Jim Cairns

James Ford Cairns (4 October 1914 – 12 October 2003) was an Australian politician who was prominent in the Labor movement through the 1960s and 1970s, and was briefly Treasurer and the fourth deputy prime minister of Australia, both in the Whitlam government.

He is best remembered as a leader of the movement against Australian involvement in the Vietnam War, for his affair with Junie Morosi and for his later renunciation of conventional politics.

He was also an economist, and a prolific writer on economic and social issues, many of them self-published and self-marketed at stalls he ran across Australia after his retirement.

James Ford Cairns was born in Carlton, then a working-class suburb of Melbourne, the son of a clerk.

He grew up on a dairy farm north of Sunbury.

His father went to the World War I as a lieutenant in the Australian Imperial Forces, but became disillusioned with the war and lost his respect for Britain.

He did not return to Australia.

Following the war he essentially deserted his family, and he traveled to Africa where he committed suicide after a stay of six or seven years.

Many years later, Cairns informed Gough Whitlam that he had long believed that his father had been killed in World War I, but that he was eventually told the truth of his father's desertion.

Cairns attended Sunbury State School and later Northcote High School, where he completed his Leaving Certificate.

Though life during the Depression was difficult with his mother having to work to provide for the family, and with himself having to make a three-hour daily commute by train, he was a good student, making his name at Northcote High School due to entering the school's broad jump championship and winning it easily with a jump of twenty feet and two inches, his competitors producing jumps of sixteen to seventeen feet.

In 1933 Cairns joined the Police Force to have more time for athletics.

He soon became a detective and gained notoriety working in a special surveillance team known as "the dogs" shadowing squad, where he was involved in a number of dramatic arrests.

While working, he studied at night and completed an economics degree at the University of Melbourne.

He was the first Victorian policeman to hold a tertiary degree.

In 1939 he married Gwen Robb (died 2000), whose two sons he adopted.

Cairns left the police in 1944.

Thereafter he was employed, successively, as a tutor and lecturer in the Army and as a senior lecturer in economic history, at the University of Melbourne.

He was a knowledgeable economist and was considered a socialist.

In 1946 he applied to join the Communist Party, but was rejected.

Following this rejection, Cairns joined the Labor Party (ALP) and became active in its left wing.

The Victorian division of the ALP had by this time been infiltrated by the mostly Catholic "Groupers", associated with Archbishop Mannix and B. A. Santamaria, and Cairns was a leading opponent of this group.

The seat had been in Labor hands since its creation in 1949, but had been taken by Liberal Mervyn Lee in 1966, as part of that year's pro-Liberal landslide.

However, a redistribution wiped out Lee's majority and gave Labor a notional majority of six per cent.

Rather than face almost certain defeat, Lee made an unsuccessful bid for the seat of Bendigo.

This proved prescient, as Cairns easily won Lalor with a healthy swing.

In Canberra, Cairns became a leader of the left.

He was a highly effective debater and was soon feared and disliked by ministers in the Liberal government of Robert Menzies, although his personal dealings with Menzies himself, who nearly always felt a healthy respect for an intelligent and principled adversary, were more cordial than might have been expected.

Cairns was also disliked by many in his own party, who saw him as an ideologue whose political views were too left-wing for the Australian electorate.

Like many Labor figures of his generation, Cairns spent most of his best years in opposition due to the Coalition's unbroken run in government from 1949 to 1972.

Nevertheless, Cairns' abilities could not be denied.

In 1955, when the federal Labor leader, H. V. Evatt, attacked the Groupers and brought on a major split in the Labor Party, Cairns sided with Evatt.

At the 1955 election, he stood for the House of Representatives for the working-class seat of Yarra, held by the leading Grouper, Stan Keon.

He completed his doctorate in economic history in 1957, and by the 1960s he was among the Labor Party's leading figures.

At this time he also lectured on Marxist and socialist history, and taught free seminars in Melbourne for working people who were unable to afford tertiary education.

His first overseas trip, which he took place at this time to the US and Asia, had a great effect on him.

Early in 1967, the septuagenarian Arthur Calwell retired as Labor leader, and Cairns contested the leadership, but lost to Gough Whitlam.

The following year, when Whitlam briefly offered his resignation as part of his fight against the left wing of the party, Cairns again contested the leadership.

In what Cairns has been quoted as saying was "... the most active and intense and vigorous election campaign that's ever been run in Australia", Cairns was elected and held Yarra until 1969, when it was abolished at a redistribution.

He then shifted to Lalor in Melbourne's western suburbs.