The Money Men by Chris Bowen (superbooks4u .txt) 📕

respective careers, Cairns and Whitlam were potential rivals for the Labor leadership. In 1967, Calwell resigned the party leadership following the disastrous election result of the previous November. As the deputy and putative leader, Whitlam’s candidacy was inevitable. Cairns also ran, as did Frank Crean (whom Calwell supported), Fred Daly and Kim Beazley Senior. Whitlam initially received thirty-two votes to Cairns’ fifteen, Crean’s twelve, Daly’s six and Beazley’s three. After the second round of voting, following the elimination of Daly and Beazley, Whitlam was elected with thirty-nine votes to Cairns and Crean’s combined thirty-two votes.

The ballot for deputy leader was closer. Whitlam supported his close confidant, the Tasmanian Lance Barnard. There were seven other candidates, including Cairns. In the seventh round of voting, Barnard defeated Cairns by thirty-five votes to thirty-three. This was not a result that would engender stability in the Labor leadership team, particularly as Whitlam was determined to put his modernising stamp on the leadership to maximise the chances of Labor claiming office.

In an effort to ensure that he, and not Cairns, shaped the party’s attitude to the important question of the Vietnam War, Whitlam appointed himself shadow minister for foreign affairs, and his moderate and loyal deputy Barnard the shadow minister for defence. He appointed Cairns the shadow minister for industry, making him Labor’s second most senior spokesman on economic matters in the days before the creation of the finance portfolio. Whitlam then immediately set about reforming the party, making it clear that he was prepared to put his leadership at risk rather than become a lame-duck leader of a party in perpetual opposition. He told the Victorian State Conference that he ‘did not seek and do not want the leadership of Australia’s largest pressure group’.

Whitlam succeeded at the 1967 ALP National Conference in bringing about the fairly modest reform of adding the party’s four federal parliamentary leaders to the federal executive. But his satisfaction at this progress was short-lived. One of the parliamentary leaders added to the executive, Senate leader Lionel Murphy, used his new position to join with the forces of the Left to object to the election of the new Tasmanian delegate, Brian Harradine, a robust right-winger. Whitlam was infuriated by this setback and decided to resign the leadership and then recontest it to establish his authority. Cairns pushed Barnard to challenge him, but Barnard refused. Urged on by Gwen Cairns and his loyal numbers man, Tom Uren, Cairns then decided to challenge Whitlam himself.

The announcement of Cairns’ candidacy for the Labor leadership goes down as one of the more bizarre nominations in Australian political history. Cairns could not speak due to laryngitis, so Gwen called a press conference at which she announced Jim’s candidacy, with her husband standing mutely beside her. Cairns’ letter to Caucus made it plain that his candidacy was based on opposition to Whitlam’s modernisation agenda, accusing the leader of an ‘intellectual arrogance and dangerous folly’, and asking the Caucus the rhetorical question: ‘Who’s Party is it, ours or his?’16

Cairns’ pitch to Caucus was more successful than Whitlam had anticipated, with the incumbent only re-elected by a narrow margin: thirty-eight votes to thirty-two. If Barnard had agreed to run, he would likely have won the ballot, given he appealed to the right of the party, something that patently did not apply to Cairns. Regardless, it would be Cairns’ last candidacy for the leadership of the Labor Party.

Cairns worked with Whitlam on economic and trade policy, with Whitlam becoming a more passionate and consistent advocate of winding back the debilitating protection and tariff regime than Cairns was. But as Whitlam noted ten years after the fall of his government:

In the early 1960s, I found it illuminating to discuss economic questions with Cairns as well as Crean … We even seemed to be persuading the Party to modify the uncritical support for protection which had been a shibboleth in the Party since the Scullin Government … I soon found however that Cairns was an unstable rock on which to found a policy.17

Cairns faced the abolition of his seat of Yarra in the 1968 federal redistribution,18 a challenge that every MP hopes to avoid. In Cairns’ case, his seat was largely absorbed into the seat of Melbourne, held by former leader Arthur Calwell. Cairns no doubt had cause for hope that Calwell would stand aside to make room for him, given that Calwell had strongly supported his challenge to Whitlam and, Cairns alleges, had previously intimated that Cairns could take over the seat if it was ever required. However, Calwell would not be the first MP, or the last, to decide that it was more important to stay in parliament than to make way for a talented colleague. That being the case, Cairns decided to nominate against Calwell and live with the consequences. Calwell did not withdraw. The Labor Party now had to decide between honouring and accommodating a former leader and the continued representation of a member with the potential to serve in future Labor governments. On this occasion, Labor chose its former leader. Faced with likely defeat in the preselection, Cairns withdrew and nominated for the outer-urban seat of Lalor, which he won easily in 1969, and in each of the subsequent federal elections in which he was a candidate.

A glimpse at Cairns’ diary shows that after his re-election, he was active on issues relating to international engagement with Vietnam, and South-East Asia in general. In November 1970 he travelled to Stockholm for a conference on international peace, and in May 1971 he went to Budapest for a meeting of the World Peace Council. He caused a furore on the latter trip when he said, during in a stopover in Moscow, that he had observed ‘no more suppression than in many aspects of Australian life’.19 A few days after returning from Budapest, Cairns was off to Oslo for a meeting of the International Committee of Inquiry into American Crimes in Indo-China, and that August he attended an International Parliamentary Union