John Faulkner (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Of all the things I could say about Clyde Cameron—about what he did, about what he achieved—one thing is paramount, one thing from which all the rest stemmed: Clyde Cameron could count. He could count the number of members in a statewide union ballot. He could count the number of votes on the state or federal executive of his union and party. He could count exactly how many votes the AWU could control at ALP conferences. In 1955 he counted how many votes ‘Doc’ Evatt would need at the federal conference of the ALP to expel the groupers. In 1970 he counted how many votes Gough Whitlam needed on the federal executive to intervene in the unelectable Victorian branch. Both times, as history attests, he got his sums right.

Clyde made his mark on history as a minister in the Whitlam government, perhaps most famously through helping to establish equal pay for women. But it was not on the front bench but in the back room that he made his mark on the Australian Labor Party and the labour movement. As he said after his retirement:

I did not mind other people getting the glory while I was exercising the power.

Trained in the hard school of AWU union politics, Clyde had formidable toughness and considerable skill in manipulating the machinery that makes a political party run. He used those skills and that toughness in the interest, as he perceived it, of the party he served for so long and with such intensity.

Clyde was both an utterly ruthless realist and a passionate idealist. He sought to find a place for himself and for the labour movement within the two extremes of politics—as he himself described them: the extremes of either power without purpose, or purpose without power. His ability to balance these demands was best shown by the role he played as a power broker of the Left in delivering crucial left-wing votes to support Gough Whitlam’s abolition and reformation of the left-controlled Victorian branch of the ALP. It is true that the argument Whitlam used to convince him was to ask him to choose between being a footnote in a book by Alan Reid or Minister for Labour.

But Clyde Cameron did not crunch numbers for purely personal gain. He always worked in the interests of the party, as he saw them. He had his own personal code, and he was disciplined in sticking to it. He voted against, and thus blocked, the preselection of his own brother Larry because he believed the other candidate was the better objective choice. He broke with the ticket of his own union to vote for Don Dunstan’s preselection. Clyde put the party before any factional or state interests, and he put the party before any personal interests.

When Clyde Cameron died last Friday, the Australian Labor Party lost part of its history, not just because Clyde personally remembered many of the most dramatic events in ALP history—he was the last surviving member of the 1949-51 parliament—but because Clyde Cameron himself was the exemplar of the kind of man once common in the ALP but now very rare. Son of a founding member of the AWU, he travelled from shearer’s shed to cabinet room. His parents, both his shearer father and his Quaker mother, gave him an abiding belief in the power of human action to improve the world and the importance of social justice. His early experience of hardship in childhood—Clyde said in his memoirs that he remembered months of never being fully fed as a child—and as a young man during the Depression left him pretty bitter, his own words, towards people who did not understand the realities of life for the unemployed.

Like many Labor people of his generation, his experience during the Depression left him committed to full employment. He said:

I envy people who have had the chance to go through life without knowing what it is to be unemployed.

He barely tried to hide his contempt for those who treated the ill-paid or unemployed as the cannon fodder of economic policy. As a young man on the dole, Clyde experienced firsthand the hardship—and the humiliation—of unemployment. And as a young shearer, Clyde saw firsthand the difference that union action could make to the basic, everyday life of working people. As a union representative, the squatters nicknamed him ‘Shithouse’ Cameron, because he used to inspect the pit latrines to make sure they had flywire protection as required by the Shearers’ Accommodation Act—something that might seem petty and pedantic to anyone who has never seen how bad the flies can get in the West Darling.

But from those early days as a union organiser to the end of his life, no detail was too small for Clyde Cameron to notice, no task beneath him. After his death on Friday, a former staffer who had first met Clyde after his retirement from parliament in the 1980s described how Clyde spent election campaign after election campaign sitting in the back room of a campaign office, folding letters and stuffing envelopes for mail-outs. It is the kind of job that has to be done on every campaign but one that many retired MPs and former ministers would think a bit beneath them. Not Clyde. I will not say that he was afflicted with modesty—false or otherwise—when it came to his own gifts and his contribution to the Labor movement but nor was he subject to hubris. No job was too small, no task was too tough for Clyde Cameron. As a young union organiser, that attitude won him support from men whose pay and conditions he worked to improve. His constituency in the shearing sheds gave him a power base in the union and the numbers on the conference floor. That put him on the wrong side of the ruling clique. They were tough men. Clyde was tougher.

In 1939, as a young 26-year-old organiser, he walked into his first meeting of the South Australian AWU executive and discovered it was a ‘kindergarten for retarded children’. He said in his memoirs:

When I later went into the first Caucus meeting of the Parliamentary Labor Party after my election in 1949, I remember feeling what a tame outfit it was compared with the AWU conventions I had attended. AWU conventions brought together the toughest group of Labor people you could find anywhere in Australia ... Those men had absolutely no regard for fitness or decency. Nowhere else did I witness the same kind of ruthlessness and cruelty that I saw in the Annual Conventions of the AWU.

