There’s been quite a lot of discussion about the political views of former Senator Arthur Gietzelt, who died recently at the age of 93, and in particular about claims[1] that he was a secret member of the Communist Party.
Although it’s scarcely conclusive, this is one of the few occasions when I have some direct evidence to contribute to a discussion of this kind. In the aftermath of 1975, I formed the view (ill-advised in retrospect) that I could help fix Australia’s problems by becoming a Labor party staffer. I wanted to move to Sydney, so I applied to all the shadow ministers based there, receiving replies only from Doug McClelland and Arthur Gietzelt.
I can’t remember much about McClelland, or even for sure if I met him. As I recall, he was associated with the Right, but didn’t have the thuggish persona that generally went with that group, especially after the rise of Graham Richardson.
But, although I didn’t get the job, I did have a brief conversation with Gietzelt, who said something to me along the following lines “When I was your age [I was in my early 20s at the time], we all thought the Soviet Union was the way of the future. But you young people will have to find a different way forward”. My politics then were much as they are now, on the left, but strongly anti-communist, and of course, I was puzzled as to how the left should respond to the resurgence of neoliberalism/market liberalism, represented at the time by Malcolm Fraser(!). So this resonated with me in a number of ways, and I’ve never forgotten it.
I took it to mean that Gietzelt had once been a communist sympathizer (whether a party member or ‘fellow traveller’) but had ceased to be so. That wouldn’t be totally inconsistent with an association with the then Communist Party of Australia, which had broken from Moscow after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, but that wasn’t the impression I had: I assumed that his views had changed well before that, presumably in the wake of the Hungarian invasion and Kruschchev’s secret speech.
As I say, this is scarcely decisive evidence, but Gietzelt had no reason to mislead me, and no need to say anything at all to me along these lines: in all probability we were never going to meet again, and we didn’t.[2] So, my own guess is that, if Gietzelt was ever a member of the Communist Party, it was well before he entered the Federal Parliament.
[fn1] Made most prominently, I think, by Mark Aarons, who, however, wasn’t drawing on personal knowledge but from a reading of ASIO files – scarcely a reliable source as anyone who remembers the ASIO of the Cold War era will attest
[fn2] It was a long time ago, and it’s possible that I was still a candidate for the job. But presumably, in that case, a secret CPer would be dropping hints in the other direction, to see if I was likely to be OK with the idea.
John Quiggin 
Douglas McClelland is still very much alive, BTW. I have heard him spoken of as a great gentleman by someone who couldn’t possibly have been accused of undue sympathy with his politics, or with ALP politics in general.
I’ve often wondered if I had an ASIO file. At the age of 18 I was actually followed by two middle-aged men in the kinds of suit that made them look like extras in an episode of “Homicide”. I was on a motorcycle and they were in what was then a fairly late model (an XC) Falcon. I noticed them because in those days I used to have a quite eccentric path from my house at Ryde into the city and being 19 liked to work the bike pretty hard and they had therefore to drive even harder to stay with me.
Naturally, I had to test my theory, and to do so I left my route and doubled back through a street that only had one way in and out by car but permitted a person riding a bike to pass between a cyclone mesh fence and a brick wall and into a park. (I had decided long before that this would be my way of shaking someone tailing me). I then doubled back to the head of the street to view the vehicle. They seemed plenty annoyed.
In those days there were no mobile phones and no cameras, and after a few minutes, they left the street and turned down the street leading to the other end of the park. I noted their plates.
Later on that evening on return home I saw the car parked about 50 metres north of my home so I pulled in behind a large truck, discarded my helmet and then waited until it became dark enough to approach them furtively.
Sure enough when I got close enough for a look it was the same two guys. I tapped on their window, nearly scaring them half to death. When the driver wound down the window I produced a tyre lever and said — you’d better have some legitimate business or I’m going to find out where this fits.
The guy flashed but quickly withdrew some official looking ID and said something that sounded like “special branch” (I think this was the organisation that framed Tim Anderson over the Hilton Bombing later) and asked me where I’d been.
Again, being 18, I told him, in the vernacular of the time, what he could do with his question, and added that until he told me who he was and whom he worked for I wouldn’t be answering any of his questions. He elected to leave. Quickly.
