Jim Cairns
James Ford Cairns was an Australian politician who was prominent in the Labor movement through the 1960s and 1970s, and was briefly Treasurer and the fourth deputy prime minister of Australia, both in the Whitlam government. He is best remembered as a leader of the movement against Australian involvement in the Vietnam War, for his affair with Junie Morosi, and for his later renunciation of conventional politics. He was also an economist, and a prolific writer on economic and social issues. Many of his books were self-published, and self-marketed at stalls he ran across Australia.
Early days
James Ford Cairns was born in Carlton, then a working-class suburb of Melbourne, the son of a clerk. He grew up on a dairy farm north of Sunbury. His father went to World War I as a lieutenant in the Australian Imperial Force, but became disillusioned with the war and lost his respect for Britain. Following the war, he did not return to Australia and essentially deserted his family. He travelled to Africa where he committed suicide after a stay of six or seven years.Many years later, Cairns told Gough Whitlam that he had long believed his father had been killed in World War I, but that he was eventually told the truth of his father's desertion.
Cairns attended Sunbury State School and Northcote High School, where he completed his Leaving Certificate. Though life during the Depression was difficult. His mother had to work to provide for the family, and Cairns needed travel for three hours a day to attend Northcote High. He was a good student, making his name as an athlete, easily winning the school's broad jump championship with a leap of, his competitors only managing jumps of.
In January 1935, Cairns joined the Victoria Police to give himself more time for athletics. He soon became a detective and gained notoriety working in a special surveillance unit, the Observation Squad, known by their colleagues as "The Dogs", where he was involved in a number of dramatic arrests. While working, he studied at night at the University of Melbourne and completed an economics degree. He was the first Victorian policeman to hold a tertiary degree. In 1939, he married Gwen Robb, whose two sons he adopted.
Cairns resigned from the force in 1944. Thereafter, he was, successively, as a tutor and lecturer in the Australian Army, and a senior lecturer in economic history, at the University of Melbourne. He was a knowledgeable economist and was considered a socialist. In 1946 he applied to join the Communist Party, but was rejected.
Following that rejection, Cairns joined the Labor Party and became active in its left wing. By that time, the Victorian branch of the ALP had been infiltrated by the anti-communists, predominantly Catholic, Industrial Groups, associated with Archbishop Mannix and B. A. Santamaria. Cairns became a leading opponent of the Groupers.
In 1955, when the federal Labor leader, H. V. Evatt, attacked the Groupers, precipitating a major split in the Labor Party, Cairns sided with Evatt. At the 1955 election, Cairns stood for the ALP for the working-class seat of Yarra, in the House of Representatives, held by the leading Grouper, Stan Keon. In what Cairns has been quoted as saying was "... the most active and intense and vigorous election campaign that's ever been run in Australia", Cairns was elected and held Yarra until 1969, when the electorate was abolished at a redistribution.
He shifted to the electorate of Lalor in Melbourne's western and south-western suburbs. The seat had been in Labor hands since its creation in 1949, and prior to 1969, it also included areas north of and outside of Melbourne. It had been won by the Liberal candidate Mervyn Lee in 1966, as part of that year's pro-Liberal landslide. However, the same redistribution prior to the 1969 election had shrunk Lalor to a quarter of its size in south-west Melbourne, wiped out the party's majority and gave Labor a notional majority of six per cent. Lee made an unsuccessful transfer for the seat of Bendigo which had replaced part of Lalor. Cairns easily won Lalor with a healthy swing.
Leading left-winger
In Canberra, Cairns became a leader of the left faction of the ALP. He was a highly effective debater and was soon feared and disliked by ministers in the Liberal government of Robert Menzies, although his personal dealings with Menzies himself, who nearly always felt a healthy respect for an intelligent and principled adversary, were more cordial than might have been expected. Cairns was also disliked by many in his own party, who saw him as an ideologue, whose political views were too left-wing for the Australian electorate. Like many Labor figures of his generation, Cairns spent most of his best years in opposition due to the unbroken run in government by the Coalition from 1949 to 1972.Nevertheless, Cairns' abilities could not be denied. He completed his doctorate in economic history in 1957 and, by the 1960s, he was among the Labor Party's leading figures. At that time, he also lectured on Marxist and socialist history, and taught free seminars in Melbourne for working people who were unable to afford tertiary education. His first overseas trip, which he took place at this time to the US and Asia, had a great effect on him.
