THE
GODFATHER

THE
GODFATHER
THE LIFE OF BRIAN BURKE

QUENTIN BERESFORD

First published in 2008

Copyright © Quentin Beresford 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Beresford, Quentin, 1954–
The godfather: the life of Brian Burke/Quentin Beresford.

9781741755565 (pbk.)

Includes index.
Bibliography.

Burke, Brian, 1947–
Australian Labor Party.Western Australian Branch – History.
Criminals – Western Australia – Biography.
Premiers – Western Australia – Biography.
Political corruption – Western Australia.
Western Australia – Politics and government – 1976–1990.

994.10692

Set in 11/16 pt Caslon by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Son of Labor

2 The making of a political operator

3 In the shadow of Huey Long

4 The fixer

5 Crony capitalism: Burke and WA Inc

6 The rise and fall of an ambassador

7 On trial

8 Back from the brink

9 Return of the Godfather

10 An uncertain future

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

To Marilyn
and my family scattered across Australia

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THIS BOOK HAS TAKEN A SUPPORTIVE community to produce. Heading this list are those who agreed to be interviewed. It was not an easy decision for some, given the controversial nature of the subject matter. The contribution of people’s memories, insights and first-hand observations have added a layer of intimacy to the events in the book that could not be gained simply from the public record. I thank the following: Les Ayton, Kim Beazley, Malcolm [Mal] Bryce, Peter Clough, Colleen Eagan, Peter Gormon, Gerard Gormon, John Halden, Bob Kucera, Margot Lang, Dr Carmen Lawrence, Bevan Lawrence, Jim McGinty, Barry MacKinnon, Paul Murray, Brian Peachey, Phillip Pendal, Joseph Poprzeczny, John Quigley, Susanne Roberts, Martin Saxon, Beth Schultz,Tom Stephens, Arthur Tonkin, Michael Thorn,Tim Treadgold, Judyth Watson. It should be remembered that several of these interviewees had distinguished careers serving the public in the government led by Brian Burke and were uninvolved in the events surrounding his WA Inc activities.

Several of those interviewed deserve special mention. Mal Bryce, John Quigley and Martin Saxon made themselves available for repeated interviews, extending over many months. In different ways, each played a central role in the events discussed in this book and, therefore, their participation has added depth to the account. I was very fortunate, too, that Joe Poprzeczny persisted over many months in helping me draw out the implications of Burke’s Marist Brothers education and the half forgotten idea of distributism.

Some people agreed to be interviewed only on the basis of anonymity. I extend my thanks to them.

I appreciate the generosity of those people who gave me access to their own files on the politics of the period. Ready access to Martin Saxon’s extensive and award-winning journalism from the 1980s and early 1990s was invaluable. Saxon’s career reminds us of the crucial role investigative journalism plays in a democracy. Bevan Lawrence, who led an important public movement calling for a Royal Commission into WA Inc, had assiduously collected a wide range of newspaper material to which he gave me access and this added greatly to the depth of my knowledge of the WA Inc era. Also very helpful was Dr Harry Phillips’ extensive writings on Western Australian politics in his role as one of the state’s most respected political scientists.

I am conscious of how much I have been able to draw on the work of individual journalists who have written about Burke over the years. I have acknowledged my debt to these people in the bibliography.

I was also fortunate in having a number of people prepared to read and comment on the manuscript. I am very grateful for those people who reviewed the manuscript for the publishers. Dr Carmen Lawrence, Phillip Pendal and Dr Harry Phillips offered valuable comments. Martin Saxon was also generous with his time in reading and commenting on the draft. However, the reviewers are not responsible for matters of fact or interpretation: the author naturally takes responsibility for the finished product.

Edith Cowan University has supported my research career over fifteen years with grants and study leave. On this project, in particular, I would like to thank several people who are now no longer at ECU: Professor Patrick Garnett, Dr Peter Bedford and Dr Sherry Saggers. Thankfully Mr Bill Noble is still providing great administrative support at the university as he did for me on this project.

My publisher, Allen & Unwin, has my gratitude for its enthusiasm and for providing such a range of professional expertise. It has been a delight to work with Elizabeth Weiss, Rebecca Kaiser, Kelly Fagan, Elizabeth Croger, Ann Lennox, Andrew Hawkins and the rest of the team.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to my research assistant, Bianca McKinney. Her energy and skill at locating diverse sources of information never ceased to amaze me and the information she turned up added greatly to the account of Burke’s life.

I would like to thank Dr Chris Sheil for pointing out to me the value of historian Marc Bloch’s writings on patronage and for providing a dialogue on this vital link to Burke’s career, as well as discussing with me Machiavelli’s ideas.

I never lose sight of the support given by my family to my writing projects. As the cliché goes, writing is a solitary pastime. I am fortunate that my adult children show great interest in these projects and tolerate my absences more than they should have to: my thanks and love to Michelle and William and to my son-in-law, Des, and grandson, Jacob. In Sydney, Matthew, Karen and Bianca are never far from our thoughts.

