Vince Gair

Vincent Clair Gair (25 February, 1901 – 11 November, 1980) was an Australian politician. He served as Premier of Queensland from 1952 until 1957 when his stormy relations with the trade union movement saw him expelled from the Australian Labor Party. He was elected to the Australian Senate and led the Democratic Labor Party from 1964 to 1973. In 1974 he was appointed Australian Ambassador to Ireland by the Whitlam government.

Early life

Gair was born in Rockhampton, of mixed Scottish and Irish parentage, and raised Roman Catholic. His parents were founding members of the Labor Party in Queensland in the 1890s. He began work with the Department of Railways upon the family's move to Brisbane and in 1916 he joined the Australian Labor Party (ALP). He married Florence Glynn in 1924. She died in an accident five years later.

Parliamentary career

The state electorate of South Brisbane was held from 1929 to 1932 by Neil Macgroarty, Attorney-General in the government of Arthur Moore. Macgroarty was influential in creating the Mungana Royal Commission to destroy the political career of Ted Theodore, and had thus incurred the displeasure of the influential James Duhig, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane. It was rumoured to be the personal intervention of Duhig, wishing to find a Catholic candidate to unseat Macgroarty, that saw Gair win ALP preselection for the seat. The Moore government lost office in the elections of 1932 in which Gair unseated Macgroarty.

Gair worked at consolidating his hold on the marginal electorate, at which he was largely successful except in the elections of 1938, when a newly-formed Protestant Labor Party targeted his seat. He fended off the challenge and retained a low profile in Parliament. In 1941 Vince and Florence Gair's only daughter died, an event which affected him deeply. He remarried, to Ellen Sexton in 1944 and the two had two sons.

Gair was a backbencher for ten years during the William Forgan Smith government before being appointed as Secretary for Mines under the elderly Frank Cooper in 1942. The same year he became Minister for Labour and Employment (later Labour and Industry), and in 1947 he was elected by his colleagues as Deputy Premier. In 1950 he also became Treasurer.

Unusually for a Labor minister, Gair had not previously held office in a trade union. Many Labor parliamentarians in Queensland in particular were closely aligned with the Australian Workers Union (AWU). Premier Edward Hanlon was the first in a succession of Queensland premiers not to be linked with the AWU, a fact that had seen a reduction in its influence. Gair also was not associated with the AWU, and in fact had a strong personal dislike of the AWU's Queensland president, Joe Bukowski, dating back to their childhoods in Rockhampton when Bukowski bullied Gair. Gair was determined not to be beholden to AWU power, an important determining factor in many of his actions as Premier.

In 1948, the Industrial Groups associated with the Catholic Movement of B. A. Santamaria were introduced into Queensland to combat the influence of the Communist Party of Australia in the trade unions. The Industrial Groups (whose members were known as Groupers) were supported by Gair, who hoped to use them to cement his personal power base within the organisational wing, as well as by Bukowski and the AWU. When conflict with the Groupers precipitated a national split in the ALP, leading to the formation of the breakaway Democratic Labor Party (DLP), the national organisation of the AWU swung its support behind ALP leader Dr H.V. Evatt and disbanded the Groups. This would later deprive Gair of a potential source of support within the party organisation.

Hanlon died on 15 January 1952 and Gair, having been Acting Premier since the previous August, was elected by the ALP Caucus to succeed him on 17 January.

Premiership

Gair came into conflict with Bukowski when the AWU in 1955 began making allegations that there was corruption in the process of granting and extending pastoral leases in the state. In July the AWU executive met with Gair, who according to them promised an inquiry, which Gair denied. Bukowski publicly expressed a desire to appear before the Bar of Parliament to detail his allegations, in which he was supported by Frank Nicklin, leader of the Opposition, but Gair defeated his motion in parliament. In February 1956, Ian Wood, a Liberal Party Senator for Queensland, alleged that the government had demanded payments from pastoralists in order to ensure the extension of pastoral leases and that these payments had been diverted to Labor Party funds. Gair immediately set up a royal commission which resulted in the laying of criminal charges against Lands Minister Tom Foley. Foley was acquitted of the charges but was found by the Royal Commission's report to be responsible for the improper solicitation of party donations, for which he was sacked as a Minister and expelled from the Labor Party.

Gair discovered that the AWU had gained its information about the scandal from a senior public official, Vivian Creighton. Gair pressed for Creighton's resignation on the grounds of official misconduct. The parliamentary dismissal of Creighton raised claims that the government was acting out of vindictiveness, and was criticised by the AWU. Nevertheless, Gair easily won the elections of May 1956.

