by Tony Dear, January 2014

When Paul Krutulis first turned up at a Workers Party (WP) meeting in 1976, aged 21, he looked benign enough, but soon displayed his intensity. A reformed communist, he soon found the WP’s basic axiom to be a good moral guide: NO MAN OR GROUP OF MEN HAS THE RIGHT TO INITIATE THE USE OF FORCE, FRAUD, OR COERCION AGAINST ANY OTHER MAN OR GROUP OF MEN. (“Men” can be read as “women”.) Although this principle found acceptance with most people, many of those people spat the dummy when it was applied totally consistently, the implications not suiting their prejudices.

Paul gave up his course in education at Monash University in order to immerse himself in (anti-) politics. Most members devoted a limited amount of time to the Party, but Paul was motivated and full of ideas. For my part, I installed printing equipment at my house for producing leaflets and was Paul’s driver for the purposes of mobility. Perhaps he had more courage then caution, and I more caution at the age of 36 than courage. But this was probably a complementary arrangement.

ENERGY-SAPPING ACTIVITIES
During a period of unproductive meetings and my unrewarding attempt at election in the federal seat of Henty, WP members experienced threats of various kinds.

For instance, at a city demonstration, Paul and I had an anti-socialist placard ripped out of our hands and taken out of sight. A policeman was surprisingly sympathetic, but could do nothing about it.

On another occasion, as we held signs, someone stepped in front of us, quickly photographed us and disappeared. That probably put us on ASIO’s files.

One public meeting was well-attended by anti-communist east-European immigrants. They manhandled a female member of our group as she offered them WP pamphlets. Apparently, they misinterpreted Workers Party as being communist. I retaliated, but it was no more than jostling on both sides. More importantly, it raised the issue of the WP’s name — a label which Dr John Whiting of Adelaide was at this stage still supporting, but which John Singleton and others were denigrating.

One of the biggest public meetings arranged by the WP was a complete disaster after the newspaper executive Maxwell Newton, while speaking, unaccountably let loose an anti-Semitic comment. Also, on returning to my car to drive home, I found it covered with Nazi swastikas, etc. I arranged some media coverage for that, but its benefit was debatable.

Other meetings deserved more success than they received: Dr. Moshe Kroy, professor of linguistics at Latrobe University, was a brilliant libertarian speaker, seeming to always give a model response to any doubters. One questioner was so awed by him that he intimated to Dr. Kroy that he — Kroy, was virtually infallible, whereupon, Kroy cruelly ground him into the dust with the comment: “That is not an argument!” He was constantly frustrated by peoples’ inability to be persuaded by rational argument and by governments’ propensity to achieve the exact opposite of their stated aims. How ironic it was then, that Kroy later moved through various fringe organisations such as Scientology and the “Moonies”. Astonishingly, he deferred totally to the guru of the Moonies, allegedly engaging in cruel rituals including the burning of his wife’s feet. The police were searching for him on a charge of murder when, apparently to avoid the inevitable, he used a box of sleeping pills to commit suicide in a hotel room. My personal view is that he became so frustrated in his perception that the totalitarian juggernaut was unstoppable that, while searching for relief, his intellect cracked.

DIRECT ACTION
Paul now wanted a more-educational programme of activities: Universities were places where brochures could be displayed, so he and I printed libertarian articles to suit the recipients. Topics such as sex, drugs, anti-conscription and freedom of speech were favoured. The brochures needed a Workers Party mention, so batches of them were sometimes stolen, so we spread them more widely in smaller quantities.

Paul and I would go out late at night to do graffiti work. I must emphasize that we resolved never to “daub” — (Paul’s favourite term) — private property. Any public building was fair game because, according to established “logic”, we owned it. Paul was brilliant with words. On a government unemployment building, we daubed: “Bludgers’ paradise, taxpayers’ hell!” That was so good that it disappeared the next day — I checked it. On bridges, in full view of train commuters, we daubed: “Medibank is sick!” Some of those slogans remained for decades because it was as difficult to go up and remove them as it had been for us to put them there. On one occasion, our car was stopped by police. Since we felt morally clean, we denied any wrong activity. They seemed interested in whether we were homosexuals. If we had been, we would probably have admitted it and said: “So what, officer?” Unaccountably, they never checked the van for suspicious equipment (the paint and brushes) as would be expected, so we flattered ourselves that they sensed something harmless about us.

