Jim Cairns
Minister for Secondary Industry | |
---|---|
In office 19 December 1972 – 9 October 1973 | |
Prime Minister | Gough Whitlam |
Preceded by | Gough Whitlam |
Succeeded by | Kep Enderby |
Deputy Leader of the Labor Party | |
In office 12 June 1974 – 2 July 1975 | |
Leader | Gough Whitlam |
Preceded by | Lance Barnard |
Succeeded by | Frank Crean |
Member of the Australian Parliament for Yarra | |
In office 10 December 1955 – 25 October 1969 | |
Preceded by | Stan Keon |
Succeeded by | Division abolished |
Member of the Australian Parliament for Lalor | |
In office 25 October 1969 – 10 November 1977 | |
Preceded by | Mervyn Lee |
Succeeded by | Barry Jones |
Personal details | |
Born | James Ford Cairns 4 October 1914 Victoria, Australia |
Political party | Australian Labor Party |
Spouse | Gwen Robb |
Alma mater | University of Melbourne |
Occupation | Policeman, lecturer |
James Ford Cairns (4 October 1914 – 12 October 2003) 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 them self-published and self-marketed at stalls he ran across Australia after his retirement.
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.[1] His father went to the World War I as a lieutenant in the Australian Imperial Forces, but became disillusioned with the war and lost his respect for Britain. He did not return to Australia. Following the war he essentially deserted his family, and he traveled to Africa where he committed suicide after a stay of six or seven years. Many years later, Cairns informed Gough Whitlam that he had long believed that his father had been killed in World War I, but that he was eventually told the truth of his father's desertion.[2]
Cairns attended Sunbury State School and later
In 1933 Cairns joined the Police Force to have more time for athletics. He soon became a detective and gained notoriety working in a special surveillance team known as "the dogs" shadowing squad, where he was involved in a number of dramatic arrests.[1] While working, he studied at night and completed an economics degree at the University of Melbourne. He was the first Victorian policeman to hold a tertiary degree. In 1939 he married Gwen Robb (died 2000), whose two sons he adopted.
Cairns left the police in 1944. Thereafter he was employed, successively, as a tutor and lecturer in the Army and as a senior lecturer in economic history, at the University of Melbourne.[1] He was a knowledgeable economist and was considered a socialist. In 1946 he applied to join the Communist Party, but was rejected.[1]
Following this rejection, Cairns joined the Labor Party (ALP) and became active in its left wing. The Victorian division of the ALP had by this time been infiltrated by the mostly Catholic "Groupers", associated with Archbishop Mannix and B. A. Santamaria, and Cairns was a leading opponent of this group.[1]
In 1955, when the federal Labor leader, H. V. Evatt, attacked the Groupers and brought on a major split in the Labor Party, Cairns sided with Evatt. At the 1955 election, he stood for the House of Representatives for the working-class seat of Yarra, 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",[1] Cairns was elected and held Yarra until 1969, when it was abolished at a redistribution. He then shifted to Lalor in Melbourne's western suburbs. The seat had been in Labor hands since its creation in 1949, but had been taken by Liberal Mervyn Lee in 1966, as part of that year's pro-Liberal landslide. However, a redistribution wiped out Lee's majority and gave Labor a notional majority of six per cent. Rather than face almost certain defeat, Lee made an unsuccessful bid for the seat of Bendigo. This proved prescient, as Cairns easily won Lalor with a healthy swing.
Leading left-winger
In Canberra, Cairns became a leader of the left. 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.[1] 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 Coalition's unbroken run in government 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 this 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 contested the leadership, but lost to 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, and if four ALP parliamentarians had changed their minds, Cairns would have been successful. Whitlam appointed Cairns as shadow minister for trade and industry.[1] By this 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 that 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 and the trade unions. 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 and seriously injured his wife.[1]
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.[3] They were initiated by the department of Political Science at Monash University, which was interested in researching the psychological motivations of politicians, but Cairns then continued them privately with Diamond over the course of a year, finding them to be "a voyage of self-discovery."[4] Another of Cairns' biographers, Paul Strangio, had noted how, in his interview technique, Diamond successfully "managed to penetrate his subject’s emotional defences."[5][6]
In May 1970, Cairns, as chair of the
Cairns in Government
At the
In June, ‘’The Bulletin’’ magazine published a leaked Australian Security Intelligence Organisation document which gave a controversial, 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.[8]
In December 1974, Whitlam appointed Cairns as Treasurer. This 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 this period, however, 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 this time, but as few Australians were exposed to the foreign media, the economic credibility of the Whitlam administration suffered.
