Paul Strangio | Young, ambitious and eager' : Stan Keon and the Victorian Public Service Association | Labour History, 87

Young, ambitious and eager' : Stan Keon and the Victorian Public Service Association

Paul Strangio^*

Standish Michael Keon (1913–87) was one of the 'seven' defectors from the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party at the 1955 Split. His narrow defeat at the subsequent election terminated a decade-long parliamentary career (state and federal) during which he had earned a formidable reputation — some predicted that he had the stuff to attain the highest political office. Despite this reputation, the published literature on Keon is scarce. This paper fills part of that void by exploring his period as secretary of the Victorian Public Service Association between 1939 and 1949. It particularly focuses on his successful prosecution of the Association's campaign for an independent Public Service Board that brought him into direct conflict with Albert Dunstan, the longest serving Victorian Premier during the first half of last century. The paper shows that Keon's secretaryship acted as a springboard to entry into the Victorian parliament in 1945. It also illuminates his style as a trade union official, a style confrontational and compelling. Through this evocation of Keon as militant trade unionist, the paper offers a counterpoint to standard assumptions about the anticommunist breakaways of 1955.

Introduction

Daubed on the wall of a derelict Richmond factory — itself a monument to inner Melbourne's industrial past — is the fading slogan, 'Keon traitor to ALP'. Classified as an object of 'local significance' in 1998 by the National Trust (Victoria) for providing a rare surviving physical link to the Labor Split era, the graffiti also reminds us of a central player in that calamitous event — Standish Michael (Stan) Keon.¹

One of the seven federal parliamentarians to defect from the Australian Labor Party (ALP) in 1955, thus joining the hall of infamy of Labor 'rats', Keon also occupies his own special niche in the party's folklore: as the man who might have been prime minister but for the Split. John Cain Snr, leader of the Victorian Parliamentary Labor Party during Keon's stint in the Victorian Legislative Assembly between 1945 and 1949, is said to have regarded him as 'the most promising political material he had ever encountered'.² When Keon transferred to the House of Representatives at the 1949 elections, the kingmaker of the Victorian ALP, Pat Kennelly, reputedly told Ben Chifley: 'Keep this fellow on the rails and he'll take over your job one day. He's got a head, he's got a tongue, and he's got guts'.³ Even Chifley's successor, H.V. Evatt, despite the vexation Keon had caused him as leader, nominated him as one of the three most able members of the Labor Caucus during an April 1954 conversation with B.A. Santamaria.⁴

Implicit in this reputation is that Keon was one of the great political tragedies of the Split — his parliamentary career prematurely snuffed out, despite vain and persistent attempts to recapture the seat of Yarra he lost to Jim Cairns at the 1955 elections.⁵ Yet, like his fellow Labor Split renegades, the published literature on Keon is meagre. The scattered references to him are largely confined to studies of the Split and the related context of the anti-communist mobilisation within the labour movement during the preceding decade. The dominant impression conveyed by this literature is of a politician propelled by the overriding and intertwined impulses of Catholicism and anti-communism.⁶ 'To many', as James Griffin observes, 'he seemed priest manqué'.⁷ Nowhere is this image given cruder and more vivid expression than in Frank Hardy's pitiless characterisation of him (under the pseudonym Michael Kiely) as a sexless fanatic in the final pages of Power Without Glory:

Kiely sat with his eyes averted. He was sly, never looking anyone in the face or doing or saying anything without motives of personal gain or gain for the cause of political Catholicism ... Colin Lassiter reckoned that Kiely should have been a Jesuit, that his mother, when carrying him, had wanted a girl, not a boy. Michael Kiely had never given way to a sexual urge in his life. Fervent suppression of his sexual desires had led to inhibition — he was uncomfortable in the presence of young women, and had developed a restless, intense, sadistic personality. He found outlet for his repressions in his religion, his career, and especially in his hatred of Communism. He would exterminate the Communists physically.⁸

Fortunately, the unpublished research on Keon, by Geoff Browne and Tony Abate, affords the basis for a broader understanding of his motivations and ideological disposition.⁹ Notably, however, their conclusions are dissonant. Whereas Browne argues that Keon was substantially a creature of the 'distinctive Catholic subculture' he was exposed to as a young man though his involvement in the Catholic Young Men's Society (CYMS), Abate is inclined to see his 'ideological repertoire' as 'more diverse and complicated'. This paper also seeks to offer a perspective on Keon outside the standard framing of the Split and his anti-communist activities by examining his decade-long secretaryship of the Victorian Public Service Association (VPSA) between 1939 and 1949. It is particularly concerned with his leadership of Association's protracted agitation for an independent Public Service Board. Successfully culminated in 1946, that campaign helped terminate the government of Albert Dunstan, the longest serving Victorian Premier during the first half of last century. For Keon, the campaign was politically crucial: it provided a platform for his election to the Victorian Parliament. It also provided a testing ground for his confrontational political style, including his faculty for polemic. Indeed, by focussing on this period we come face to face with a Keon whose militancy clearly transcends that of anti-communist warrior. Insofar it suggests that militancy had expressions and sources more complex than the published literature allows.

Keon's Chance: Appointment to the VPSA

Born in Richmond in July 1913 of Irish-Catholic working-class stock, Stan Keon was 25 years old when appointed Secretary of the VPSA at the end of 1938. His starting salary of £400 per annum compared poorly to that received by his counterparts in other States. For Keon, however, that probably paled in the context of the blessing the five-year appointment represented: it was his first opportunity for stable employment since leaving school aged twelve.¹⁰ Much later, Keon was to summarise those intervening years. Prosaic as the description is, it nonetheless conveys the employment desert in which he had wandered:

When I left school I went to work at Suttons music shop in the city as an office boy till the Depression, when I lost my job. They talk about the 1930s Depression, but there was always depression as far as Richmond was concerned. I battled around at odd jobs for a while, then I managed and edited the Irish Review with Bessie Calwell, Arthur's wife. I did a couple of projects for the Hospitals and Charities Board, battled round the country, rode the 'Rattler', worked for Radio Corporation, went back to Suttons, and then got a job as a secretary of the Public Service Association.¹¹

One offset for Keon in this bleak period had been his involvement in the CYMS, which was a focus at that time for a vibrant Irish-Catholic working-class inner city sub-culture. According to Geoff Browne, the CYMS was not only the 'seeding-ground for the immutable values of Keon's political life' and where he honed his debating and writings skills, but where he forged 'personal alliances which were to prove vital at later stages of his career'.¹² One of those contacts apparently first formed within the CYMS was with Arthur Calwell, who became an early mentor to Keon. When Keon joined the ALP as a teenager, Calwell nominated him; the younger man later reciprocated by acting as Calwell's campaign secretary.¹³ Significantly, according to Browne, it was his alliance with Calwell — a former VPSA President — that is likely to have been instrumental in Keon prevailing over a substantial field to become Association secretary.¹⁴

The Calwell connection immediately poses the question of whether Keon's secretaryship had its roots in a Catholic network operating within the organisation. This is entirely plausible, all the more so in view of the sectarianism then alive within the Victorian public service. Robert Murray, for example, observes that '"Masons versus Catholics" in the battle for promotion in the State Public Service had been an issue ... for many years'.¹⁵ On the other hand, and not unexpectedly, the available VPSA records contain nothing to sustain the supposition that Keon had been the Catholic 'candidate' for the secretary's position. What they do indicate is that division over his appointment turned on the issue of his age rather than creed.¹⁶ Moreover, throughout his tenure in the job, Keon's religious affiliation, together for the most part his anti-communist sentiment, were not given explicit outlet. While that discretion may well have been pragmatic for Keon, it also reasonable to conclude that for him the role, if not divorced from, was largely distinct from his Catholicism.