The dedication at the beginning of this book is the smallest token of my appreciation for the contribution my wife Marilyn made not only to this project, but extending in so many ways over the quarter century of our married life. In this, as in past projects, I have been blessed in having the benefits of her dialogue about the issues and her editorial eye for narrative.

A note on methodology:

I made an approach to Brian Burke regarding his possible involvement in this project. After a short discussion he passed me on to his daughter, Sarah, with whom I had an extended and pleasant conversation.We discussed an offer I made to her father for an interview that would be included in the book as an extended epilogue in which he would have an opportunity to respond to specific issues raised by his career. I also offered to follow up on any contacts the family passed onto me as possible people to interview. However, the family did not proceed with these offers.

Given the requests of anonymity, I have de-identified most interview material unless specific approval was given to be named as a source and/or the use of a name is in some way crucial to the text. However, everybody interviewed did have direct contact with the events covered in this book and all material has gone through an extensive process of verification. In nearly all cases, information which is not attributed complements the public record.

The term ‘Godfather’ has for years had several meanings in everyday language. Its use in the title of this book has been taken from references on the public record to Burke operating as a controlling figure in the Labor Party—a man enthralled by power, capable of attracting loyalists of near total devotion and able to directly influence people’s careers. In this context, Burke has, on more than one occasion, been referred to as a ‘Godfather’ figure in the Labor Party. The term carries no other inferences.

INTRODUCTION

ON 6 NOVEMBER 2006 BRIAN BURKE, former premier of Western Australia, manoeuvred his ample frame out of the double glass doors of the building housing the state’s powerful Corruption and Crime Commission to a waiting media frenzy. The scene was bristling with contrasts. Sporting a panama hat and dark glasses, the burly ‘hard man’ of ALP politics, who had been jailed twice since leaving office, clutched his wife’s hand in a tight, childlike, chest-high grip. The grilling he had just undergone over his nefarious lobbying activities did not suggest the respectable business consultant he professed to be. Yet during this appearance, and on succeeding days, accounts of influence peddling at the heart of government involving a network of compliant and often singularly devoted ministers, backbenchers and local councillors revealed that Brian Burke had provided a uniquely successful service. For his clients in the business world, including some of the wealthiest in the nation, Brian could pull strings, get the best outcome, deliver on access—and it was all done discreetly, secretly. For the six years between 2000 and 2006, Burke acted as a mole for business in the very bowels of government in the most resource-rich state in the nation at the height of its economic prosperity.

In the weeks that followed his first appearance before the Corruption and Crime Commission, the story of his extraordinary prowess as a lobbyist—and the unconventional methods he often used—gradually smeared a number of state and federal Liberal and Labor politicians. While Burke became convenient ammunition in the endless rounds of combat in Canberra, journalist Matt Price summed up public reaction to the extraordinary revelations emanating from the Corruption and Crime Commission when he wrote: ‘All around Australia people are shaking their heads in utter bewilderment. How on earth is a dodgy character like Brian Burke still able to exert such malevolent influence, both in and outside WA?’¹

How indeed? Describing Burke as a ‘dodgy character’ purporting to be a legitimate business consultant just scratches the surface of his paradoxical life: image and reality have rarely meshed. This is clear in each of the three main phases of his public career: premier of Western Australia between 1983 and 1988, ambassador to Ireland for three years after retiring from politics, and business consultant/powerbroker in the Labor Party since the late 1990s. In each of these phases he lived parallel lives; his public persona concealed his private actions. He was among the first wave of politicians in the late 1970s to utilise the power of the media, becoming one of the undisputed masters of political spin. Burke used this skill to mask a fascination for both wealth and power and, importantly, his indifference to many democratic conventions.

In his first phase, this mastery of the media helped him become the most popular political leader in Australia during the mid 1980s. But behind the carefully cultivated charisma, Burke engaged in a world of secret deals with high-risk entrepreneurs which, by the time he left office at the beginning of 1988, had begun to unravel as the WA Inc scandal. During 1991 and 1992 a royal commission exposed the layers in which Burke concealed his reckless and secretive dealings with high-profile entrepreneurs, bypassing the proper processes of government. The after-effects of these deals were staggering: billion-dollar losses to the taxpayers while, at the same time, the Labor Party had received multi-million-dollar donations.What had been Burke’s reason for risking fundraising on this scale? And did he in any way gain personal benefit from the donations?

