By Ed Lewis

John Percy's purported "History of the Democratic Party and
Resistance" is dubious history. It's a participant's account, sloppily
written in places, crammed with triumphalist moralising on behalf of
Percy, his brother Jim, and the DSP current, and often careless with
facts. If was history it would be bad history, but in reality it's
Percy's reminiscence, liberally larded with hindight, with little
regard for historical method, especially factual precision.

An example of Percy's looseness with facts is his treatment of the
expulsion of the left from Victorian Young Labor in 1974 (pp 279-80).
Percy writes: "In Victoria the left came close to winning control of
the Young Labor Association, and the ALP leadership reacted by a
wholesale purge in February 1974. Most of the 34 expelled were SWL or
SYA members, but they also included half a dozen ALP members who got
too close to us, who got caught up in the witch-hunt. After a vigorous
campaign, the ALP tops were forced to reinstate us, but the experience
somewhat dimmed our vision of changing things through the ALP."

In fact, it was the Young Labor right, not the ALP leadership, that
expelled the 34 leftists. The right included a number of up-and-coming
Labor careerists who later became prominent, including Robert Ray (now
Senator), Dean Wells (MP in Queensland, for some time attorney general
and now environment minister), Peter Gavin (member for Coburg in the
Victorian parliament for 13 years), Greg Sword (until recently a
prominent official of the Nation Union of Workers), Andre Haermeyer
(minister in the Victorian Labor government of Steve Bracks). Others
such as Mark Plummer, Ross Betts, John Zeleznikov, Mike Harlan and
Geoff Farey appear not to have pursued careers in the ALP and union
movement, or if they did I'm not aware of it.

At the time of the expulsions, none of the Young Labor right-wingers
were prominent in the Labor Party and were not part of the ALP state
leadership. Their careers were yet to be made, although some of them
probably had some links to the top levels of the Centre Unity faction
(which was really the right). It's pretty clear that the YLA
right-wingers cooked up the expulsions on their own, and some of them
probably set their careers back by a few years because of the
embarassment they caused to Centre Unity by their clumsiness, and
because they almost destroyed Young Labor in their attempts to defeat
the left. It took many years for Young Labor to recover from that
incident.

The Victorian Labor Party leadership was strongly influenced by the
Socialist Left at the time. The SL may not have had a majority on the
state executive, but it was probably the largest faction on that body,
and it usually had a majority in alliance with the small traditional
Labor right faction of the ALP leadership that was associated with
Senator John Button. That group opposed the expulsions and supported
readmission of the leftists to Young Labor, and the Socialist Left was
important in securing the readmission of the leftists.

Relying on memory, even the Centre Unity leadership, or at least a
prominent leader, reacted to the expulsions by saying that there
appeared to have been a denial of natural justice. At least one
prominent Centre Unity leader was heard to refer contemptuously to the
YLA right-wingers as "the young aparatchiks".

The 34 were expelled only from Young Labor, and not the ALP, and there
was never any question of them being expelled from the Labor Party.
They retained their ALP membership and were able to campaign in the
ALP for readmission. Many Labor Party branches supported the
readmission of the YLA left.

Thus John Percy is simply wrong to say that "the ALP leadership
reacted by a wholesale purge", unless he has some new evidence of a
conspiracy between the YLA right and the Centre Unity leaders, who at
the very least would then stand accused of betraying their young
acolytes rather badly. If Percy has such evidence, he doesn't cite it,
and it's reasonable to conclude that his latter-day zeal to condemn
the Labor Party has run away with him. This is not history, and not
even accurate reminiscence, but propagandist mythology.

As for the 1974 incident having "dimmed our vision of changing things
through the ALP", if that's the case, how does Percy explain the
continued work in the ALP for another decade of people who had views
close to those of the DSP/SWP, including the publication of an
internal ALP magazine, Labor Militant, in the early 1980s? At the very
least, if what Percy says is true, the continuation of work in the ALP
for another decade would seem to indicate less-than-dynamic leadership
by the central DSP/SWP leaders, if not incompetence.

Another example of factual sloppiness is Percy's invention of a
"Resistance Centre" at 136 or 140 Queensberry St, Carlton, in the
early 1970s (p 181). At that time, the youth organisation was known as
the Socialist Youth Alliance, not Resistance, and the term Resistance
Centre was not applied to DSP-Resistance offices until at least the
mid-1980s. This is a small point, but in a supposed history,
particularly of the micro-history genre that Percy seems to be
attempting, factual inaccuracy about the central focus of the story is
extremely sloppy, to say the least.