The VPSA that Keon took the reins of in 1939 seems to have been a demoralised and divided organisation. The outgoing, and inaugural, secretary, J. McKellar, had resigned against a background of simmering dissatisfaction at his timorous stewardship and a narrowly averted secession by the Association's Clerical Division.¹⁷ While unionisation by Victorian public servants dated back to 1885, organisational permanency had been delayed until November 1923 when the VPSA had been established as the Victorian branch of the Australian Public Service Association.¹⁸ McKellar had been appointed in early 1925. Despite his near decade-and-a-half tenure, McKellar's departure elicited only a luke warm tribute in the Association's organ, the Public Service Journal of Victoria (PSJV). The unhappy circumstances of his going were also alluded to:

The younger members of the Service do not realise all the pioneering work done in the early years of the APSA. If the General Secretary in Victoria has not a string of spectacular victories in his belt he has an array of minor victories in the face of fierce odds ... It requires high courage for a man no longer young, who, realising the difficulties in front of him, tenders his resignation ... Let he who is ready to cast stones consider whether he would be game enough to do the same with his own official position in these days of stress.¹⁹

Much of the rank-and-file frustration with the VPSA's leadership undoubtedly had its roots in the Association's supine performance during the Great Depression. The nadir had been its meek acquiescence in salary cuts imposed by the Hogan Labor Government's Public Service Payments Reduction Act 1930 ostensibly in an attempt to preserve the government and thus forestall a worse fate at the hands of the non-Labor parties.²⁰ In his study of the Victorian trade union movement's travails during the depression years, L.J. Louis asserts that the public service unions' isolation from the broader industrial movement (neither the VPSA nor the Victorian Teachers Union was affiliated with the Trades Hall Council or the ALP) and 'limited aims and parochial outlook' rendered them particularly ill-equipped to withstand the clamour for wage cuts.²¹ The VPSA General Council's submission to salary reductions also possibly reflected the traditional industrial diffidence of white-collar unions of that era. A hangover from the nineteenth century, political activity by public sector workers, let alone any semblance of industrial militancy, still carried a whiff of illegitimacy. In Victoria, as late as 1903, the Irvine Government had legislated to curtail the political rights of public servants and, when that provoked industrial action by affected railway unionists, the government crushed the strike, alleging that the railway workers, by taking the unprecedented action for government employees of withdrawing their labour, had become 'not strikers but mutineers' against 'constitutional authority'.²²

Whoever McKellar's became replacement then, their priorities were clear: to galvanise the organisation and soothe the mood of rebellion especially among junior members. With this in mind, the VPSA General Council resolved that the new secretary be a 'young man'. Keon apparently impressed Council members as a candidate who combined youth and elan; in welcoming his appointment the Association's 1938 annual report described him as 'young, ambitious and eager'.²³ Whether they anticipated the element of militancy he was to inject into their hitherto staid organisation is another matter.

Keon had an immediate impact on the organisation. As editor of the PSJV, he promised a 'Bigger, Brighter, Better Journal'. When the new-look journal appeared in November 1939, gone was the previous drab brown jacket. It had been replaced by 'gaudy purple' and featured an illustration of Parliament House — an omen of Keon's future trajectory. The journal's overhaul was reflected in other ways: expanded service news, social notes and sporting sections, the inclusion of gardening, bridge, medical and women's columns, as well as a greater advertising presence.²⁴ Even before the November issue, Keon's influence had been evident in the ebullient lead editorials. His early commentaries consisted of a generalised protest against the '"Alice in Wonderland" administration of the Victorian Service'. Their basic assertion was that, by allowing the salary and working conditions of Victorian public servants to lag behind those offered in comparable occupations and other Australian public services, successive governments had imperiled the State's progress. Prefiguring the post-war orthodoxy that the expanding province of government required an educated, professional public service, Keon insisted that 'the first need of any government, in view of the complex and positive nature of their modern tasks, is to have a trained body of men capable' of fulfilling those tasks. Governments of all persuasions were indicted for neglecting the Service, which received 'the same old "crook" deal from the bottom of the pack' from 'legislators, whether the United Country Party, United Australia Party (UAP) or Australian Labor Party'. The incumbent Dunstan ministry was not spared censure:

The attitude of the Government towards the many urgent Service problems ... is strongly reminiscent of our old friend Micawber, who gaily signed a promissory note with a 'Thanks heaven that's paid'.²⁵

Stan Keon, 1948
According to the State Library's description, the photograph shows Keon leaving Parliament House following his suspension. If so, it would be November 1948 when he was suspended for giving a Nazi salute to the chair (after he had been initially suspended for accusing the Speaker of bias).
Source: Herald & Weekly Times Limited Portrait Collection, State Library of Victoria. Reproduced with permission

The revitalised PSJV divided members. From some quarters came praise for its 'brightness' and encouragement for the policy of 'speaking out frankly on the disgraceful condition the Victorian Service is drifting into'. Others, though, were mortified by the departure from a past editorial style of respectful forbearance. An officer from the Taxation Department took exception at its 'smart alec' tone, while a complaint from a Law Department officer reflected the dour, aristocratic attitudes prevalent in the Association's upper echelons:

Whatever its other defects, the old brown jacket always maintained a standard of dignity worthy of an official organ of the VPSA. A petty, bad-tempered rag is hardly likely to be an asset in promoting the legitimate claims of the State Public Service. Gossip and sport may suit the typistes and junior fifths, but for my part something more solid than aimless elegies would be appreciated.²⁶

Notwithstanding these reservations, nearing the end of his first 12 months in the job, Keon won strong endorsement in a report by the Association President, Joseph McDonald, to the General Council's final meeting for 1939. Besides sprucing up the journal, his 'energy and enthusiasm' was credited with a growth in membership. A recruitment drive in regional Victoria had been particularly fruitful with new branches established in Bendigo, Geelong, Kerang, Rochester, Shepparton and Swan Hill.²⁷

Keon Versus Dunstan

Keon's next challenge loomed as more difficult — wringing concessions on industrial claims from the incurably niggardly Premier and Treasurer, Albert Dunstan. Since 1935 Dunstan's minority Country Party Government had been sustained in office by the Labor Party — an alliance, legend has it, engineered by Arthur Calwell and sanctified by John Wren.²⁸ It was precisely the kind of expedient arrangement by which Victoria's otherwise dysfunctional political scene operated in the first half of last century, but which also debased that scene. The victim of a scandalously malapportioned electoral system, the ALP's decision to accept the demeaning status of 'government corner supporter' to the Country Party had been theoretically calculated to give Labor sway over the ministry's program. In practice, Dunstan, a virtuoso in the Spring Street art of political intrigue and deal-making, repaid Labor with the thinnest of legislative gruel. The historian of the Victorian parliament paints a devastating picture of the Dunstan modus operandi and the legacy of his decade-long premiership:

Dunstan's government did as little as possible and what very little it did was directed almost exclusively to country Victoria ... He believed in smaller government, rural protection, free market forces, a reduced public service, non-metropolitanism, agrarianism. Government activities of all kinds, particularly in the fields of health, education and social welfare services, were therefore ruthlessly shorn of resources. Physical stock and infrastructure deteriorated, administrative networks grew absolute, salaries were cut, working conditions were eroded, state education quality declined, and government sector morale plummeted ...²⁹

Thus, as Geoff Browne remarks, Dunstanism provided 'the cold climate in which Keon had to operate'.³⁰

