The young Movement recruit was expected not to concentrate merely on the threat of Communism but on that of free-market capitalism as well: the exploitation of workers; urban decadence and the possible balance it might find in rural purity; political centralism; the arms race and the class war. The young member of the Movement thus espoused a socialist program far to the left of that which any political party today would dare embrace. He would be in favour not only of rural living and family life, but also of worker participation in industry’s management and rewards, decentralisation, broader ownership in production, friendship with Asia, and the beginnings of what came to be called the multicultural society. Therefore to become a member of the Movement was not necessarily a narrowing enterprise for all.
The Movement is generally associated with one man, Santamaria, but in fact it was a mass movement and had grass roots. Its members were asked to become frontline soldiers in the fight between Catholicism and Communism. But by the early 1950s, Campion realised that the days of this ‘emergency bushfire brigade’ he thought he had joined were over. The Movement was becoming just another political apparatus, another political faction. He was not alone in his view. All across Australia, Catholics were beginning to suspect Santamaria’s Movement. In early 1954, Evatt was aware of the Movement’s capacity to wreck and was courting it. He phoned and asked Santamaria to fly to Canberra to help draft his policy speech, but Santamaria rather prissily replied that he was not a member of the party.
One of the opponents of the Movement was Archbishop Matthew Beovich of Adelaide, a cleric not of Irish but of Croatian origins. Archbishop Francis Carroll of Canberra–Goulburn was opposed to the Movement’s entry into politics. Santamaria thought the bishops shouldn’t control the Movement, and said that within the Movement Carroll’s position had almost no support. Melbourne’s powerful archbishop Daniel Mannix and Santamaria got comfort from the support of Archbishop Romolo Carboni, the apostolic delegate from 1953 onwards.
Doubts were widespread by 5 October 1954, when Evatt made his attack on ‘disloyal elements’ in the Labor Party. At Morgan’s Bookshop in Sydney he blamed the recent Labor electoral defeat on disloyal Victorians and claimed that Santamaria’s organisation was trying to take over the Victorian Labor Party: ‘Adopting methods which strikingly resemble both Communist and Fascist infiltration of larger groups, some of these groups have created an almost intolerable situation—calculated to deflect the labour movement from the pursuit of established Labor objectives.’ Evatt continued his own version of a witch hunt for disloyal members in Caucus and an investigation into the Victorian branch, where the Movement’s Industrial Groupers were strong. The Split happened inside the Movement as well as in the Labor Party itself, but it was more strongly a Victorian than a New South Wales phenomenon.
New South Wales had had experience of what it was like to have a Catholic-based political party in the field. In 1920, when the great majority of Catholics were Labor voters and when some middle-class Catholics tried to win support for their schools by setting up their own political party, this brought the combined opposition of Protestants and led, via organised Protestantism, to the 1922 election of George Fuller’s government, with implied promises from some of his ministers to put the Catholics in their place.
In response to the Vatican’s claim by way of the decree Ne Temere that only the Church had the right to marry Catholics, a Marriage Act was passed to assert the state’s right, but, to his honour, Fuller did nothing to stoke the sectarian rhetoric for which the debate, public and parliamentary, became notorious. Catholics learned the lesson that if they were ever again to go on their own into politics they would be not only pilloried but also defeated by pluralism. The Catholics in New South Wales therefore decided in the 1950s to stay with the Labor Party and do the ordinary, humdrum street work of a political party—hospitals, schools, roads, housing, job protection, libraries, even an Opera House.
Throughout 1949 and for the next two years the Federated Ironworkers’ Association (FIA) was in an uproar of violence and rigged ballots and libel. Laurie Short, a former Communist (indeed a Trotskyist) but now a Labor man, was able to prove in the courts that he had been physically assaulted by an organised gang of pro-Communists outside a union meeting, that a union ballot had been rigged against him and that he had been libelled and falsely expelled from the union. These were the conditions that made possible the growth of the Movement and the Groupers. By the end of 1952, every national and branch official of the FIA was a member of the ALP’s Industrial Group.
