PAUL Keating, as president of Young Labor in 1968, always referred to the Left of the ALP as "the comms".
I was a bit taken aback by this brutal political shorthand. Fresh from university studies in history and politics, I thought snootily that his language a bit crude.
I was wrong.
How wrong is confirmed by the just-published book The Family File by Mark Aarons. It's an account of what ASIO files - the largest collection in Australian history - say about four generations of a communist family, Mark's father Laurie being the long-term general secretary of the Communist Party of Australia.
But the bombshell revelation is the system of dual membership of the ALP and the CPA, something long suspected but now spelt out by the ASIO documents and Mark Aarons's family familiarity with Australian communism.
The implications are huge.
As a teenage Whitlam-ite I sat in the gallery of Sydney Town Hall and watched factional debates at the annual state ALP conference. I now know, courtesy of this book, the Left leaders carried Communist Party tickets. Their real loyalty was to the CPA, a party still loyal to Moscow.
Aarons quotes ASIO files that place former senators Arthur Gietzelt and Bruce Childs as CPA members.
It is almost certain that in the circle of activists around them there were numerous others. Others were simple left-wingers who had fond and close association with the CPA. Others took their political cues from its campaigns and propaganda.
One ASIO agent believed that former federal ALP minister Tom Uren was a CPA member between 1948 and 1958. Bob Hawke, it is reported, believes Uren as well as Gietzelt, both ministers in his cabinet, were CPA members, probably on the basis of ASIO advice.
But Uren strongly denies it and Aarons, who listened to a long oral history interview between Uren and his father, accepts Uren's denial.
The revelation of dual membership is rich in implications. They recast the political history of Australia from the 1950s to the 70s.
First, they vindicate the decision of a large part of Catholic Australia to veto the election of federal Labor governments by voting for the breakaway Democratic Labor Party after the Labor split of 1955.
Still something of a Labor romantic, I find it painful to squeeze this out, but it strikes me the DLP indictment of the ramshackle Labor Party led by H. V. Evatt and Arthur Calwell was mostly right.
A "pro-communist left wing" - you can hear Bob Santamaria enunciating it as one word - secured an elevated role in the ALP once so many Catholics withdrew and this Labor Left was led (or largely led) by figures who kept a dual membership in the Communist Party in their bottom drawers or pasted in the end piece of an unread Das Kapital above the family fireplace.
Second, the revelations demean the reputations of Evatt, the mercurial and somewhat disturbed leader of the ALP 1951-60, and his successor Calwell, leader of the party from 1960 to 1967. Both compromised the party, in Evatt's case by choosing a communist-led Left wing to be his ally and tolerating cosy relationships with CPA personnel at a time when they were rusted-on Soviet loyalists. Calwell accommodated himself to the communist-dominated Victorian state ALP executive and finally, absurdly, joined it even while serving as federal leader.
Under Calwell's leadership the left was able to hammer a commitment to a nuclear-free southern hemisphere into federal ALP policy. This came straight out of the CPA and was designed to rupture the Australian-American alliance when Labor won government; that is, it was a policy device for banning visits by US naval vessels to Australian ports.
In 1963 the Left got to within one vote at a national ALP conference of committing Labor to oppose the American communications base on Northwest Cape. The other Left policy victory was to lock federal and state Labor governments into denying state aid to non-state (that is, Catholic) schools.
We can now assume the impetus behind these policy thrusts was delivered by ALP officials and trade unionists who held dual membership in the CPA or were so aligned to it a party ticket barely mattered.
It was Gough Whitlam who challenged this bunch and, I believe, must be rewarded with a marking up in his historic reputation. Historians should rediscover Whitlam the anti-communist.
It was he who took on the Victorian executive, even abusing them to their faces, in 1967 at the first Victorian conference he addressed as leader. It was he who treated the federal executive of the party with the contempt it deserved; it was he who sought to build a modern, reforming social democratic party instead of the comm-dominated rabble it had sunk to.
Just think: with no Gough, Jim Cairns would have led Labor, a naive academic who never conceded the North Vietnamese presence in South Vietnam, never criticised North Vietnam, could refer to Stalin and Mao as "leaders of world socialism", and as treasurer said he would print money to reduce unemployment. As I write this, the chilling analogy dawns on me: Cairns as an Australian Salvador Allende.
From Aarons's book not just Whitlam but the whole ALP Right is elevated, the party members who did not take Santamaria's advice and walk out but who opted to stay in the ALP and fight. Their names should be recorded on some kind of honour roll. They include Laurie Short and John Ducker, and the secretaries of unions of carpenters, electricians and rubber workers now dead and forgotten, united in a view that the party of Curtin and Chifley was not to be packaged up and handed over to Marxist-Leninists and outright Soviet agents.
Ducker, leader of the NSW Labor Right who died two years ago, once used the expression in a conversation with me, "the right-wing of the Labor Party, in the best sense of the term": in the 50s and 60s they turned up at conferences and blocked a takeover of the ALP by "the comms" - I now adopt young Keating's nomenclature.
Bob Carr is a former Labor premier of NSW.
