AMR Interview with Comrade David Matters

David Matters at the 1988 Congress of the Socialist Party of Australia. Photo: CPA

(For part 1 of the interview, see AMR 76 – Interview with comrade David Matters (Part 1))

AMR: What did all that teach you, as a young man in your early twenties, about the struggles between different groups in the unions and the workplace like the car industry?

DM: Look, I was still learning. The best way to say it is that we wanted a better life than the one we had, and we couldn’t see the direction for going forward. The Socialist Workers’ Party were against running for union positions. This was slightly before Pedro Camejo denounced his own party as a sect. That was a bit of a movement inside the Socialist Workers’ Party and the Trotskyist groups. Before that anyone who stood in a union position was a potential bureaucrat. So there was a conflict with the workers needing and wanting leadership, needing to change things.

AMR: If a group like the Socialist Workers’ Party wasn’t going to take up leadership, how did they see change coming about?

DM: To me now, it’s a bit hard to see what they were doing. I think they thought that they would gather the numbers, they’d explode, and it would happen. I’m not sure that the main people pushing the organisation saw that as their task. I think there was an underlying current or direction somewhere else that detected changes coming in the working-class movement and the problems that were coming. So, they assigned the Trotskyist groups in a different direction. Trotskyist organisations were more like anarchists, with circles within circles. Eventually I was not happy. The prospects of socialism out of this course were not there, but then I was living this life.

One day we were watching a guy reading a newspaper, who used to pick us up on the bus. His job looked pretty much better than what we were doing getting dirty in the factory. So, one comrade went off and got a job on the buses, and so we followed and went into the buses.

There was also a strike. I remember them going on [strike] for the 38-hour week. The Bus Union was leading that strike in the Brisbane City Council. There was a series of bus drivers’ strikes, so that attracted the Trotskyist group to the class struggle. It gave the gurus at the top something that was useful for us to go and do. So, we were given permission to leave the car industry and go into the bus industry.

That was the beginning of my time as a bus driver, in 1981. I was taught to drive a bus at the Toowong Bus Depot. That was one of the hardest things I had to learn to do. The buses were then pre-select, that is, semi-automatics. They were very old vintage British buses.

AMR: With the big steering wheels?

DM: Big steering wheels, little levers for changing gears, plastic seats for the passengers and a cane seat for the driver. You’d stand up at the traffic lights and put a newspaper under the cushion to try to give more cushioning. The Panther buses were a little newer. There was some power steering in the Volvos. In the British Panthers, they were automatic, but still manual steering. This meant there was no power-assisted steering, so it was a physical job. The routes didn’t go very far.

I ended up at the Carina Bus Depot. We (the Socialist Workers party) had changed our policy and we were starting to look towards moving to union positions. There was the beginning of discussions between the Socialist Workers’ Party and the Socialist Party of Australia, who I’d never heard of before.

AMR: So this was the first time you heard of the Socialist Party of Australia, the SPA.

DM: There was a young comrade when I was in Parramatta, who used to go and sit in their office. But to me they were still a mystical organisation.

We started to have some joint meetings with the Socialist Party. The approach of the Socialist Party was very distinct. They insisted on a level of professionalism from the comrades. They didn’t regard an organisation as proper unless it had letterheads, had proper addresses. At that time, I think Jim Henderson was a leading figure in the branch in Queensland. We had comrades such as Edgar Ross around.

I began to work with Socialist Party of Australia comrades in at least two organisations. One of them was the SEQEB dispute in 1985. The other was the Palestinian Human Rights Committee. We were also doing joint work on the [Prices and Incomes] Accord. The Socialist Party was working very hard to build Left and Progressive Unity. This was around the same time as the Nuclear Disarmament Party was formed.

AMR: Can you say what the SEQEB dispute was about?

DM: It was the Southeast Queensland Electricity Board. For the whole period I was at General Motors Holden, and even in the buses, the most powerful union was the Electrical Trades Union. They had been waging a series of disputes, strikes, and struggles against the repressive Bjelke-Petersen government. The strikes were pursuing income gains and against the contracting out of work. The ETU had won at least twice against the Bjelke-Petersen Government. The final straw was in 1985 when over 1000 linesmen were sacked.

Arriving in Queensland was a different experience. You were coming up against political police. They were a bit heavy in NSW, where they would stop you and arrest you. I got arrested once in NSW. But I got arrested again in Queensland selling Direct Action in the pubs of Ipswich. Pretty courageous stuff: we were selling newspapers supporting a beer strike, in pubs. Or crazy, if you like.

