Bob Gould, 2008
Source: Ozleft, May 5, 2008
Proofreading, editing, mark-up: Steve Painter
In her important and warm-hearted novel, Ride on Stranger, Kylie Tennant describes labour movement battles in Sydney in the 1930s:
The strange turbulence of the city, its careless ferocity, was perhaps due to the large strain of Scots and Irish in the population, but it seemed that if anyone wanted to start a fight, there were always plenty of strangers ready and willing to join in. If the thing had a political flavour, the unions would take up the case, the Labour Leagues [the old name for Labor Party branches] would take it up. Part of the duty of the UCDL was to be out addressing meetings of Labor supporters night after night in little drafty and dusty halls all over the suburbs, putting the case for this or that protest. It was as though Sydney was encompassed with a network of separate spider webs, the spiders might be suspicious and ready to eat each other; they might be connected by a single thread, yet if you touched a strand of that network, 100 spiders leapt and danced indignantly in their webs — The Sydney of the UCDL was a network of lawyers’ offices, of bare wooden meeting halls, of committee meetings, annual conventions.
The NSW labour movement still has some of the features so eloquently described by Kylie Tennant. In the past six months there have been hundreds of such meetings all over the state in the sort of location Tennant describes: local protests against electricity privatisation, union meetings, shop stewards’ meetings, demonstrations, Greens meetings, National Party meetings and Labor Party branch, state electorate council and federal electorate council meetings.
These community and labour movement gatherings have been presented with very detailed and thorough, well-documented material opposing electricity privatisation. After hearing the discussion and the evidence, hundreds of these meetings have voted overwhelmingly against electricity privatisation. These meetings have spread in a wide and rising arc, which culminated in last weekend’s Labor Party state conference.
That conference laid down a policy of opposition to privatisation as party platform and law for the NSW Labor Party, the highest parliament of the labour movement in this state. After a comprehensive six-month discussion, the movement rejected privatisation by 702 votes to 107 despite heavy pressure from government, the bourgeois media and all the other forces doing the bidding of capital.
I’ve just been to my first meeting of a Labor Party branch to which I’ve just transferred. It turned out that I knew three or four of the people there, but I didn’t know much of the political layout of the branch, which is in the electorate of one of the left ministers who have so far been cautious about voting against the government in the Labor caucus.
I know this minister a bit. She’s a fine young woman and a very competent minister just at the start of her political career and I’m conscious that it’s a big ask for her to stand up to her cabinet colleagues.
Nevertheless, I’ve been rather publicly and vigorously pressing her and her left cabinet colleagues about the political necessity of breaking with the vague convention of cabinet solidarity on the question of electricity privatisation. I’ve tried to make it as impersonal as possible, because I respect and kind of like the woman. Four or five months ago, when she had just become a minister, she was pretty cagey. People in the labour movement can see me coming when I’m on the campaign trail on some question or other.
By this weekend’s Labor Party conference we were a bit more friendly again, and she appeared to have come around to the view that the Rubicon had to be crossed in the caucus, and she intended to do so. I think she probably will tomorrow morning, and three cheers to her for doing so.
There were 15 people at the branch meeting, which is a reasonable attendance for a Labor branch in the middle of winter, and the members present said it was bigger than their last few meetings. About half the members are younger people, some of whom work for left politicians and the others are older workers and some labour movement veterans. The president turns out to be a woman I’ve known quite well for many years.
I had intended to move a resolution couched in careful and not unfriendly terms pressing the left minister to vote against Iemma in the caucus despite the cabinet solidarity convention. The branch was way ahead of me, and two or three of the older members were putting up the same proposition in slightly different words in a fairly vehement way. The younger people, some of whom work for Labor pollies, were also quite vehement in their support.
I seconded a couple of the motions. There was a show of hands and they all went through by 13 or 14 to one abstention or opposition (from the same individual, a conservative older worker who I know slightly. Sydney is a small town of five million people).
I gave out a few of the leaflets I had prepared for the conference. The younger ones already had it from the conference, but the older members who spearheaded the resolutions hadn’t seen it.
That’s just a fairly ordinary Labor Party branch and similar meetings are being held all over NSW. I’m reliably informed today that the idea of emailing all the Labor pollies has been brought up independently all over the place, and the politicians are getting hundreds, if not thousands, of emails from all kinds of people and organisations.
That’s the way effective mass agitations against rotten actions by government are initially built, and the overwhelming vote at the Labor state conference gives great confidence to ordinary people to join the battle in some concrete way, however modestly.
Already people throughout the labour movement and in the community are considering what to do next if the government scrapes through tomorrow’s caucus meeting with its plan to push ahead with privatisation.
The number of MPs opposed to Morris Iemma and the rather disturbed Mick Costa is rising steadily and the good guys may scrape over the magic number of 36, but if they don’t and the government defies the conference vote, we’re set for a kind of political civil war in the labour movement, and everyone involved can feel it.
We’re on the high ground, the cabinet rump is defying party policy adopted by an overwhelming majority. In his eccentric way, Costa is one of our main campaigning assets. The television media have been replaying his bizarre rant at his old colleagues in the movement that put him where he is, and many are amazed almost to the point of laughter at his strange behaviour. Some have expressed concern for his mental health. Labor Party president Bernie Riordan, an old friend of Costa, said from the platform that Costa should go and see his doctor. Many people on websites and other places have been comparing his performance to the oratorical style of Mussolini.
My late father, who was an activist all his life on the Lang side in the labour movement, was a one-armed veteran of the First World War (he married late in life, which is why I exist).
