Bert Kelly, “Insider’s view a mixed blessing,”
The Bulletin, November 23, 1982, p. 139.

I found Clyde Cameron’s book Unions In Crisis very interesting, though a few parts worry me. Cameron was in parliament 10 years before I arrived and I had heard many stories about what a villain he was and almost expected him to have a tail. I found that he was — and is — a cultured and competent gentleman.

The book tells us a lot about the inside workings of the union movement. Cameron knows where many of the “bodies” are buried, not surprising because he put some of them there. Years ago when I expressed surprise to some of Cameron’s colleagues about his nice nature, they warned me that when he was patting me on the back in his friendly fashion he really was looking for a soft spot in which to insert the knife.

This wasn’t true but Cameron certainly knew how to handle the rough side of union politics. That is why he went as far as he did.

He went from the shearing shed to be Minister for Labor and Immigration in the Whitlam Government and he gives a fascinating insight into the difficulties that a courageous and responsible minister had in that post in a Labor administration and under a Prime Minister as headstrong as Whitlam.

Cameron faced constant pressures from colleagues in parliament and the union movement to improve wages and conditions, even when this was clearly wrong. And there were some frank admissions of mistakes that he made without help.

For instance, discussing his experiences as a shed hand and quarry worker in his youth, he says:

These experiences warped my judgment and for the rest of my life I became obsessed with a determination to lift the wages for young people regardless of the kind of work they were doing. I was too purblind to see that most of the work open to young people was outside the shearing sheds and stone quarries. We have not helped the young by demanding that they may not be employed unless paid excessive wages. We priced them out of the labour market and we deserve no thanks for that.

Australian politics would be saner if politicians made more such admissions.

The book is packed with pang-by-pang descriptions of political and union battles fought with competence and courage and I commend it to any student of industrial affairs. However, though I got from the book a competent picture of the past, I did not get as much guidance for the future.

Cameron tells us how to make the present wages machine work more smoothly and even how to cut corners with it but perhaps we would do better with a different kind of machine altogether.

Most countries have systems different from ours and to think that theirs could be even worse is difficult. But Cameron dismisses the possibility of real change to our present system. He says:

Australians are accustomed to it and they accept it because “custom breeds preference.” It will be reformed; but it is safe to say that it will never be abolished by Act of Parliament; for no politician will forget the lesson given to the Bruce-Page Government in 1929.

That is 50 years ago and, surely, we at least should look at alternatives.

Given Cameron’s experience as a shearer, I was disappointed that he did not say more about piecework.

If we ran our factories like our shearing sheds, a lot more wealth would be created to share. It may be that, in days long past, shearers got a pretty rough trot but they have become the aristocrats of labour.

Why should other pieceworkers be victimised now?

Cameron seems to have swallowed the multinational nonsense. He assumes that there is plenty of fat for distribution to the workers just because some overseas companies have made a lot of money in the past.

Most of our business, however, are owned by ordinary Australians and there is not a lot of fat on most of us to share.

The really sad part, for me, is to find that Clyde is still blowing on the embers of his past.

Talking about workers participation in management, he recounts some European success in this field. Then he says:

That is why I ask company directors to follow the pragmatists of Europe and face the fact that this is the last decade of the 20th Century. It does not worry me that they will not heed my advice because I want to see them presiding over the demise of private capitalism.

I know Cameron had a rough time as a lad and, clearly, the old wounds still hurt. But it is sad to see this warping the judgment of so wise a man.