AMR: (Laughter).

DM: While people were trying to swallow West End beer in preference to XXXX beer. You can see we would have got a little bit of razzing.

AMR: Going back to the meetings between the SPA and the Socialist Workers’ Party, there’s two questions. Did you know at the time the reason for discussions between the SPA and the Socialist Workers’ Party? If not, when did you find out?

DM: There was a meeting led by a woman called Pat. She led it for the Socialist Workers’ Party and explained the [Prices and Incomes] Accord to us. I had a feeling that Jack McPhillips and Peter Symon were meeting with the Percy brothers. They came back and explained, and we took a decision to support the SPA’s position.

We had a series of big strikes. In the 1980s the TWU broke through the wage restrictions and there was a good pay rise. Prior to my experience in the trade union movement, wages were set by the Metalworkers Union. They used to set the margins, and everyone would follow through. That was the wages system. At that time, I can say I had very little understanding of this. It’s worthwhile noting that when we’re talking with people who have the political persuasions of the Trotskyists, it’s an alien world to these comrades. They don’t know the foibles and the differences of the working class. It happens all around them, but they don’t see what’s going on. I was in a similar position.

I was very unhappy inside the Socialist Workers’ Party. I found the factionalism, [especially] the last faction that formed before a conference, was stifling. I knew the course of events that was going to unfold, that the comrades were going to be expelled and that another Trotskyist organisation would be born. I thought it was a futile argument over futile points of view. It was not going to change the situation or improve the organisation.

I was considered to have gone what they called “funny.” They sent Jim Percy to talk to us, because the whole branch was “infected” by whatever “disease” I had. He gave a long talk, which I thought was spectacular. Until I went up to the next comrade and asked what they thought they had heard. They had heard something completely different. They’d heard what they wanted to hear.

I was working with comrade Ray Ferguson, at that stage in the Palestine Human Rights Committee. This was a couple of years after the terrible events with a massacre in Beirut. I was very heavily influenced by this and had come to work with the Palestinian Community. It was very small in Brisbane, but I had the great pleasure to work with the Afifi family. We were pro-PLO but they were pro-Hamas, but this did not stop us from working in a very united manner. The differences were beyond me; I just liked the people. And I enjoyed the food. I used to be the secretary of the Palestine Human Rights Committee and people left me alone. We were supporters of the workers during the SEQEB dispute, so our organisation got named in the parliament by Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

At that point, I had started to want to join the Socialist Party of Australia.

AMR: You made a very important comment earlier, that you were impressed with the professionalism of the SPA. Can you say a bit more about that?

DM: One of the most impressive things I noticed was their care for working people. They took the time to talk with workers. In the SEQEB strike, there were a couple of workers who had influenced the strike in the wrong way. They’d gone in an anarchist way. All the political groups were active in the SEQEB support group. The old Communist Party was there, the Anarchists, the different Trotskyist groups, and the Socialist Party. But the Socialist Party, in my opinion, did the most practical work to assist workers: to get food, to get support, and they talked in a careful, measured way so as not to expose workers to troubles that they didn’t need to be exposed to.

AMR: Would you use the word “discipline”?

DM: The discipline was enormous. The fact was that they were the only party that had the courage to tell the workers that the strike had been defeated. The Labor Party didn’t have the courage to tell the workers and let them get on with their lives. That fact will never leave me.

The support for the Soviet Union: we were involved in debates concerning “Solidarity” in Poland. My position had begun to change in relation to the work that I was beginning to do. I was further recruited to the Socialist Party and became a member of the Party. I started with a view that it would be a better experience, but then the positive outcomes were the way the Party assisted me in my union work. The other comrade who was with me in the Socialist Workers party was insistent that he was going to be the (bus) depot delegate, even though the majority of union members in the bus depot thought otherwise. I had thought to run for vice-president, but the good advice that I got from the secretary of the (Brisbane) branch of the Socialist Party, Ray Ferguson, was that I should contest the delegate’s position. He felt that I would be somewhat more amenable to the workers.

By that time, I’d switched over and joined the Socialist Party: July 1985. I wrote in my diary because I thought it might be important.

I remember sitting in a meeting chaired by Jim Henderson of the Industrial Committee of the Party. We were discussing how to tell the workers that the [SEQEB] strike was over. The way that Jim chaired the meeting, the way he gave a say to everybody … what I found was that you didn’t have to form a faction in order to have an opinion. What was scary was that we all had to have an opinion. When a report was given, everyone was expected to speak for a short period of time to express their point of view. The two things you dreaded most were not getting mentioned in the sum-up or getting mentioned but in unfavourable terms.