At least initially, Dunstan dispensed enough crumbs to Keon and the VPSA to postpone the decline into outright hostility that characterised their relations from 1942. Three industrial claims dominated the early period of Keon's secretaryship. The first, and most easily accommodated, was an anomaly left unaddressed in 1936 when the Dunstan Government, cajoled by Labor, had restored the Depression cuts to public service salaries and pensions.³¹ Adult wage rates continued to be pegged at £172; not only was this well below the pre-depression rate of £208, but a long way behind other State Services, all of which had an adult wage of £210 or greater. In April 1940, forming part of a deputation that included Labor's deputy parliamentary leader, Herbert Cremean, Keon presented Dunstan with a detailed submission arguing for the reinstatement of the adult wage to £208. In October the PSJV reported that the government had agreed to the request, an announcement 'warmly welcomed' by members.³²

The second issue raised by Keon at the April meeting was a five-day working week. A reform first introduced in New South Wales by the Lang Government, its delayed implementation was another condition that rendered Victoria's the Cinderella among Australian public services. In putting his case to Dunstan, Keon dryly noted that 'you have heard our representations on this matter so often that you should by this time be more familiar with the arguments in its favour than I am'. The Premier responded in trademark style. Resolutely non-committal, he undertook to 'look into it further'.³³

Dissatisfied at Dunstan's stonewalling, Keon and the VPSA organised two rallies of public servants early the following month to press for the abolition of Saturday morning work. Drawing crowds of two and one thousand respectively the rallies were prominently reported in the press.³⁴ Keon's address from the steps of Parliament House to the first exemplified his pugnacity. The meeting had been called, he declared, 'not to protest or to plead, but to instruct'. Keon told the rally about his encounter with 'a gentleman on the tram' who was shocked at the Association staging such a rally when Australia was at war. 'Good heavens!', the man had exclaimed, 'What's happened with your show? Have they gone all Bolshie holding mass meetings at a time like this?' Keon repudiated the unnamed interlocutor's admonishments or the insinuation that by 'holding these mass meetings we are in some vague sort of way menacing the unity of the Empire'. Similarly, in his July editorial, he scoffed at the idea that the Association ought suspend its industrial demands or voluntarily sacrifice its working conditions to contribute to the war effort. The VPSA had no intention, he warned, of listening to 'advocates of appeasement' who would 'storm the Government with offers ranging from working every night in the week to a gift of grandfather's back collar studs'. This sentiment appalled one member who condemned the journal's 'failure to give vocal and practical expression to the desire of the Service to make some special effort to help our Government in this time of National Crisis'.³⁵

Yet, for a trade union official in 1940, Keon's position on the war and industrial relations was far from exceptional. Jim Hagan points out that, with the fighting still remote from Australian shores, 'appeals for industrial discipline in the cause of patriotism went largely unheeded'. Nor was it merely a matter of 'business as usual'; in 1940 strike rates reached a level unprecedented for a decade. A substantial factor behind this surge of disputation was the influence of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). In dutiful conformity to Comintern policy, the party expected its members to hinder the war effort, a stance maintained until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 at which point the communists became fervent supporters of the war.³⁶

Less of a contrivance and so less fickle, Keon's ambivalence towards the war also sprang from a different source. According to Browne, not only did he not join the armed forces but 'wrote to several of his friends urging them not to enlist in a "British" war'.³⁷ As this implies, Keon approached the events in Europe principally through the frame of Irish radical nationalism. A toddler at the time of Britain's bloody suppression of the Easter 1916 Irish republican uprising, Irish nationalism was part of his diet while growing up. He imbibed it from his family and within the neighbourhood of Richmond, parts of which were dubbed 'Irishtown'. As a teenager he had enthusiastically participated in the annual St Patrick's Day procession and, hungry for information about Ireland, arranged for contacts there to send him news clippings of local events. Later, as editor of the Irish Review in the 1930s, he not only mythologised Irish culture, but gave vent to anti-Anglo sentiment.³⁸

If Irish nationalist sentiment coloured Keon's view of the war, less clear is whether his equivocal attitude to the conflict owed anything to a preoccupation with the threat of communism. Paul Ormonde has strongly argued this was the case with B.A. Santamaria, as it was with Pope Pius XII.³⁹ As early as 1937, Keon had been a spectator at one of the early defining moments in the mobilisation of Catholic anti-communism in Australia — the famed debate on the Spanish Civil War at the University of Melbourne. His alignment with that mobilisation was confirmed in August 1941 when he, and a handful of others, gathered in Santamaria's home for the 'founding meeting' of the Catholic Social Studies Movement.⁴⁰ To acknowledge this emerging involvement with Catholic anti-communist activism by the early 1940s, however, is not to accept that it had yet become the dominant imperative fuelling Keon. His attitude to the war is indeed illustrative of a more complex interplay of influences: conventional trade union suspicion that conservative governments were intent on using the war as a pretext for reducing working conditions, Irish nationalism and, possibly, an ambivalence about what was the most pressing threat to Christian civilisation: fascism or communism.

The VPSA's plea for a five day working week fell on deaf ears, with Premier Dunstan insisting that public opinion would not tolerate its introduction at a time of national emergency.⁴¹ In the second half of 1940 the government did yield ground, however, on another of the VPSA's perennial objectives — a Public Service Board. In the decades following the granting of responsible government, Victoria had been something of a pioneer among the Australian colonies in respect to public service reform. With the passage in 1883 of the Public Service Act, Victoria became the first colony to establish a Public Service Board. Permanent, and comprising three members appointed by the Governor-in-Council, the Board had been set up to give effect to the legislation's objective 'to abolish all patronage with respect to appointments and promotions'. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, Victoria had relinquished its claim to being progressive in the field of public service administration. Against a background of depression and extensive retrenchments in the service during the 1890s, the Board's functions were largely transferred to a Commission of Audit and, then, in 1902, 'a single Public Service Commissioner was appointed with limited powers'. Four decades and four commissioners later, that remained the status quo.⁴²

The VPSA's fundamental grievance with this arrangement was that it made no provision for the determination of service salaries and conditions of employment, independent of the government of the day. This placed Victoria out of step with the Commonwealth and the other States, except Tasmania. In those jurisdictions, either through the operation of a public service tribunal or commissioner and/or the relevant arbitration authority, salary fixation was autonomous of government.⁴³ The Labor Party had long favoured an independent public service tribunal. In 1928 the Hogan Government foreshadowed legislation for that purpose, but it remained still-born when the government was defeated at the year's end.⁴⁴ The second Hogan ministry got marginally further. One of the inducements for the VPSA concurring to the 1930 salary reductions had been a commitment by the Labor government to establish a Classification and Efficiency Board for public servants. Accordingly, a Bill for that purpose was introduced in October, only for it to lapse at the second reading stage.⁴⁵

The ALP had expected the Dunstan Government to make amends for its unfinished business. Characteristically, however, Dunstan filibustered and when, finally, he could stall no more, the Bill he produced in September 1940 proved only partially satisfactory. It provided for the constitution of a Public Service Board comprising an 'independent' Chairman appointed by the Governor-in-Council, a 'government representative' also appointed by the Governor-in-Council, and a third member elected by public service officers. If this seemed a strange formula for independence from government, worse still was that the Board's powers were advisory only — its recommendations on salaries and other conditions of employment required the Governor-in-Council's imprimatur.⁴⁶