Loans affair
In late 1974, in an attempt to raise funds for large capital works projects (such as drilling for gas on the north-west shelf between Australia and
Cairns' political undoing began with an incident that is often conflated with the Connor/Khemlani dealings but was essentially separate. In 1974, Cairns was introduced by Robert Menzies to
Cairns and Morosi
In late 1974 Cairns met Junie Morosi who had worked for Al Grassby and Lionel Murphy. Morosi greatly admired Cairns from having read his academic writings and she introduced Cairns to the work of Wilhelm Reich, opening his mind to the relevance of human psychology as it related to social change.[1] Cairns decided to offer Morosi a position as his principal private secretary and the pair began an affair.[1][11]
On 2 December 1974, the media reported Cairns' employment offer to Morosi. The reports highlighted Morosi's lack of public service experience, past business failures, her physical beauty and pointed out that she had often been seen dining in Canberra with senior Cabinet ministers. As a result, Cairns and Morosi announced that she would not take Cairns' offer of employment. The Liberal Opposition called for a senate inquiry. An investigation found there was no evidence of impropriety on the part of Morosi or of no preferential treatment being given to Morosi. On 13 December, it was reported that Morosi would accept Cairns' offer of employment.[11]
During the Australian Labor Party's National Conference in February 1975, Cairns gave an interview to a reporter in which he spoke of "a kind of love" for Morosi, reigniting the controversy. The press continued to speculate about the affair. During the 1975 National Conference, a photographer hid in a tree and waited while Morosi, her husband, Cairns, and his wife were having breakfast on a balcony. This photographer took a photo just when Cairns’ wife left the balcony and with Morosi's husband out of shot. The Daily Telegraph ran the picture of Cairns and Morosi the next day with the headline "Breakfast with Junie". Allegations were made in the House and the Senate. Accusations of misconduct were made by a variety of institutions.[11]
In 1982, Morosi took
On ABC radio in September 2002, Cairns admitted for the first time that he had a sexual relationship with Junie Morosi.[12][13] Four years earlier, referring to his decision to employ Morosi and the ensuing media storm that it created — Cairns said that "looking back over it, it was a mistake on my part".[1]
Aftermath
In 1977 Cairns retired from Parliament. He devoted the next portion of his life to the
Cairns was subject to a great deal of media ridicule for these activities, but displayed his usual firm conviction about the rightness of his causes. In his later years he lived at Narre Warren East near Melbourne. He sold his books outside suburban markets, where he would talk about politics, history or his life.
