Introduction
(July 1993)
Malcolm Fraser’s greatest achievement was probably to put class struggle back at the top of the political agenda.
Few serious students had ever doubted that Australian society was unequal. The country’s long history of strikes and social conflicts was well known, and the years since 1968 had seen industrial disputes and social movements at high levels. But Fraser’s daring grab for power in 1975 polarised the contending forces into two great camps, giving the labour movement in particular a sharply defined enemy. On the day of Fraser’s “Canberra Coup”, social theorist Bob Connell wrote:
If there remained any lingering doubt about the class nature of Australian politics, the events of 1975 must have resolved it. There is hardly a clearer case … of the way a threatened ruling class is able to mobilize fragments of state power, business connections, financial resources, and the legitimacy given them by the dominant culture, in a campaign to remove an offending government.
Yet 1975 created more dilemmas than it resolved. Fraser’s capitalist backers expected him to end the country’s economic crisis, squash protest movements, smash the unions; his foes, mostly in and around the labour movement, expected the unions and the ALP to wage a fierce struggle to dislodge the usurper and teach the bosses a lesson. None of these expectations was met. While many in the labour movement did “maintain the rage”, seven years of strife brought the exhaustion of the contending forces and the triumph of new political leaders preaching “national reconciliation”.
Since then, Hawke and Keating’s “reconciliation” has lost credibility, Australian society remains divided between workers and bosses, oppressors and oppressed; and since the conflict between them is so enduring, we need to learn from the last round of struggle. To study why neither side could prevail during the Fraser era may help in determining how workers can take the offensive today.
This study argues the importance of organization, leadership and politics. Neither camp, capital or labour, had mobilized effectively for the struggle. Neither had a coherent leadership willing, or able, to take the offensive in sustained fashion, partly because neither side understood the dimensions of the economic crisis. In the nineties, the last point is clearer, and the other issues are beginning to confront us once again. In the coming struggles, workers and oppressed people will need new kinds of organization. Without them we will at best repeat the disappointments of the seventies, and at worst suffer shattering defeats, should our opponents learn the lessons of that era while we do not.
I contend that we need organizations and leaders of a revolutionary stamp, fighting to overturn the social order and put an end to class society. If this view is generally implicit rather than explicit in the following pages, it’s because the forces that fought for it in the Fraser era were generally too marginal to shape events. That is precisely what must change in the coming years.
After two chapters that set the scene and introduce the players, chapters three to five discuss the main industrial and political confrontations of the early Fraser era, ending in defeat for the labour movement. The final two chapters resume this central theme by recounting a second period of conflict between the “big batallions” of labour and capital, which resulted in Fraser’s defeat, but not necessarily victory for the working class. The middle section of the book (chapters six to ten) considers social movements and the distinctive struggles in Queensland, along with the development of ideas and theories on the left. I was on the scene of many of the events described.
For comments and other assistance I am grateful to Liz Ross, Mick Armstrong, Janey Stone, Rick Kuhn, Graham Willett, David Glanz, Verity Burgmann, Jeff Goldhar, Carole Ferrier, Sandra Bloodworth, John Minns, Ian Rintoul, Phil Griffiths, Alison Anderson, Alec Kahn, Bob Weatherall, Walter Struve, Tanya McConville, Herb Thompson, Dave Nadel, Ken Howard, Richard Lane, Graeme Haynes, Vicki Spiteri, George Wragg, Tess Lee Ack, David Lockwood, Rob Zocchi, Judy McVey, Natasha Proctor, John Dawes, John Howard of Arena Printing, and the staff of the Victorian State Library.