The Public Service Bill passed through the parliament without amendment in October, despite criticisms by both Labor and UAP members that it fudged the principle of independence.⁴⁷ Equally conscious of the legislation's 'imperfections', the VPSA nonetheless declared itself 'elated at this success, which has crowned a quarter of a century's arduous agitation'. Naturally, it trumpeted the provision for staff representation on the Board. A message to members from the President Joseph McDonald singled out Keon for congratulations, referring to 'his success in securing' the reform. J.V. Dillon, a VPSA Council member and soon to be elected the Association's inaugural Board representative, later confirmed to Browne that Keon's influence had been decisive. Keon had applied 'all the pressure round the place' on Labor leader John Cain Snr to prise the Bill from the Dunstan Government.⁴⁸

The enactment of the Public Service Bill ushered in a brief honeymoon between Dunstan and the VPSA. Not only had it come hot on the heels of the restoration of the adult wage, but it was followed in July 1941 by a Budget announcement of an across-the-board increase in public service salaries. Modest in scale — especially in light of the government's bulging coffers — and unevenly distributed, this allocation nevertheless represented the first general increase in public service salaries since 1926.⁴⁹ Keon welcomed the increase with an editorial in the PSJV that sang the government's virtues:

We do not desire to hold up Mr Dunstan as a paragon of virtue from the Public Service viewpoint, but taking a long view of Service history the present Government has been relatively outstanding in so far as Public Service reforms are concerned. May it long continue to be so.⁵⁰

Continue the concessions did for a little time more. In the first half of 1942 the Dunstan Cabinet accepted a recommendation from the Public Service Board that temporary women employees in administrative branches of the public service with five years or more service be granted permanency. It was estimated that the decision would lift the proportion of permanent female officers from less than one per cent to around one-third. Reported in the PSJV as a direct product of the formation one year earlier of a Women's Division of the VPSA, Dillon also attributed the breakthrough to Keon's 'unflagging interest and zeal'. The victory on permanency for women officers was followed in August by the government's agreement to yet another long sought after Association claim: the principle of public service salaries being adjusted according to changes in the cost of living.⁵¹

By 1942, then, Keon could claim a substantial and growing record of achievement as VPSA secretary, especially compared to that of his predecessor. Figures in that year's annual report showing a near fourfold increase in financial members since his arrival further testified to his revival of the Association's previously ailing fortunes.⁵² However, 1942 also marked the beginning of a sharp deterioration in relations with the Dunstan Government centred on the issue of the Public Service Board's lack of independence. For the next three years this became the supreme concern for Keon and the Association.

The Campaign for an Independent Public Service Board

The catalyst for the souring of relations between the VPSA and the government was a decision by Cabinet in April 1942 to extend public service working hours by seven per fortnight without any compensation, an extension defended by the Premier as necessary at 'a time when every section of the community is called upon for some sacrifice'. An outraged VPSA responded twofold. First, a large meeting of officers overwhelmingly resolved to refuse to comply with the revised working hours, instead offering the federal government the additional hours 'to be used in any capacity to further the war effort'.⁵³ Second, the Association requested that E. J. Ward, Federal Minister for Labour and National Service, intervene in the dispute under the powers conferred on him by the National Security (Industrial Peace) Regulations. In June, Ward did so by referring the matter to the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration.⁵⁴ In the interim, according to a version of events published in the PSJV, Dunstan 'Directed the impartial Chairman of the Independent Public Service Board to call a special meeting to rubber stamp' the government decision. Acting in consultation with the VPSA Executive, Dillon refused to attend the Board meeting, which therefore lapsed for want of a quorum. However, at a second attempt a few days later, the Board endorsed the extension of working hours, despite Dillon's protests. Predictably, the Association considered that in acting so the fledgling Board had seriously compromised its pretensions to autonomy.⁵⁵

The Labor Party saw things similarly. In July it finally withdrew support from Dunstan, leaving the government reliant on a short-term arrangement with the UAP. While the trigger for the break had been the Premier's attack on the Curtin Labor Government's uniform taxation proposals, it also reflected a broader frustration with Dunstan's inertia on a range of issues including administration of the public service. To underscore this point, in the days following its move to the opposition benches, the ALP initiated a debate on public service conditions in which it demanded the government establish a truly independent public service tribunal. Labor members repeated those calls during the September Budget debate.⁵⁶

The increasingly bitter wrangle over working hours unfolded throughout the second half of 1942, ultimately ending up in the High Court. Warning members that the fight would be costly, the VPSA engaged as its counsel the recently resigned UAP Prime Minister Robert Menzies. It proved to no avail. The High Court ruled in favour of the Dunstan Government's argument that, since the public service officers were not engaged in industry, their claim could not be heard by the Arbitration Court because the National Security regulations only pertained to disputes arising from industrial matters.⁵⁷ Smarting from the defeat, Keon staked out the battleground with the government:

The Premier having secured an order prohibiting the Service from approaching the Arbitration Court, must now himself accept the responsibility of making our present Public Service Board independent and impartial, empowered to make final and binding decisions without the approval of the Treasurer.

The message was repeated in the Association annual report published at the beginning of 1943. 'No longer', it declared, 'must service salary and conditions be subject to the whim of the temporary occupant of the position of Treasurer'.⁵⁸

The antagonism between the Association and the Dunstan Government only deepened during 1943. In the countdown to the June State elections, the VPSA made it abundantly clear that it considered a continuation of the government inimical to its interests. With both Labor and the UAP committed to an independent Public Service Board, in his May policy speech Dunstan announced that, if returned as Premier, he would reform the existing Board to invest it with the power to determine salaries and conditions. He further promised that that all three members of the Board would be 'independent'.⁵⁹ Dunstan's version of independence remained problematic, however; he now proposed the Board include neither representatives of the government nor the service, but rather all appointments be made by the Governor-in-Council. Keon responded to the plan with suitable venom:

As a means of creating three well-paid jobs in which party hacks may recline during the senile stage of their life ... the Premier's proposals have considerable merit ... As a serious attempt to cope with the Service claims for an independent Board, it is simply absurd. However, it is more than a joke; in effect, it is a declaration of war on the Service.

In his final editorial before the election Keon cast off the fig leaf of public service political neutrality. The VPSA made 'no apology, he wrote, 'in advising every Crown employee to exercise both his vote and his influence in such a manner as to prevent, if possible, a further term of Dunstanism'.⁶⁰

With the elections confirming, at least in the short term, the 'parliamentary status quo'⁶¹, Dunstan tacitly acknowledged the thorn that Keon had become in his side by returning fire at him. The Premier delivered his attack when parliament resumed in July and John Cain Snr challenged him over his mismanagement of a public service 'seething with discontent'. 'Mr Keon is bullying, bouncing, and bluffing you, and you are dancing to his tune all the time', retorted Dunstan.⁶² Rhetoric notwithstanding, there is little doubt that Keon did have the ear of Cain and the Labor Party by that time. A few years later the now former VPSA President, Joseph McDonald, observed that Keon had 'practically lived in Parliament House' during the campaign over the Public Service Board.⁶³ Certainly it seems safe to assume that Keon figured in the Byzantine negotiations that preceded a jointly agreed move between the Labor Party and the UAP leader, Tom Hollway, to bring down the Dunstan Government in September 1943. Writing to Cain only days before the successful no confidence motion, Hollway had outlined the conditions for an arrangement in which Labor would temporarily support the UAP in the Legislative Assembly for the purpose of passing a mutually acceptable electoral redistribution scheme designed to liberate at long last the major parties from the incubus of Dunstan and the Country Party. In the letter, Hollway pointed out that another imperative for Labor to enter such an arrangement was 'legislation for an independent tribunal for public servants and teachers to which both parties are pledged, and as to which the Premier, up to date, has proved adamant so far as the form of the tribunal is concerned'.⁶⁴

