My secret undercover life

The 1970s were an exciting time for a teenage conservative.

1979 : PM Gough Whitlam (C), Bob Hawke (L) and Lionel Murphy planning Labour party campaign in 1979. pic News Limited.

“Champ, we were wondering if you would consider undertaking a special mission for us. It involves a little bit of danger but mainly involves a cool head and an ability to absorb what’s going on around you.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“There’s a Trotskyist youth group which has advertised a weekend training camp. And it’s open to anyone to apply to go along. This is a rare opportunity for us to get inside them and find out a lot about who they are and what they’re doing. We don’t know how important they might be but we want to find out what they have planned for Australia.”

The person offering me the mission, should I choose to accept it, was Bob O’Connell, the NSW president of BA Santamaria’s anti-communist National Civic Council.

My involvement with the NCC started young. My father had been active in the Movement, the NCC’s forerunner which battled the communists in the unions in the 1940s and 50s.

O’Connell’s son was a classmate of mine at Christian Brothers Chatswood, when I was a Year 11 student there in 1973. In those days I was a great one for attending television studio current affairs audiences and trying to get noticed by asking questions. I was a right-wing prototype of the perennial inner-city audience for the ABC’s Q&A program, those young people who believe the opportunity to ask a pointed question on national television is the exercise of an inalienable human right.

I must have had some recent media appearance, as on one parent-teacher night Bob got his son to introduce us. O’Connell was a gentle giant of a man, about nine feet tall, a true gentleman, a wonderful friend to young people, an accomplished political organiser, a kindly uncle really, though capable of being stern on occasion.

Bob Santamaria, on the other hand, was short and stout, bald like O’Connell, with an aquiline nose. They were known within the NCC as Big Bob and Little Bob. The NCC and its world of intrigue and semi-covert political action dominated my life for a couple of years.

I was nervous about going to the Trotskyist camp, but willing to do so. My parents forbade it on the grounds that the moral behaviour at a communist youth camp was likely to be unpredictable or worse.

Jeff Phillips was a student activist a few years older than me. He was a great fellow, tall, willowy, something like the character Psmith out of PG Wodehouse, endlessly witty, always laughing, and as game as Ned Kelly. Jeff would later become a union official with first the shop assistants, then the ironworkers. Then he would go to the bar and become a Senior Counsel and eventually become modestly active in the Liberal Party.

Jeff went along to the Trotskyist camp instead with another bloke, the son of one of the NCC office staff. This guy was a member of the Army Reserve and made the mistake of taking his army kitbag. He was expelled from the camp after the comrades discovered his militarist connections.

I was in and out of the NCC’s Sydney headquarters — a modest office space in Porter House, in Castlereagh Street — all the time and went to work there full time for a few months at the end of 1974 and the start of 1975.

The NCC got a tip-off from within the federal government or its bureaucracy that a federal raid was being considered on the NCC offices. This followed the raid by the Commonwealth Police, under the direction of attorney-general Lionel Murphy, in March 1973 on ASIO headquarters in Melbourne.

Murphy ordered the Commonwealth Police to break into ASIO headquarters and secure all the files and safes where confidential documents were held. All the ASIO staff were prevented from going to their normal desks and kept at the front of the office.

It was an extraordinary event in Australian history, utterly unthinkable today. It reflected the paranoia of the Labor Left at the time towards ASIO and especially reflected Murphy’s poor judgment. Gough Whitlam later described the raid as one of his government’s greatest mistakes.

Murphy wrongly thought ASIO was keeping critical information on Croatian terrorism in Australia from him and he also thought there was a big ASIO file on him.

Harvey Barnett, the head of ASIO under Bob Hawke, said the raid “sent shock waves around Australia and the Western world”.

Barnett wrote: “For a cabinet minister to intrude in such an undisciplined and peremptory way into the sensitive centre of a nation’s security organisation — even though he was the minister responsible — caused grave concern at home and abroad. Many thought the Westminster system was at risk and wondered if they were witnessing the emergence of a new and draconian political order of the left in Australia. Usually the first action radical political regimes take in any sort of coup d’etat situation is to make a grab for the records of the security service … Australia’s overseas allies were aghast and concerned.”

Barnett was no cigar and brandy balloon ASIO reactionary. Hawke in his own memoirs writes warmly of Barnett.

We in the NCC office were also aghast and concerned, especially when we got the tip about a forthcoming raid on our offices.

Whether this raid was to be carried out by the Commonwealth Police or by ASIO itself was unclear. If it had been carried out by ASIO, the NCC would almost certainly have had some precise, advance warning.

But any such raid would have been outrageous. There would have been no national security justification for it. The NCC, unlike the communists, was not receiving any money from foreign governments and all its operations were normal legal campaigning within a democratic society, if admittedly a little exotic.