In the second phase of his career, his parallel life was equally pronounced. While ambassador to Ireland, Burke was again involved in several questionable business dealings. Called back from his post to appear before the Royal Commission into WA Inc, he eventually faced charges which sent him to prison twice during the early to mid 1990s. It was widely thought that his reputation was so damaged that he would never again occupy a public role. Few at the time understood the duplicity which had led to such a dramatic fall from grace. Kim Beazley, an old friend of the family, was at a loss to explain how the Brian Burke he knew was the man exposed during the WA Inc Royal Commission: ‘The fate of Brian Burke is one of the things that mystifies me. Next to Neville Wran, he is the best politician I ever came across, and that things could have gone so bad still baffles me.’²

Out of jail by late 1997, and bitter about his loss of reputation, Burke set about securing his redemption. In the third phase of his career he managed a comeback to public life that must rank as one of the remarkable feats of modern politics. He re-established his authority in the right wing of the Labor Party where he even played an influential role in state and national Labor politics. And he also became a successful businessman through a consultancy he formed with former ministerial colleague Julian Grill. Part of their business strategy was to rebuild Burke’s public image which Burke largely orchestrated by exploiting old contacts in the media. These were used to project the view that Burke had been a scapegoat for the excesses of WA Inc. Yet, while trying to reclaim his respectability, Burke was simultaneously building his business consultancy by ruthlessly exploiting contacts in the Labor government and bending the processes of government decision-making to achieve outcomes for his clients. His business strategies were unconventional and often audacious, revealing a love for intrigue and risk taking.

Having to face his accusers again for actions similar to WA Inc only deepened the paradox that is Brian Burke. He not only seemed unaware of the implications of the powers of the Corruption and Crime Commission— whose genesis can be traced to the recommendations of the WA Inc Royal Commission—but he showed little capacity for self-reflection about his previous fall from grace. Just when many thought Burke had rehabilitated himself as a respectable business figure, he was revealed as a masterful but deceitful lobbyist. Kim Beazley was among the group shocked at reading the transcripts, describing their contents in two despairing words: ‘Dreadful.Awful.’³ Beazley may have acknowledged Burke as a flawed character, but not a malevolent one. For others who had been close to Burke in government, or who had observed him at work in the Labor Party after his second stint in prison, the Corruption and Crime Commission hearings revealed the man they knew only too well: the charmer, the networker, the intimidator. Yet even among this group there was surprise at the extent of his cynical, self-interested activities.

Burke’s ability to disguise his private activities forms the subtext of this book. What shaped Brian Burke to operate in this way? On the surface, the question is not an easy one to answer. He had a strong family background. The son of a prominent Catholic federal Labor politician, he grew up eulogising his father’s commitment to helping society’s battlers. Yet there were great tensions in his father’s world that embroiled the son. Tom Burke was at the epicentre of ‘the Split’, one of the most tumultuous battles in Labor history; an acrimonious, ideological struggle between Catholic and communist influences in the Labor movement. Brian and his brother,Terry, grew up in the shadow of their father’s bitter defeats in this internal struggle.

However personality has also played a role in fostering his covert activities. From the time he was a teenager, Burke stood out as someone possessing a special combination of interpersonal skills. He commanded more than the normal quotient of attention: he had the ‘gift of the gab’, the ability to charm, and a capacity to attract loyalists. These innate skills were nurtured in the bearpit of Labor factional politics. By the time he became premier he had refined these skills into a personalised style of leadership. He adopted much the same approach in his career as a business consultant where his armoury of personal skills disarmed selected cabinet ministers, party officials and, it has been claimed, some senior bureaucrats.

A wealth of material exists on Burke’s character. No other contemporary political figure has been so systematically examined by official inquiry. The WA Inc Royal Commission, the Corruption and Crime Commission hearings and a lengthy Select Committee report into one of his controversial consultancy deals have together generated many thousands of pages of evidence on Burke’s career and these offer unparalleled insights into his character, leadership style, methods of operation and relationships with political colleagues and business. This voluminous evidence is a repository of information on the nature of modern politics.

A capacity for charm, manipulation and deceit is common to many political leaders. This shift to a more intensely Machiavellian approach to politics over recent years has emphasised the moral flexibility of leaders and their need to pursue a competitive advantage over opponents. If Burke had retired from public life as premier in the late 1980s, his career would have served as a classic illustration of this shift. But as a business consultant and an influential powerbroker in the Labor Party, who brought many of the same qualities to the fore again, it became obvious that Burke’s character goes beyond a Machiavellian framework.

Few share Burke’s ability to use personality as a secret weapon. He can readily project a number of different sides to his personality while masking his motives. While some always harboured suspicion about this talent, most were seduced by it. His reputation as one of Australia’s most popular premiers was built on his ability to project charm and a sense of intimacy with the public. Burke was the ‘ordinary man’s’ premier. In reality there was nothing ordinary about Burke’s quest for power nor his fascination with the risk-taking world of business. At the individual level, Burke could extract extraordinary levels of loyalty from those in his close circle through his innate understanding of how to target an individual’s strengths and vulnerabilities. Above all, he understood the power of flattery. This skill enabled him to convince others to engage in his undertakings. Yet flattery and charm were only part of Burke’s arsenal. Occupying parallel worlds necessitated a willingness to engage in secrecy, deceit and obfuscation—Burke was a master of intrigue.