The significance that the issue of a reformed Public Service Board had obtained was emphasised in the debate that followed Cain's no confidence motion of 7 September 1943, when Hollway successfully amended the motion to condemn Dunstan for his failure to appoint 'an independent tribunal to finally determine salaries, promotions and working conditions of teachers and the Public Service'.⁶⁵ Keon's name again cropped up during the debate, on this occasion during a speech by Jack Mullens, the Labor MLA for Footscray. Mullens was destined for the same path as Keon — transfer to the federal parliament in 1949 before expulsion from the ALP during the 1955 Split.⁶⁶ As noted earlier, by now Keon appeared to be aligned with the forces mobilising around B.A. Santamaria to combat communist influence in the labour movement. While this connection remained clandestine — certainly there was no sign yet of those activities intruding into his VPSA duties — it nonetheless bordered on the comical that Mullens felt compelled to nip in the bud whispers emanating out of the Dunstan Cabinet that Keon was a communist. Describing Keon as 'an intimate friend of mine; he graces my fireside and occasionally I grace his', Mullens protested 'honourable members would not expect me to sit cheek by jowl with a communist'.⁶⁷

The demise of the Dunstan ministry triggered a game of party musical chairs quintessential of the exotic world of mid-twentieth century Victorian politics. Following a five day hiatus during which Labor occupied the government benches, the eventual outcome was not, as the conspirators had originally planned, a Hollway ministry supported by the ALP, but a composite Country Party-UAP ministry headed by Dunstan. Labor fumed at the UAP betrayal, a judgement shared by the Age. 'It is now possible', the newspaper advised:

for the future historian to place on record the fact that in Victoria there was once a political party which ... passed through a valley of dubious intrigue into political disrepute.⁶⁸

The ministerial arrangements may have changed, but Dunstan's methods were unreconstructed; as Raymond Wright puts it, he simply 'plodded on'. Characteristic of this administrative dawdle was his procrastination in producing legislation to create a fairer electoral system and an independent Public Service Board, both of which were part of the agreed price for support from the UAP.⁶⁹

Dunstan's go slow on Public Service Board reform meant that the issue continued to preoccupy the VPSA and Keon throughout 1944 and 1945; the persistent delays also ensured that there was an increasingly splenetic edge to that campaign. In March 1944 a mass meeting of public servants and teachers overflowed Assembly Hall to call on the government to establish without further delay a public service tribunal 'with executive powers in making awards on salaries and working conditions'. Another demand was that the current Chair of the Board, retiring the following month, be replaced with a County Court judge to ensure impartiality. The Premier came under a barrage of criticism. Keon told the meeting that the public service had had a 'stomach full' of his promises and warned that there would be war if the Board's next chairman was a 'yes man'.⁷⁰ Dunstan swiftly struck back at what he dubbed the 'Yarra bank style' demands. His government had given assurances on several occasions that legislation to reform the Board would be introduced in the coming session of parliament. In the meantime, Cabinet would not be influenced by the VPSA's impudent threats, nor dictated to by any 'noisy section of the service'. Keon was deceiving himself and his followers if he thought anything could be achieved by such 'bulldozing' tactics.⁷¹ Dunstan's counterattack failed to impress the editorial writers. The Sun News-Pictorial accused him of 'naively affecting a shocked pose at what he deems the temerity of the criticising service', while his promise of legislation inspired it to a Shakespearian turn of phrase: 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow'.⁷²

The pledges and delays continued for the remainder of 1944. As it became clear that no Bill would be forthcoming that year, Keon turned his anger on the UAP and Hollway, alleging they had been 'duped' by Dunstan. He, too, borrowed another's words. The 'present situation', Keon wrote, 'irresistibly reminds us of the story of the young lady from Riga who went for a ride on a tiger and finished up inside, not outside, the tiger'.⁷³ Despite the now poisonous state of relations between the government and the Association, some level of dialogue was maintained. A series of meetings involving Dunstan, Keon and McDonald's successor as VPSA President, Sam Jennings, led to an agreement that from November the service would no longer be required to work the extended hours imposed on it two and a half years earlier.⁷⁴

Finally, in May 1945, Dunstan introduced a Bill 'to consolidate and amend the law relating to the Public Service of Victoria'⁷⁵, though even then the second reading was postponed to August. The Bill did nothing to placate the VPSA; to the contrary the proposed reforms were deemed a regression by the Association because they enhanced the powers of the Governor-in-Council in relation to the Public Service Board, particularly in the crucial areas of the creation and abolition of public service positions, and the payment and conditions of employment of public service officers. In his second reading speech, the Premier readily conceded that the principle of executive government supremacy animated the Bill: 'I consider that the Governor-in-Council ought to be the superior authority and should not be compelled to accept recommendations from an inferior body'.⁷⁶

In consecutive editorials in the PSJV, Keon excoriated both the Bill and the Premier. While acknowledging that the Bill offered 'sectional financial benefits', it woefully failed the crucial test of creating 'an independent tribunal'. He condemned as 'arrogant effrontery' its provision that the Public Service Board 'requires Governor-in-Council approval' before it could 'even consider matters involving increases in salaries'. According to Keon, the issue at stake now transcended 'the merits or demerits of Public Service legislation', to the more fundamental question of whether Victoria was 'to remain a democracy or is the disastrous decade through which we have just passed to result in the establishment of a Dunstan dynasty?' The August editorial, headed 'How Long, O Lord, How Long?', closed with the peroration: 'we join our voices with the outraged democracy of this State and cry, "Who will rid us of this turbulent Premier?"'.⁷⁷

When Keon wrote those words, he was almost certainly aware of the plans being hatched to finally rid Victoria of Dunstanism. Once again Cain and Hollway were both party to the plot, with electoral redistribution and reforms to the public service and teaching profession foremost considerations in their negotiations.⁷⁸ Dunstan suspected Keon's involvement. Addressing the Assembly in late August, he complained that Keon was

busily engaged in attempting to divide the parties. He is telling members of the Liberal Party why they ought to vote against the government, and at the same time he is busily engaged in doing everything possible to ensure his success at the Labor preselection ballot for the Richmond seat.⁷⁹

Dunstan was right about Keon's feverish campaign for pre-selection in Richmond, nominations having closed a week earlier. A three-horse race, Keon and Jimmy Loughnan were challenging the septuagenarian incumbent, Ted Cotter, who had held the seat since 1908.⁸⁰ The money was on Loughnan, 'Wren's candidate' according to Keon, and scion of one of the suburb's most notorious Labor family dynasties. Keon later attributed his upset victory over the local party machine to a 'combination of hard work and good luck'.⁸¹ But behind that bland account was a complex configuration of factors. Browne indicates the VPSA not only launched Keon's bid for parliament but, along with the CYMS, provided a crucial support base for consolidating his hold on the seat in the second half of the 1940s. The Association President, Sam Jennings, explained the rationale for its mobilising to put Keon in parliament thus: 'we want to put a ferret in the burrow'.⁸² Keon would also have been able to call on the many political contacts, parliamentary included, acquired while with the VPSA. The political experience and public profile he had gained in that role, especially during the campaign on the Public Service Board, no doubt also figured in his pitch for pre-selection. In sum, the VPSA secretaryship served as a crucial platform to his entry to parliament. It indicates, too, that Keon's initial political power base was far from confined to Catholic anti-communists.