AMR: Comparing your earlier comments about the organisation of the Socialist Workers’ Party, it seems to me that the SWP’s organisation doesn’t sound like democratic centralism. When compared with the Socialist Party, as you’ve just observed, everyone was expected to put forward an opinion.

DM: Backtracking again for a moment: one of the things that got me most into trouble in the Socialist Workers’ Party was when we’d begun working the bus industry. In the bus industry we were working with a group of people, who were more right than the right-wingers: the AWU, the Australian Workers’ Union. There was a fellow called Gino Musemici, who had associations with Rolly Livingstone, a professional industrial advocate, who was brought in to tackle the union movement during the Mt. Isa strike. Gino had been brought to us by Sue Bolton, who is still now a council member in Malvern, in Melbourne. She had come along and said he was our own direct “Lech Walesa” (from Poland). Sue Bolton had been [put out] – it’s not sour grapes but it sounds like sour grapes – because I had said we should work with the current secretary of the trade union, Tom McHenry. He was a big shock to me, because he was everything that the Socialist Workers’ Party said didn’t exist he was a militant, a trade unionist, and a communist. The first time I had heard him speak at a (bus) depot meeting; I was in a state of turmoil. He was saying things that were quite a shock to me, which according to the sect didn’t exist. This was beginning to get me in trouble with the Socialist Workers’ Party, because I suggested at a fraction meeting that we should work with this comrade. That was apparently a heresy. From that point on I was considered to have begun to go “funny.”

The other thing that was very active while working in this group was that I was given the job of being the “left cover,” which suited me because I was left. They would give me the job of moving strike motions against a particular working condition, for example, when the employer used to take our overtime and use it to pay us for public holidays. So, you were short-changed in a week when there was a public holiday. My job was to get up and move that we strike. Tom McHenry, who was then the secretary, while saying the right things and doing the right things, probably tactically had become stuck in the position with other right-wingers around him, so he couldn’t lead us into a strike. And I kept moving for strikes. The peculiar thing was that I attracted both the left and the right in the union as supporters. I came to the view that I needed to shift position, and that was part of the problem that I had with that section of the Socialist Workers’ Party.

We had joint meetings. I remember one when I was in the Socialist Party, meeting in Sydney, and John Percy turned up with half the library and piled it in front of him. I could see the comrades in the Socialist Party groaning, “let’s hope he doesn’t read all that.”

AMR: (Laughter).

DM: They tried to outwit the Socialist Party. I think what the Socialist Workers’ Party wanted from the Socialist Party were the international contacts. To some extent they were successful in gaining some [contacts]. They wanted to improve their position, in [the sense of] not being regarded as a serious party in an Australian context.

I went through the whole period, including attending one conference, as Peter Symon’s sidekick. The Socialist Workers’ Party had a conference during the Gorbachev period in a hall in an agricultural college in Hawkesbury. They were in a religious fervour, the Socialist Workers’ Party. I remember looking in some of their eyes, and the look I’d seen in born-again Christians was in their eyes. They were stomping the ground and chanting and screaming “Gorby, Gorby, Gorby.” We were at that stage becoming extremely suspicious of Gorbachev.

AMR: So, they were openly supporting not just a non-communist but an anti-communist, who had managed to come up in a degraded Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and who was in the process of dismantling the Soviet Union.

DM: Yes. They introduced us to people like the Croatian Socialist Party, who I think were outright fascists. I tend to think in hindsight that the approaching counter-revolution was a part of this process.

Jim Percy, in one of his attacks on me when I left [the Socialist Workers’ Party], asked me why I was joining a “dying organisation.” “We’ve got everything we can out of this,” he said – that was the approach they were taking. It took me a few years, and I’ve always remained open about my origins, to dismantle the Trotskyist way of thinking.

This is very important, to understand the differences deeply.

AMR: I would like to ask you about the process of learning to become a member of a Marxist-Leninist Party, in other words, unlearning what you had learned and assumed when you were a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party.

DM: It’s a very prolonged process and every now and then you can get caught with a thought bubble that remains from the Trotskyist positions. Even as late as 2011 in the union, I still had some residual thinking that went down to the concept of rank-and-file activity. Not fully understanding – or understanding in principle but not in practice – that wildcat strikes are undisciplined actions against the whole union. As a union official, I probably had too much tolerance for wildcat actions. The last one was a right-wing activity designed to bring our leadership undone. I should have been harsher in the centralisation of the struggle. Democratic Centralism is our democracy and each component of this concept ensures the other there is no effective centralism without democracy and no democracy without centralism. This seeming contradiction is at the heart of the process. The Trotskyists present a form of centralism which destroys the rights of their members.