While the evidence shows that Burke used his personal skills in calculated ways, his behaviour defies easy categorisation. He has always possessed some contradictory personality traits.While using his personal skills in often pernicious ways, he has been a devoted husband and family man.When in trouble, Burke has a habit of invoking the unconditional love given to him by his family. Family means a great deal to Burke, beyond even its Catholic underpinnings. While antagonistic, and frequently vengeful to many outside his circle, he has enjoyed trusting relationships with a range of longstanding friends. Burke’s generosity towards this group has a genuine quality. And, for someone whose motives were often self-seeking, he did show flashes of interest in a more equal distribution of social opportunities, especially early in his career. Despite these contradictions, however, I have tried to avoid retreating into the convenience of describing Burke simply as an enigma. There is a core to Brian Burke.

A third component which played a part in Burke’s career is the weakness in the political system in which he operated. Burke’s story is a cautionary one about the vulnerability of democracy. He may have possessed the drive and skills to pursue wealth and power, but his personality and career must be placed in the context of the institutions of democracy that validated his skills, often turning a blind eye to his deployment of them. Consequently, Burke has been able to capture key elements of his party, the bureaucracy, the media and parliament. He is remarkable for not only achieving this degree of control while premier, but reclaiming a large part of it when operating as a business consultant and Labor powerbroker. Why were these institutions so prone to being captured? And how did Burke deploy his skills to do so?

Brian Burke’s is a story like few others in Australian politics.With its succession of triumphs and tragedies, its links to Labor Party history and culture, its tentacles into the world of business, its shadowy links between money and politics, and the power of the media, his career is a case study in understanding the darker sides of modern politics.

CHAPTER 1
SON OF LABOR

RISING TO GIVE HIS FIRST SPEECH IN state parliament in November 1973, Brian Burke paid an emotional tribute to his late father, Tom. He said that ‘any credit that is mine is due to him’.¹ Fourteen years later, when announcing to parliament his impending retirement, the touching bond was undiminished. Describing his father as ‘the greatest single influence on my life’, the soon to be departing premier again felt compelled to acknowledge his debt saying, ‘My achievements are to his credit.’² There is nothing unusual in an adult paying such a tribute to a parent except that Burke’s carried an unusually reverential tone; it was as if he had lived in the shadow of an idealised version of Tom. Continuing his farewell speech, he said he hoped he had ‘brought some of his [father’s] forbearance, humility and unselfishness to this Parliament’.³ Few who knew Brian Burke well at the time would have described him as either humble or selfless. And Burke himself must have been aware of the contradiction: that after five years of engaging in reckless, secretive and high-stakes games with Perth’s entrepreneurs, he sought to leave office cloaking himself in his father’s personality, which he rightly described as thoroughly decent. At the time, the full extent of the contradiction escaped everyone.

So how had the father shaped the son? And why had the son idealised himself through the father? These are tantalisingly difficult questions to untangle because Brian Burke was born into a family steeped in both religion and politics during one of the most tumultuous times in ALP history. Tom Burke would carry to his grave the scars of his battles within the smoke-filled backrooms of the ALP. His young son would witness his father’s sad demise.

Tom Burke, like so many of the post World War I generation, grew up in the shadow of the Great Depression which hit Western Australia harder than most other Australian states. Born into a family of keen Labor supporters in the country near Moora, he was luckier than most in having the resources and determination to survive the catastrophic collapse of the economy. His father, Peter, descended from Irish immigrants, was a battling farmer before buying a cartage contracting business to ply produce to and from the West Perth markets. This provided a stable income while thousands were being thrown out of work. Peter’s sons joined him in the venture. With two horses and two carts, the family toiled from three in the morning until five in the afternoon.⁴

The slump in the price of wheat—the mainstay of the state’s already fragile economy—sparked financial hardship in city and country. This spilled over into political protest and militancy.While he was enrolled at City College to study accountancy part-time, Tom could not have escaped the desperation of the demonstrations organised by the unemployed with their pleas for ‘solidarity or starvation’. The family took an intense interest in politics: ‘Religion and Labor was all we got—father used to eat and sleep the Labor Party.’⁵ ‘Grandma Burke’, Tom’s grandmother, was the enforcer of the moral code, taking it upon herself to round up the local community for attendance at church.

