ozidude1968 said:
What would Australia be like without Mr Santamaria's "Movement"
Exactly which 'movement' are you talking about?
Let me address the actual historical details in as few words as possible:
Santamaria was officially only ever leader of the Catholic Rural Movement. Unofficially he was a major figure in the now infamous industrial activist Catholic Social Studies Movement in Victoria, but his influence was much weaker in the CSSMs of the other Australian archdioceses, to the point that he was barely ever welcome in the Sydney archdiocese, both before but most particularly after he became a political celebrity in 1954. However he did, as we would now say, 'network' with anti-communist officials in other states, particularly in the secular Industrial Groups (not to mention the actual ALP structure).
Of course this leads us to the salient but often overlooked fact that the Movement and the Groupers were, while closely intertwined, actually distinct entities.
The Movement and the Groupers began when in the late thirties/early forties Santamaria collaborated with three important figures in Victorian labour politics. They were; deputy leader of the state parliamentary ALP, Bert Cremean; secular union leaders Dinny Lovegrove and Vic Stout. They all wanted Santamaria, who at the time was Archbishop Daniel Mannix' non-clerical administrative assistant, to throw the weight of Catholic Action behind their plans to create anti-communist cells to organise in individual union elections. These cells were to be called Industrial Groups. This he did, using the Catholic-community based Movement to compliment these three leaders' labour-movement based 'Grouper' structure.
By the end of the forties the Industrial Groups had used their growing influence to take control of the state Labor Party organisation, which at the time was elected by a union-dominated conference. So the Groupers became the political Labor establishment, with Lovegrove taking the role of party secretary and Santamaria's Movement colleague Frank McManus taking the role of party president.
Yet the problem with having dedicated anti-communist leaders in charge of the state ALP would soon became evident, even to their wartime allies in the party's moderate wing. The Grouper/Movement majority on the party executive had marginalised the old guard of party professionals, such as state parliamentary leader and sometime premier John Cain, but most particularly former state secretaries Pat Kennelly and Arthur Calwell. These men were not Leftists, and had originally approved of the Groupers fighting Communists in the unions, but they otherwise believed in running the ALP in the style of a pragmatic urban machine, much like Tamanny Hall in the US Democratic Party.
By the beginning of the fifties it was becoming obvious that the wartime surge in Communist activism was dying out, and that there would be neither a Communist takeover of the existing ALP-aligned union movement, nor would there emerge a standalone Marxist union movement as existed in many European democracies. It was at this point that Kennelly fell out with the Groupers/Movement, and decided to move towards creating an anti-anti-communist alliance compromised of other moderates and, most significantly, with those union Leftwingers who had always opposed attacks on CPA influence in their organisations.
By the middle of the decade this push against the Groupers/Movement faction was gaining steam, with Trades Hall president Stout defecting to the broad alliance, leaving behind his onetime crusade against the Reds. Kennelly had earlier lost a bitter state parliamentary preselection battle to a Movement candidate, yet had rebounded to win a spot on the ALP's senate ticket. Now in Canberra he had a perch from which to create a new power base, and with federal party leader H.V. Evatt he had found a willing factional ally to help him defeat his opponents back home in Melbourne...
Now I'll address the popular misconceptions about how significant B.A. Santamaria was in the Australia-wide union movement and Labor Party, in as few words as possible:
In late 1954 Dr Evatt imagined his leadership was under seige from a national Rightwing factional alliance of some sort. He focussed his fear and anger on the Victorian Grouper/Movement establishment. Yet instead of criticising party officials Lovegrove and McManus, he took a more lateral approach--he went after the section of that establishment contained with the ostensibly non-partisan Catholic Action community.
Quite publicly he released a tirade against the non-party member Santamaria's very own publication, 'News Weekly'. This glorified parish newsletter was very much a propaganda organ of the Grouper/Movement elite, yet it was also quite detached from the traditional labour political arena, being essentially an amateur ideological hate tract when it came to denouncing communists, their fellow travellers, and anyone who wasn't quick enough to distance themselves from either tendency. It was easily denounced as a sinister, conspiratorial force. A force that was parasitising 'real Labor values'.
Evatt and his newfound ally Senator Kennelly had found the perfect method of compelling the national party to intervene in the affairs of the Victorian party. Using the polemical skills of respected Canberra press gallery correspondent Alan Reid they successfully created the impression that Santamaria was more influencial within the Victorian party establishment than he actually was, and that moreover this influence was just as baleful as any attempted Communist takeover of the party organisation.