Keon's run for Richmond was impeccably timed. By the time he prevailed over Loughnan in 'a rank and file revolt' in early October, Victoria was already in election mode. In late September Dunstan obtained a dissolution after Liberal MPs combined with the Labor Party to defeat the government in the Assembly.⁸³ During his parliamentary attack on Keon of August, Dunstan had grumbled that the VPSA was 'supposed to be non-political'. Any such illusion was abandoned during the campaign preceding the November elections. The PSJV all but advocated a vote for Labor, while despairing of any public servant sufficiently foolhardy to support Dunstan. They were 'obviously beyond advice from any quarter'.⁸⁴

When Labor snared eight seats from the Country Party, enabling Cain to form a minority government, the Association's prayers were promptly answered. In December, Premier Cain introduced a Public Service Bill proposing substantial reform to the operation of the Public Service Board. Critically, it provided that Board decisions on conditions of employment, including salary fixation, no longer be subject to Governor-in-Council approval, but instead be binding unless disallowed, within 30 days, by a resolution of both houses of Parliament. This procedure largely emulated the position that had applied in the Commonwealth Public Service since the early 1920s. The other provision of the Bill most welcome from the Association's perspective related to the introduction of long service leave for public servants.⁸⁵

Debate on the Bill dragged out between March and May 1946. During second reading proceedings, Keon had the honour of being the government speaker chosen to follow Cain. Not given to the circumspection expected of newly elected members, Keon not only sold the virtues of the proposed Labor reforms but lashed the previous government. The 'difference between the present Bill and the [1945] Dunstan Bill', he announced, could be likened to the difference between heaven and hell'. Riled by Keon's temerity, the former Premier interjected at a later stage in the debate that the government was 'taking instructions from the honourable member for Richmond'.⁸⁶

Despite a late hour attempt by the non-Labor parties in the upper house to dilute the principle of Board independence through an amendment that would have made its decisions on salaries dependent on the consent of both the Legislative Assembly and Council, the Bill was passed largely unmolested.⁸⁷ The Association rejoiced. In a PSJV editorial headed 'Eureka', Keon claimed that the Cain Government had 'earned the gratitude of every Victorian Public Servant for generations to come'. In turn, the VPSA focussed its gratitude on Keon. At the Association's mid-year annual conference, a motion was passed expressing the organisation's 'great debt to our Secretary for the work he has done in connection with the Public Service legislation just passed'. The tributes flowed liberally. Former President McDonald described the legislation as Keon's 'monument', while his successor, Sam Jennings, stated that Keon had rendered the Association 'service that money could not buy'. Others enthusiastically spoke in favour of the motion, among them delegates from various country branches and a representative of the Women's Division.⁸⁸

Conclusion

Whether those showering praise on Keon realised it or not, their words had the air of a valedictory. With the 'Battle of the Bill' (as the campaign over the Public Service Board become known in Association parlance) won, and Keon's duties now formally divided between the parliament and the VPSA, his influence over its activities gradually ebbed during the remainder of the 1940s. The appointment of an assistant secretary at the beginning of 1946 portended this development.⁸⁹ The break, however, was not complete until his election to the federal parliament in December 1949 at which time he resigned from the organisation.⁹⁰ Notably, it was only in the final 15 months of that decade-long association that evidence surfaced of Keon's anti-communism impinging on his role with the VPSA. The earliest example was in a PSJV editorial of October 1948 in which in attacking the composite Liberal-Country Party Hollway Government, he wrote:

In this State of Victoria people are engaged in a fight to prevent Communist controlled unions victimising members who dare to criticise the ruling junta. Mr McDonald [a Minister in the government] and his colleagues seem to have little to learn from these Soviet satraps in the way of viciousness and vindictiveness against those who dare to criticise them.⁹¹

By then, Keon was intimately involved in the 'fight' by the combined forces of the Movement and the Industrial Groups against Communist influence within the labour movement to which the editorial obliquely referred. Indeed, at the annual Victorian ALP State conference that Easter, it was Keon who, as Robert Murray observes, had signalled the Grouper's arrival as 'a distinctive force' within the party. Keon had done so by delivering a withering rebuke to Calwell, now a senior Minister in the Chifley Government, for having dared in a conference speech to chide 'those who, he said, had an "obsession" about communism'.⁹² The attack on Calwell was profoundly symbolic of Keon's trajectory. He was turning his back on his old mentor, a person who had been instrumental in him gaining an initial foothold in the labour movement, and someone kindred in background: working-class, Irish and Catholic. In doing so, Keon was also turning his back on the pragmatic labourist tradition to which Calwell continued to adhere. Instead, he was on a different path, one in which all other impulses were to be subordinated to a dogmatic anti-communism. In short, he was on the path to the Split of 1954–55.

Yet, through its focus on his period as VPSA secretary, this paper indicates that it is inaccurate to shrink Keon, as much of the published material does, to that of a single-dimensional militant Catholic anti-communist. Rather the paper reveals a Keon whose militancy took multiple forms: as a trade unionist, Irish nationalist, opponent of the non-Labor Parties and rhetorician. In an obituary of Keon published in News Weekly in February 1987, B.A. Santamaria observed that his 'secretaryship of the VPSA provided an indispensable political training'.⁹³ This paper confirms this is so, but the speed with which he invigorated the previously moribund Association equally suggests that the stuff for a formidable organiser and activist was as much instinctive to Keon as acquired by experience. What the VPSA secretaryship did in a practical sense was to rescue him from the career wasteland of his post-schooling years, allowing him to demonstrate his latent potential. Once in the role, with entree to the Parliament House corridors and the power brokers of the State ALP, he seemed inexorably destined for bigger things. The campaign over the Public Service Board presented the perfect issue to kick start his political career.

As striking as were the speed and scale of Keon's achievements during his stewardship of the VPSA, most remarkable was his style. Brash and combative, his was a modus operandi the antithesis of the sotto voce with which the Association, and white collar unions in general, had traditionally pursued their interests. Keon showed scant respect for the orthodoxy of public service political neutrality — from 1943 his attacks on the Dunstan Government were unashamedly partisan. Nor did he show much in the way of respect for the Premier, bitterly jousting with Dunstan. This anticipated a recurring pattern of Keonism: his fearless, intemperate assaults on 'untouchables': John Wren, Chifley and, ultimately, Santamaria.⁹⁴ Trenchant and visceral rhetoric exemplified Keon's firebrand style. Rehearsed in the VPSA, ferocious oratory became a hallmark of his political personae, earning him admirers and enemies alike. Evatt famously remarked of him: 'When I hear Keon talking I can smell the faggots burning'.⁹⁵

What were the sources of that militancy? Undoubtedly Keon was saddled with the standard grievances of class, religion and ethnicity, yet one also senses in Keon something still more elemental, something even more deeply rooted fuelling the outer fire. Uncompromising and vehement, his anti-communism might even be read as only partly ideological and partly an expression of this innate militancy. Murray has astutely described him as 'a natural extremist'.⁹⁶ To accept this would also help make sense of his post-Split direction. By 1959, as he had with other erstwhile allies before, Keon had turned on Santamaria, passionately denouncing him for trying to transform the Democratic Labor Party 'into a specifically Catholic Party'.⁹⁷ Here was irony indeed: tacit admission that the anti-communist crusade had ultimately led him and others down a sectarian cul de sac.

Endnotes

^*�This paper has been peer-reviewed for Labour History by two anonymous referees.

^1.�Age, 12 April 1999. Also based on information supplied to the author by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) in October 2003.