Spartan and morally upright, the Burke family weathered the Depression. But at times it must have appeared to them that the democratic system might buckle under the weight of the hard times. Fear was aroused by several protest rallies. One held in the centre of Perth turned ugly when conflict erupted between the several thousand protestors and the police. As a Labor family, the Burkes were more than likely to closely follow these events. At the intersection of politics and economics lay the family’s other abiding loyalty, the Catholic Church. It could not have escaped the Burkes’ attention that communists were thought to be stirring the pot of protest among the unemployed.⁶ The Catholic Church was growing ever more alarmed at the appeal of communism among its working-class flock.⁷ As the seeds of a struggle for the soul of the ALP were being sown, Tom Burke started to make his way in the world, and into Labor politics.

Fired by his father’s enthusiasm, Tom joined a debating society and practised speaking in front of a mirror,⁸ and upon the completion of his commercial qualifications he threw himself into Labor activism. He had joined the party some time after Labor’s victory at the federal elections in 1929 under leader James Scullin. Soon afterwards the Burke family participated in its first election, a state election which was lost by the Collier Labor government.⁹ Described as ‘an earnest man of high attainment’,¹⁰ Tom had a role in forming the Perth branch of the ALP. This raised his profile and helped him win endorsement to contest the 1937 Federal election, which he lost.

Events over the next few years kept Burke from renominating. Still working as a carter, he married Madeline Orr and later joined the Royal Australian Air Force. Regarded as a young man of potential, and amid the darkening clouds of World War II, Burke maintained his involvement in the administrative affairs of the ALP until 1943, when he became the Labor candidate for the federal seat of Perth. This time he won, earning the affection and support of his intensely political wider family.Tom’s sister Mary lived in the country and regularly sent him her thoughts on rural politics. In fact, when she had the telephone connected in the mid 1940s, the first bill created an almighty commotion because almost all of it had been incurred talking politics with her brother.

On joining the federal parliament, Tom quickly won the affection of both Prime Minister John Curtin and Treasurer Ben Chifley. Chifley, in particular, took a shine to him as Tom stood out among his colleagues for his grasp of financial matters. Loyal and charitable and sympathetic to battlers, he was regarded as a devoted Labor man. He carried into parliament many of the values of old working-class Australia. In his maiden speech he made a heartfelt declaration that Labor would never again allow a ‘man-made depression to ravage the life of the nation’.¹¹ And he argued that good wages were crucial to addressing the pressing problem of lifting the nation’s birthrate. He was an enthusiast for the White Australia policy, too. In one speech, he robustly declared that Australia should not apologise for the White Australia policy, explaining: ‘Racial superiority is not involved. The White Australia policy had to be introduced because unlimited immigration from Eastern countries would submerge the comparatively small white population here; and the whole of Australia’s living and working standards.’¹²

Two years after Tom entered parliament, and in the dying days of the war, a tired and worn-out John Curtin died in office. The by-election for his seat of Fremantle was won by Kim Beazley Sr, and Tom and the new member of parliament quickly became firm friends. They shared much in common. Both were deeply religious (Beazley belonged to the religious movement called Moral Rearmament) and fiercely anti-communist. Tom was best man at Kim’s wedding and later on their families enjoyed social occasions together. Their two sons, Kim Jr and Brian, spent a lot of time in their early years together, and were almost like cousins.¹³ Both men nurtured their political ambitions—Tom dreamed of one day serving as the federal treasurer in a government led by his good friend.

At this time Labor had several fights on its hands which occupied Tom’s energies, none bigger than the one over Labor’s plans to nationalise the banks. Burke became one of the frontline defenders of the plan after Chifley dropped the bombshell following the 16 August 1947 Cabinet meeting.¹⁴ Emerging from the meeting with a wide grin to announce the government’s intention, Chifley seemed unprepared for the predictable backlash.While the plan caused outrage in the financial sector, and sent shivers down the backs of many Australians, Labor members of parliament with bitter memories of the Great Depression were resolute. Tom could remember the attitude of the banks during his father’s failed farming venture in the lead up to the Depression.¹⁵ With his characteristic manner of speaking at the dispatch box with one of his hands tucked in the back of his trouser belt, Tom told parliament that the development of the country was being impeded by the ‘huge burden of capital indebtedness’ endured by farmers embroiling them in ‘a never ending struggle to make ends meet’.¹⁶ With the nationalisation of the banks, farmers along with home builders and home purchasers would be provided with ‘the money they require at a reasonable rate of interest’.¹⁷ Labor members were flooded with letters of protest as the measures passed though both houses of parliament only to be struck down by the High Court in August 1948.

Against this stormy background Tom’s wife Madeline had given birth to Brian on 25 February 1947. He was the couple’s third child.Terry was the eldest child, followed by Anne. The family home was in the solidly middle-class suburb of Wembley, notable for its strong Catholic population and the presence of nuns on the street walking back and forth to the Brigidine Convent. A year and a half after Brian was born, a fourth child came along, Frankie, who was soon found to have Down’s syndrome. Frankie grew up to be a much-loved member of the family, a focus for the affections of not just his brothers and sister but of the wider Burke clan. Brian Burke, in particular, was very supportive of his brother and in later years he publicly expressed his love for Frankie. But Frankie’s first few years were difficult. He was a sickly baby, in part because of the problem he had in swallowing. Madeline, joined by Tom when he was home from Canberra, would sit up all night and feed Frankie with an eye-dropper.¹⁸ For much of the time in his earliest years Brian had to fend for himself as his parents were occupied by Frankie’s special needs. This must have been a source of some anxiety for young Brian, even though his mother said that he was a happy, independent little boy.

