However bitterly fought the differences, there was a discernible unity of commitment

The ACTU turns 75

Bob Hawke salutes Australia's peak union council.

Solidarity forever

By Bob Hawke

I thank you for the honour of delivering this keynote address at the 75th anniversary of the ACTU. I do so on the condition that having spoken at the 50th you will invite me again for the centenary celebrations.

When I read these days about the toughness of factional fighting in the labour movement I allow myself a wry grin. I think back to my arrival at the ACTU in Melbourne in mid 1958 as the raw young Research Officer and Advocate in the depths of the split in the industrial and political labour movement.

Politically the very word "Labor" had been hijacked by the enemies of Labor on the Right and on the Left. On the right the DLP whose main purpose in life was to sustain Menzies and keep Labor from office - a purpose which was equally served, but without such manifest intent, by Bill Hartley the Secretary of the ALP and his equally misguided acolytes.

At the industrial level that intensive political warfare was reflected in the bitter unrelenting struggle between the Groupers on the one hand and, on the other, the sympathisers of the ALP and the Communist Party, sometimes acting separately sometimes together.

The depth and intensity of the political animosities had to be seen to be believed. Long-standing friendships were shattered - even families were sundered. Each side had its own watering hole - the Groupers on one corner in the Dover Hotel, Non-Groupers in the Lygon/John Curtin on the other, with the Victoria Trades Hall across the road in the centre, forming a triangle of turbulence.

And within that we had then our own C&MEU - Catholic and Masonic Enmity Unincorporated. Prima facie judgements were made on a man - and it was nearly all men then - by the digital test: did he cross himself or did he use the secret grip.

You youngsters today in the labour movement who think you operate in a tough environment are kidding yourselves - as compared with those days of my Melbourne initiation to the ACTU yours are like a playground skirmish.

Of course it took me - fresh from the kid-gloves atmosphere of disputation in academia - some time to come to terms with this new and at times ugly reality. But gradually I became aware of a basic and reassuring truth.

However bitterly men fought out their ideological differences within both the political and industrial structures of the labour movement, there was a discernible identifying unity of commitment to improving the wages and conditions of the working men and women of Australia.

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