I saw the two of them at a couple of rallies later — one in solidarity with Fretilin, and another in an anniversary of the Whitlam sacking. I warned a couple of people to keep clear of them.
The Murdochites are addicted to running McCarthyite sly smear campaigns against free thinkers; the slandering of Manning Clark was just the most visible example of stuff that has been happening for generations.
As for the ALP and neoliberalism, I genuinely believed that ALP state governments were elected by the public to defend both genuinely rational economics (not carpetbagging) and the Commons.
What a shattering disappointment this century thus has proved to be, therefore.
@Fran Barlow
You had an ASIO file for sure. In those days that made you a little special but not any more. These days I am sure every Australian citizen has an ASIO file. TPTB now have the resources for total surveillance. I have no doubt they use them.
I think the OP and comments show the inevitably speculative and discursive nature of these discussions, in assessing the inner thoughts of people. Not being critical, as JQ’s anecdote may well serve to cancel out Mark Aarons’ guesses, but seems to me trying to situate someone reliably on a spectrum, or label them with a badge, is biased towards statics rather than dynamics, as we seek labels which serve polemics but close down analysis.(Always found the “secret card-carrying communist” allegation a strange one – is this card like a whisky flask or a pocket warmer (remember them?) that you stroke, to fortify you? The secret wouldn’t last for long.
That moment of revelation when it hits you that the world works differently to what the official story told you, yet everybody else seems comfortable with the moral or credibility deficit, is a powerful and personally disruptive force. I expect post The Dismissal, lots of soul-searching and moodiness would have been going on, and personal disappointments (including with Whitlam and Hawke’s tame response) must have raised questions in radical parliamentarians about the parliamentary road. Showing their bravery and strength of conviction, parliamentarians George Georges and George Petersen didn’t drop their bundle, and continued agitating as maverick individuals. They didn’t need to be secret agents of anyone else.
I thought the recent series on SBS about the radicals and their ASIO files could’ve explored a lot of important issues, but seemed mainly nostalgic “war tales” and cloak and dagger excitement. The fact of large scale political reinvention by so many people associated with the hard left says something about the times, the influence of personal lifestages and the political categories themselves.
One of the few times I ever found myself in sympathy with Humphrey McQueen was when he wondered out loud why ASIO justified its existence nowadays, since almost everybody and his dog engages in relentless political and personal confessionalism via Facebook.
@Fran Barlow
Agree with Ikon’s assessment.
As an aside, a relative worked in the building where (everyone knew it was also the CIA) the Sydney US consulate was housed. He used to point out the CIA guys by their suit material – apparently someone had got the contract and used reams of identical blue fabric to make their suits.
The “Falcon” is interesting, too. You might not find it easily but ‘Green Falcons’ were an identifying feature of fascist secret police in Latin America in the ’70s.
I agree the SBS series on ASIO could have been much more than it was, but I would still recommend everyone see it.
PS: There was a guy known as the ‘Father of The Falcon’:
Yep, same guy. Who needs theories of conspiracies when the real world evidence proves them?
I think many of us will have files.
Anyone who isn’t brain dead is likely to have a file on them, in this country.
Some among Tony’s Cabinet do not have files – apparently, not an oversight.
So there are over 23,000,000 files in this country that basically say, “Probably not a terrorist”? That seems like a bit of a wasted effort. I’m so glad these sorts of things can be put on computers these days and not in manila folders otherwise we would probably have driven the manila extinct by now. If Sun Tzu is correct and he who defends everywhere defends nowhere, then in a country where everyone has a file on them does no one have a file on them? Of course that would mean that if Stasi had been a little more dilligent and have a file on everyone then about 16,111,000 files would suddenly disappear once they got the job done and that seems unlikely, so maybe I shouldn’t over apply Sun Tzu and the Art of War in my life and perhaps I should just confine it to certain areas such as my love life.
@Ikonoclast
Well everyone, or nearly everyone is documented, but I would be surprised if most people were being documented by ASIO or an equivalent agency. That’s not to say that there probably are far more files than are warranted by any serious threat to the legitimate interests of others.
@Fran Barlow
Fran, nice to see you’ve moderated your extremist philosophies and become a respectable matron (?)
I doubt whether Fran has ever been an extremist, just a bit good hearted and curious as to how the world works.
