Cold War hysteria led to many Australians being unfairly hounded by the security service
THE life of John Burton, who died two weeks ago at the age of 95, provides another perspective on the revelations that there were indeed a few reds under Australian beds during the Cold War.
In 1947, H.V. 'Doc' Evatt, external affairs minister in the Chifley government, picked Burton to head his department. Aged 32 and after just 10 years in the public service, it was a spectacular rise. The protege of a Labor minister, and one with left-wing tendencies to boot, it also was enough to make him a marked man.
Burton came under suspicion as a communist and a Soviet spy, even though his background alone made those claims improbable. His father was a missionary and head of the Methodist church. Burton himself intended becoming a minister and was secretary of the Student Christian Movement at Sydney University.
He lost his religious faith, but not his values. Nor was he willing to compromise his intellectual independence, an attitude not well suited to the McCarthyist era of communist witchhunts. He promoted policies that were regarded as left wing but in reality were ahead of their time, such as diplomatic recognition of China, the independence of Indonesia from Dutch colonial rule and building Australia's future in Asia.
For years his movements were tracked by ASIO and his phones bugged. "I could never send a message from my office to Dr Evatt's office without the American ambassador having the precise details within minutes," he said in 1972. "The ambassador used to drop little hints to let me know he knew what I knew."
Along with other senior officials, he was asked to take a special oath of secrecy to not pass on intelligence information to the government. Burton refused. He said later that Charles Spry, then head of military intelligence and later to become ASIO's first director, had told him democracy needed to be protected from itself.
Although Spry denied using the words, it was typical of the attitude of the time. Some things were too important for our elected representatives, particularly if they were on the Labor side.
Burton was called as a witness at the Petrov royal commission into Soviet spying, objecting forcefully but in vain to being required to give evidence in secret. The release in 1996 of Soviet cables between Canberra and Moscow supported allegations of spying against two diplomats, Ian Milner and Jim Hill, but vindicated the reputation of Burton, among others.
But his career as a public servant had been ruined long before that. After Robert Menzies was elected in 1949, he shunted Burton off to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as high commissioner. Burton subsequently carved out an international academic career in conflict resolution and applied his thinking by bringing together opposing parties in secret talks on some of the world's most intractable conflicts, such as Ireland, Cyprus and confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia.
Burton can be accused of naivety on occasions, such as when he went to Beijing for a peace conference that was regarded as a Chinese propaganda exercise. But that did not make him a communist, any more than the three ministers of religion who were in his party.
Historian Greg Pemberton, who is writing a book on Burton, says Marxism was not the only influence on the Labor left at the time: "As in Britain and New Zealand, Christian liberalism or Christian socialism was a really important element. Although Burton was a secular person by this stage, this was his inspiration. The debate about what happened in the Cold War misses that."
Conservatives will see as vindication of their obsession with communist influence in Australia in the evidence uncovered by Mark Aarons in his book, The Family File, from which an extract was published in last week's Inquirer. Aarons obtained access to the ASIO files kept on his family, a staggering 32,000 pages in all, including 14,000 on his father Laurie, Australia's best known communist. They include claims that John Wheeldon, a Whitlam government minister and Arthur Gietzelt, a Hawke government minister, were one time members of the communist party; secretly so, because otherwise they would have been expelled from the Labor Party. Wheeldon, who journeyed from the far left to the far right during his lifetime, is dead. Gietzelt denies the claim.
What ASIO established was extensive contact between Gietzelt, other prominent ALP members such as Tom Uren and communist party officials. Misguided it may have been, particularly with the benefit of hindsight, but it was not a crime.
Communists achieved their greatest influence in the broader labour movement, where Mark Aarons says at their peak they achieved control of almost half of Australian unions.
Given Labor's links with the unions, it is not surprising that some Labor MPs had contact with communists.In any case, their influence in Labor governments was limited. Gietzelt was a fierce opponent of Gough Whitlam, as was Uren for periods. When the Labor caucus elected Gietzelt to the front bench, Bob Hawke gave him one of the most junior jobs, veterans affairs.
To the extent that Labor governments have succeeded, in the past and present, it often has been by disowning left-wing policies. Communism was never a match for Australian democracy and conservatism.
More serious was that two diplomats, Milner and Hill, passed classified information on to the Soviets through a communist party official, Wally Clayton, including, according to Clayton in his confession to Laurie Aarons in his son's book, "detailed plans of the Yanks and their military situation in the Pyrenees for the war against the Soviet Union". But that was about the only concrete damage that occurred.
In the process, the net was cast extraordinarily wide, traducing the reputation of many innocent people in Australia, as in the US and elsewhere. The Hope royal commission into the intelligence services that reported to the Fraser government encountered an attitude to the inquiry of "deception, dissimulation, delaying tactics and suppression of information", in the words of commission secretary George Brownbill, in a speech in 2008.
In other words, they regarded themselves as above the law. They also, said Brownbill, were "badly politicised". "It would have been much more serious if the ASIO operatives had been more competent. But as it was, their scattergun approach to the investigation of 'subversion' resulted in an equally scattergun approach to the fulfilment of their true function: as the fourth arm of the defence of the realm."
Spry, as ASIO director-general, gave Menzies and his attorney-general intelligence gossip about political opponents.
"The ASIO files disclosed numerous cases where gossip and title-tattle about people and their so-called communist sympathies was recounted to certain figures in the Menzies governments and then revealed in some cases under parliamentary privilege," said Brownbill. "Much of this was no more than slander under privilege. That is, the evidence was just not there."
The legacy of the Cold War is a long one. One of John Burton's daughters, Meredith Edwards, became an influential public servant, playing a leading role in innovative policies such as the HECS scheme for universities, the child support scheme which greatly improved the circumstances of the children of separated parents and the labour market programs introduced in the wake of the 1990 recession.
She rose to deputy secretary in the Prime Minister's Department where, in 1996, her new boss, Max Moore-Wilton, gave her an excellent performance review but told her, according to Edwards, that she probably wouldn't go very far under the Howard government because of her "antecedents".
She says he then suggested that she move to the backwater of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Like her father, she resigned to become an academic.
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