Paul Strangio

I first encountered Race Mathews in the early 2000s, around the time of the publication of my biography of Jim Cairns. He struck me as reserved and cerebral, but generous. As national secretary of the Australian Fabian Society, he invited me to deliver a talk about the biography at the Melbourne Trades Hall. Following Cairns’s death in late 2003, Mathews initiated a Jim Cairns Memorial Lecture as a joint endeavour between the Fabian Society and several university ALP clubs. What struck me about this was that Mathews and Cairns had been from different wings of the Labor Party, the former probably the most fervent disciple of Gough Whitlam, a philosophical and leadership rival to Cairns, and yet here he was helping to preserve the memory of Cairns. It suggested a refreshing ecumenicalism, an open-minded, enquiring spirit.

As chief political correspondent for the ABC’s 7.30, Laura Tingle was a ringside commentator of the latest knockout bout of leadership pugilism in Canberra. Calling the crazed week-long events in the Liberal Party that climaxed in Malcolm Turnbull’s removal from office in August ...

John Curtin occupies the top tier in the pantheon of Australian national leaders. ‘Expert’ rankings of former officer holders – a practice lately imported from the United States, where ...

Fresh from celebrating one glorious misadventure in Australia’s radical history, the labour movement now confronts a more awkward anniversary. The recent 150th year celebration of the Eureka Stockade brought with it a certain self-congratulatory afterglow. Less sanguine recollections will no doubt colour the fiftieth anniversary of the great ALP Split of 1955. This catastrophe had its origins in a decade-long struggle between right-wingers combined in Industrial Groups, and communists, over union power. The legacy of this Split ran from mass expulsions in the ALP, to collapse of state governments, disaffiliation of a union bloc and, finally, to a new political party, the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), whose preferences ensured that the ALP could not win a federal election for two decades. Whatever malaise debilitates contemporary Labor, the Split remains the party’s greatest tragedy.

First, a disclaimer. Since 1975 I’ve had a sneaking affection for Jim Cairns. At that time, I was flirting with various environmental causes – as you do at the age of nine. I circulated some petitions at my primary school calling for the preservation of the Tasmanian south-west from its concrete-crazed Hydroelectricity Commission. I forwarded these to a string of political power-brokers, identified rather shrewdly by their appearances on the ABC news.