You could nail her for pedantry, but that’s a different issue..
Geoff Andrews
I’ve never had extremist philosophies though it would be fair to say that I’m extremely interested in nurturing a world in which every human grasps the mandates and constraints of “playing nicely with others” and uses that insight to shape their decision-making. Some people think that’s the very definition of extremism, others might see that as befitting a respectable matron, and yet others might think it an incipiently revolutionary concept spanning the micro and the macro.
Which of these, if any, best characterises your view of my interest?
When he was in his 20s and seeing stalin as the face of the future, it was the 1940s.
After the great famine, the purges and show trials, and stalin siding with the nazis!
The communist party was banned after the fall of france by menzies because of its defeatism and sabotage of the war effort
My ASIO story is from someone I knew reasonably well but havent seen for a long time now ,he seemed honest . He was a bit of a commie and did a Phd (I think it was ) on student politics of the 70’s at La Trobe Uni (where I met him) so it makes sense he would have had his own manila folder. A few years after uni he got a job secondary teaching at one of Ballarats top Catholic boys schools. Its beside the point of this post but having noticed him to be gay they promptly put him on locker duty so he could watch the boys undressing ,and he said there was lots of dodgy stories like that and much worse. Anyway when he began organising some kind of better representative body for the lay staff ( the Brothers ran the show ) he got called in to the Vic Catholic schools head office in Melb where they had his ASIO file . They said it said he was gay and that he had visited Eastern Bloc countries. There was no ASIO person at the meeting. Then he resigned .
Yes sunshine, that’s how it used to work and may still possibly do.
As to CPA sleepers within the ALP, well, just look at what has happened to the ALP since they all retired or were expelled; it’s gone to the dogs, run by people who report daily to the US Consulate on cabinet discussions. Look, the ALP ought to preserve Gietzelt and keep him on display the way the that Bentham had himself kept as an ‘auto-icon’. I reckon Uncle Ray’s smiling presence in the foyer at Sussex st would have a salutary effect and keep the party on the straight and narrow.
I retreived my NSW State Special Branch file and am in the process of retrieving my ASIO file from the National Library. It won’t say much but will make interesting reading. The trick is to try and figure out who was the rat.
Anyone who thinks it worthwhile can apply to the National Archives of Australia and fill out a form –
Application for access to an ASIO record not in Archives custody. NA will contact ASIO and seek release of any file held. Depending on how long such material may have been held – and their necessity not to compromise any ASIO operative(s)(hence the older the better) – a request will get a response either photocopies or digitised within about 3 months. It may be redacted or refused.
Before chasing ASIO, Archives offer their RecordSearch database for details of ASIO files already in their custody. First up a trip to Canberra might be the best bet. Happy hunting
If the Communist Party ever attempted the strategy of infiltrating operatives secretly into the ALP in order to facilitate a takeover of the country, obviously it failed completely.
I can imagine that ASIO and Special Branch agents would like to believe that it was their unsung heroic counter-efforts that foiled the Communists. But I think any such hypothetical plan for a Communist takeover would have had no chance of success from the start, and any work by ASIO or Special Branch agents to stop it would have been as much totally wasted effort as the hypothetical efforts of the Communist infiltration agents themselves.
So, in sum, I don’t see that it makes any difference one way or the other whether Arthur Gietzelt was secretly a Communist.
Incidentally, on two separate occasions as a university student in the 1980s I consulted a University careers adviser and on both occasions one of the ideas he canvassed with me was the possibility of becoming an ASIO agent. On the second occasion he showed no signs of remembering having mentioned the idea to me before. I never gave it serious consideration, but I always wondered what the story behind it was. Did he raise the possibility with every student who saw him? If not, there must have been something about me that made him consider me a likely prospect. But what?
S-D, maybe it was yr good looks?
I recall a commission of Inquiry into the S.A. State Special Branch, I think the Commissioner was called Fox, who found that the SA Police had accumulated 50,000 files on dangerous subversives in S.A.; he commented that they must have been the most incompetent subversives in human history having failed entirely to seize control of power in S.A. and recommended abolishing Special Branch, which was done. Apparently the main criteria that the Police had for deciding someone was a subversive was that they held views or behaved in ways unfamiliar to S.A. Police.