At the Labor branch to which I transferred this evening, one of the older workers who was most vehement in insisting that our left minister colleague should take a stand against privatisation, was also hopping mad about the obscene behaviour of the state government in closing the Anzac Bridge to the public on Anzac Day and only allowing dignitaries to get close to the unveiling of a bronze statue of a New Zealand soldier to match the Australian soldier on the other side of the bridge.
The government turned away 1000 people, many of them New Zealanders, who had come to witness the ceremony, some at considerable expense. This was despite the fact that the logistics of the bridge would have allowed for any number of people to attend. This energetic protest against the government’s bizarre behaviour was carried unanimously. I pointed out that my late mother, the wife of a World War I veteran, would have been prevented from going on to the bridge.
My father was as Australian as me, but his father was a Fenian Irishman and a member of the Land League in Tipperary, who settled at Clybucca near Kempsey, where there was quite a colony of Tipperary Irish who had been peasants in Ireland and became small selectors in Australia.
Every three months or so they would have a bit gathering of all the family. My dad could swear in Gaelic and sing some of the old rebel songs in Gaelic and English. He wasn’t much of singer, but he enjoyed songs such as Napper Tandy and Johnny Boland and the Land of Sweet Ross Row. Another song, the name of which of I forget, had the punchline: “Michael, get the blunderbuss that’s hidden in the thatch”.
It was about one of the many risings over hundreds of years, which were usually defeated until the final one in 1921, which mainly succeeded.
The present situation in the NSW labour movement is a bit like that. There are lots of Labor Party grandfathers metaphorically saying to Michael: “Go and get the blunderbuss that’s hidden in the thatch, we’ll oil it and get it working it again for the political civil war in the labour movement if it has to come to that”.
In the tradition of the Irish national movement, and the Australian labour movement, which has considerable Irish influence, there are times of quiescence and defeat, but the movement always revives. No one in the NSW workers movement wants another Labor split, we just want the Labor cabinet to adhere to Labor policy.
After 20 or so years of retreats and defeats on policy matters, the privatisation issue has become a sticking point, and all over the state in meeting halls and school halls and back rooms in pubs, like the one in which the meeting of my branch was held tonight, the ranks of the labour movement are oiling their political blunderbusses.
Iemma and the very erratic Costa don’t realise what they’ve unleashed. The rank and file of the movement don’t want to bring down a Labor government, but they’ll fight if they have to, by any political means that are necessary.
Good Christians all round this country,
Come listen to my song,
I don’t intend to raise it high,
To detain your attention long.
There are in it but verses few
To let the neighbours know
How Boland he was banished
From the land of sweet Ross Row.
It was on a Saturday evening,
As you may plainly hear
The stars were in the sky
And the moon shone bright and clear;
Donovan came to my door
And this to me did say:
“Arise up, Johnny Boland,
And along with me come away.”
While I was putting on my clothes,
This reply made he:
“If you turn Queen’s evidence
A happy man you’ll be.
You will have money plenty
Your wants for to supply
The Queen will give you employment
Where none will call you spy.”
“Hold your tongue,” said Boland,
“And don’t say so to me;
If I am poor, I will endure
To live in poverty.
I’ll never become Queen’s evidence,
My comrades to overthrow;
I’d sooner live in poverty
On the land of sweet Ross Row.”
In pops Tommy Corrigan,
And seized me by the hand:
“Arise up, Johnny Boland,
You must quit your native land.
Bid farewell to your children;
You never shall see them more.”
He handcuffed me like a murderer,
And marched me out the door.
He marched me off to Six-mile Bridge,
And from that to Castlechrin.
Said Butler to Boland:
“I Will commit you back again.”
Said Boland to Butler:
“Pray what have I done,
But the beating of Mr Heckman,
And the taking of his gun?”
He marched me off to Ennis jail,
It’s very well you’d know;
From thence I was transported
From the land of sweet Ross Row.
Farewell to my five orphans,
I’m leaving here behind.
Friends and relations,
Both men and women kind.
The Lord, who is our witness,
Who right from wrong doth know,
Will punish those who banished us
From the land of sweet Ross Row.
Farewell unto the blunderbuss
That was hidden in the thatch;
Farewell unto the powder horn
That was ready for the match;
Farewell to the boys of County Clare;
Alas, I now must go;
And adieu to you, old Ireland,
And the land of sweet Ross Row.
For the wearing of the green (1798 version)
O Paddy dear, and did ye hear the news that’s goin’ round?
The shamrock is by law forbid to grow on Irish ground!
No more Saint Patrick’s Day we’ll keep, his color can’t be seen
For there’s a cruel law ag’in the Wearin’ o’ the Green.
I met with Napper Tandy. And he took me by the hand.
Saying: How is poor old Ireland? And what way does she stand?
She’s the most distressful country, That ever yet was seen.
They are hanging men and women, For the wearing of the green.
For the wearing of the green,
My native land, I cannot stand,
For the wearing of the green.
My father loved you tenderly,
He lies within your breast.
While I, that would have died for you,
Must never so be blessed.
For laws, their cruel laws, have said,
That seas should roll between
Old Ireland and her faithful sons,
Who love to wear the green.
For the wearing of the green,
My native land, I cannot stand,
For the wearing of the green.
I care not for the Thistle,
And I care not for the Rose;
When bleak winds round us whistle,
Neither down nor crimson shows.
But like hope to him that’s friendless,
When no joy around is seen.
O’er our grave with love that’s endless,
Blooms our own immortal green.
For the wearing of the green,
My native land, I cannot stand,
For the wearing of the green.
This may refer to Michael Herlihy, who in late August 1848, the year of the Young Ireland uprising in Limerick, was arrested for having a blunderbuss concealed in the thatch of an outhouse.