Jim Cairns and soulmate Tom Uren. Jim Cairns, leader.

Jim Cairns led the greatest, most successful Australian campaign against a war in the twentieth century, writes Peter Botsman. If Cairns’ views and ideas had been accommodated within a more open Labor Party conference, it would have been hard for the Democrats and the Greens to have commanded a million voters at the last Federal election.

There were two Australian Labor icons of the seventies: Whitlam and Cairns. One remains an icon. Two years ago, you might have found the other alone, on a street corner, selling pamphlets. The books of one are beautifully stitched and presented, the books of the other are remaindered, printed with cheap glue; the pages often fall apart as you read them.

Yet who will history remember best?

What is distracting about these two are the circumstances of their political demise. Kerr’s coup distracts us from Whitlam’s politics and ideas and, as Phillip Adams wrote on Tuesday, Cairns’ love affair with Junie Morosi and his ambitious flirtation with Arab financiers as Federal Treasurer distract us from his intellectual legacy.

There are bigger judgements to make about these men.

When Whitlam accepted Cairns’ resignation and appointed Hayden Treasurer in 1974, he set an ideological course for the Labor party and its Federal Parliamentary Caucus which remains dominant. Labor was to be an unashamedly pro-free market party with a reformist social welfare reform agenda. It was hard to argue against the electoral logic at the time, even Cairns most loyal supporters, including his lieutenant Tom Uren, accepted this fate.

Now, Cairns critique of Whitlam and the Labor Party makes compelling reading and a case can also be made that it is of some significance electorally.

Since 1975 Labor has been in power for 13 of 28 years. But if Cairns’ views and ideas had been accommodated within a more open Labor Party conference, it would have been hard for the Democrats and the Greens to have commanded a million voters at the last Federal election.

Labor might have won the last two elections if it had been able to hold a broader alliance together. Further, having lost the confidence of a million Green and Democrat voters, Labor is destined to stay in the middle of the road in a competitive struggle with the Liberal-Nationals for conservative, aspiring, middle class Australia. As Cairns sarcastically noted of Labor’s lethargy:

Radicals in Australia are few and far between. Only once in my life time have we Australians had a real shock. It was the fall of Singapore, when we thought nothing would stop the Japanese. But something did and everything was alright.

Re-reading Cairns and re-thinking his legacy is important. He led the greatest, most successful Australian campaign against a war in the twentieth century. In 1968 he was, hands-down, the Australian orator and activist. Much more than Whitlam ever could, he held audiences then in the palm of his hand. His quiet sincerity and integrity turned war-mongers into believers in peace.

The multi-dimensional nature of the protest against Vietnam with its roots in millions of young activists, made Cairns believe in a new politics. His experiences within the Labor Party, both at a parliamentary and administrative level, appalled him. He wanted more fundamental change. A revolution is not a change of management. It is a change in man, he wrote in 1979.

The problem with the professional Labor Party was that it was, of course, all about simply changing the management of the country. Cairns wrote:

A Labor Prime Minister ‘born to be a king’ is destined to produce a ‘powerful Governor-General’, ‘a bunyip aristocracy’. Whitlam arriving, Kerr could not be far behind.

As with Don Chipp’s rejection of the Liberal Party, for Cairns the modern Labor Party was fundamentally dishonest. The Labor Party and the unions are “first interested in jobs especially their own and with the status and power which comes with those jobs and its principal problem is that it has never defined a culture of its own”.

From 1975 Cairns set about defining a new political culture. It all seemed pretty loopy at the time and many of Cairns ideas border on a fundamentalist psychology. But with a Green vote doubling every Federal election, and a growing wave of disillusionment with the major parties Bob Brown, for one, knows there is electoral punch to the Cairns vision.

The most interesting of Cairns’ ideas was to move beyond the “wealth/welfare limitation”. He wanted politics to go beyond the idea that increasing the amount of public and private expenditure was the source of all prosperity. Now with three quarters of total government expenditure devoted to social spending and increasing concern at the environmental growth limits of private industry, Cairns’ idea of voluntary simplicity is positively mainstream.

Hundreds of thousands of Australians have opted to move outside the cities to the regions in the inland and along the coast to find a better balance between work and life. TV series and films are made on these themes, and the demography of the future, both in Australia and other western countries, seems destined to be built on the concept of a simpler, more fulfilling existence.

People may still titter about Cairns view that the key to the depravity of public life was repressed sexuality. But the Australian’s popular columnist Ruth Ostlow and her many readers might disagree. Again it seems that time is on Cairns side.

The great thing is it is still a challenge to read Cairns. He was the last grass roots intellectual of the left that the Labor Party produced. When he departed in the late 1970s it was the Labor Party’s loss. If Labor is ever to be the force of change and progress that it was in the 1890s and 1940s and 1970s, the party men will have to take time out from their public relations mills and electoral machines, and read and understand Jim Cairns.