The letter that proves what Howard knew about ‘dogs on the docks’
Almost three decades on from a dispute that gripped – and divided – Australia for months, proof of the Howard government’s close involvement has come to light.
It’s September 1997 and Arthur Sinodinos has a delicate matter to raise with his boss, John Howard. The prime minister has been like “a dog at a bone” about cleaning up a waterfront dominated by the powerful Maritime Union of Australia. Howard reckons it’s “one of the most long-lasting pieces of unfinished industrial relations business in Australia” but, 18 months into government, he doesn’t have a lot to show for his efforts to get the big stevedores such as Chris Corrigan at Patrick to change the culture at the ports.
Behind the scenes, Howard’s tough workplace minister, Peter Reith, is up to his ears in secret reports and briefings, as advisers and public servants juggle scenarios for a showdown on the wharves.
The Patrick boss has had plenty of encouragement from Reith’s shadowy adviser, American Stephen Webster, who is preparing a report on how to break the union’s grip on the wharves.
But now Corrigan wants more. He wants to speak to the man at the top and he wants the prime minister’s permission to train non-union workers in Dubai – men to work the straddle cranes when his 1400 MUA workers are locked out.
Sinodinos writes to Howard on September 22, 1997: “This major stevedore wants to see you before 1 October because he is then going to Europe and needs to know whether he should reactivate the training of Australians offshore to cope with a waterfront dispute.”
The letter does not name Corrigan or Dubai, and when the prime minister meets the Patrick boss Corrigan is circumspect. Howard tells him: “I admire your determination, but what you do is a matter for your free and commercial judgment. All I ask of you is that anything you do is within the law.”
The prime minister initials the letter and it’s filed away.
Nine weeks later, when the Dubai exercise is revealed in federal parliament, Reith and Howard deny any prior knowledge of the Dubai training.
The letter – proof of the government’s close involvement in what will become the biggest industrial dispute in Australia’s history – is safely out of sight.
Its discovery now by Macquarie University historian Geraldine Fela shows the prime minister in fact knew much more about the “major stevedore’s” plans than he admitted at the time. Months later – on May 8, 1998 – still under pressure, Howard told Radio 6PR that the suggestion he and Reith knew about Dubai before it was revealed was “a joke”.
And 12 years after the event, Howard wrote in Lazarus Rising: A Personal and Political Autobiography: “When news broke late in 1997 that a workforce … was being trained in Dubai, this was the first that, to my knowledge, anyone in the government had known of it.”
This week, asked if he regretted not telling voters that he knew offshore training was planned, Howard said: “As I am sure you understand, context is everything. I was asked about the Dubai training, and it was that precise question which I responded to. There was no intention to mislead.”
Almost three decades on from a dispute that gripped – and divided – Australia for months, the Sinodinos letter is one of the more important pieces of information revealed in an ABC Radio National podcast, Conspiracy? War on the Waterfront, which takes a deep dive into links between the government, Corrigan and the National Farmers Federation.
Fela, who is writing a book on the dispute and its long-term impact on industrial relations, says the letter, which she found – hiding in plain sight – in official correspondence files in the National Archives, adds to the historical record. “No one ever believed that Reith didn’t know about the whole plan but what the (Sinodinos) letter shows is that not only did Howard know about the offshore training, Corrigan actually sought his direction on the plan,” Fela says. “Corrigan wasn’t just saying: ‘I’m doing this.’ He was saying to Howard: ‘Can I do this?’ ”
The question of who knew what about Corrigan’s plan to evict union workers with the help of security men, some working with dogs, close to midnight on April 7, 1998, may seem academic now, but it has intrigued journalists and unionists for decades.
The government’s involvement was obvious early when, on the night of the sackings, Reith announced it would fund the redundancies for Corrigan.
The prime minister’s role was further revealed by award-winning journalist Pamela Williams when on May 15, 1998, she cited documents proving Howard was “at the apex of a chain of command on the federal government’s docks strategy”. Indeed, the prime minister had signed off on an “interventionist” waterfront strategy in April 1997 – a year before the “dogs on the docks”.
The Coalition had come to power in 1996, promising a tougher approach to unions, and early in 1997 public opinion appeared to be on Howard’s side.
