Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to incorporate Senator Carr's speech.

Leave granted.

Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Science) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The incorporated speech read as follows—

In 1891 George Black delivered one of the most lasting definitions of labour politics.

Our goal, he said, was to 'make and unmake social conditions'. This was the mission of the late, great Wally Curran. And he gave it one hell of a crack.

I pay tribute to him today as a great Australian and legend of the labour movement; a man of principle and character; generous of spirit, large in imagination, and unstinting in his service to the cause.

This was a man who helped shape a generation of labour activists - and in so doing, helped to reshape politics and industry in this country

Wally Curran: the boy from the boning room, born on Butcher's Picnic Day, the 20th January, in 1932.

To his opponents - and they were many - Wally was always something of an enigma.

They simply couldn't square his great intellect and learning with what they saw as his humble roots.

And the collars don't come much bluer than Wally's.

Born in Williamstown in the Great Depression, his mother was a factory worker and his father was a slaughterman.

Wally grew up with the 'professional fishermen' - or poachers - on the docks.

When he turned 14, his mother told him to find a job, or she'd find one for him. So Wally left Williamstown Tech at 14 and worked in the woollen mills and on the Williamstown Docks.

Then he got a job as a labourer in the local meatworks. There, he worked 16 hour shifts, for precious little pay, in appalling conditions.

Injuries on the job were common. The work was hard and physical. He was an adult before he had the time to be a child.

But these conditions did not make him bitter or resentful. They steeled him for the fight that would define his life.

The fight for dignity at work and justice for working people.

The fight for the opportunities and richer life that people of his class were denied.

And the greatest mistake of his enemies was to underestimate what this man could do.

For four decades he served the Australasian Meat Industry Employees' Union and its members faithfully.

He was Assistant Secretary of the Victorian Branch, for 18 years; and Secretary for another 24.

Wally's industrial tactics were creative. He argued that people who criticised the AMIEU didn't understand it.

"It's free and democratic" he used to say. "That's how the members arrive at their decisions, and then they proceed in a disciplined way."

His views are captured in a short story he wrote about the experience on the picket line.

"The picket was good humoured, peaceful, and marked by a sense of comradeship and belief in the right to take action and protect our jobs.

"This was, after all, Australia, and not some bloody sheikdom that relied on rule by force. We had the right to strike, the right to organise, and that's what we were exercising on that wharf.

"Some picketers took up fishing, only to discover that the fish had been contaminated by the local oil refinery and tasted of kerosene. Talk about the oil company, and what multinational companies did to local environments, here and elsewhere in the world, then became a topic for serious discussion.

"Being on the picket line to defend our own real and very immediate interests created a sense of social responsibility and the need to take

notice of and action about a whole range of issues; that affected our lives and our future."

That larger vision - that empathy - were very much Wally's hallmark.

It was Wally Curran who took up the fight for equal pay for women in meatworks, later broadened to the entire manufacturing sector, when no-one else would touch it.

It was Wally Curran who championed an end to the Christmas sackings, the stand-downs without pay, the wretched insecurity that was for so long just accepted

It was Wally Curran who agitated for, and then implemented, the first Meat Industry Superannuation Fund.

It was Wally Curran who was instrumental in establishing the first Trade Union Clinic for workers; then secured funding for research into worker safety; and fought for the introduction of equipment that saved lives.

It was these contributions which earned him a Medal in the Order of Australia in 1997.

Through it all, he remained faithful to his class, contemptuous of bourgeois pretence, and true to the principles that fired him.

Wally made no secret of his red credentials.

He left the Labor party in the 1950s to join the Communist Party.

The training and intellectual involvement he found in the CP helped him succeed where others failed.

He returned to the Labor Party in the 1960s.

Here it is true that he favoured a much more comprehensive and radical political program than anything the Labor Party could offer.

But he matched that ambition with incredible political acumen - achieving a compromise that has always defined the labour movement at its best.

Industrially and politically, he knew when to set aside his ideological aspirations in order to reach a real-world settlement.

And he achieved so much. His influence could have a real impact on the fate of governments. His speeches made headlines. His counsel was sought by generations of Labor activists, and politicians.

He never held a formal position within the Labor Party, he never sought to be elected to a parliament, but he was never a 'faceless man'. And he never betrayed the union or its members.