Remember the S.A. Police murder of George Duncan in 1972 because he was ‘different.’
@jungney
In Qld Special Branch (which was the precursor to ASIO – btw) infiltrated informants into Quakers and anti-fascist/peace groups right from the start. Heard this at the Qld Police Museum lecture series from an ex-special branch detective. He was sort of making light of it, like it was way back in the olden days, but I found it chilling.
State Special Branches co-existed with ASIO, and were generally seen as more focused on political reppression and even more comically incompetent.. They were mostly abolished in the late 20th century, but some have been re-established as counter-terrorism units, I think.
The CPA punched well above its weight in terms of its intellectual influence on the broader left (including the ALP Left) even after it had ceased to be able to do much in its own name. This was the real significance of the establishment of the Socialist Forum group in Victoria in 1984 – the CPA’s Victorian leadership had formed the view that there was no longer any scope for a political party to the left of the ALP and that the CPA should fold itself into a “socialist organisation” that would mainly focus on ideas and policy development, and when this position didn’t win majority support within the CPA nationally they decided to take that option in Victoria.
Even after this, the CPA and its publications (the weekly Tribune and the monthly Australian Left Review) continued to be considered essential reading for Labor people, and from 1986 onwards ALR became a major forum for leading ALP members to discuss the problems of the ALP and potential solutions. Lindsay Tanner was prominent in these discussions and openly acknowledged the ALP Left’s intellectual debt to the CPA.
As for indulgent attitudes to the Soviet Union, these were quite widespread on the Australian Left for much of the 20th century, and one of the ironies is that after the CPA broke with the Soviet Union over the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and subsequently it was met with a chorus of complaints from ALP Left and independent Left people that “you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater”, “you’re more worried about a dog being kicked in Moscow than about workers being exploited in Australia”, etc. I certainly encountered these attitudes in 1989-91 from a couple of prominent ex-ALP identities in the Brisbane Left who have since passed on.
@John Quiggin
The key phrase is “comically incompetent”. I wonder sometimes if comical incompetence reveals a deep-seated psychological wish to not oppress too much. I know at times in my government job I found creative ways to not obey oppressive directives.
No, I think they were genuinely incompetent, Ikonoclast (although not so comical – a few acquaintances were quite savagely assaulted by SA Special Branch coppers).
On a related note, we got a few visits from Commonwealth police back in the day – aaparently one of my housemates had failed to register for National Service, and they eventually noticed it one time he was collecting the dole. Keystone Kops writ small … they thought the blokes in the house were all poofters (we affected long hair), and told my girlfriend she was in terrible moral danger as a consequence. As she told them, where would she be safer than in a house full of homosexuals?
True story about Arthur Gietzelt, which I heard from someone who heard it from one of his staffers.
Gietzelt and this staffer were on the phone, when all of a sudden they heard their conversation being replayed. Evidently the ASIO phone tapping equipment wasn’t working properly. This was the late 70s or early 80s.
JQ, if you’d been employed by Gietzelt, you’d have an ASIO file for sure.
Gietzelt went on to become a minister in the Hawke government. I think he was minister for territories, and was responsible for the ACT getting self government.
Another Gietzelt story. At some point in the late 70s, he was shadow minister for agriculture. He lost his place in the shadow ministry due to some piece of factional bastardry. He took a bunch of files to the new agriculture shadow minister.
“What I am supposed to do with these?”, he asked.
“You can shove them up your arse”, replied Gietzelt.
Rather than just figures of fun, the Special Branches corroded democracy significantly, right back to 1931when Blamey was Chief Commissioner in Victoria, and said by historians to be leading a proto-fascist secret army outside his official duties!
Google Special Branch and look at some of the commentary eg. in 1977, 80,000 files on NSW individuals and organisations and 28,500 on individuals in SA including all but two State and Federal Labor parliamentarians. This at a time when the Communist Party probably had only 2-3,000 members nationally. According to Justice White, the SA files were “scandalously inaccurate, irrelevant to security purposes and outrageously unfair to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of loyal and worthy citizens” Don Dunstan’s Wikipedia entry notes that he sacked Police Commissioner Salisbury for misleading him about the files. Jude McCulloch’s 1999 report KEEPING THE PEACE OR KEEPING PEOPLE DOWN? POLICING IN VICTORIA gives a lot of history.