There were a range of things, and it started with understanding the Soviet Union and anti-Sovietism. I’d been brought up with the idea that the Soviet Union was a bureaucracy. I was in shock when I came into the Party and comrades began to say some negative things about Stalin. I thought it was simple: I’d just have to embrace Stalin and everything would be fine and my Trotskyism would be cured. I threw all my Trotskyist books into a pile, with the intention of getting rid of them. Comrade Eddie Clynes was most insistent that I shouldn’t. He suggested that I needed to read them and be able to debate them. I’m grateful to him for that advice.

We also had these strong lectures by Jack McPhillips. One of the peculiar features of the Socialist Party was that it was a bit territorial, in that some comrades had different access to different territories in the Party. Jack McPhillips had significant access to the trade unions and Peter Symon more towards the social activists. That gave me a bit of worry, because I thought that it was factionalism, and I didn’t want a bar of it. Maybe that had a negative impact on my life in the Party, but I was also concerned that I didn’t want there to be factions.

The process of coming into the Party involved learning to think for myself. I remember the sectarian blinkers coming off. Part of building me towards the Party was the activity of Tom McHenry. Although I’d heard of a group, the National Civic Council, I wouldn’t have known [who they were] and that I was working with them. I couldn’t recognise them, and it was a big shock when Tom McHenry said, “you know you’re working with the National Civic Council – the ‘Groupers’?” They didn’t know they were working with someone heading towards Communism either. So, I’d technically infiltrated the Right.

That was part of the trouble I was going through at the time. I was regarded by the Right as a renegade, and I was regarded by the Trotskyists as a renegade. And they were suspicious in the Socialist Party because I had Trotskyist characteristics back then.

There were some people who joined at the same time, a couple Alan and Dianne Muir. They were close friends with Bill Dawson, the Party’s state president. I managed to get Dianne Muir onto the bus-driving job. I have to say there were leftist tendencies in that group. They did not have a practical understanding of Trotskyism. I found that comrades – when they were talking with me about Trotskyism, even comrade Ray Ferguson – didn’t read the key sentences as to what was being said. Having experienced it, I knew what these people were saying. The comrades were often generous in how they read material from the Socialist Workers’ Party, they would read the left camouflage and think that was what was being said. They would miss the right turn in the material. But I had to be polite.

The process of the Gorbachev developments: I had suspicions about Gorbachev, but again I was not trusted because I’d been a Trotskyist. Even Jim Henderson was hostile to Ray Ferguson for bringing me to the Party. At one stage when I was becoming a friend of the Party, I wasn’t allowed to use Party equipment to print a Palestine Human Rights Committee leaflet.

AMR: With you coming from a Trotskyist outfit, what were people suspicious about, what were they watching for?

DM: I’m not sure, perhaps because I identified myself as having broken with that. I think I was an easy target.

AMR: It wasn’t because they suspected you were part of one of these efforts to take over the SPA?

DM: They wanted to be sure. The interesting thing is that I was also trusted. I was moved into the branch secretary position of the Rocklea branch and worked with great treasurers like Tom Simmons.

AMR: Did it make a difference that you were open about having been a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, but that you’d made a break with that?

DM: I felt I had to be careful not to be labelled a “former smoker.” Because the relationship was developing … and even the bourgeoisie was worried about a significant boost of youth to the Socialist Party through some sort of merger between the Socialist Workers’ Party and the SPA. The alliance that was formed included the building of a more united left position. As a Party member I was active in supporting – and this was as late as 1988-1989 – Drew Hutton as the lord-mayoral candidate in Brisbane. We toured him around bus depots as our part of a contribution to a joint effort between the Socialist Party, the Socialist Workers’ Party, and the Greens. We ran Ray Ferguson for the Logan City Council, and the Greens assisted us in that campaign. Part of the work that was going on was to try to build a Left and progressive United Front. The Socialist Workers’ Party infiltrated these organisations and attempted to take them over. The Socialist Party comrades were critical of how the Socialist Workers’ Party had interfered with the development of the Nuclear Disarmament Party. The SWP later changed its name to Democratic Socialist Party and changed the name of the paper from Direct Action to Green Left. They went into the Greens in a big way.

