included the right to search homes without a warrant, and detain people without trial. The ALP charged that references to “prohibited things” could be used to arrest wearers of political t-shirts and badges.
Though disappointed that no boycott eventuated, the Aborigines pressed on with their own protests. In August 1981 the Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action (FAIRA) organised a rally for land rights which marched twice: once illegally and a second time along the permitted march route. FAIRA's tent embassy in King George Square attracted international interest, volunteers from North Queensland communities and “enormous support from white people too”.
In April 1982, 300 people turned out for another rally. Aborigines in Brisbane formed a Black Protest Committee and white sympathisers launched a Land Rights Support Group. When Petersen visited New Zealand, he was met by demonstrators. Brisbane black leaders insisted they intended a peaceful protest, but many of them realised that, in Miller's words, the police might “try and provoke us … it is their game to bash people.”
Knowing there would be international scrutiny of Queensland's much criticised Aboriginal and Islander legislation, Bjelke-Petersen hit on a way to confuse the issue: he declared in March 1982 that he would grant what he called a type of land rights under the title of Deeds of Grant in Trust. Aboriginal and Islander reserves would be abolished and their titles transferred to elected community councils, which would also manage them. However this plan met none of the key criteria laid down by Canberra for land rights. Boundaries of reserves could be changed by the Lands minister or government; security of tenure wasn't guaranteed; the Deeds could be revoked at any time. The government hoped the manoeuvre would give some of the more conservative communities the illusion of land rights, while not really restricting opportunities for developers. In this it failed, as all sections of the Aboriginal movement condemned the plan.
Thus the case for demonstrating was as strong as ever as the Games approached. Tension was also mounting. British tabloids reported that “dozens of helicopters” were ready to transport police armed with machine guns to confront demonstrators. This was wild overstatement, but the government probably hoped its elaborate preparations would discourage militant protests. If so, it hoped in vain. It was true that leading Brisbane blacks were rather cautious -- initially the Black Protest Committee wanted to confine things to a cultural festival -- but more determined activists managed to inject greater fighting spirit into the actions, which encouraged white supporters to be more adventurous as well.
On finding that the police were stingy with march permits, Southwest Queensland black leader Ray Robinson promptly announced that “Aboriginals will march where and when they want”. A fortnight before the Games began a civil liberties group carried out street theatre combined with an illegal march, and on 25 September prominent Aboriginal public servant Charles Perkins called for marches without permits, though he met immediate disagreement from black Liberal Senator Neville Bonner. (The Liberals later rewarded Bonner for his efforts to restrain the protesters by moving him to an unwinnable position on their 1983 Senate ticket.)
On Sunday, 26 September some 3000 blacks and whites marched through Brisbane in a legal procession. However they showed a measure of defiance by holding two unscheduled sit-downs in the streets. Two days later they were marching again. The police had granted a permit at the last minute -- it was the first weekday daytime march granted a permit since 1977. Again there were two sitdowns in defiance of permit restrictions. The police almost certainly relented on the daytime permit because militants had won the debate in the Aborigines' camp at Musgrave Park. The Black Protest Committee had resigned, making way for a new leadership called the National Black Unity Group, who were more prepared for confrontation.
The protesters concluded the week's actions with an illegal march, which saw 500 people converging on the Games site at the Queen Elizabeth II stadium. After it one arrested demonstrator, FAIRA executive officer Bob Weatherall, declared: “I'm only guilty under white law. I'm not guilty under Aboriginal law. I have the right to walk on my own land.”
The 1982 general strike
No matter how numerous the challenges to Queensland's right wing government -- over civil liberties, abortion or land rights -- only one group in society had the muscle to seriously threaten Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and that was the trade union movement. The power industry unions in particular went toe to toe with him several times. From 1977 at the latest, it seems clear that Petersen had set his sights above all on smashing union power.
In October 1977, as the confrontations over street marches were beginning to mount, Petersen announced that government policy for the November State election would include the “right to work”. He meant the term in its American usage, as an attack on the closed shop and unionism generally. The proposal was put to the joint parties' meeting by the same Charles Porter who had sponsored the march ban motion. The conservatives were in no hurry to act on the issue, however, perhaps because they feared, as the Labor minister Mr Fred Campbell told the Liberal Party State convention in April 1978, that they would only weaken politically moderate unions while leaving left unions with greater muscle to dominate the union movement.
However a successful strike by Gladstone power workers in August 1978 appears to have stirred the Premier's anger: he began talking about outlawing strikes in essential services. Within a year, Russ Hinze had prepared an Essential Services Bill.
The Bill gave the government sweeping powers. It could order an immediate return to work, sack anyone defying such an order for more than 48 hours, make collection of strike funds illegal, allow firms to sue for damages, assert direct government control of industry, deregister unions and impose fines. Unionists could not choose jail rather than pay fines, so the way was open for their property to be seized. When asked about the possibility of a general strike in response, Hinze was pugnacious: “Let's see how good the union leaders are.”
