Jim Cairns

Dr Jim Cairns

James Ford Cairns (4 October 1914 - 12 October 2003), Australian politician, was prominent in the Labor movement through the 1960s and 1970s, and was briefly Deputy Prime Minister 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.

Contents

1 Early Days

2 Leading leftist

3 Cairns in Government

Early Days

Jim Cairns was born in Carlton, then a working-class suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, the son of a clerk. He grew up on a dairy farm. His father went to the First World War and never came back: his family never found out why. His father had syphilis, and according to Cairns' biographers his mother was so afraid of passing the infection to her son that she refused any physical contact with him. For a person so gifted in persuasion, Cairns was diffident and reserved, and some of his friends attributed this to his awkward relationship with his mother.

Although Cairns was a very bright student, he had to abandon his studies to support his family, and in 1933 he joined the Victorian Police Force, becoming a detective. While working he studied at night and completed an economics degree at the University of Melbourne. He became a talented economist and also a convinced socialist. In 1939 he married Gwen Robb, whose two sons he adopted.

In 1944, Cairns left the Police and was employed, successively as a tutor, a lecturer and a senior lecturer in economic history, at the University. In 1946 he applied to join the Communist Party but was rejected. He joined the Labor Party and became active in its left wing. The Victorian Labor Party was at this time controlled by the Catholic right-wing forces known as the "Groupers", associated with B.A. Santamaria, and Cairns was a leading opponent of this group.

In 1955, when the federal Labor leader, Dr H V "Doc" Evatt, attacked the Groupers and brought on a major split in the Labor Party, Cairns sided with Evatt and came close to being expelled from the party. At the 1955 elections, he stood for the House of Representatives for the working-class seat of Yarra, held by the leading Grouper, Stan Keon. In what is said to have been the most violent election campaign in Australian history, Cairns was elected.

Leading leftist

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. He 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. He also struck many people at this time as cold and fanatical - a judgement which he (much later) accepted.

Neverthless Cairns's 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. In 1967, when Arthur Calwell retired as Labor leader, Cairns contested the leadership, but was defeated by Gough Whitlam. The following year, when Whitlam resigned as leader as part of his fight with the left-wing of the party, Cairns again contested the leadership, but again narrowly failed. Whitlam appointed him shadow minister for trade and industry.

One of the reasons Cairns did not become leader of the Labor Party was that through 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 troops in 1965, and against conscription for that war. Until about 1968, most Australians supported the war, and opposition to it was led by the Communist Party and the trade unions. After 1968, however, opposition grew, and Cairns came to see this movement as a moral crusade. In 1969 he was bashed by a group of men who broke into his home.

In May 1970, Cairns, as chair of the Vietnam Moratorium, led an estimated 100,000 people in the largest political protest ever seen in Australia in a "sit-down" demonstration in the streets of Melbourne. Similar protests of proportionate size took place simultaneously in other Australian cities. There was none of the predicted violence, and the moral force of the (mainly young) protesters had a major effect on Australian attitudes to the war.

Cairns in Government

In 1972, Whitlam led the Labor Party into government for the first time in 23 years, and Cairns became Minister for Overseas Trade and Minister for Manufacturing Industry. He had by now shed much of his Marxist ideology of earlier years, though he was still a strong believer in state planning. He got along surprisingly well with the heads of industry although critics later said this was because he was sympathetic to their requests for Government assistance. After the 1974 election, he was elected Deputy Leader of the Labor Party and thus became Deputy Prime Minister.

Missing image
Ac.cairns2.jpg

Dr Jim Cairns and Junie Morosi

In December 1974, Whitlam appointed Cairns Treasurer (finance minister). This was the high-point of Cairns's 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 economy began to decline during 1975, and Cairns (like other finance ministers around the world at this time) had few answers to the new phenomenon of stagflation, the combination of high unemployment and high inflation that followed the 1974 oil shock.

The Loans Affair

In an attempt to raise funds for a massive Keynesian pump-priming exercise, Cairns and another senior minister, Rex Connor, tried to borrow huge amounts of petrodollars from the Middle East through an intermediary, a Pakistani banker called Tirath Khemlani (the so-called "Loans Affair"). When the Liberal Opposition learned of this, Cairns and Connor denied to both Parliament and to Whitlam that they had given Khemlani authority to act in the name of the Australian government. When it emerged that this was untrue, Whitlam moved Cairns from Treasury to the Environment ministry.

In addition to his involvement with Khemlani, Cairns also attempted to raise overseas funds through George Harris, a businessman and president of the Carlton Football Club. Cairns provided Harris with written authorisation to raise A$2,000 million, offering him a 2.5% commission. Cairns denied the existence of this letter, and when it was produced he denied having signed it. In July 1975, Whitlam sacked him from the ministry.

Cairns and Morosi

By this time Cairns's relationship with Morosi had become public, although the media at that time was still sufficiently discreet for its precise nature not to be mentioned. At the Labor Party national conference in February 1975 he gave an interview in which he confessed "a kind of love" for Morosi. Morosi considered Cairns to be sexually repressed, and evidently he found her company liberating. It is not clear when the relationship became sexual, and Cairns was not at this time directly asked if it was.

In a 1982 defamation case he initiated before the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Cairns denied on oath having had a sexual relationship with Morosi. The jury in that case found that the article in question did contain "an imputation" that Cairns was "improperly involved with his assistant, Junie Morosi, in a romantic or sexual association," but that this statement was not defamatory. Cairns did not receive money for defamation, although Morosi did. In 2002 Cairns admitted that he had had a sexual relationship with Morosi.

Aftermath

Cairns's Labor colleagues found his conduct in the Loans and Morosi affairs intolerable, and his political reputation was destroyed. In 1977 he retired from Parliament. He devoted the rest of his life to the counter-cultural movement, to which he had been introduced by Morosi. He sponsored a series of Down to Earth conference-festivals (known as Confests) at various rural locations, and was photographed sitting in the dust meditating. He published a series of books in which he was highly critical of his former self, of conventional politics, of gender roles and Western culture generally.

Even in the counter-culture movement, however, Cairns and Morosi remained the centre of controversy, with disputes soon arising over the organisation and finances of the Down to Earth gatherings. In 1979 Cairns severed his formal links with the Down to Earth organisers. But he retained legally and financially embroiled with a failed communal settlement at Mount Oak south of Canberra until, after a messy court case, he cut his losses and ended his involvement with what was left of the movement in 1991.

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, while remaining close to Morosi, he was reconciled with Gwen Cairns (she died in 2000) and lived at Narre Warren outside Melbourne. He became a familiar figure selling his books outside shopping centres. In 2000 he was made a Life Member of the Labor Party. Cairns died of bronchial pneumonia at the age of 89 in October 2003. He was accorded a State Funeral at St John's Anglican Church in Toorak, with a very large number of mourners.