The Victorian state elections of 9 December 1952 returned the Labor government under John Cain, but opposed to the old-style Labor men were a more militant right-wing group, about one-third of the Cabinet, who were supporters of the Movement and its agenda.
Santamaria wrote to Mannix on 11 December that the Movement had helped moderates win back the Australian Council of Trade Unions, all but one of the Trades and Labor Councils, and most of the key unions. Within five or six years it should ‘be able to completely transform the leadership of the Labor government’. This would have meant fierce anti-Communism combined with social programs that might have altered the face of Australia. With acrimony against the groups growing in Labor circles, Melbourne’s Archbishop Simmons surprised everyone by making a thinly disguised public attack on the Movement at the installation of Eris O’Brien as archbishop of Canberra–Goulburn in January 1954. Simmons bluntly declared that he was sure O’Brien ‘will set his face sternly against any attempt to involve the Church in underground political intrigue’. Catholic Action and the Movement were, in Simmons’ view, becoming politicised.
Asked to write a report for Cardinal Norman Gilroy of Sydney on Movement activities at Sydney University in February 1954, the young Campion considered that the Movement was either ‘a mandated Catholic Action body’ involved in politics without the bishops’ knowledge or ‘simply a Catholic party-political machine working with the full approval of the hierarchy, to gain political control of the nation’s important institutions for the Church’. Obviously, he did not think it was the latter. By now there was a change of mood in Sydney towards the Movement, and Cardinal Gilroy and other bishops would demand the separation of Catholic Action and the Movement.
News Weekly, Santamaria’s newspaper, surprisingly rejected the anti-Communist extremism of US Senator Joe McCarthy and criticised him as ‘hot-tempered, vulgar and abusive’. Early in 1954, News Weekly cautiously endorsed Evatt for the prime ministership. But Evatt was convinced that the Petrov defections were part of a conspiracy against him. He fell under the influence of a disgruntled ASIO officer, R.F.B. Wake, who invented a fanciful conspiracy allegedly organised by the Catholic writer of mysteries and substantial analyses Paul McGuire. McGuire had held a few secret meetings with army officers and others but they were abortive and did not seem to have had any effect on the Petrov issue. Wake had resigned from ASIO in September 1950, regarded as unreliable and too close to Evatt.
Evatt performed poorly during the election campaign, making extravagant promises for social welfare. Compared with the 1951 elections, in 1954 the Catholic vote for Labor had increased markedly from 72.7 per cent to 77.8 per cent in Victoria, where Labor won 50.3 per cent of the overall votes, and from 55.3 per cent to 64.4 per cent of Catholics in New South Wales. In Queensland the percentage of Catholics voting for Labor dropped slightly, from 59.5 per cent to 59.1 per cent.
But the election was lost.
On 5 October 1954, Evatt attacked the Groupers, their supporters on the Victorian ALP state executive, and the influence of Mannix. After Evatt’s outburst, Santamaria contacted the Movement’s state presidents to see if they advised him to fight Evatt or to compromise. For three hours Archbishop Mannix and Santamaria discussed what should be done. According to Santamaria, he put to the archbishop that he understood that the Movement’s leaders had the right to make their own decisions. But if their decisions were in favour of resisting Evatt, it would have major
consequences for the Church. Santamaria, like a good layman, said that Mannix should advise him and that regardless of the Movement’s own view, it should adopt his advice. Mannix refused to decide, and in the absence of his verdict, Santamaria said that the Movement ‘will resist with all the force at our disposal’. Mannix told him that it was his decision, and not one that Mannix himself had made.
Santamaria wrote to regional offices, asking bishops to strongly endorse the resistance he was going to make to Labor. The New South Wales Movement told him that Gilroy and Carroll had agreed to this, which was not true. At a meeting at Belloc House in Melbourne, named after the writer Hilaire Belloc, Mannix was asked to state publicly that the Church supported the Movement. The hope may well have been that Evatt would then have to attack Mannix publicly and that would lose him the Catholic vote. But the New South Wales executive did not align itself to the Movement, and the secretary of the New South Wales ALP, Charlie Anderson, left the Movement when asked to choose between it and the Labor Party.