Santamaria was successfully portrayed as the éminence grise of the entire sitting Labor Right establishment in Victoria.
I won't go into detail about the state and federal party conferences of Febuary and March of 1955, but suffice to say that during this period the militant anti-communist establishments in each state branch of the Australian Labor Party began to fall victim to the claim that they themselves were nothing but pawns of the sinister Melbournian Santamaria. It was true that the anti-communist strategies he had helped write were influential, and had been adopted in other states, most particularly in NSW, where the local Rightwing elite had remodelled themselves as Groupers soon after the rise of their allies south of the border. But it was not true that Santamaria was any kind of paramount leader of anti-communism throughout the national party. His realm had always been Victoria, and his travels outside that state had always been at the sufferance of local officials in either Church or labour community. And the level of respect he received always varied from state to state.
Yet... In 1955 the majority of the Victorian Right establishment found themselves outside the party, with their remaining loyal MPs forced to sit as 'rats' after having chosen to be expelled by the newly reformed state and federal party machines.
It was in this environment that B.A. Santamaria actually
did start to become the leader of his very own political labour movement, as almost all the new third party MPs lost their seats that year in the Victorian and federal elections, while there were few unions willing to affiliate with the new party, therefore depriving it of any skilled working class secretariat to draw talent from.
Over the next few years militant anti-communists in almost every state would be expelled from the ALP, or would leave voluntarily. Many of them would gravitate towards what was quickly becoming Santamaria's party. Some ex-ALP professionals who'd found themselves driven from the old party for their supposed inflexible Rightism would at first refuse to join what was now called the Democratic Labor Party, as they considered their first loyalty was to their state's working class politics; this was the case with some Rightwing unionists in NSW, and even moreso with anti-communist ex-MPs in Queensland. However, the Victorian was quickly becoming the only figure with a political base capable of running serious political campaigns in both union- and general-elections, thanks to his continued employment as senior lay figure in his Catholic archdiocese, and because of his superior media management skills. The fact that the new Victorian ALP establishment had moved to style itself as hard Left was of great benefit to Santamaria and his old allies/new followers, as it allowed them to portray themselves as both political martyrs as well as the only anti-communist section of the Victorian working class.
The only alternate base to the new Melbourne-centric DLP was amoung the ranks of the Groupers expelled from the Sydney machine, yet they faced the active hostility of their local archdiocese, not to mention a party which hadn't actually moved very much Leftwards in their absence, and in fact was still lead by a rump Rightwing establishment.
In summation: Was Santamaria the creator of the anti-communist push within Australian labour during the nineteen forties and fifties? Well, he could claim to have been one of the architects of this anti-communism, most certainly in Victoria. His influence elsewhere is at best uncertain, at worst negligible--at least before he became a celebrity in the latter Evatt years. At that point he did become a national anti-communist leader. Of sorts.
Did the original pre-1955 anti-communist push defeat the communists' attempt to take over the Australian union movement, and therefore preserve the ALP's base for democracry? This is very complicated. Robert Murray in his seminal work on the subject,
The Split: Australian Labor in The Fifties, gives us a good summary of the unions that were wrestled from the control of communist office holders. Yet he doesn't go into much detail about the actual longterm health of the CPA in Australian unions, about how that particular movement was at a great disadvantage in the post-Depression and post-War eras. IMO the communists were beginning to weaken with each day that the country was no longer at war or in economic decline, aka the rest of their working lives for every man and women alive on Victory in the Pacific Day. This organisational decline would soon become a death spiral when Khrushchev gave his secret speech and the people's revolutions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia were crushed (oh, the irony of there being any 'communist question' whatsoever in Australian politics a mere eighteen months before Hungary.) Further irony is to be had by the fact the quite uniform CPA of the fifties would become the split-riven microparty Left of the sixties and seventies, before finally dying in the end years of the Cold War
What about the DLP's claim that the post-split ALP was unduly influenced by Communists? Certainly there was a broad Left alliance that included Communists in its ranks, and this alliance was the dominant force in the party between 1955 and the beginning of Whitlam's supremacy over the party. But the majority ideology of this alliance was fairly isolationist in the greater scheme of things, not internationalist, so therefore not really under any sort of capital 'C' Communist control. And within half a dozen years this political establishment had moved to replace anti-anti-communism with culture war issues as their guiding belief. Of course the culture war in question was distinctly anti-Catholic, so there was little reason for the Santamaria-ites to forego their ongoing massive retaliation against the traitorous pro-Moscow/pro-Peking dupes [sic] of the ALP...
ENDS BRIEF DISSERTATION.