It’s probably true that political surveillance is away from verbal radicalism and street marches towards “homegrown extremism” with international links, but the Qld anti-bikie laws are giving new authority to state police to move further into a para-military role with associated training, and the “right to be different” is still under threat. Tolerance for nose rings and pink hair is not the diversity I mean here, but the difference referred to in that phrase “it’s better to have character than to be a character”. Marcus’s “repressive tolerance” idea comes to mind.
@John Quiggin
Yes, after ASIO was created in 1949 they happily worked together. Qld’s ‘Special Bureau’ (as it was first called) was formed in July 1940.
Don Lane devoted a chapter to it in his memoir:
He also wrote that he found it ironic that Labor complained about it during the ’60s, ’70s & ’80s since it was formed under a Labor government.
@Paul Norton
I knew some Labor Party activists who referred to Stalin, without irony, as “Uncle Joe”.
More than one later become members of parliament.
@Paul Norton As usual Paul, an entirely accurate potted history of the times. Thanks. I joined a non-CPSU organization full of non-conformists, artists of all sorts including the Jindyworobaks, actors, musos, old radicals who gave lectures about the illegal period and the importance of never backing down. A fantastic collation of nationalists, in fact, more than communists by the time the New Left arrived.
@kevin1
Thanks for that and the links to other sources. Not Commissioner Fox, but white. Funny how this old history comes around again. Viva Assange!
to keep tabs on and isolate the people who can fill the empty spaces in our social connections is an absolute neccesity for the harvesting of consent to be reassured.
from the incredibly efficient intelligence gathering mechanism of the confessional box to the one in four reporting (willing or unwilling) to the east german stasi,when have we been not under surveillance by opaque power cliques?
the disintegration of local groups by intransigent individuals has probably been experienced by quite a lot of us.
@28 the local voices for disunity don’t all come from govt .
at the mo there is a court case where a farmer who lost highly valuable certification due to the contamination of his product by genome invasion is taking action against the person who legally introduced the contaminant..
this is case is being watched throughout the world.
it goes a bit further than the personal.
one aspect is the fact that in the same way different types of tomatos(say) will readily cross pollinate,so wild turnip, wild mustard and the crop in question,canola (used to be known as rape,latin rapa(wonder why they changed it?))have crossed and produced weeds of grain crops in the wheat belt that are immune to expensive pesticides.
so a farmer will spend on weed control and still lose money by having the product down graded by weed seed and on top of that,lose money because the product cannot be sold a gm free.
you think there is no surveillance by the profit seekers of the people getting this info into the public mind?
at another level personal information gathered by barclays bank has been sold.
(ah a free and liberated open market)
the commie bogey?
gawd,it’s dead.
bury it.
Without taking a view on the accuracy of the specific claims made in ASIO files about Arthur Gietzelt’s party affiliations, I’d point out that Mark Aarons was able to compare the contents of his and his family’s ASIO files with his, and their, recollections of events and formed the view that often ASIO agents were quite well clued up on what was happening in and around the CPA. Of course this doesn’t mean that there weren’t also many cases of scandalously inaccurate, speculative and prurient “intelligence” being placed on file.
I once had the chance to see a report on the “intelligence” activities of the NSW Special Branch and it was hilarious at one level but deeply disturbing on another. All that you needed to do to be the subject of a Special Branch file was to park your car near the NSW Labour Council building or to run the vehicle hire company that the May Day Committee hired trucks from for their speakers’ platform.
@Paul Norton
Because the Labor Party in NSW didn’t split, The NSW Labour Council was not merely un-communist, it was full of, if not run by, Groupers. The NSW Special Branch must have had rocks in their heads.
Having been a member of both the CPA and the ALP during the 1980s I can safely say that many of the older generation of the ALP left were much more Stalinist in their political positions than the CPA was. The reason for this lies much more in their roots in European politics than it does in anything which happened in Australia. Europeans leftists generally referred to Stalin as ‘Uncle Joe’, especially Italians, and don’t forget the fact that Greeks had two communist parties as well as PASSOC to which their families in Greece owed their various loyalties. I know less about German Parties but no doubt there is a similar story there. Within the Italian PCI there were numerous political positions about the USSR but there was a lot of distance from it in their stated positions. Grass roots party members were very different as many had been partisans, or their immediate family members had been, and so they were very loyal to that which had sustained them in their hardest times. It is actually a very complex story. It is very important to understand why people thought the way they did.