^2.� Cited by Senator Brian Harradine during his parliamentary tribute to the recently deceased Keon. See Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (CPD), Senate, vol. S. 119, 17 February 1987, p. 58. Also see John Iremonger, 'Rats' in John Faulkner and Stuart Macintyre (eds), True Believers: the Story of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2001, pp. 272–8.

^3.� Melbourne Herald, 15 August 1978.

^4.� See Santamaria's panegyric for Keon, News Weekly, 4 February 1987. Admittedly, it is difficult to know what reliability to attach to the Evatt compliment as retold by Santamaria. Elsewhere Santamaria insinuates that Evatt's profligate flattery and promises during the private conversations they held prior to the May 1954 election were cynically designed to guarantee the Industrial Group's political support. See B.A. Santamaria, Santamaria: a Memoir, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1997, pp. 123–5.

^5.� Those attempts are addressed in Paul Strangio, 'Cairns, Keon and the Battle for Yarra: a Microcosm of Labor Split Politics' in Peter Love and Paul Strangio (eds), Arguing the Cold War, Red Rag Publications, Melbourne, 2001.

^6.� Admittedly, Robert Murray and, more recently, James Griffin, suggest an additional complexity in their references to Keon. See Robert Murray, The Split: Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1972, pp. 8 and 72–3; and James Griffin, John Wren: a Life Reconsidered, Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2004, pp. 353–60. The published literature on Keon is usefully surveyed in Tony Abate, a Man of Principle? A Political Biography of Standish Michael Keon, MA thesis, Victoria University of Technology, 1994, ch. 2.

^7.� Griffin, John Wren, p. 354

^8.� Frank Hardy, Power Without Glory: A Novel, Lloyd O'Neil, Melbourne, 1972 (1950), p. 708.

^9.� Geoff Browne has written two unpublished papers, Standish Michael Keon: an Outline for a Political Biography and A Catholic Young Man. See also Abate, A Man of Principle?

^10.� Details of Keon's appointment are based on minutes of the Victorian Public Service Association (VPSA) Branch Council meeting, 5 September, 10 October and 5 December 1938; and the VPSA Annual Report for Year Ended 31 December 1938, which are reprinted in the Public Service Journal of Victoria (PSJV), 25 October, 25 November and 26 December 1938, and 25 February 1939. See also Browne, 'Standish Michael Keon', pp. 1–9.

^11.� Quoted in Copping it Sweet: Shared Memories of Richmond, City of Richmond and Carringbush Regional Library, Melbourne, 1988, p. 241.

^12.� Browne, 'A Catholic Young Man'. See also Browne, 'Standish Michael Keon', pp. 5–6 and 11–12.; and Chris McConville, Croppies, Celts and Catholics: The Irish in Australia, Edward Arnold, Melbourne, 1987, pp. 70–3.

^13.� Age, 5 December 1961. One of those relationships sundered by the Split, Keon is accorded a single fleeting mention in Calwell's memoirs. See A. A. Calwell, Be Just and Fear Not, Rigby, Melbourne, 1978, p. 233.

^14.� Browne, 'Standish Michael Keon', p. 13. According to a report of the selection process included in the minutes of the VPSA Branch Council meeting of 5 December 1938, applications were initially whittled down to 15 with 10 interviewed for the position. See PSJV, 26 December 1938.

^15.� Murray, The Split, p. 97.

^16.� According to the minutes of the VPSA Branch Council meeting of 5 December 1938, the recommendation to appoint Keon was upheld despite it being disputed by two members of the General Council who preferred an 'older man'. See PSJV, 26 December 1938.

^17.� See minutes of VPSA Branch Council meeting of 5 September 1938 and VPSA Annual Report for the year ended 31 December 1938, reprinted in the PSJV, 25 October 1938 and 25 February 1939.

^18.� Jim McDonald, 'Centenary Sketch, VPSA 1885–1985', VPS News, April 1985. See also R.M. Martin, White Collar Unions in Australia, Australian Institute of Political Science, Sydney, 1965, p. 3.

^19.�PSJV , 25 February 1939.

^20.� L.J. Louis, Trade Unions and the Depression: A Study of Victoria, 1930–32, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1968, pp. 73–7. Notably, some members of the Labor government opposed the cuts, see Victorian Parliamentary Debates (VPD), vol. 184, Legislative Assembly (LA), 25 November 1930, pp. 4015–19 and 4046–55. Further cuts were imposed on the service as a result of the Hogan Government's 1931 Financial Emergency Act, which by giving effect to decisions of the May-June 1931 Premiers' Conference precipitated the government's fall and a split in the Victorian ALP. See Louis, Trade Unions and the Depression, chs 5 and 8.

^21.� Louis, Trade Unions and the Depression, pp. 3 and 73–4.

^22.� Lorraine Benham and John Rickard, 'Masters and Servants: The Victorian Railway Strike of 1903' in John Iremonger, John Merritt and Graeme Osborne (eds), Strikes: Studies in Twentieth Century Australian Social History, Angus & Robertson in association with the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Sydney, 1973. In his history of the Australian Commonwealth Post and Telegraphic Association, the largest of the staff associations during the first decades of the Commonwealth public service, Gerald Caiden observes that 'Public Service unionism in nineteenth century Australia, like its counterpart in the mother country, was regarded 'as something verminous, something to be stamped out, something impertinently out of place in a government office'. Gerald E. Caiden, The ACPTA: A Study of White Collar Public Service Unionism in the Commonwealth of Australia 1885–1922, Department of Political Science, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Occasional Papers No. 2, Canberra, 1966, p. 6. See also R. N. Spann, Public Administration in Australia, Government Printer, New South Wales, 1973, pp. 312–4.

^23.� Minutes of VPSA Branch Council meeting, 5 September 1938 and VPSA Annual Report for the year ended 31 December 1938, reprinted in the PSJV, 25 October 1938 and 25 February 1939.

^24.�PSJV, 25 August, 1 November and 1 December 1939.

^25.�Ibid., 25 April , 25 July and 1 December 1939.

^26.�Ibid., 1 December 1939.

^27.�Ibid., I January and VPSA Annual Report for year ended 31 December 1939 reprinted in ibid., 1 March 1940.

^28.� Calwell's claims credit for conceiving the alliance in his memoirs. See Calwell, Be Just and Fear Not, pp. 40–4. See also Kate White, John Cain and Victorian Labor 1917–1957, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, pp. 74–9.

^29.� Raymond Wright, A People's Counsel: A History of the Parliament of Victoria 1856–1990, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 162–5. For an exhaustive analysis of the parsimonious public finance policies of the Dunstan Government, see J.B. Paul, the Premiership of Sir Albert Dunstan, MA thesis, Department of Political Science, University of Melbourne, 1960, ch. 8.

^30.� Browne, 'Standish Michael Keon', p. 12.

^31.�VPD, vol. 199, LA, 4 August 136, p. 717. Also see Labor Call, 6 August 1936.

^32.�PSJV, 25 July 1936, 1 April and 1 October 1940. On of the victims of this anomaly was Keon's future State and federal Labor parliamentary colleague, Frank Crean, who entered the Taxation Department of the State Public Service in 1933. See VPD, vol. 220, LA, 20 March 1946, pp. 850–1.

^33.�PSJV, 1 April 1940.

^34.� See, for example, the Age, 8 May 1940, and the Melbourne Herald, 7 and 8 May 1940.

^35.�PSJV, 1 June, 1 July and 2 September 1940.

^36.� Jim Hagan, The History of the ACTU, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 191981, p. 108. See also Stuart Macintyre, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from Origins to Illegality, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1998, pp. 407–11.