When the AWU uncharacteristically endorsed strike action by shearers, Gair raised the union movement's ire by negotiating with the federal government in order to secure the export of wool shorn by non-union labour. Gair was ultimately successful in a negotiated end to the strike, but the effect was to cement an unlikely alliance between the militants of the Queensland Trades and Labour Council (TLC) (represented by Boilermaker's Union secretary Jack Egerton) and the AWU.

Out of the several issues over which Gair and the union movement came into conflict, the most severe was to prove to be that over the introduction of three weeks' paid leave to workers under state industrial awards. This had been part of the party's election platform since 1953. Gair announced in 1955 that although the state's finances did not permit the extension of annual leave, the government would extend entitlements to long service leave. This compromise was regarded as insufficient by both the TLC and the AWU, and in November they moved in the Queensland Branch's Central Executive that legislation introducing the leave be introduced by the parliamentary party.

The majority of Gair's Cabinet refused to accept what it saw as direction from the Central Executive, and in February 1956, Bukowski and Egerton organised the numbers at the next Labor Party convention to vote in favour of a leave increase. After private discussions it was revealed that Gair would introduce the leave sometime over the course of the year. After the election, however, Treasurer Ted Walsh revealed that the state's budget was in deficit and Gair claimed that extending leave would be financially irresponsible.

The parliamentary party found itself in deadlock with the organisational wing and the trade unions, with the TLC and the Central Executive maintaining pressure on Gair throughout early 1957. Gair still refused to budge, thinking that the executive would not dare to expel him. For its part, the QCE did not believe that Gair would take many of his caucus with him. The QCE finally expelled Gair on 24 April. He took a total of 25 defectors from the ALP Caucus with him, including all the Cabinet except Deputy Premier Jack Duggan, to form the Queensland Labor Party (QLP). Gair tried but failed to gain Country Party support for his continuation as Premier. On 12 June, the ALP, now led by Duggan, crossed the floor of Parliament and voted with the Country Party and the Liberal Party to deny supply (that is, the money needed to govern) to what was left of the Gair government.

An election was called for 3 August, in which both the QLP and the ALP lost ground, although Gair was re-elected at South Brisbane as a QLP candidate. Nicklin became Premier and for the first time in 25 years, a Labor Government was out of office in Queensland. The ALP would not return to power in Queensland until 1989.

DLP leadership and the "Gair Affair"

Although he was no longer Premier, Gair continued to lead the QLP, which was reduced to 11 members after the 1957 election. However, he was defeated at South Brisbane at the 1960 state election. In 1962 the QLP merged with the Democratic Labor Party, which had previously been largely inactive in Queensland, and Gair contested the Senate elections of 1961 for the DLP unsuccessfully. In 1964 he was elected to the Senate, where he became the DLP's leader, a post he held until 1973. During his time in the Senate he advocated a strong defence and foreign policy based on anti-Communism. The DLP generally sought the middle ground on domestic issues. Gradually his anti-Communist views became outdated but he stubbornly refused to modify them in the face of developments like Richard Nixon's détente with China and Russia in the early 1970s.

Gair subsequently became disillusioned with the DLP, who forced him to resign as leader in October 1973. In 1974, when the Labor government of Gough Whitlam was desperately attempting to gain a majority in the Senate, Whitlam tried to create an extra vacancy in Queensland for the upcoming Senate elections so as to gain the ALP an increased chance of winning an extra Senate seat. Whitlam approached Gair with the offer of the position of Ambassador to Ireland. Subsequently, when knowledge of the appointment had become public, there was an outcry from the conservatives. The Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen decided to thwart Whitlam by causing the issue of writs early for five, rather than six, Senate vacancies.

A group of Country Party Senators kept Gair occupied in their office, drinking beer and eating prawns, while Bjelke-Petersen saw the Governor of Queensland (Air Marshal Sir Colin Hannah), to have the writs issued; and as a result, Gair failed to resign his Senate position in time. (This delaying tactic was later known as "the Night of the long prawns": Gair later said that he was perfectly aware of why he was being feted by his colleagues, some of whom were former enemies.) Gair's actions helped to precipitate a double dissolution. After the election, held on 18 May 1974, the ALP remained without control of the Senate. Whitlam was later dismissed when the Senate refused to pass supply bills (see Australian constitutional crisis of 1975). The 1974 election marked the electoral demise of the DLP, which lost all four of its remaining seats, largely as a backlash against Gair's actions.

Gair took up his post in Ireland, but when the Fraser government took office after the 1975 elections, Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock had Gair recalled. Gair died in November 1980 in Brisbane, aged 79, on the fifth anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam government.

Further reading

*Costar, Brian. "Vincent Clair Gair: Labor's Loser". In Murphy D, Joyce R, Cribb M, and Wear, R (Ed.), "The Premiers of Queensland" pp. 268-285. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. ISBN 0-7022-3173-8.