Other activities involved electioneering in a Wagga by-election and in South Australia where Dr. Whiting — that leader of leaders — was surprised to see us. There, we learned that a businessman was standing for the WP on a platform of refusing to pay income tax. This man subsequently underwent psychological and financial destruction at the hands of the taxation department. In another case, a teacher was sacked as a result of his WP activities. If the naïve Paul Krutulis had noted more carefully this immense power of the state and Education Department over the individual, he might still be alive today. In the end, of course, even the powerful John Whiting threw his hands into the air and withdrew after his medical general practice was affected.

Paul now enrolled as a federal senate candidate, so he sought ways of getting personal publicity. For instance, he wanted to make a citizen’s arrest on Rupert Hamer, the Victorian premier. The easy part was to find crimes committed by him against the individual in the form of arbitrary or coercive laws. Paul would have dealt well with the media on this project, but I needed to keep my teaching job, so the idea was scotched.

All these kinds of posturing by Paul were misinterpreted by a university boffin as attention-getting for the sake of it. Yes — it was attention-getting, but for purely electoral purposes.

Then he got a tram conductor’s job, never intending to submit to its compulsory union, in fact, again, intending to use intransigence to generate publicity for his senate enrolment. So I would drive him to media interviews about his Tramways dispute or deliver resolute messages to the Tramways Board concerning compulsory unionism which we both found to be anathema. He responded in interviews in a rational and well-measured manner.

He ran into all sorts of difficulties which nevertheless gave him more publicity. For instance, at one stage, he was given a certificate exempting him from union membership. Later, the certificate was cancelled on the grounds that it may “cause” a strike, showing, to anyone who looked, the (predictable) lack of principle amongst the political elite.

Next, Jennifer McCallum resigned as the president of People Against Communism. Possibly, she had been intimidated by unionists (see later). In any case, Paul took her place, thereby really entering the danger zone. At a public rally in the city, as the new president, he scratched down notes a few minutes before speaking and started like this: “Gallagher! Halfpenny! Munday! need I say more?” With hindsight, I can imagine union leaders there present boiling with evil rage. Perhaps their plotting started at this point.

It was about this time that Paul’s parents’ house in Mont Albert had rocks thrown through its windows. He slept in a bungalow at the rear and was a bit unnerved by the incident, but recovered his composure.

Laurie Meyer, a wealthy businessman was a somewhat introverted character. He was an anarcho-capitalist as were a number of us in the WP. He had a cautiously peripheral connection with the WP, but kept Paul’s financial head above water after being impressed by his courageous efforts.

Throughout this politically active period, many WP members just read Ayn Rand or moved into and out of Scientology. Paul and I, armed with the well-known WP axiom, enjoyed discussing anarcho-capitalism. If one of us had a philosophical query, or made an error of interpretation of the axiom, the other would sort it out. Formal laws told us nothing except that people were coerced in almost every aspect of their lives. Of course there were curly issues, but we thought those few issues — eg. abortion — would have more light thrown on them in a freer, more-technological society. We certainly saw little harmony in most issues in the world at large. Once during such discussions, he said to me: “If you were a woman, I’d fuck you!” I knew exactly what he meant and could have been the first to say the same thing to him. However, I had a girlfriend (now wife), and he had a girlfriend and we were not homosexuals anyway, so never would the twain meet. We would be satisfied with being soul mates.

Paul’s girlfriend was an official of an extreme but ephemeral right-wing organisation, and once had her attractive face splashed enormously on the front page of the Age. Paul’s interest in her probably originated in her inclination towards free markets. While this was not uncommon in right-wingers, she was typical in wanting to clamp down on social freedoms, and Paul was unable to persuade her of the inconsistency.

It was also around this time that Paul said to me: “All this anti-union activity will make me lucky to survive to forty years old.”

“Forty!”

Paul had a sister Maria, 25, a lawyer, and a brother Steven, 21, a railway worker and significantly, a union member. Paul’s relationship with Steven was rivalrous. Their wrestling games, for instance, ended in victory for Paul who was physically strong. This sort of thing may have sewn the seeds of hatred required for what was to come. On one occasion, Paul, who did a bit of boxing, said to me: “In the ring, I could floor you with one punch!” In reply, I said: “If you feel the need to tell me that, you might be showing weaknesses elsewhere.” I don’t think he ever tried to impress me again. He didn’t need to anyway.