Early in 1967, the septuagenarian Arthur Calwell retired as Labor leader, and Cairns unsuccessfully contested the leadership, against Gough Whitlam. The following year, when Whitlam briefly offered his resignation as part of his fight against the left wing of the party, Cairns again contested the leadership. Although he again failed to win, the margin was much smaller than in the previous year. If four ALP parliamentarians had changed their minds, Cairns would have been successful. Whitlam appointed Cairns as shadow minister for trade and industry. By that time, Cairns, like other left-wing firebrands of his generation, such as Clyde Cameron and Tom Uren, strongly supported Whitlam, as they were sober enough to realise Labor would never win power again without policies Whitlam was developing, which directly appealed to the middle class.
One of the reasons Cairns did not become leader of the Labor Party was that, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, his main focus was not on parliamentary politics but on leading the mass movement against the Vietnam War, to which the Menzies government had committed combat troops in 1965, and against conscription for that war. Until about 1968, most Australians supported the war. Whitlam himself was cautious about publicly committing the ALP to an explicitly anti-war stance. Opposition to Australia's role in Vietnam was led by the Communist Party, trade unions, and student groups. After 1968, however, non-communist opposition grew, and Cairns came to see the anti-war movement as a moral crusade. During the election year of 1969, a group of men broke into Cairns’ home, assaulted him, as well as seriously injuring his wife.
In 1968, the psychiatrist John Diamond conducted a series of in-depth, psychologically probing interviews with Cairns. The interviews, which were recorded on audiotape, have been described as "politically unique" by one of Cairns' biographers. They were initiated by the Department of Political Science at Monash University, which was interested in researching the psychological motivations of politicians, but Cairns continued them privately with Diamond over the course of a year, finding them to be "a voyage of self-discovery". Another of Cairns' biographers, Paul Strangio, noted how, in his interview technique, Diamond successfully "managed to penetrate his subject’s emotional defences".
In May 1970, Cairns, as chair of the Vietnam Moratorium Campaign, led an estimated 100,000 people through an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in the streets of Melbourne. It was the largest protest in Australia until it was overtaken by the anti-Iraq war protests in February 2003. Protests took place simultaneously in other Australian cities. The violence predicted by some opponents of the demonstration did not occur, and the moral force of the, mainly young, protesters had a major effect on Australian attitudes to the war.
Cairns in government
At the December 1972 election, Whitlam led the Labor Party into government for the first time in 23 years, and Cairns became Minister for Overseas Trade and Minister for Secondary Industry. He had shed much of his socialist ideology of earlier years by than, though he was still a strong believer in state planning. He got along surprisingly well with the heads of industry, although critics said that was because he was sympathetic to their requests for government assistance. During his time as Minister for Trade and Minister for Secondary Industry, Cairns undertook a number of overseas trade missions. The most successful was his mission to China, which resulted in an increase in Sino-Australian trade, from 200 million dollars before the visit to 1,000 million dollars a year after his visit. After the 1974 election, Cairns was elected Deputy Leader of the Labor Party, defeating Lance Barnard 54 votes to 42, and thus became Deputy Prime Minister.In June, ‘’The Bulletin’’ magazine published a leaked Australian Security Intelligence Organisation document which gave a controversial and highly political view of Cairns. The political fallout from the leak led the government to act on its 1974 election policy to establish the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security.
In December 1974, Whitlam appointed Cairns as Treasurer, which was the high point of Cairns' political career. On Christmas Day 1974, while Whitlam was overseas, Cyclone Tracy devastated the city of Darwin, and Cairns, as Acting Prime Minister, impressed the nation with his sympathetic and decisive leadership. It was during that period that Cairns hired Junie Morosi as his principal private secretary, and he soon began a relationship with her which would eventually help ruin his career.
Australia's already severe economic problems worsened during 1975, and Cairns had few answers to the new phenomenon of stagflation, the combination of high unemployment and high inflation that followed the 1973 oil crisis. Overseas finance ministers, especially in Britain and Europe, faced the same problems at the time but, because few Australians were exposed to the foreign media, the economic credibility of the Whitlam administration suffered.