Before the advent of air travel, the life of a Western Australian federal member of parliament was a grinding one. Away for six weeks at a time and having to face long train journeys across the endless expanse of the Nullarbor, only the most committed could endure the strain. Luckily, the Burke family home at 61 Simper Street,Wembley provided Tom with a haven. The California-style red brick bungalow, set on a quarter acre block replete with spacious back lawn, vegetable patch and garden shed, displayed the family’s solid but unpretentious circumstances. There was no flashiness about the Burkes’ life: furniture was conventional and the car was an older model.

Tom’s position as a local politician lent a certain élan to the family’s reputation, but it was Frankie who helped cement the family’s links to the wider neighbourhood. He was forever ducking off up or down the street to be found by caring neighbours who would escort him home. Tom loved to chew the fat with anyone who cared to talk about the issues of the day. He also appears to have shaped Brian’s life in one very interesting way as the source of his son’s life-long fascination with stamp collecting, a hobby which, almost unbelievably, helped to send Burke to prison many years later. As a federal politician,Tom received lots of mail and, presumably, from all parts of the world. Collecting was part of the family tradition. Other adult family members kept stamp and coin collections. Starting him at a young age, Tom began interesting his son in the stamps that came through the letterbox as a way of furthering his education, encouraging him to investigate the people and places whose images adorned the stamps. After ripping the stamp off the envelope, he’d say to Brian something to the effect of ‘find out about this and stick it in your album, boy’. Harder to fathom is why Brian kept up such an interest when most other children let such childhood hobbies slip by.

Being an avid collector of stamps was an integral part of Brian’s life. He once described himself to a journalist as ‘having been a self-conscious fat kid with a fascination for stamps’.¹⁹ This is probably a reference to his primary school years when his problem with weight, which dogs him to this day, manifested itself in repeated bouts of binge eating. It is likely he had a form of a compulsive eating disorder linked to anxiety. Childhood eating disorders are known to have links to family traumas.²⁰ In Burke’s case these traumas may have been due to the difficulty his mother had giving him attention after the birth of Frankie and/or his later anxiety when he saw his father suffer at the hands of the Labor Party.

These anxieties could be contained in an otherwise happy household. The kitchen was the hub of the house. Here Madeline carried out her duties as the cornerstone of the family. Loved and admired by the Burke clan, she welcomed everyone with open arms and never had a bad word for anyone. Tom had a likeable and straightforward approach to the world. But, unlike his father, Brian started showing signs of being precocious while in primary school. He could charm the nuns and have other children in stitches of laughter by peeling off one-liners with ease.²¹ Early on he showed an innate ability to have an effect on the emotions of others. Yet up until the age of thirteen his self-confidence was dented by his being short and fat. Afterwards he had a growth spurt which contained his battle with weight.

Certainly the Burkes were an atypical family. More than most, they were drawn into the darkening clouds of international politics. The family’s politics and faith made this inevitable. The end of the war sparked renewed fears among Catholics about the influence of communists in the Australian trade union movement. For years the Catholic hierarchy had been ramping up its denunciations of the evils of communism, alarmed that many of its flock continued to support the Left, ignoring dictates about ‘correct’ political behaviour.²² During the early to mid 1940s left-wing ideas remained popular among many working people, who continued to suffer poor working conditions and low wages. Nevertheless the Communist Party of Australia actively supported the war effort. At their high point in 1945 communists could lay claim to at least a third of the votes at the Australian Council of Trade Unions Congress, and they controlled a number of powerful trade unions even though from this point their influence began to slip away.²³ Intensifying concern about their activities was the shadow of the Cold War and the incipient rise in tensions between a distrustful Soviet Union and a fearful Western alliance. For those connected to the world of politics, the early Cold War years were a time of increasing insecurity. Loyal Catholics felt especially vulnerable. It would have been impossible for the Burkes to ignore the international role of the Catholic Church as one of the main sword bearers opposing communism. Equally the family would have been aware that fear of communism was becoming irresistible political capital for conservative politicians.