But Dubai – revealed on December 3 that year – and the sackings four months later on April 7, 1998, damaged Corrigan and the government. In the end, thousands of Australians joined “community picket lines” to support the locked-out workers. Many would have had little love for the MUA and its history of hardline union tactics, but the brilliance of the union movement, including the ACTU led by then assistant secretary Greg Combet, was to parlay an attack on the wharfies as an attack on every Australian employee. It was an easier story to sell back then, when unions were stronger and the idea of “scab labour” or crossing a picket line during a strike was still seen by many people as a step too far.
The MUA’s “closed shop” mentality, which often included jobs being passed from fathers to sons, was not popular but the discovery that a government – expected to be the honest broker between capital and labour – was implicated swayed public opinion.
Writing in Inquirer in 2018 – the 20th anniversary of the dispute – workplace editor Ewin Hannan captured the intensity of those weeks.
“At the height of the dispute,” he wrote, “Melbourne’s East Swanson dock resembled a war zone as thousands of unionists and their supporters linked arms in the pre-dawn semi-gloom, their faces floodlit by a police helicopter. Like the post-apocalyptic setting of a Mad Max film, the road before them was blocked by metal spikes, railway sleepers and an overturned semi-trailer … Suddenly, hundreds of police officers marched out of the darkness, slowly advancing during the next half-hour until the groups stared at each other from a distance of a few paces.”
It was a bad look, and as the MUA took to the courts to plead its case that the government, Patrick and the farmers were involved in an illegal conspiracy, the key players found themselves in one of the most fast-moving, dramatic stories of Australian history.
For many, silence was the only strategy. Some have spoken more openly through the years, some have died, but Fela and ABC podcast producers led by Claudia Taranto found many who were happy to trawl through their memories and place their narrative on the record. Howard, Corrigan, Combet and many others were interviewed for the podcast, which re-creates those colourful events.
But it’s the paper trail that intrigues a historian such as the 31-year-old Fela. Reith, who was truly the architect on the Coalition’s side, died in 2022 but he was a meticulous diarist and there are many boxes of his papers held in the Howard Library at the Canberra campus of the University of NSW. The former workplace relations minster heavily curated his public record, according to Fela, but her granular knowledge of the dispute helped her to work her way through the gaps Reith created, ostensibly to throw researchers such as her off the track.
Her big find is part of the so-called Webster report Reith received from his adviser, Webster, on October 3, 1997. The thrust of this secret report has been known but details are revealed for the first time in the podcast. Reith cut it from 80-plus pages to six, removed any identification, but clearly could not resist retaining it in his papers.
At the time, the Webster report was seen by journalists as the “smoking gun” linking the government with the plans. Now, it’s the discovery rather than the content that is important, although Fela argues it shows how the Coalition “had a hand in every stage” of the dispute. Webster was as careful as Sinodinos not to put names down on paper but the scenarios detailed in the report add to the historical details. Webster, a “fixer” who had worked for industrialist Dick Pratt, had started work on a contract in Reith’s office on June 20, 1997, with the specific job of managing the “interventionist” strategy.
His report advances various scenarios but these are no abstract ideas; rather, they are the result of extensive discussions between Webster, other advisers, farmers, stevedores and others.
This week, Howard told Inquirer he could not recall if he read the Webster report “in full” and said: “I probably did not but was aware of its thrust.”
Indeed he was – which is why that document was so tightly held by Reith. It was the kind of paperwork, along with the Sinodinos letter, that would have been dynamite if revealed in 1998 when the Federal Court – and later the High Court – was asked to rule on the conspiracy case.
In the end, the MUA’s claims were never tested in court; the union dropped the case as part of the settlement of the dispute in September 1998.
As part of the research, producers revisited leaked documents from the time and listened to about 20 hours of tapes made by broadcaster Fran Kelly for the 2008 series The Howard Years.
Kelly had interviewed Howard, Reith and Corrigan, but also key advisers Greg Bondar, Mark Textor and transport minister John Sharp along with John Coombs, the MUA boss, who died in 2021.
Says Taranto: “The tapes gave us hours of an interview with Peter Reith, along with the other big political players in the story. Listening to them with fresh ears 15 years after they were recorded, we found new threads to the waterfront story that Fran and her producers couldn’t use or that they missed.”