All this was happening at the same time as the [Prices and Incomes] Accord, which was a part of the counter-revolution unfolding and was its representation in Australia. The Russian slogans “glasnost” and “perestroika” meant openness and restructuring; the slogans around the Accord were “openness” and “restructuring.” The idea was created that you could have a pluralist government in the Soviet Union, so the dismantling of the Soviet system had already begun before the counter-revolution struck.

This process was occurring in unions as well. When I joined the Socialist Party, it had just been through a massive split, a devastating split. A large [part], probably 600-800 trade unionists, had been ripped out of the Party, including large sections of the transport branch.

AMR: This was over the Prices and Incomes Accord?

DM: It was over the Prices and Incomes Accord, and the devastatingly bad behaviour of the Clancy forces. I know there are comrades who found their way back. If we re-examine the split historically, we may be able with hindsight to say that some things were necessary and some things were not. But these comrades went through this bitter experience. The comrades I met were still shell-shocked, were still disappointed. The Party that they had begun to rebuild after the split with the [old] CPA (which had been foisted on them) and was going somewhere was then ripped to pieces.

AMR: To clarify: so the split was over whether to support the Accord or to oppose the Accord, is that correct or not?

DM: In the end it came down to behaviour within the trade unions. The approach that was taken was that the Clancy forces would say that Jack McPhillips was trying to interfere in the different trade unions, and that the Party was interfering with their right to conduct their own business in the trade unions. Comrades like Jack McPhillips were trying to say that class collaboration is a fraud, that class collaboration will lead to the workers losing ground.

The imposition of the Accord was an aggressive act. It caused a massive amount of division within the working-class movement. It took six ACTU congresses to quell the opposition to the Accord in the trade union movement. There were some right-wing trade unionists who were opposed to the Accord.

AMR: Would you say that a main aim of the Accord was to split the working class?

DM: I think the main aim of the Accord was to disassociate the working-class movement from the struggle for socialism. The splitting [of the working-class movement] was a part of that process.

People talk about authoritarianism, well the behaviour of the forces around [ACTU secretary Bill] Kelty and others was authoritarian. They expelled and sacked union leaders for opposing the Accord. People who spoke on joint platforms with us lost their jobs. There was already a habit in some unions, where they would stand over Party members and ask them to leave the Party and join the ALP. There was a fellow called Albert in the Miscellaneous Workers’ Union, whom the comrades continually talked about: he’d made that choice and gone to the ALP. There were militant unions led by our comrades and some of them were dissolved. The Food Preservers’ Union was heavily attacked.

At the same time as this process was occurring, the amalgamation process was beginning. Part of the threat to the trade unions was your position and your list of callings. A list of callings is the occupations which [a union] can cover. It is an agreed demarcation within the union movement. One of the things that was going on during this whole period – and this was the latter part of the Accord [process in] 1989-1990 – was when they began to attack organisationally. Unions were separated into principal, significant, and other. You didn’t want to be “other,” because “others” were to be liquidated and completely absorbed into other unions. “Significant” meant you could stay a union, but you had to amalgamate.

Jack McPhillips gave us a lecture on these questions of restructuring and amalgamations. By then I was a union secretary of the Tramways Union. Jack’s advice to us was that we needed to restructure the awards and do as well as we could out of that, because the workers would expect some gains in wages and conditions. There was some value to simplifying job classifications. His instruction was also that we should hold onto positions if we could, because the way they were treating the unions meant they would not let communists back into the leadership if we lost any positions.

The amalgamation process had some merit to it, but it needed to be about uniting forces that were related in the industries and developing industry unionism – not conglomerate and not amalgamated unions that had no industrial basis to work together. We should be pursuing the struggle in that direction – that’s how Jack was leading us. This is the direction we took in the Tramways Union, which led to us beginning to form the Queensland Transport Unions Federation, amalgamating with the Australian Railways Union, and so deepening that industry struggle and trying to unite workers.

This was very difficult, because there was the government’s battle against the Builders’ Labourers Federation (BLF). The BLF had really annoyed the tradesmen’s union, which was the Building Workers Industrial Union. The BLF used the leverage they had acquired because of changes in the production process. In the 1980s, concrete pouring had become a very important part of the building industry. Control over when you could pour the concrete or when you decided not to continue pouring had damaging effects on the employers. So, the builders’ labourers, who were considered to be unskilled, were getting paid more than the skilled workers. It was craft unionism versus industrial unionism, and it has taken a while to resolve. And later there were changes again in the industry.