The political outcome of such a raid would have been dynamite, however. If the NCC’s files had been seized and published this would have gravely damaged the many figures on the Labor Party’s right who worked so closely with it, even though it was a banned organisation for Labor members.

For a few days hundreds and hundreds of files were shredded in our Sydney office, many of them union pamphlets and how-to-vote cards. This was a tragic loss to history. The NCC resembled the Ottoman Empire in its attention to record-keeping. Peter Westmore, who ran the NCC’s student activities in Sydney, would write a weekly report to national headquarters on his activities.

Like all important communications in the NCC, these letters were cut in half and posted in separate envelopes to separate addresses, later to be sticky taped together for reading. This was a security measure which even at the time struck me as a bit over the top.

Even after shredding a lot of documents, just to function the NCC had to keep some records. Fearing a raid, the NCC had lawyers all ready to apply for injunctions to prevent the publication of any seized material. For a few weeks, there was a roster of volunteers who slept overnight in the office on a camp bed, not to resist any raid but to urgently ring the lawyers if such a thing happened.

Some days Jeff was posted on a desk outside the office to give an early alarm if a police or ASIO raid should take place. Displaying a taste for absurdist irony, during this time Jeff read Frank Hardy’s agitprop novel, Power Without Glory, the authorised far-left fictional interpretation of Santamaria’s mentor, Archbishop Daniel Mannix. In the end, there was no raid on NCC offices.

NCC activism embraced all kinds of strange activities.

One weekend a group of us drove down to Port Kembla to canvass voters for an internal election in the ironworkers union. Although the Right controlled the ironworkers nationally and in NSW, the Left had won control of the Port Kembla branch.

Naturally the union’s head office had a list of the names and addresses of all its own members so the Port Kembla right-wing ticket, sponsored by the union leadership, was able to send leaflets to all members entitled to vote.

Our job was to go and knock on the doors of members’ houses and offer them another leaflet, canvass according to a few clear guidelines why they should support the anti-left team and offer any practical assistance we could.

Privately, O’Connell told me how important these campaigns were: “Champ, the reason all the hard heads in Australian politics have to take the NCC seriously is because we can run campaigns like this.

“If you want to run a campaign against communist control of a union there’s only two groups that can do it, us and the NSW Labor Council, in other words the right wing of the ALP. The NCC can get a team together to run in the union, we can produce the leaflets and if necessary get a group of volunteers to address thousands of envelopes to post the material out. And we can get groups like we’re getting to go down to Port Kembla and deliver literature and canvass union members’ homes. All the hard men of Australian politics know that, and that’s why they have to take us into their calculations.”

It was heady stuff to work for a few months in the office full time with Bob and Peter. Peter was a genuine intellectual who lived with his wife, Carmel, in a tiny terrace house in inner-city Newtown, aptly enough in Newman Street. He researched the Petrov spy affair for a cover story in Quadrant magazine. My main job in the office was to try to recruit high school leavers for the NCC’s university groups.

I would ring Catholic high school principals and tell them I was representing the democratic clubs at the Sydney universities and that we promoted Catholic social teaching. I would then ask if there was anyone who had just done the HSC they would recommend I get in touch with. Some principals invited me out to their schools to look over their students’ HSC results and I could get the contact details of the people I thought prospective. Privacy issues were less of a worry then.

The NCC, under the cover of the Democratic Club or some such, would then write to these students and I would ring and go and see the ones I thought most likely. It is actually a pretty hard sell to interest kids in serious political activism and I don’t think I had any great recruiting success.

Years later, as university undergraduates, Tony Abbott and I would make the odd recruiting trip to the countryside, to meet high school students who had been recommended.

Not all our recruits were Catholic. If we had thought public school principals would give us the same access I would have rung them too. The Democratic Club was after any sensible student who would join and there were always plenty of non-Catholics involved.

As a high school student, with Peter’s assistance I set up a little outfit. The naming was left to me. I thought it was important that we not look like conservative fuddie-duddies so we ludicrously called ourselves the Progressive Students Association. Given the far-left connotations of the word progressive, a term often used by communist front organisations, never has there been a more misleadingly named group than ours.

Our only corporate work was producing a little two-page propaganda sheet, with the equally awful name of High Cool. Our one big triumph came when we wrote to A Current Affair asking to have our voice heard on some issue or other. To our astonishment, we were invited to send two representatives along to be interviewed on TV.

In so far as the Progressive Students Association had any members at all these consisted of me and Jeff, so we succeeded in getting 100 per cent of our membership interviewed on television.

The NCC always had some kind of relationship with ASIO. ASIO studied the communists for several reasons. Many communist groups received money from the Soviet Union and other foreign governments. Some used violence for political purposes. Some facilitated espionage. ASIO got information from the NCC and vice versa. So there was always a clandestine, secretive, slightly exotic air about the NCC.

I loved it.

Edited and adapted from When We Were Young and Foolish (Allen & Unwin, $33), by Greg Sheridan, out tomorrow.