Tom became enmeshed in the politics of the Cold War.With communism on the march in much of Asia, the Soviet Union in possession of the ‘bomb’ and with the outbreak of a witch-hunt against communists in the United States, it was inevitable that fear of the perceived threat of communism to the security of Australia would be exploited locally. The alarm over communist involvement in the trade unions became the lightning rod for the political battle within the ALP. Tom Burke was opposed to communism but not only because he was Catholic. Speeches he gave in parliament indicate a strongly felt, anti-communist world view. But this was not the climate for rational enunciations of political philosophy, especially those uttered by a provincial West Australian politician not well versed in international affairs. In fact, such an irrational climate was bound to produce casualties. Tom Burke became one of the saddest casualties of the split in the ALP between its left and right wings. He was politically destroyed by this schism and ended up despised by large sections of his beloved Labor Party.To many Catholics, however, he remained a hero.

The spark that led to his ultimate demise was ignited by an influential Catholic layperson, B.A. Santamaria, whose ‘doom-laden view of the world’ espoused the possibility that, through the ALP’s left wing, the Communist Party could take over the party.²⁴ However fanciful and exaggerated a notion this was, Santamaria, with the backing of the Church, embarked on a crusade to rid the ALP of its communist influences and, in the process, change the party’s policy direction. Forming a secret group called the Movement he infiltrated unions with Industrial Groups committed to his organisation. Although Santamaria repeatedly denied that he intended to ‘take over’ the Labor Party, later research shows he wrote to Melbourne’s Archbishop Mannix telling him that he intended to replace the Labor leadership with Movement sympathisers.²⁵

As the party became increasingly divided against itself, concern over the activities of the Groupers reached Chifley’s notice. His opposition to the involvement of the Catholic Church in politics fell on deaf ears as local priests gave directions from the pulpit.²⁶ Although the Industrial Groups never operated in Western Australia, Tom Burke would still be drawn into the tension over the ideological division between Labor’s left and right wings. This division soon hardened into bitter personal conflicts.

The 1949 election added to the climate of fear as Menzies ramped up his anti-communist rhetoric. Chifley’s efforts to campaign on Labor’s proud record since 1941 were drowned out by Menzies’ clever depiction of the ALP as being too close to communism and too out of touch with middle Australia, Menzies so-called ‘forgotten people’. Backed by a bellicose, anti-communist, conservative press, Menzies capitalised on this rhetoric to distance Labor from the post-war aspirations of Australians by declaring that, if elected, his government would ban the Communist Party. Labor lost the election, although Tom Burke narrowly survived. With the resumption of parliament he must have felt that the underlying tension over Menzies’ proposed Communist Party Dissolution Bill would come ever closer to the surface.

Shadowing Tom behind the scenes was the recently appointed state secretary of the ALP in Western Australia, ‘Joe’ Chamberlain. His career in state and national ALP politics is legendary. Life had forged in him a dogged and unyielding nature and a capacity for bearing a grudge. Born in Britain in 1900 into Dickensian poverty, he quickly absorbed the language and mentality of class hatred. His was a world of sadistic teachers, dole queues, pawn shops and paupers’ funerals. He was conscripted into the British army in 1918 and his hatred of the ruling class heightened as he trudged across the war-ravaged plains of Eastern Europe. At war’s end, he left Britain and migrated to Australia, feeling like he had been ‘rejected from its uncaring womb’.²⁷

When the young Chamberlain arrived in Perth in 1923, he was immersed anew in a life of struggle and bare survival. He worked as a labourer on road construction, railway and drainage jobs before taking up a bush block and trying his luck as a farmer. Recently married and with the onset of the Great Depression, life on the land became a gruelling experience which resulted in ruin. The mental scars from this experience led to his lifelong advocacy of democratic socialism. Returning to Perth, Chamberlain began a new career in the union movement and the climb to union, and Labor Party, leadership. Fearless, uncompromising and with a forensic command of party rules, Chamberlain quickly became a polarising figure in the state and, later, in national branches of the ALP. In 1961 he assumed the position of federal secretary of the party where his stoushes with rising star Gough Whitlam dominated debates in the party. As demonstrated by these encounters, Chamberlain was afraid of no-one.

Admired by a core of party insiders for his courage and genuine principles, he was loathed in equal measure by many of the party’s right wing. Constantly in his sights were people whom he believed deviated from ‘correct’ Labor principles.²⁸ Tom Burke came under his scrutiny over Menzies’ 1950 Communist Party Dissolution Bill. From that point a showdown between the two was inevitable. This showdown became part of the Burke family’s narrative, and centred around Chamberlain’s determination as ‘a cold, ruthless, enigmatic operator of the far Left’ to carry out ‘the political destruction of the moderate Labor man, Tom Burke’.²⁹

Signalling that an American-style McCarthyist witch-hunt for alleged communists would be unleashed on Australia, Menzies’ speech introducing his plan to ban the Communist Party was a masterful example of fear politics. Communists were duplicitous, he thundered. Their cunning ways were cleverly hidden behind a respectable facade. They were difficult to counter, and the union movement was especially vulnerable. In Menzies’ lofty mind, the Australian working class was easy prey for communists’ devious means.³⁰