His feud with long-serving AWU general secretary Tom Dougherty started in the 1940s, when Cameron was state secretary for the South Australian branch of the AWU. Cameron’s fight to democratise the union and choke off the power of union officials to expel rivals elected by the rank and file was eventually successful. As Minister for Labour he was able to bring about changes to the Conciliation and Arbitration Act that would stop Dougherty’s crooked practices. Eagerly awaiting Dougherty’s defeat at the next elections, Clyde was deeply disappointed when Dougherty died in office a few months later. As Mungo MacCallum reported this weekend, when Bob Hawke, as president of the ACTU, attended Dougherty’s funeral, Cameron blasted him. He said:

What you have done is to pay your last respects to the most evil man ever to hold office in any trade union. You presided over the funeral of a cruel, arrogant, deceitful, hypocritical, malevolent, treacherous and lecherous man. One of the worst criminals ever to escape the gallows, a gangster, a thief, a thug, a blackmailer, a ballot-rigger, a wife-starver, a traitor to his union, a standover man, a giver and taker of bribes, a tyrant and a coward.

Cameron was seldom afraid to say exactly what he thought. He was willing to speak ill of the dead, of the living, behind people’s backs and to their faces. He was what we call in the Australian Labor Party ‘a good hater’. Bob Santamaria, who ought to know, described Clyde as ‘both permanent and consistent’ in his opposition to the groupers. He was described by Alan Reid as ‘radical, implacable, tenacious’. Another journalist, listening to Clyde doing his best to cripple the career of an enemy, described him as burying his knife in a defenceless back with ‘impeccable, slow, twisting calculation’. The enemy in question was Bob Hawke. Clyde, fortunately, was not successful in that endeavour.

Clyde was one of the legendary hard men of the ALP. Eddie Ward was his mentor. Joe Chamberlain was his role model. But unlike either of them, Clyde knew that the party had to find policies broadly appealing in order to win, and he was persuaded by Whitlam’s argument that, in politics, ideological purity is not an end in itself. His support for federal intervention in Victoria was crucial to its success. He coaxed wavering votes, including Kim Edward Beazley’s, created opportunities for emergency meetings when the numbers failed to hold at the first Broken Hill meeting of the executive and split crucial votes away from the right.

When the federal executive found the Victorian branch guilty of the charges against them and abolished the branch, Clyde’s typical attention to detail when it came to machinery matters came to the fore, and he insisted the executive deal with every charge separately so, if court action should overturn any one of the charges, the others would not be tainted. When Clyde Cameron crunched someone, they stayed crunched. Gough phoned Clyde to thank him, saying, ‘No-one but you could have got the numbers’—or so Clyde recalled the conversation.

It is ironic that one of the people Clyde had to persuade to vote with him at those crucial 1970s meetings was Kim Beazley Senior. Fifteen years earlier, in 1955, Clyde realised that Doc Evatt was not going to have the numbers against the groupers on the floor of the conference. He plotted with Joe Chamberlain to have the federal executive choose its own delegates to represent the grouper dominated state of Victoria. As Clyde admitted:

It was highly irregular for the Federal Executive to be deciding a matter that properly belonged to the conference, but when you are in a war, fighting for survival, you cannot afford to be worried about technicalities.

It was Kim Beazley’s rejection of this ‘irregular’ strategy that saw him fall out with Joe Chamberlain, the powerful Western Australian state secretary. In 1970, both Clyde and Kim were on the wrong side of Joe. But they were on the right side of the electorate.

After 1972, Clyde had the chance to fulfil a life-long dream and he became Minister for Labour and Immigration. One of his first and most memorable actions was to re-open the case for equal pay for women. But Clyde knew that equal opportunity was as important as equal pay. He would not accept lists of candidates for appointments or promotion that did not include women. In the days before the words ‘affirmative action’ were part of the language, Clyde was practising a rough-and-ready version of the same. He did not put it in those terms, however; he simply said that he wanted to give women a chance. When a 1975 reshuffle saw him lose his beloved portfolio, he described it as:

... the event of my life that caused me the most distress. Ever since I was a child I had longed for the day when I might be lucky enough to be in a position to do something for organised labour ...

Gough told him he would find science an interesting portfolio, but Cameron refused to be placated. He later said:

Actually, after a while, as Gough predicted, I did begin to find science and consumer affairs quite interesting, but I kept that to myself.

His relationship with Gough Whitlam never recovered. I have talked about Clyde’s role in federal and union politics, but, of course, as a powerful influence in the South Australian branch, he exercised a great deal of sway in South Australian politics. In 1967, for example, he got Frank Walsh to stand down as Premier to make way for Don Dunstan by moving a motion at the party state council meeting congratulating Walsh for putting the party’s interests ahead of his own and standing down in favour of a younger man. This was the first Frank Walsh had ever heard of his selfless decision to step aside but, when the council erupted in a standing ovation, he saw the writing on the wall. This high-profile intervention was not Clyde’s typical way, though, of doing things. He later said:

Nobody likes to see any outfit run by one man, so it was important to be discreet ... A person who holds power is a madman to flaunt it.