There’s an enormous amount of information about Arthur Gietzelt, which paints a completely different picture, that hasn’t been published yet.
Eg, Arthur’s ASIO file 1983… “In summary therefore any information passed outside ASIO should be qualified because without further corroborating evidence a statement that GIETZELT was a secret Party member would not stand close scrutiny.” Even ASIO didn’t have any concrete proof, and doubted the quality of their own intelligence. Arthur has strongly denied ever being a dual card carrier of the ALP and CPA. Where’s the presumption of innocence? None of this garbage would stand up in court. The author of these scurrilous attacks hasn’t told anyone that he sought preselection for a seat on Sutherland Shire Council and asked for Arthur’s backing. It was not forthcoming. Sour grapes, get square, conflict of interest? You be the judge.
@Lee Gietzelt
In the absence of credible contrary evidence he should be taken at his word.
But what would it matter if he was a member of the CPA while also a member of the ALP? At the time there were more than a few members of the ALP who were also members of the NCC, which was also a proscribed organisation.
It was just the politics, especially the intra-Labor politics, of the time.
@Uncle Milton
I would be much more concerned at a Labor caucus meeting with those members who would run down to the US consulate and spill their guts about who was saying and doing what at internal meetings. The risk to Aust national sovereignty from US scheming to manipulate the ALP would have to be greater than anything that could be achieved by the CPA, mostly ageing and reformist by the late 60s, outnumbered by more radical elements of the Australian left within activist circles, hostile to the USSR and Chinese communists, and with little influence in mainstream Australia.
@kevin1
I would be much more concerned at a Labor caucus meeting with those members who would run down to the US consulate and spill their guts
@Uncle Milton
Slam dunk!
@Uncle Milton
Are you sure the informant was Shorten? Or may it have been Arbib who was also exposed as reporting regularly to the yanks? I don’t think that Shorten is the first ALP leader to have submitted a job app. to the US prior to being elected. I recall Hawke receiving a yankee scholarship during which period he apparently impressed them with his co-operative attitude.
Everything changes and nothing.@Uncle Milton
@jungney
The Crikey story goes on to say that the Americans’ interlocutor tried to impress his audience by telling them he has an MBA from the Melbourne Business School. That would be Shorten.
In response to Jim Rose @15 in particular, but also picking up on points made by others, WWII didn’t end in June 1941. In the four years following the start of Operation Barbarossa until the war ended most Australians saw it as extremely important that the Soviet Union should win on the Eastern Front and were glad when it eventually did so. Conservative stalwart Sir Frank Packer’s newspapers published cartoons depicting Stalin as a conquering hero borne victoriously across Eastern Europe into Germany riding “six white horses” that bore the names of Zhukov, Budenny and other Red Army generals – I know because I’ve seen copies of the newspapers that carried the cartoon. That was the mood of the times, and one didn’t need to be left-wing, let alone communist or pro-communist, to partake of it.
And in the spirit of the past having many surprises in store, guess which party published a statement on the front page of its national newspaper applauding Israel’s victory over the “semi-barbaric Arab kingdoms” in 1948.
@Paul Norton
That was when Israel was seen as much as a socialist project as a Zionist one.
@Uncle Milton
Yair, ok then. Well, who’s surprised?
FWIW: it’s still happening, the spook state persecution of democratic worker citizens. I have no doubt that the eight hour interview to which I was subject by an ex-deputy Commissioner of Police, NSW, one who was booted out for reasons of corruption, was informed by the department’s alarm (NSW Child Protection) at the ‘discovery’ of my substantial links with the Aboriginal community extending back to the 1970’s and the period of my membership of the CPA.
I also have no doubt that there are spooks all over the Australian environment movement especially the anti-coal and anti-csg mobs. Pinkerton’s, whose history ought to make any democrat shudder, is active in Australia as are the Feds as infiltrators. Watch out for fit blondes with pony tails for whom no-one can account.