With tensions already rising over the activities of Santamaria’s Movement, the bill to ban the Communist Party was guaranteed to bring the divisions in the Labor Party into the open. Many in the ALP regarded the bill as a threat to basic civil liberties in that it reversed the onus of proof: those charged with being communists would have to prove they were not. The bill ran counter to Labor tradition and to its support for civil and human rights. When it was introduced in the House of Representatives in March 1950, Labor took a strong stand in opposing it. Trouble started brewing when the bill reached the Senate. Ignoring Chifley’s resolute position, the parliamentary Labor Party agreed to reverse its blanket opposition and sponsor amendments, a process that divided the party’s Federal Executive. The executive split down the middle, and the deadlock was only broken when Tom Burke persuaded the Western Australian State Executive to allow its members of the federal parliament to vote in support of the bill. It then fell to Burke to phone through the decision to Chifley. Pained over the switch in positions, Chifley told him, ‘You could not have done a worse thing to the Party’.³¹

In Chifley’s office at the time he took the call was South Australian Labor member Clyde Cameron, who was struck by his leader’s ashen-faced look of anguish. When he learned the cause, Cameron exploded, ‘That bastard ought to be expelled, you’ve treated him like a son.’³² What prompted Burke to advocate the change is not entirely clear. Chifley thought he was motivated by wanting to protect his slim margin at the next election, but he may have harboured nobler motives in wanting to blunt Menzies’ anti-communist rhetoric as a political tool against the party. Certainly, Burke later wrote to his leader explaining that he had been trying to save the party from electoral defeat, and not simply trying to protect his place in parliament. He offered Chifley a letter of resignation as testimony to his motives which Chifley tore up.³³

Nonetheless Tom Burke had delivered his mentor a humiliating blow. Forced by his executive, Chifley had to recant on his declaration of principle and instruct Caucus to let the bill pass. He had a brutal message for the party: ‘accept your humiliation and we can go forward, recriminate and we shall split.’³⁴

Although deeply saddened, Chifley resisted the urgings of some of his colleagues to pursue recriminations against Burke. According to Clyde Cameron, Chifley loved Tom like a son. Fred Daly, another young Labor member, thought that Burke was the ‘pride of Chifley’s eye’ and was being groomed to be a future treasurer.³⁵ But there was no hiding that Chifley felt shattered. A few weeks later he had a heart attack and died. Tom’s reaction to his leader’s passing has not been recorded. He might well have felt deep regret given the stress he had placed his mentor under during the last weeks of his life. His reaction can be surmised from his son Brian’s idolisation of the Labor icon—the ex-train driver whose sweetness of temperament was combined with a faith in the ‘light on the hill’. Brian proudly placed a signed, framed photograph of ‘Chif ’ on the wall of his office when he became premier.

Less forgiving of Burke was Joe Chamberlain, as Lyla Elliott, his secretary, remembered: ‘I don’t think Joe Chamberlain ever forgave Tom Burke for what he did to Ben Chifley . . . They were arch enemies from that time until Tom died in 1973.’³⁶ Chamberlain became something of an anti-Catholic in the early 1950s. Just as Santamaria had developed conspiracy theories about the extent of communist influence in the labour movement, so Chamberlain had succumbed to a similar mindset about the influence of the Catholics. He was strongly influenced by The Catholic Church Against the Twentieth Century, Arvo Manhattan’s controversial book which investigated the Church’s extensive international involvement in civic affairs. According to Chamberlain’s son Harold, the book ‘greatly disturbed Dad because he read it at the time the Catholic Church was trying to proselytize its private entrepreneurial philosophy in the Australian Labor Party with the concurrent goal of destruction of Labor’s doctrine of socialism’. From then on, Joe became a fierce opponent of the ‘remorseless tentacles of the Catholic Church’.³⁷

By contrast, Tom Burke had always been a dedicated, if not doctrinaire, Catholic. Attending mass on Sundays and observing all the church rituals was part of his family tradition and he was friends with many of the Catholic members of the Labor Party.

These personal and political divides instilled suspicion, distrust and hatred between the two men. After circling each other for months, Burke and Chamberlain’s paths finally crossed at the party’s Federal Conference held in Hobart in March 1955. Prior to the conference new Labor leader, Dr Bert Evatt (whom Burke had unsuccessfully stood against following Chifley’s death), denounced the Groupers at work in the party as disloyal Labor members, stating that their methods of infiltration resembled those of both the fascists and communists. Evatt instigated an investigation into the Victorian branch where he believed most of the trouble was occurring. In Western Australia the scramble for the election of delegates to the Hobart conference witnessed Tom Burke mounting a concerted attack on Chamberlain in a party forum which was greeted with prolonged applause.³⁸ Chamberlain had been humiliated. The hatred between the two was now at a flashpoint.