Describing a few highlights and memorable moments in Clyde’s long career is a poor reflection of the full extent of his contribution. He worked the party’s machine continually, relentlessly, ruthlessly, with a nudge here and a phone call there, influencing preselections, policy and party operations. He could be persuaded but never intimidated.

For many years in the ALP, regardless of who was steering the ship, Clyde Cameron was one of the people down in the engine room, making sure that none of the pressure gauges hit dangerous levels and that the engines responded when the captain turned the wheel. His contribution was no less valuable for being often unseen. And, in the Labor Party and the labour movement, it was no less appreciated for being unseen. His courage and conviction, not to mention his cunning, made a crucial difference at some of the ALP’s most perilous moments. His was a life of both power and purpose. Our thoughts and sympathies are with his family and friends.

Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It was with great sadness that I heard on Friday of the passing of the former member for Hindmarsh, a great South Australian, Clyde Cameron, in the early hours of that day, in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in my home town of Adelaide. I want to say a few things in this place about this man, who was a great South Australian and a great servant of the Australian working people. Clyde Cameron was many things: he was a shearer, a union organiser, an industrial advocate and a historian—or, as Mike Rann recently observed, a ‘prolific chronicler of Labor Party history’. He was the representative of the people of Hindmarsh for 31 years—a seat which is now held in this place by the member for Hindmarsh, Steve Georganas. He was a cabinet minister. But, above all, he was a staunch defender of working people and their welfare. Clive Cameron was a man who made a towering contribution to our movement and he was an iconic figure in the South Australian branch.

Clyde Cameron was born in Murray Bridge in 1913 and his first job was as a shearer at Ashmore Station in South Australia after leaving school at the age of 14. From a very young age he had a commitment to improving the lot of the people who he represented and from whence he came. After a period of unemployment during the Great Depression, Clyde Cameron was elected as an organiser for the Australian Workers Union in South Australia and became the state secretary of that union in 1941. He was elected to federal parliament in 1949 and spent 23 years in opposition—a record which I am sure very few here would like to hold—before becoming a minister in the first Whitlam government. Before Clyde Cameron’s death this past Friday, he was the last of the members of parliament elected in 1949. His record of winning 13 consecutive elections for the seat of Hindmarsh before retiring, after 31 years, in 1975 is one of considerable achievement.

As Senator Faulkner has pointed out, Clyde Cameron made history when he argued the case for the appointment of former High Court Justice Mary Gaudron to prosecute the case for equal pay for female workers in the arbitration commission. He was a leading advocate of pension increases, for the provision of child care to support working women and he greatly improved the pay and conditions of public service workers during his term as Minister for Labour and Immigration. Dame Roma Mitchell, yet another great South Australian, said at one of Clyde’s book launches that he made a lot of good friends and he kept them for a long time. He also made a lot of fierce enemies and kept them for a long time.

Clyde Cameron, along with Don Dunstan and others, helped pioneer multiculturalism in Australia and, as others in this place have talked about, his association with Gough Whitlam and his keen understanding of the machinery of our party brought about the necessary reform that was required for Labor to win office after so many years in opposition. Of course no reflection on Clyde Cameron’s life would be complete without acknowledging the famous falling out that Clyde Cameron and Gough Whitlam had. As John Bannon has observed, it was not so much the sacking of Cameron but the manner in which it was done. Cameron’s humiliating treatment was never forgiven. Certainly Clyde Cameron’s career was a controversial one, but his reputation as the hard man of the Labor Party was belied by the friendships he cultivated on the conservative side of politics. I note, also, notable names include James Killen, John Gorton and Mary Downer.

I have known Clyde Cameron at somewhat of a distance from when I joined the party as a much younger person, when I was a student at Adelaide university. Clyde would still attend the various party fora that I attended. He was kind enough to write to me after my first speech in this place; he wrote to me congratulating me on some of the issues that I had raised and expressing his views about them. I remember being incredibly touched and moved that somebody who was such a significant figure in our movement would take the time to read the first speech of a Senate backbencher. Last year, or perhaps the year before, I was fortunate enough to be at a dinner where Clyde Cameron was presented with lifetime membership of the South Australian Labor Party. He certainly remained active in the South Australian party and community, right up until he fell acutely ill last month. There were a great many fundraisers, Labor Party events and community events over the years that I have attended where Clyde Cameron has attended. In 1995 Clyde was made an Officer of the Order of Australia. He spent his retirement in Adelaide’s West Lakes and has never stopped being an integral part of the Labor Party in South Australia. He passed away on Friday aged 95. I understand that at the time he was Australia’s oldest former parliamentarian. He is survived by his wife of 40 years, Doris, and his two sons, Warren and Noel, and a daughter, Tanya. I extend my condolences to his family and place on record my gratitude and recognition for the enormous contribution of this great South Australian.

Question agreed to, honourable senators standing in their places.