To pass such a law was one thing, to enforce it another. The unions gave notice almost immediately that they would resist, calling a job delegates' meeting on 18 October. On 23 October Petersen lashed out at the power workers, declaring that “we have reached the stage where work must surely be regarded as a contract” and three days later the new Act became law, yet the unions remained defiant. In November, 2000 trade unionists rallied in Roma Street Forum while another 1000 assembled at Ipswich. Then in December the power workers again stopped work … and Cabinet was not game to use its new powers.
The government let a further opportunity go by in March 1980, when the power workers struck for 48 hours over the government's attempt to buy off key operators, by offering them higher pay if they would guarantee power supplies during any emergency. Again, Bjelke retreated. The first great confrontation did not come until 1982 during a campaign for the 38 hour week.
The power workers had already won a shorter working week, and as late as July 1982 it appeared that other unions and the government had reached an agreement on shorter hours, though railway workers were showing some dissatisfaction over rostering changes they were being asked to accept. However Petersen first stalled on the question of timing, then when the unions protested he withdrew his offer altogether. Probably he was encouraged by the decline of industrial militancy nationally which had resulted from the onset of recession. But the unions began preparing for industrial action, with the railway workers announcing a 48 hour stoppage from midnight on Sunday, 15 August. The AWU, which had not been previously involved, called a stopwork of its government employees to consider action. By Monday there were thousands of workers on strike, but it appeared simply to be the latest round of an ordinary industrial campaign -- and one being conducted against a background of trade union retreat all over Australia, owing to the emergence of a sharp recession.
Although Bjelke-Petersen declared a State of Emergency, he had done so before without using it. He also spouted aggressive rhetoric, announcing that union leaders would “be knocked down in the rush of men wanting to get back to work,” presumably due to promises that “anybody who turns up for work will have a job forever.” Those who did not would face suspension, said Petersen. But Queensland workers were used to hot air from the Premier. Petersen's attempt to make a hero out of Cairns railway employee Ian Stiff, who had announced his intention of scabbing, was nothing new either: earlier in the year ALP Senator Jim O'Keefe had read into Hansard sections of a telephone conversation in which Joh praised apprentice electrician Steve Pearson for planning to sabotage power strikes.
Thus it was easy to discount his threats to use the Essential Services legislation and suspend workers. The Courier-Mail called them “melodrama” and reported that quite a few members of Cabinet had cold feet.
It is unlikely that building workers' leader Hugh Hamilton took his own words any more seriously when he warned: “The government has gone crazy … if anyone is sacked the industrial action will widen.” For the union officials did not intend to mount a very militant campaign. At mass meetings on the Monday they argued for a 24 hour stoppage instead of the 48 hours which job delegates were demanding. They succeeded in winning over the Brisbane meeting, and most government unions in the capital returned to work after a day. In regional meetings, though, in the absence of the top officials, it was a different story. Townsville, Mackay, Bundaberg and Maryborough all voted to stay out for 48 hours, while in Ipswich the union leaders were greeted with abuse by a meeting which voted almost unanimously for the longer stoppage. The contrast with Brisbane was impressive; it suggested that the rank and file were fairly keen.
But it was only at the end of Monday, with the news that Petersen -- encouraged by the union officials' retreat -- had indeed suspended 3500 railway workers, that this dispute suddenly became something out of the ordinary. On Tuesday, 17 August he moved to deregister eleven unions. These moves immediately brought new life to a fading union campaign. When TLC secretary Fred Whitby said the Cabinet “must be smoking opium” to provoke the unions like this, many Queenslanders thought he had a point.
The railways stayed closed; car workers, oil workers and coal miners walked off the job; and the AWU decided to bring its members out, as did glass and metal unions. The maritime industry stopped dead. Most important of all were the massive power cuts which shut down basic industry, and were seen as symbolising the strength of the working class.
Within a day, Petersen had begun to soften his stand, saying he would consider withdrawing the suspensions if the strike ended. By Thursday the Cabinet was contemplating the fact, according to the Courier-Mail “that its Essential Services Legislation was ineffectual, having been told that deregistration moves against unions, fines on unions and the right of private citizens to sue for loss caused by strikes were impossible to enforce.” An unnamed minister lamented: “It has been put to the test and found very wanting.” Columnist Ken Blanch revealed that the Premier was so fearful of union militancy he had rung a local Gladstone journalist to “check the union climate in the city” before visiting to open a new aluminium smelter.
On Friday, 21 August the government capitulated. Talks in the Industrial Commission had failed to get any compromises from the unions, so Petersen unilaterally reinstated all the suspended railway employees and revoked all the Essential Services Act provisions. The Joh Bjelke-Petersen who appeared on television that night was a far cry from the arrogant bully Queenslanders were used to seeing. “He had his head down,” socialist and union militant Mark Gillespie later recalled, “none of the usual ranting and raving. A quick announcement, and he walked off.” It seemed a historic turning point might be at hand.