In 1983, Cairns made an unsuccessful run for the Senate as an independent and won 0.5% of the vote. Although he had not resigned from the ALP when he made his independent Senate run, the Labor Party did not expel him and remained a party member until he let his party membership lapsed in 1991 but rejoined the party in 1996.[14]
In 2000 he was made a Life Member of the Labor Party. Cairns died of bronchial
Personal life
Cairns married Gwen Robb in 1939. He adopted Robb's two sons by her previous marriage, Barry and Phillip when they were 4 and 5 years old respectively.[1] Cairns claimed no religious affiliation. In a 1998 interview, he said: "I have never believed myself to be anything that I can attach a name to. I was not a Christian. I did not regard myself as a humanist or a socialist. I was something: what I am, and it did not have a name".[1]
Bibliography
- Cairns, G. O. & Cairns, J. F., Australia, 1953
- Cairns, J. F., Socialism and the A.L.P., comment by Bruce McFarlane, 1963
- Cairns, J. F., Living with Asia, 1965
- Cairns, J. F., Vietnam : is it truth we want?, 1965
- Cairns, J. F., Economics and foreign policy, 1966
- Cairns, J. F., Here I stand : statements, 1966
- Cairns, J. F., Changing Australia's role in Asia, 1968
- Cairns, J. F., Australian foreign policy, 1968
- Cairns, J. F., Eagle and the lotus; western intervention in Vietnam 1847-1968, 1969
- Cairns, J. F. & Cairns M.P., Silence kills; events leading up to the Vietnam Moratorium, 8 May 1970
- Cairns, J. F., Eagle and the lotus : Western intervention in Vietnam, 1847-1971, 1971
- Cairns, J. F., Tariffs or planning? : the case for reassessment, 1971
- Cairns, J. F., Quiet revolution, 1972
- Cairns, J. F., Impossible attainment, 1974
- Cairns, J. F., Labor Party? Dr. Evatt - the Petrov affair - the Whitlam government., 1974
- Cairns, Jim, Vietnam : scorched earth reborn, 1976
- Cairns, Jim, Oil in troubled waters, 1976
- Cairns, Jim, Growth to freedom, 1979
- Cairns, Jim, Survival now: the human transformation, 1982
- Cairns, Jim, Human growth, its source and potential, 1984
- Cairns, Jim, Strength within: towards an end to violence, 1988
- Cairns, Jim, Towards a new society : a new day has begun, 1990–1993
- Cairns, Jim, Untried road, 1990
- Cairns, Jim, Reshaping the future : liberated human potential, 1996
- Cairns, Jim, On the horizon: a cultural transformation to a new consciousness, 1999
- Cairns, Jim, Liberated biological function: the source of human quality, 2001
- Cairns, Jim, New day : liberated biological human potential: the source of social reform to the good society there's no other way, 2002
- Heffernan, Jack, Socialist alternative : an A.L.P. view, foreword by J.F. Cairns, 1969
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s Film Australia (1998). "Australian Biography project interview – Jim Cairns". The Australian Biography project. National Film and Sound Archive, Commonwealth of Australia. Retrieved 19 February 2022.
- ^ Carr, Bob, "How Gough Carried The Can For Progress", Sunday Telegraph (Sydney, Australia) 26 October 2014
- ISBN 0-140059-75-X.
- ISBN 0-140059-75-X.
- ISBN 0-522850-02-2.
- ^ "Trade Practices/Tobacco documents/Jim Cairns biography". ABC Radio National. 9 May 2002. Retrieved 21 June 2021.
- ^ "Labor sticks to old team". The Canberra Times. 11 June 1974.
- ^ Coventry, CJ. Origins of the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security (2018: MA thesis submitted at UNSW).
- ^ a b "The loans affair, 1974–75 – Fact sheet 239". National Archives of Australia. Retrieved 17 December 2011.
- ^ Harris & Main (2006) pp. 149-176
- ^ a b c d Laing, Kate. "'A Kind of Love': Supergirls, Scapegoats and Sexual Liberation" (PDF). University of Sydney. Retrieved 18 December 2011.
- ^ Richard Ackland (20 September 2002). "Cairns admits sex, and breathtaking hypocrisy". Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 25 June 2010.
- ^ Annabel Crabb (16 September 2002). "Cairns admits Morosi affair". The Age. Retrieved 25 June 2010.
- ^ John Robert Hawkins (July 2014). "Jim Cairns: The Dreamer" – via ResearchGate.
Sources
- Film Australia (1998), "Jim Cairns", Australian Biography, National Film and Sound archive, Commonwealth of Australia, retrieved 25 June 2010
- ISBN 1-920910-67-0.)
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Further reading
- Dowsing, Irene (1971), Jim Cairns MHR, Acacia Press, Blackburn, Victoria. ISBN 0-85808-005-2
- Ormonde, Paul (1981), A Foolish Passionate Man, Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria. ISBN 014005975X
- Strangio, Paul (2002), Keeper of the Faith, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Victoria. ISBN 0-522-85002-2