RB: Comrade, I want to ask you about all of the different things that were happening when the old CPA was breaking down for some time, dissolved, and liquidated itself, and then the SPA reclaiming the name Communist Party of Australia. What did all that mean at the time and what was involved in the process?

DM: I think it was a prolonged period. It goes right back to the formation of the SPA: the comrades prepared for the eventual liquidation of the old Communist Party, they were that convinced they wrote it into the constitution, and I was impressed by that foresight and understanding. I was aware of the Communist Party’s existence when I was in with the Trotskyists, particularly in Sydney, and they were always excited that they had a Trotskyist faction inside the old Communist Party. But they were very insular as a group, the old Communist Party, they didn’t talk to anybody other than people they already knew, so that was one aspect of the impression then.

When I came to Brisbane, I came across old Communist Party comrades, and they didn’t have the same approach industrially as the Socialist Party. In fact, they were terrified of anybody young, I think they accused me of being a thug, and they were more likely to be supportive of the class collaboration of the opportunists. During the period of the fall of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of Australia was beginning to shift even further to the right. First, the Bernie Taff group left. Most of the Trotskyists thought that they were right wingers, in fact most people thought they were right wingers, in the sense of their lack of social feeling. The situation was like this: some went from the Trotskyists to the International Socialists, then to the Communist Party, and then they moved into the Labour Party right. A number of these comrades that were in the old CPA were gleefully, happily visiting me, when they dissolved the Communist Party, to tell me their new ministries, or their jobs in the ministry for the Goss government. So, I was meeting these political people who were major figures at the time.

I was getting to form an impression of where they sat at the same time as we were in the struggle to try and protect working class conditions to create, to protect unionisation rates/rights, and we were in a deep struggle to stop privatisation from happening in our industry. We had massive meetings with Bill Kelty and others. They were running re-education camps for workers, for union officials, trying to educate us into thinking about Australia reconstructed, and to try to imbue more class collaborationist thinking in the trade union leadership. All this was happening during the period of the Hawke-Keating government, and they were a significant part of this activity.

AMR: In the eighties?

DM: The eighties and into the nineties. The outcome was devastating across the whole country. I can remember going to Melbourne after the first public transport commission privatisation push, and we got taken on a tour of Transport House in Melbourne. There were hundreds of empty desks, we met an official from the Clerical Union and he was in a great deal of stress, worn out. Many of the officials of my industry were fighting these privatisations.

All this is going on at the same time as parties were dissolving and they were trying to create an idea that communism is finished, and that socialism has no future. Employers came to me to tell me that Todds, the big Brisbane bus company, had won the contract to put in the bus-service in Hanoi and that therefore you should give up on socialism. So, we had to hold our line. We had different groups being formed, and I can’t say that I understood each of them. Peter Symon would talk about these different groups, such as the Socialist Forum, and many different people – some of them are still around – were trying to form different organisations because they thought they were different ways to do things.

The principal suffering was in the organisation of the working class and the lowering of the activity of the class. There were struggles over shorter hours, against privatisations, contracting out; working days were increased up to 12 hours and this has had devastating effects in the coal industry where black lung disease is killing workers again. The 1908 Broken Hill miners strike had won a 35-hour week as part of their struggle against this insidious disease. The strikes that we held in that period: when I was shown statistics from the council, our union was like a very tall skyscraper in amongst some very small tents. We would have 1200 days lost and some people might have two days or a day as a group. This was the turmoil that was going on, and they were trying to convince us that the whole concept [of socialism] was a failure.

The ACU, the Australian Association of Communist Unity, were hostile to our party, and so were other forces like the Maritime Union Socialist Activities Association. But I would have to say that our comrades were very militant in trying to force the development of unity, in bending over backwards to find what they could agree on and set aside the differences. It was the hostility coming from the ones heading towards collaboration that was creating the most division. They were accusing the Party of being left sectarian and I think that this is just not true. So, the dissolution of the old CPA was a big blow even though it wasn’t a loss for our Party. It meant that workers began to think that Communist Parties don’t exist anymore. And so, we had many difficulties.

[As for reclaiming the name of the Communist Party of Australia,], we gave the process about four years. Peter Symon was very insistent that we allow a lot of space, and we had the added complication of the CP Marxist-Leninist. We wanted to talk to everyone to make sure that they understood we weren’t just trying to assume a dead body, but that we were stepping forward because this had [always] been our intention. It wasn’t something that had gone through our congress without contest. Sections like the Ipswich branch around Bill Dawson and Allan Muir and others had come down [to Sydney], and I think even to some extent some comrades who left after the 1992 congress remained of that opinion. Some of those comrades held a funeral for an old comrade and used the old Socialist Party flag and, were opposed to the Socialist Party becoming the Communist Party. They thought that we should remain the Socialist Party of Australia. That was in 1996, some comrades had left the party in 1992 and some of those who remained left the Party after the decision to resume the name.

