Fred Paterson

THE PEOPLE'S CHAMPION: Fred Paterson, Australia's Only Communist Party Member of Parliament

by ROSS FITZGERALD

University of Queensland Press, 1997, 312 pgs, $26.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Fred Paterson - Rhodes Scholar, ex-Theology student, brilliant athlete, WW1 veteran, prominent radical barrister and communist pig farmer - has the distinction of being the only socialist ever elected to any Parliament in Australia.

Paterson, who died in 1977, was the CPA candidate for the Queensland state seat of Bowen and was elected by this strongly working class and small farmer electorate, not once but twice, in 1944 and 1947, until the State ALP government gerrymandered the electorate out of existence in 1950.

Ross Fitzgerald, History Professor at Griffith University, has written the first full-length biography of Paterson and a fine biography of a fine life it is.

Born the son of a pig farmer in 1897 in Gladstone, Queensland, Fred's exceptional academic potential saw him scholarshipped into the Grammar school and university system, producing the “pious, patriotic, unpolitical” youth he was. He may have become a life-long defender of the capitalist system of privilege were it not for his stubborn insistence on such working class values as fairness and equality.

His political awakening was guided by a principle he took both from the Jesus of his early Christianity and the Lenin of his later communism: judge people not by what they say but by what they do. Serving in France in WW1, he saw that war was not about defending freedom but defending profit. The Church did not practice Christ's philosophy but bolstered the status quo. The ALP government governed not for the workers' benefit but for the bosses.

Fred pursued the political logic of his social justice concerns into a thorough-going anti-capitalist commitment. He joined the CPA in 1920, remaining a member for 57 years until his death. Fighting off attempts by the government, the Bar Association and solicitors to prevent his becoming a barrister, Fred became a Rumpole of the Revolution, defending the CPA, trade unions, the unemployed, migrants and others that he termed “the useful people”.

His legal work, free legal advice, strike support work and his stump oratory won him a wide popularity. Elected to the Townsville City Council in 1939, he went on to win the State seat of Bowen from the ALP in 1944 with 44% of the vote.

As Fitzgerald notes, the win was also a reflection of the strength and popularity of the CPA during the Depression and war years, especially in the 'Red North' of Queensland. In 1932, for example, the CPA had eleven branches in Bowen alone; in 1944 there were around 4,000 CPA members in Queensland in an “astonishing 200 factory, locality and countryside branches”.

Fred marked himself out as unique amongst the parliamentarians of his day, and ours, by declaring his class loyalty rather than representing the whole electorate (which by virtue of their economic power means governing for the rich); by extensive reporting back to his constituents; and by maintaining his extra-parliamentary activism.

It was his support for the 1948 rail strike that led to the vicious and cowardly assault on him by a plain-clothes Queensland detective during the 'St Patrick's Day Bash' when 200 cops attacked a march by unionists. Fred suffered severe head injuries, from which he never fully recovered, and suffered from a loss of drive and energy.

Paterson's career was ended by a combination of the government's electoral gerrymander which split his working class support base in two, and the CPA's decline during the Cold War. In 1950, his vote shrank to 13%.

Moving to Sydney in 1952, Paterson maintained some legal activity around such issues as the High Court challenge to Menzies' Bill to outlaw the CPA, charges of ballot-fraud against CPA-led unions, the 'Petrov' Royal Commission on Espionage, and legal advice on defamation for Tribune. He died from stroke in 1977, aged 80.

Fitzgerald not only gives us the public Fred, the MLA and barrister, but also the private Fred - the austere, non-smoking, non-drinking, non-swearing yet warm and humorous man, and the committed communist who never went much for the organisation side of the Party, and who was often at odds with the national CPA leadership when their slavish adherence to the Moscow line put them out of touch with Australian political reality.

Fitzgerald flirts with a thesis that Paterson was an atypical communist, less attached to 'ideology' than to a pragmatic, left-labour reformist tradition. There certainly was an element of this in Paterson, and the CPA generally, in the Party's attempt to mould Marxism to the political consciousness of Australian workers but, as displayed in Fitzgerald's book, Paterson and his Party comrades always maintained the goal of the working class taking over political and economic power from the Australian capitalist class, whatever the false directions Stalin might have led them to.

We can only agree with Fitzgerald, who “is enamoured neither of mainstream political parties nor of the workings of the parliamentary system”, that “as the twentieth century closes, much of the pattern and shape of Paterson's politics deserve emulation in Australia, especially by those who claim to be of the labour left”.