A number of Catholic parliamentarians stuck firm with Evatt, including the powerful and recently elected political boss Senator Pat Kennelly. Many Catholics now read Evatt’s attacks on the Movement as attacks on Catholicism itself, and this soured the old alliance between Labor and Catholic. As well as this, many Catholics were entering businesses and professions that had previously not been occupied by them in vast numbers, and so at the social level many Catholics were becoming more conservative than their working-class parents, and were willing to see Evatt as at least one version of the Antichrist.
The wisdom of Evatt’s attack was questioned by many Labor people, and even members of Parliament said they had not heard of the Movement before Evatt’s statement gave it its new level of prominence. On 12 and 13 October, Labor’s Federal Caucus was in turmoil, and Tasmanian senator George Cole moved that all positions be declared vacant so that Calwell, a Catholic and a vocal anti-Communist (indeed vocal about all things) and thus a potential fence-mender, could stand for the leadership. But Evatt ruled that the motion be deferred for a week to give him time to organise support. Evatt accused the group associated with News Weekly, the Movement’s newspaper, of McCarthyism, and Santamaria and others of wanting ‘to set up a separate party within the party’. The national Movement held an emergency meeting at Point Piper in Sydney. It was not only over Evatt, but also concerned with rumours that the Church was withdrawing its support from the groups. The Sydney branch, more loyal to Labor, was so angry at the outcome of the meeting that it threatened to no longer distribute News Weekly.
At the Caucus meeting on 19 October to declare all positions open, Evatt pressed his attack and got strong union support in Victoria and Queensland. On 20 October, Evatt was re-elected by fifty-two votes to twenty-eight—the latter went to Calwell. Meanwhile, the personal nature of some attacks on Santamaria were enhanced by general anti-Italian bigotry, with overtones of his relationship to Spanish Fascism and the whole matter of priestly control. The Catholic Weekly complained that ‘in the secular newspapers, in some Protestant pulpits, in the Labor Party itself, men are talking of Catholic Action as if it were a conspiracy to overthrow the existing order and impose some sort of clerical dictatorship on the Australian people’. It also accurately foretold that if Labor fell apart over the issue, it would spend a great time in political exile, and that a Labor split could give the Communists a chance to launch a coup, as had happened in Czechoslovakia in 1948.
The Communist Party of Australia’s (CPA) industrial successes were already in decline by then and yet had been enormously greater than its minimal electoral success. By the end of the war, the CPA had a membership estimated at 23,000, and it was militant and committed to producing industrial results. But Australian Communism in the 1950s was confused by the competing claims of Moscow and Peking, by a conflict of personalities, by the relative roles of Sydney and Melbourne in the struggle with the labour movement, and in the evolution of a new party policy to do with what its relationship should be.
The ALP Federal Executive held a crisis meeting in Canberra on 27 and 28 October 1954 and voted, by seven votes to five, for a Labor Party inquiry into the Movement’s intrusion into the party. Evatt had warned the National Executive as it convened on 27 October that if the Movement faction united, it could seize control of the party. Even so, he declared, ‘As I understand it the “Movement” as such is not at all identical with Catholic Action . . . it has nothing to do with the Lay Apostolate which all Catholics and Christians honour.’ Nonetheless, he was perceived as an anti-Catholic sectarian. The author’s father, a Catholic working man and World War II veteran, did not see the Movement—of which he was not a member—as the wrecker of Labor unity, but Evatt himself, and spoke nostalgically of how, in the forces in North Africa, sectarianism had not mattered; there, his favourite padre was a Presbyterian named McKay who took a truckload of troops up to Palestine to visit Jerusalem.
In reality, Evatt had got on well with Mannix, with the apostolic delegate Carboni and with the urbane Archbishop O’Brien, an eminent historian, and certainly did not discount their flock. Through his Irish grandmother he had an attachment to things Irish: eloquence to a fault, memory of ancient wrong, the sense of being the dispossessed and hungry of the earth while being sure that they were better than those who despised them. But in his view parts of the bishops’ flock were letting Labor down, in particular three recently elected members, John Mullens, Standish Keon and Thomas Burke, who in turn charged Evatt with not consulting the party over his appearance in front of the Petrov inquiry or over his election promises on the pension means test. There were counterclaims that the Victorian branch was in the hands of the Movement.