AMR: What was the 1992 Congress like?

DM: The 1992 Congress was so divided. [There was] the coming up of hostility in what I regarded as a very good organisation. I thought I had found a great place for socialism and then there began to be rumours, tittle-tattle about different comrades. One comrade would say something about one comrade and the other would then say something about the other and eventually it would get beyond a heated exchange, and I don’t think that was very productive for the Party. We had such great figures, Edgar Ross and Jim Henderson, in the Party and they were brilliant to listen to and to hear their stories. They gave a brilliant wrap of the Communist Party. But we got to a position where those comrades were getting hostile with each other, and this was not a good environment.

AMR: So you think they were egged on?

DM: I think they were egged on, and I think that the comrades who were running tales should have been stopped. I sat on the state committee, and we had five comrades on the state committee.

AMR: In Queensland?

DM: In Queensland. [The state committee] had Bill Dawson and Allan Muir, myself, Ray Ferguson, and Ian McCloud. There were all these bluster-type moments. There was always this view that Lenin had managed to force the revolution by standing up and blustering and threatening. There was a wrong attitude in that regard around, and I remember a state executive meeting when two comrades attempted to split the state executive. I said: just sit down; you are not getting any support from me for that sort of behaviour. I tried to join Jim Henderson’s branch, because tales were being run about Jim and he was rightfully firing back again, but this wasn’t helping the situation.

When I see that happening in the Party anywhere, it is important that it is stopped, because it led to the dissolution of our branch. The other things that comrades were doing was bringing back tales from the Central Committee. I’d sit through a branch meeting – and to stay in the Party I had to stay in a little Rocklea branch with around 4 people who were left. They would start these speeches about the Mensheviks and go on for an hour. These were good comrades, who I had great respect for, but this was nonsense, and it created an atmosphere of inability to be able to build the Party. We had comrades that we have had to let go because their attitude when a recruit comes in is that they start a fight and the objective of that is to get the new recruit to leave. That doesn’t help build the party.

AMR: To say the least.

DM: We had to find our way in this difficult set of circumstances. This was going on all over the Party, but the most pronounced and devastating place was in Queensland.

AMR: Can you say what the situation in Queensland was for the Party in the late 1980s and the beginning of 1990s? What was the situation after all of these breakdowns?

DM: We had branches: a branch in Collinsville, just west of Townsville, which was a mining branch, where we had 7 or 8 comrades, and an industry branch. We had a branch in Mackay, we had a branch in Rockhampton. I think we had a branch in Townsville, we also had one in the tablelands, we had four to five branches in Brisbane, and we had a branch in Ipswich. So you can see that we had a reasonable [organisation].

AMR: Yeah.

DM: We weren’t huge, but we had a state structure and an office. We had a professional approach; we had a full-time state secretary and we had standing within the union movement. So, it was a lot to throw away.

AMR: After all that?

DM: We lost the branches. We lost good comrades; they would walk out of the Party. We ended up losing completely the Ipswich branch apart from one or two older comrades. We lost the branch in Collinsville, who went and joined the Labor Party except for one or two comrades. Obviously, the Labor Party got a very good branch, but it left the Party without the ability to do the work it needed to do.

AMR: Was there a Brisbane branch after all of this and then isolated comrades in different parts?

DM: There was originally, I think, a central Brisbane branch and in the end, we ended up having to merge most comrades into the central Brisbane branch. We did build up to three branches at one stage where we had a Latin-American branch, and a Brisbane branch and a transport branch, but then troubles happened in the Brisbane branch and we had to let go of the transport branch to keep the Brisbane branch alive.

AMR: Two questions: how did the dissolution of the Soviet Union affect you personally？And what was it that kept the SPA and then the CPA going?

DM: Personally, the loss of the Soviet Union produced a devastating grief. Many other comrades, I understand, were in grief. Some of the behaviour of comrades I took as grief, because the Soviet Union was such a powerful force. We used to host the Moscow variety theatre. We used to come out and we’d raise funds for The Guardian for assistance, we had the Soviet friendship society, with a good organisation. A lot of people had put a lot of life and energy into those projects.