^37.� Browne, 'Standish Michael Keon', p. 8.

^38.�Ibid., pp.5–8; Abate, A Man of Principle?, pp. 24–6.

^39.� Paul Ormonde, 'An Authoritarian Man' in Paul Ormonde (ed.), Santamaria: the Politics of Fear, Spectrum, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 97–105.

^40.� Ross Fitzgerald, The Pope's Battalions: Santamaria, Catholicism and the Labor Split, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2003, pp. 37–8 and 57–8.

^41.� VPSA Annual Report for the year ended 31 December 1940, reprinted in the PSJV, 2 December 1940.

^42.� F. A. Bland (ed.), Government in Australia: Selected Readings, Government Printer, Sydney, 1944, pp. xiii and 49; C. J. Hayes, 'The Administration of State Public Services', Public Administration Australia, no. xv, 1956, p. 127; Spann, Public Administration in Australia, pp. 365–6 and 372.

^43.� See Hayes, 'The Administration of State Public Services', pp. 116–31. Also see VPD, vol. 209, LA, 3 September 1940, pp. 511–12 and 734; and PSJV, August 1944.

^44.�VPD, vol. 176, Legislative Council (LC), 4 July 1928, p. 5.

^45.�Ibid., vol. 183, LA, 30 October 1930, pp. 3477–86; ibid., vol. 184, LA, 19 November 1930, 3926–38; Louis, Trade Unions and the Depression, pp. 75–6.

^46.�VPD, vol. 209, LA, 3 September 1940, pp. 509–18. See also Hayes, 'The Administration of State Public Services', p. 127; and Paul, The Premiership of Sir Albert Dunstan, pp. 348–9.

^47.�VPD, vol. 209, LA, 24 September 1940, pp.734–41; ibid., 25 September, pp. 836 and 840–1; ibid., vol. 210, LC, 22 October 1940, pp. 1155–7 and 1162.

^48.�PSJV, 1 November 1940; Browne, 'Standish Michael Keon', p. 14.

^49.�VPD, vol. 211, LA, 30 July 1941, p. 497; ibid., 24 September 1941, pp. 997–1003.

^50.�PSJV, 1 August 1941.

^51.�Ibid., 1 May and 1 September 1942. See also VPD, vol. 213, LA, 25 August 1942, pp. 692–3.

^52.� VPSA Annual Report for year ended 31 December 1942 reprinted in PSJV, 1 January 1943.

^53.�Argus, 8 April and 16 April 1942. An amendment to the resolution deferred such action until the General Executive of the Association had the opportunity to meet with the Premier. Subsequently on 15 April a meeting of the General Council recommended that officers work the new hours pending the outcome of the VPSA's request for Commonwealth intervention in the dispute. PSJV, 1 April 1943.

^54.� Ward's order, which was reprinted in PSJV, 1 June 1942, also cited a second matter of dispute between the VPSA and the Dunstan Government arising from the Premier's refusal to compensate Victoria's public servants for working on a gazetted public holiday as required by the relevant National Security Regulations.

^55.�PSJV, 1 April 1942. See also Melbourne Herald. 18 April 1942.

^56.�VPD, vol. 213, LA, 29 July 1942, pp. 405–10 and 419–26; ibid., 16 September 1942, p. 1109; ibid., 23 September 1942, p. 122. See also Wright, A People's Counsel, p. 167.

^57.�PSJV, 1 June, 1 October and 2 November 1942.

^58.�Ibid., 2 November 1942; VPSA Annual Report for the year ended 31 December 1942 reprinted ibid., 1 January 1943.

^59.�Ibid., 1 April 1943. Also see the Age, 21 May 1943.

^60.�PSJV, 1 April and 1 May 1943.

^61.� Wright, A People's Counsel, p. 168.

^62.�VPD, vol. 215, LA, 20 July 1943, p. 90.

^63.�PSJV, July 1946.

^64.� Tom Hollway to John Cain Snr, 3 September 1943, John Cain Snr file, Merrifield Collection, State Library of Victoria. Also see Wright, A People's Counsel, p. 168.

^65.�VPD, vol. 215, LA, 7 September 1943, pp. 540–1; ibid., 9September 1943, pp. 682–3.

^66.� Robert Murray, The Split: Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1972, pp. 7–8.

^67.�VPD, vol. 215, LA, 9 September 1943, p. 605.

^68.�Age, 16 September 1943. Also see the Argus, 16 and 17 September 1943, and White, John Cain, pp. 112–13.

^69.� Wright, A People's Counsel, p. 168. Also see the Argus, 16 September 1943.

^70.�Age, 23 March 1944.

^71.�Ibid., 24 March 1944;Argus, 25 March 1944; Melbourne Herald, 23 and 24 March 1944; Sun News-Pictorial, 24 March 1944.

^72.�Sun News-Pictorial, 27 March 1944.

^73.�PSJV, November 1944. See also VPD, vol. 217, LA, 27 June 1944, p. 5; ibid., vol. 218, LA, 7 December 1944, pp. 2875 and 2905.

^74.�PSJV, November 1944.

^75.�VPD, vol. 219, LA, 2 May 1945, p. 294.

^76.�Ibid., 8 August 1945, p. 3607. The Association's grievances with the Bill were elaborately outlined in a report by a sub-committee appointed by the Association General Council to examine its provisions. See PSJV, August 1945.

^77.�PSJV, July and August 1945.

^78.� White, John Cain, pp. 113–14.

^79.�VPD, vol. 219, LA, 29 August 1945, p. 3805.

^80.�Labor Call, 19 July and 4 October 1945; Geoff Browne, Biographical Register of the Victorian Parliament, 1900–84, Victorian Government Printing Office, Melbourne, 1985, p. 40.

^81.� Keon cited in Copping it Sweet, p. 241. See also Janet McCalman, Struggletown: Public and Private Life in Richmond, 1900–1965, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1985, pp. 116–18.

^82.� Browne, 'Standish Michael Keon'. pp. 17–18.

^83.� McCalman, Struggletown, p. 226; Wright, A People's Counsel, pp. 175–7.

^84.�VPD, vol. 219, LA, 29 August 1945, p. 3805; PSJV, September 1945.

^85.�VPD, vol. 220, LA, 4 December 1945, p. 83. See also Cain's second reading speech, ibid., 5 March 1946, pp. 610–6; C. J. Hayes, 'The Commonwealth Public Service', Public Administration Australia, no. xv, 1956, pp. 5–6; Colin A. Hughes and B. D. Graham, A Handbook of Australian Government and Politics, 1890–1964, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1968, p. 130.

^86.�VPD, vol. 220, LA, 19 March 1946, p. 820; ibid., vol. 221, 10 April 1946, p. 1336.

^87.�Ibid., vol. 221, LC, 30 April 1946, pp. 1589–94; ibid., LA, 14 May 1946, pp. 2004–8; ibid., LC, 15 May 1946, pp. 2027–30.

^88.�PSJV, April and July 1946.

^89.�Ibid., January 1946; VPSA Annual Report for 1946 reprinted ibid., June 1946. This is also based on the author's inspections of the PSJV for the period 1946–50.

^90.�Ibid., January 1950.

^91.�Ibid., October 1948.

^92.� Murray, The Split, p. 30.

^93.�News Weekly, 4 February 1987.

^94.� For details of these attacks, see Griffin, John Wren, pp. 354–8 and Murray, The Split, pp. 71–2 and 354.

^95.� Recalled by Jim Cairns and quoted in McCalman, Struggletown, p. 226.

^96.� Murray, The Split, p. 73.

^97.�Ibid., p. 354.

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