The TLC met over the week-end and decided to call a general strike, in support of the claim for shorter hours but also effectively demanding that Petersen step down. Hugh Hamilton is said to have pushed hard for this decision. In itself an escalation did not seem unreasonable: with the government on the defensive, it made sense to seek further concessions. The trouble was that the union officials had not laid the basis for such a dramatic politicisation of the dispute, nor were they prepared to do so now.
The successful fightback that had rocked Petersen had been partly a spontaneous upheaval independent of the TLC, and there was no guarantee the TLC could keep it going by fiat. Moreover, it had been largely defensive: workers not immediately concerned with the 38 hour week had seen the suspensions as an outrage and had shown basic solidarity. It did not follow that they endorsed the other demands of the struggle. The step to an offensive mass strike for shorter hours and to bring down Petersen would have required new efforts at mobilisation. The union leaders had to argue for the new demands, or at least give the militants on the job the green light to do so, and the process had to begin immediately. Finally, the momentum of industrial action by key unions had to be maintained. The TLC faced up to none of these problems.
For several reason, therefore, a general strike was unsustainable. Probably, for all their talk of an indefinite stoppage, the officials intended it as merely another 48 hour affair. They were gambling they could keep the rank and file out for that long without special efforts, and that this would be enough to force a government cave-in, a fact which emerged fairly clearly from one key decision: rather than maintain the existing strike momentum, they sent the electricity and power workers back to work over the week-end. When power was restored in large areas that had been previously blacked out, it had a great psychological impact. While the TLC claimed the move would help get the public on side, in reality it was a signal that the trade union movement wasn't entirely serious about confronting the government.
By the time mass meetings assembled there was a certain unevenness in the strike front. Certainly the meetings were sizeable -- about 6-10,000 in Brisbane -- and they voted all but unanimously for the official motions, but almost immediately afterwards momentum began building for a return to work. The leaderships of key federal public service unions voted not to join in. The Printing union executive endorsed the strike, but when it met resistance from members at Queensland Newspapers, it hastened to reverse its position. Coal miners voted for 24 or 48 hour strikes rather than indefinite action. The AWU pulled out, then on Tuesday, after a stormy meeting, the Transport Workers followed suit.
It was still a very large stoppage, with a majority of unions participating, but this was observance rather than a struggle with forward momentum. The fact was reflected in a complete absence of political rallies by workers or anyone else, though at Queensland University a few hundred students went on strike in solidarity.
At this point the TLC might still have rescued the situation by pulling the power workers back into the dispute. Coal handlers at the power stations wanted to join in. Brisbane Council bus drivers were also prepared to act. However an escalation was far from the union leaders' minds; rather they hastened to end the strike at midnight on Tuesday. The railways stayed out longer and various bans stayed on in support of the shorter hours demand, giving Hugh Hamilton a tenuous pretext for denying that the TLC was backing down. Privately, though, union officials conceded a “technical retreat”.
The collapse of the general strike allowed Petersen to restore his position, and even to claim that the Essential Services provisions he had so ignominiously withdrawn had somehow helped him prevail. The way was open for more aggressive National Party rhetoric, with Robert Sparkes calling for a “specially trained elite group of military technicians” to combat power strikes. And whereas a successful general strike could have created space for a huge response to the protests at the Commonwealth Games a month later, its failure meant the land rights campaign had to confront a newly confident government on its own.
For those of us on the far left who had often glibly advanced the general strike as a revolutionary tactic, these events were an education in the complexities of the class struggle. A general stoppage can be immensely powerful, shattering the will of the ruling class and its politicians, but because it creates such an all-or-nothing, winner-take-all situation it can also bring defeat and demoralisation if it isn't properly fought. Thus in the Medibank confrontation, Bob Hawke had used a politically passive one-day general strike as a safety valve to deflate a promising industrial movement.
In Queensland the union officials had turned initial victory into defeat in a curious bout of bureaucratic adventurism. The lesson for revolutionaries was that a general strike can only successfully challenge the power of capital and the state when the momentum of a working class movement is high and still rising, and when the movement's leaders have used the previous struggles to educate at least a sizeable minority of workers in the political implications of the industrial campaign. Union officials of the conventional type, with their bureaucratic mentality and political ties to the existing social order, cannot and will not do this. That, after all, was precisely the reason why the revolutionaries were fighting to build a movement of their own.
The failed general strike opened the way the for a greater tragedy, for while the battle had left the government's anti-union legislation and the ruling class mentality associated with it somewhat dented, these still remained essentially intact. Petersen was to make use of both to smash the power workers during the early Hawke years, in the SEQEB dispute of 1985, a defeat from which the class struggle in Queensland has yet to recover.