The Incorrigible Waterfront and its Decline: Inquiries and Royal Commissions into Ex-Officio Payments and Illegal Activities, 1958-1984

Abstract

The role of ad hoc government advisory and inquisitorial bodies in the twentieth century world of work has varied in its dimensions not only with national economic and political policy but also with different sectors of labour. Intervention in the affairs of Australian waterfront labour has been particularly marked since the port industries occupy a crucial strategic position in an overseas trading economy. Often as a pre-requisite or corollary of proposed legislation and changes in regulatory bodies, governments have initiated a range of royal commissions and official inquiries of various degrees of standing. Typically, these committees have dealt with manpower, productivity and issues generally subsumed under the industrial relations rubric. The 1945-46 Stevedoring Industry Inquiry conducted by Justice Foster and the 1954-57 Committee of Inquiry into the Stevedoring Industry are examples of such bodies. They sought to promote new standards of organisational rationality and productive efficiency for Australia's seaborne traffic, which at the start of our period accounted for about half the continent's ton-miles of freight.1 There has been a different and recurrent category of inquiries and investigations into what has been perceived as waterfront crime, which have attempted to impose legal penalties on trade union delinquents and to serve general notice on the port labour force to mend its ways. There were three such visitations in the period 1958-83: the 1958 Senate Select Committee of Inquiry into Indemnity Payments to Maritime Unions, the 1974-76 Sweeney Royal Commission into Alleged Payments to Maritime Unions and the 1980-84 Costigan Royal Commission on the Activities of the Federated Ship Painters' and Dockers' Union (FSPDU). On a continuum from real to symbolic, the results of these inquiries have tended towards the latter. Their history is also evidence of a powerful if erratic impulse to augment the traditional tribunal-type regulation of labour with more potent penal sanctions. All three bodies set out to clarify for their audience perceived irregularities in payment and trade union behaviour. The origins of the first of these committees lay in the reactions of the labour movement, the political parties and the waterfront employers to the post World War II industrial and political campaigns of the maritime unions. A new militancy replaced the wartime truce on the waterfront and threatened to re-activate the historic vanguard and anti capitalist role of port labour. In the stevedoring sector, the volume of disputes rose progressively through the early post-war era. Working-time lost in strikes, expressed as a percentage of manhours worked, increased from 2.3% in 1949 to 6.6% in 1955, causing consternation to government and the users and operators of shipping services.2 Moreover, as the Cold War intensified, pro American and pro-Imperial patriots began to view the Seamen's Union of Australia (SUA) and the Waterside Workers' Federation (WWF) as a potential