Through all the turns of the political cycle, he stayed true to the labour cause and true to the people who put their faith in him.

Because people did put their faith in him — Premiers and Prime Ministers as well as men and women on the factory floor.

Perhaps Wally explained it best himself.

"People always came to me," he said. "I never went to them. I never sought any great riches or a seat in Parliament. I was never after any of that, so I never wanted anything from anybody else and I was never beholden to any other bastard."

And that was something else his opponents could never understand -Wally's politics of persuasion.

The Liberals, the Nationals, the Farmers' Federation and the conservative press threw bile at him for forty years.

They could not understand this man's influence and stature in the Labor Party.

They were flummoxed when Paul Keating turned to Wally for support. And Wally was well aware of it.

"In reflecting on my life," he said, in an article in The Age in 1993, "it is easy to see where I have gone wrong. I have been constantly reminded by the metropolitan and rural press, by the electronic media, by politicians and indeed, many others, that I am the cause of society's problems."

So what, as Shaun Carney asked in 1992, was so special about this man?

"Certainly," Mr Carney wrote, "he is abrasive, aggressive, selective to the point of capriciousness in his choice of journalists with whom he will speak.

"He delights in puncturing those he perceives have even a whiff of bourgeois pretension, which means that a lot of journalists get short shrift".

But Carney goes on to make an observation about Wally that will ring very true to those who knew him.

"Mr Curran appeals to Mr Keating," he wrote, "because he refuses to bow to the established order and because he has devoted his life to the labour movement.

"When Mr Keating visited Mr Curran looking for support, he was a man with a problem just like so many members of the Meat Industry Employees' Union.

"In helping Mr Keating, Mr Curran in one respect was just doing the job he has done since the 1960s."

Now as Wally would later say, after such a passionate embrace it was too much to expect that Mr Keating still respect the Left in the morning.

But for once he was wrong. To the end of his life, they remained in contact. Mr Keating continued to hold him in the highest regard.

And in any conflict, Wally was a formidable combatant.

He had a knowledge of human foibles and an intuitive understanding of people that couldn't be found in any ministerial brief.

And he would often sum up the health of a company long before the Stock Exchange was to know. One only has to think back to the meat substitution rackets of the 1970s and 80s, where companies that had denounced him as a ratbag - and worse - were later found to be engaged in organised crime. He was onto the crooks, and they didn't like it.

They were not just selling kangaroo meat to the Americans as beef - they were shipping arms around the country in meat-vans.

And when Wally spoke up, they accused him of single-handedly destroying the industry.

He was fearless and infuriating to his enemies.

On one particularly memorable occasion, he took to the stage at the right-wing Industrial Relations Society dinner, to share some choice observations on the Industrial Relations Commission of the day.

He accused this august body of 'lacking ability, obvious bias, hypocrisy, impropriety and incompetence.'

He further noted that productivity in the managerial classes would be greatly improved if the Melbourne Club closed earlier at lunchtime.

It was remarks such as these that got him referred to the DPP in 1991.

And amidst yet another round of calls for the AMIEU to be deregistered, the AFP finally concluded there was no cause to act.

Wally was always careful to cultivate his hard-bitten image. But you would be mistaken if you confused him with his public persona.

He believed in the rights of working class people to enjoy life in all its richness.

Not just a right to decent work for fair pay, and proper health and safety conditions, but also to participate in the arts, literature, and beautiful gardens.

To Wally, it was all the same struggle. He tried throughout his career to get his comrades to see the connections.

He himself was widely read, a keen potter, and a skilled gardener.

He was a very proud member of the Australia Council from 1974 to 1978 - reappointed by Malcolm Fraser — and a director of the Spoleto Festival.

It is hard to overstate the impact of having the Secretary of the Meatworkers on such an august body.

And he was a humanist.

Who fought for the equal rights of migrant workers. Who judged you on your merits, not your accent.

Who helped me and many others at the darkest of times, with his comfort, friendship and counsel.

For all his public persona of toughness, he was a gentle, generous and compassionate man.

Even up to his final conscious moments, his concerns were with working people. We in the labour movement remember him with gratitude and pride.

Our thoughts are with his partner Kay Morrissey, his daughters Lisa and Cindy, and his two grandchildren, Lucy and Tia.

He left this world a far better place than he found it.