One revelation is from Bondar, who was Sharp’s ministerial adviser. He told Kelly of conversations with Corrigan (and possibly P&O Ports) in which the stevedores sought financial help from the Coalition.
Bondar said: “Well, the stevedores mentioned to both John Sharp and myself and to Peter Reith that if they were going to take on a fast-track interventionist approach to waterfront reform, who’s going to pay for it?”
Bondar said the cabinet signed off on funds for the “waterfront reform strategy” and this money was separate from the redundancy money for the sacked wharfies (which was later repaid via a levy on the stevedores).
Bondar told Kelly the figure of $10m was canvassed to “compensate the stevedores for a number of costs that they would have had to incur in assuring waterfront reform. But also, I suspect, to perhaps pay for the training of an alternative workforce.”
However, Bondar was uncertain how much was eventually signed off.
Corrigan told the podcast he was proud of the dispute because dock workers had gone on to enjoy a new bonus system based on efficiency.
“We turned them into entrepreneurs,” he said in an interview. “To me, we liberated these people from a communist mentality to a capitalist mentality, where they could work for themselves and think for themselves and behave as decent human beings, and I’m, I’m extraordinarily proud of that achievement.”
Sharp, who was involved in the early planning of an “interventionist” strategy on the wharves before he resigned on September 24, 1997, told the podcast of a meeting in late September 1997 in Reith’s Melbourne office, where Reith, Sharp and advisers met key stakeholders to discuss their plans for waterfront reform.
This meeting (on September 18) was known at the time but Sharp’s frank recollection confirmed for the first time the presence of ministers in the room as details of Dubai were discussed.
“The NFF (National Farmers Federation) and Chris Corrigan came forward with this plan to train an alternative workforce in Dubai,” Sharp told the podcast. “I remember thinking to myself, Chris Corrigan is the man who will do this. Chris Corrigan has got the intestinal fortitude to withstand what will be a very difficult time.”
Fela’s work on Reith’s diaries – with their careful indexing at the front of each notebook that were “almost a direction of how his notes should be interpreted” – yielded much more for her planned book.
She says the diaries revealed that “this was not a minister who was waiting in the wings for the stevedores to move on reform”.
“Reith’s diaries show that all through the first half of ’97, long before the lockout, he is constantly talking to people about how to make big change on the wharves,” Fela says.
“He’s talking to … big business names like Dick Pratt about exactly what should happen. And then once we get to the dispute, his granular detail of what is happening is incredible; he knows the exact road that the police are going to marshal on to try to break the picket line on the 17th of April in Melbourne. He has this very intricate, detailed knowledge of exactly what’s happening on the ground.”
One line in particular stuck with Fela: “As the dispute is wrapping up, Reith and Corrigan are in constant communication. When Reith finally gets the numbers about how many wharfies will be made redundant, he scribbles in his diary, ‘700 bludgers weeded out’. The government always claimed that this wasn’t ideological, that this dispute was a kind of technical question around efficiency, but saying ‘700 bludgers weeded out’ is a pretty ideological statement. It says a lot about how the government viewed the Maritime Union of Australia and the wharfies.”
Fela says the value of “getting into the nitty gritty” of an old dispute is that it can be seen in the context of the decade leading up to the dispute, as well as the decades since.
“This dispute did shape the industrial relations landscape afterwards,” she says. “There’s a very strong narrative in the union movement in general that it was a kind of unequivocal victory. The reality is that’s just not true. The terms on which (the workers) returned were far diminished.”
Indeed, the union, the government and business shared varying degrees of victory and loss in the negotiated settlement of September 1997. Hundreds of jobs were lost, but the MUA was not broken and the union retains high membership and strong bargaining power.
But as Hannan wrote in 2018: “What is undisputed is that Corrigan, the outsider and stockbroker turned stevedore, was a winner, as his big-bang gamble led him eventually to halve his workforce, change restrictive labour practices, lift crane rates and make his company, his fellow directors and shareholders truckloads of money.”
Helen Trinca and Anne Davies co-authored a history of the dispute, Waterfront: The Battle that Changed Australia, published in 2000 by Doubleday, which informed the ABC miniseries Bastard Boys. The ABC Radio National seven-part podcast Conspiracy? War on the Waterfront is available online.
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