Half-life: The NDP: Peace, protest and party politics
By Gillian Fisher
State Library of NSW Press, 1995. 154pp., $14.95
Reviewed by Margaret Gleeson
The decision by the federal ALP government, in its first year in office, to give the go-ahead for the worlds largest uranium mine at Roxby Downs (contrary to the long-standing ALP policy of opposition to uranium mining) was the catalyst for the formation of the Nuclear Disarmament Party in June 1984.
The governments decision was opposed within its own ranks and within the ranks of the peace movement, which had developed an orientation to the ALP during the large anti-nuclear mobilisations of the early 1980s.
When the NDP burst onto the national political scene (timed to coincide with the ALP national conference in Canberra), it immediately struck a chord with the masses of anti-nuclear activists who, recognising the ALP sell-out, were looking for a political expression of their demands.
The NDP was set up to provide a vehicle in the 1984 federal election to campaign around three basic demands: to close foreign military bases; to prohibit stationing or passage of nuclear ships and planes; to stop the mining or export of uranium.
In just a matter of weeks from its national launching, the NDP membership grew from tens to thousands and mounted election campaigns in all states and the ACT. One senator was elected in 1984 for Western Australia — Jo Vallentine, who left the NDP at its first national conference in Melbourne in April 1985 and took her seat, describing herself as a "senator for nuclear disarmament".
This book gives an account from the perspective of one of the NDP Senate candidates for NSW, Gillian Fisher, who was one of the group (along with Jo Vallentine, Jean Melzer, and Peter Garrett) which withdrew from the NDP at the Melbourne conference.
It draws heavily on Fisher's personal reminiscences and notes taken at the time, plus interviews with 10 of the 28 people whom she lists as "major players" having "shared the stage, the office and the campaign trail with me and thereby ended up in my story". Of these 10, only one, Robert Wood, was not a member of the group which left the NDP at the Melbourne conference. Fisher writes that the "founder" of the NDP, Michael Denborough, refused her invitation to be interviewed; she does not detail the basis for her selection of those interviewed.
The book is divided into seven chapters roughly coinciding with the chronology of events. It is disappointing in its lack of analysis. The demise of the NDP is "explained" by Fisher by the fact that membership was open "to everyone who supported its platform", thus preparing "the ground for inevitable disputes".
As one who was involved with the NDP from its earliest days in Canberra, what I find most disappointing about this book is the lack of any feel for the membership of the NDP, estimated in the thousands of new young activists, and the new kind of party which was beginning to take form, based on a genuine desire for grassroots democracy and a non-centralised structure.
However the viewpoint presented by Fisher, as a member of the group which split from the NDP, is worth reading, particularly as it debunks the innuendo and gossip which still does the rounds from time to time about the role in the NDP of the Socialist Workers Party (now the Democratic Socialist Party).
Very clearly detailed in the book is the fact that the group which left the NDP had planned even before the conference to split. At a meeting prior to the conference, it was agreed that a push would be made on the question of decision making by postal ballot of the membership, and if this was defeated that "we would go to another venue with Jo Vallentine and Peter Garrett".
Fisher quotes from the April 21 diary of Ted St John (a former Liberal MP who had been NDP campaign manager in NSW):
"Peter [Garrett] and others have grown used to the idea of splitting, if need be. I understand Jo Vallentine, and possibly Jean Melzer, as well as Peter, will publically declare, if it comes to the point, that they will not be associated with a party in which the SWP remains active. I have listed the 'assets' of the NDP in order: (a) the prestigious candidates; (b) the name; (c) the physical assets (principally a fund of $30,000 held in Canberra).
"... if we retained (a), and hopefully perhaps (b), we could forgo (c), if need be, with good grace, and should retain the bulk of the membership."
From my perspective, as a long-time peace activist and ALP member (the move by the splitters to proscribe members of other parties emphasised the SWP, but the party also included members of the Democrats and ALP), the real point at issue was whether the NDP would be a party organised along genuinely democratic lines, which recognised the value of its grassroots activist base (strangely, St John does not list the members as "assets"), or whether it would be a party (like mainstream parties) in which a passive membership responded to dictates of a leadership of media figures, being limited to the role of polling booth workers and sellers of chook raffle tickets.
Perhaps Gillian Fisher should have paid more attention to the advice of the Nobel laureate, Patrick White, whose letter to her of December 24, 1984, she quotes:
"Soul searching, not ego-promotion will earn us greater respect from those members of the public who are still suspicious of the NDP. Arrogance and the desire for stardom are fatal, as Hawke has shown us. Cling to our aim of getting rid of the bases. Make Australians realise that the ANZUS treaty is comparatively unimportant."