In a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald on 29 October, the poet James McAuley defended the Movement against the accusations of being a secret conspiracy. McAuley, a devout Catholic, editor of the right-wing magazine Quadrant, and a Catholic Action Movement sympathiser, would write a poem in honour of his meeting with Santamaria, ‘In a Late Hour’.
The hearts of men grow colder,
The final things draw near,
Forms vanish, kingdoms moulder,
The Anti-realm is here;
Whose order is derangement:
Close-driven, yet alone,
Men reach the last estrangement—
The sense of nature gone.
The last estrangement was of course Communism and its Labor sympathisers.
The ALP Federal Executive held the inquiry into the alleged Movement control of the Victorian branch from 10 to 12 November, and delivered its conclusions on 4 December. Bob Corcoran, secretary of the Dandenong branch of the ALP and a practising Catholic, gave witness of how the Movement had come to dominate the Victorian ALP. As returning officer for ALP preselection ballots, Corcoran spoke of conflict in his branch and the stacking of membership by the Movement. On 10 December, the New South Wales ALP Executive unanimously rejected the decision of the Federal Executive against the Victorian Executive and the Industrial Groups. They wanted peaceful solutions and could see a ruinous schism coming. Archbishop Mannix also called for ‘restraint and dignity’ and said they would not get anywhere by calling each other bad names. ‘I would not think of calling anyone a Communist unless he called himself a Communist.’
In January 1955, Santamaria wrote that in the coming special Hobart Conference of the ALP, the pro-Grouper delegates would have a majority of twenty-four to fourteen, enabling them to achieve ‘quite drastic solutions’. But the Federal Executive in effect ‘stacked’ the election of Victorian delegates by waiving the two-year membership rule for those electing delegates. So the ALP Federal Executive was able to ensure that at the Victorian ALP Conference on 14 January, fourteen of theirs were elected against seven of the Movement’s. Both the old and the new set of delegates intended to turn up in Hobart.
The Movement delegates to the Hobart ALP Conference were to sign a joint statement agreeing to boycott the conference if it was n
ot properly constituted. The conference had been moved to Holy Trinity Hall in North Hobart where the Federal Executive could more easily call, if necessary, on the Tasmanian police to evict the Victorian Grouper delegation, the one since replaced. With some reluctance the New South Wales delegates agreed to sign up, if necessary, to the same Grouper boycott. The Federal Executive decided nine votes to three not to suspend the election of both sets of Victorian delegates until the matter was properly adjudged. The conference also endorsed the disbanding of the Groups in Victoria and asked other state executives to disband Groups affiliated with them. It reindorsed the ALP’s ‘complete opposition to Communism and all forms of totalitarianism’. Seventeen delegates left and formed an Anti-Communist Labor Party. They knew that their candidates would lose their seats but they could punish Evatt and the Labor Party by giving their preferences to the Liberal and Country parties. The Split that would curse Labor electorally had been born, not so much by policy decisions but by grievous expulsions, in a plain twin-gabled Anglican hall on that suburban slope in Tasmania.
The delegates left in the hall continued with business. On 18 March, the conference opposed sending troops to Malaya to fight Communist guerrillas there but supported the admission of Communist China to the United Nations. So that this motion would not appear anti-Catholic, it was put by the Labor loyalist and South Australian Catholic Mick O’Halloran. Chifley had wanted to recognise the new regime in China in 1949, so it was not a new policy.
Feeling was now intense. The Catholic Worker, anti-Movement, pro-ALP, was banned from sale at parish churches, though five parish priests in the entire archdiocese of Melbourne permitted it. In a few weeks its circulation dropped from thirty-five thousand to fewer than fifteen thousand. At Warragul in the Sale diocese in Victoria, a young man named Colin Thornton-Smith sold the paper outside the church grounds but was severely excoriated from the pulpit by an Irish curate, who went on to speak of other pro-ALP people in the parish who ‘had the Communist rat on their backs’.