The way to cope was that for a couple of years I didn’t read anything socialist, because everyone was telling me to give up, and you didn’t want to open your mind for that barrage. It like a er and over again, like when you are caught in the surf. It took a while for that wave to dissipate and then we started to try to get to our feet.

How the SPA survived? Only with the hard work of quite a few dedicated comrades. And some of the inspiration of some of the older comrades, like Tommy Simmons. Most comrades in the country probably don’t know who Tommy Simmons is, but he was the branch treasurer, he was a fellow who took this as just a setback that we had to recover from. Jimmy Henderson wrote some pamphlets to explain that socialism has a future, then there was

meeting with the comrades from the Central ommittee like Jack McPhillips and Peter Symon and others, who put in a lot of work. There were comrades who bought out The Guardian, or back then The Socialist, and kept that going.

But all the time we were losing comrades in lots of places. Comrades [used] to be able to drive to Sydney and go get a shower on the docks after having arrived from the trip. Only a working-class Party organise those things. That our   ined the union, she had the General Secretary in the corner of the room while I was doing the sign-up. This kind of behaviour is not understandable for younger comrades. These workplaces were our work-places. People worked with our   lose the ability to lead as Party, to have to work as individuals in order to sustain and maintain the position – that’s the part that makes it harder.

And I think the other thing that comrades don’t pay enough attention to is that we lost what we call the norms. There was a set of cultural standards. Being a Party member meant there were things you did and that you must do: you must pay your dues; you must pay your pledge; you must distribute The Guardian; you must talk to workers about the Party; you must play a leading role in the organisation of which you are a member; you must seek to influence and bring Party policy to those organisations; you must follow the discipline of the Party fraction, so you don’t go and have a different view than the Party fraction at a public meeting; you save your differences until we get back together; you turn up a the time you say you are going to turn up; you do the jobs you say you are going to do; you don’t put forward things [you can’t follow-up]: you don’t speak disrespectfully of other comrades; and you always respect the person giving the report.

These are just a few of the things that were norms, normal behaviour, which I think our Central Committee is trying to begin to establish once again. But we must understand that these things are learnt by years of discipline. As for the concept of discipline, you don’t desert your post. When I later stepped down from the union position, I was worried that I would be shot for desertion, because it was a very important thing to stand up and carry the Party position forward and have respect for the Party. They are the things that are part of the discipline of the Party. They was there when I joined the Party, was inculcated in us as a Party, as Party norms. We can’t have that casual attitude that says we set aside some behaviours for some people,

AMR: Because of personal …

DM: … glory.

AMR: Yeah.

DM: No comrade is more equal than any other comrade. Sometimes some comrades have got to remember not to act in a less than humble fashion. We are all comrades, and comrades do things for comrades. This is a very important thing to remember, and yes of course you are vulnerable to comrades, and I had some trouble in the industry because some people who were comrades were not [really] comrades.

AMR: You are talking about the question of trust between comrades,

DM: Yeah. When I came to be elected to the union position, the right was of course after me like a posse, and we had a person who should have been a comrade in the depot. But this person managed to persuade the workers to launch a stop-work meeting, but their personal objective was to pass a no-confidence motion against me as the secretary of the union. This was because they had lost the election. We managed to use the majority support we had in two other depots to change the nature of the stoppage to make a gain for the workers and to bring the stoppage meeting to a close. When they attempted to disrupt the meeting, on television I looked like the typical union bureaucrat shutting down the meeting to get away from the striking workers, when what we had done was achieve our success. The militant work force shut down the anti-union workforce, led by the rabble, who unfortunately had sections of our Party in it. One of the comrades was jumping the fence, along with some other comrades, and I was very naïve. I said to the comrades who were part of my alliance, supporting me: why are you standing either side of me now, because you’re about to get bashed and we’re not gonna let it happen. That gives you an understanding of the loyalty of the working class to their leaders, and they knew that I was their leader, that I was their property, and no one was touching me.

The unfortunate thing is that it was part of the internal difficulties going in the Party, because the comrades weren’t being honest about such bad behaviour. They were allowing comrades to act in undisciplined fashion, and they didn’t bring it to task. Which is why, as much as people might find my behaviour not what they like, if I don’t agree with something or don’t think something is following the correct behaviour for the Party, then I will say so. No matter who you are, I will tell you that you are wrong, including sometimes to Peter Symon himself. But only because I love the Party, and because I supported him as a comrade.

AMR: You know what, I think this would be good point to finish the interview for now.

DM: It would be.