PIÈCE DE RÉSISTANCE
Now came Paul’s pièce de résistance. He was going to Sydney to “investigate a union”. He was going to stay at his brother’s flat together with their sister. The morning after his arrival there, I got a phone call from his girlfriend who was at Puckapunyal in the army reserve. She reported that Paul had been shot dead. His brother had killed him. She sounded matter-of-fact, dispassionate. I somehow found that unsurprising.

I got in touch with Maria who was present at the murder. I met her perhaps three times. Each time, she related the sequence of events almost identically. After all, she was a lawyer. So the story was convincing. Here it is: She heard some noises in the dead of night and was curious enough to creep quietly to the door of Steven’s room where she thought she heard two men talking urgently to him. Some phrases were clear enough: “You’ll only get a couple of years!” For much of the next day, Steven drank alcohol until, perhaps during an argument with Paul, he produced a rifle from his room and shot him several times. The shots and Paul’s intervening cries brought Maria to the scene. Steven rushed out to his car and roared off, eventually handing himself in at a police station. Paul was dead and would reportedly have been a vegetable, had he lived. Unionists had got him 18 years before his estimate.

At the funeral in Springvale, I gave a necessarily solemn eulogy. Jennifer McCallum had been “warned by unionists” not to attend. She complied. One wonders what need unionists would derive from this if it were not the feeling of power it gave them to control people.

SALT IN THE WOUNDS
Steven Krutulis is reported as having told the police that: “We had a few beers and I done my block and shot him.” They may have argued, though Paul never raised his voice to me, but Paul did not drink. He was rather cynical about alcohol. I remember at a party, he wanted to see me drunk, out of curiosity. We agreed that he would pay me each time I had another drink. I got tipsy enough to satisfy him, but regretted it. In fact I have yet to apologise for making a mess in the host’s toilet; I was too inebriated at the time to be aware of my guilt. Anyway, my guess is that Steven’s pernicious allegation that Paul had also been drinking would help in legal proceedings. Perhaps it did. He was simply released after 10 months of vacillation and paper-shuffling between lawyers. Maria being the prime witness, I wrote her a terse letter, though perhaps unfairly. Nevertheless, I wanted to know how such a court decision could possibly eventuate, even in a government court. And so I embarked on an attempt to see a transcript of the court case. Having learned a lot about how government bureaucrats operate, I decided to be devious from the start, posing as a student in need of material for a law project. Would a bureaucrat find an excuse to refuse access to a friend of the deceased? Probably. In fact that’s how it turned out, so it needed interventions from the ombudsman who, after much correspondence, facilitated access to the transcript. Armed with the correspondence, I went to Sydney. The first bureaucrat made a curious statement like: “The top bit of the file is missing”. I wasn’t sure what to make of this, but decided to clarify it with the next bureaucrat from whom I had to collect the file. To him I said: “May I have the missing top bit of the file as well?” To this, he retorted: “What ‘top bit’?” At this point, I wondered whether the first bureaucrat had given me confidential advice about some deviousness that he wanted me to know about. If so, I might get him into trouble by quoting him. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, so that incident remains a mystery. In any case, the file revealed nothing of import that explained the obvious miscarriage of justice. The pictures of Paul’s bullet-ridden body were not what I wanted to see. I found no account from Maria of the nocturnal visit from two presumed unionists. Were the lawyers corrupted (or threatened) into protecting them from a charge of incitement to murder? The magistrate merely speculated on Paul’s high level of intelligence. Little solace from something I already knew. The missing “top bit” could have involved anything from normal bureaucratic bloody-mindedness to corrupt legal procedures.

EPILOGUE
It transpires that all three siblings — Paul, Steven, and Maria were survived by their parents. Curiously, Steven died only 13 years after the murder at the age of 34 and after having had three children — Lincoln, Pollyanne and Hamish. The cause of such an early death is difficult to find. Paul, Steven and the father, Staysis Krutulis are in the same grave in Box Hill, Staysis having died in 2008. There was no room in the grave for Maria, who died later than her siblings, but also before her father. The only Krutulis in the Melbourne phone book appears to have been Edith, the mother who, according to residents at her former address, died at least two years ago. The two aged parents seem to have had an unhappy time surviving their children. The relatively fresh flowers left at the grave constitute another mystery since there appear to be no relatives in Melbourne and there is no trace of Steven’s children in Melbourne or Sydney. Maria is mentioned on the grave plaque. Perhaps she has children who visit the grave. Perhaps the next step is to leave a weatherproof message on the grave asking that someone answer some of these questions.