The Cold War

It's 1943. Joseph Stalin has pushed back on Adolf Hitler’s eastern front, and soon newsreels in Australian cinemas would celebrate the Soviet heroes as Stalin’s armies marched westward across Europe.

In Melbourne, 28-year-old lay Catholic leader Bob Santamaria watched in horror. At home the communists were also on the move; their party’s membership was 20,000 and rising. Santamaria and his highly influential supporter, the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne Daniel Mannix, agreed to step up the anti-Red campaign run by the Catholic Social Studies Movement (better known as the “Movement”), later rebadged the National Civic Council (NCC). The war waged locally by the NCC was against communism, but also against modern liberal values. It would dominate Australian politics through the Cold War, trigger the seismic Labor split of 1955 – which helped keep Labor out of power federally until 1972 – and define the post-war SDA.

The war would be fought on uni campuses and in the ABC and the ALP, but during the 1940s and ’50s it was focused on unions controlled or influenced by the communists. The Shoppies’ magazine had once mourned the “great’’ Vladimir Lenin but by the early 1950s the SDA, along with three other prominent unions covering ironworkers, the clerks and carpenters, would be in the grip of the Movement and, soon, out of the ALP.

An important Santamaria strategy was to use the communists’ own tactics against them. Such was his urgency, he wrote in a report to key Catholic bishops in 1944 that the Movement needed a national campaign “modelled completely on the Communist Party” and its organising principles. God’s crusade and knights. Stalin’s methods.

By the late 1980s the Communist menace had receded. The Berlin Wall had fallen, and the four main NCC unions were back in the ALP fold. Union amalgamations gobbled up the ironworkers, clerks, and carpenters. Of the big NCC unions, only the SDA was left standing.

But while the Cold War was almost over, the morality war was alive and well. The mission and methods of the Shoppies remained intact: iron-fisted Catholic control, and close partnerships with big employers that gave it significant political power.


In a timbered boardroom at Melbourne’s Docklands where he has an office in a former warehouse, Bill Kelty is scribbling on a whiteboard. He’s giving Good Weekend a crash course on the SDA and its place in the labour movement, politics and the economy.

In the 1940s and ’50s, the communist credo was to fight the bosses. The NCC or “friendly” unions, as Kelty describes them, worked with employers to keep the communists out. They offered predictable wage outcomes, no strikes and a single voice for a large and dispersed workforce. “[The SDA] is a Catholic union with Catholic connections,” Kelty says. A lot of employers supported it because of that but they also supported it because the SDA was a moderate and friendly union.’’

This is what Kelty’s ACTU successor Greg Combet calls the “partnership’’ model of unionism. A “legitimate’’ model, says Combet, but with an inherent danger. Unions became reliant on employers, weakening their bargaining power. “There was always a risk this would impact outcomes for workers,” says Combet, also a former minister in the Gillard government.

A partnership was formalised with the SDA in 1971 when six major retailers, including Coles and Woolies, signed landmark “closed shop” deals under which companies would sign up their staff as SDA members on the union’s behalf. While convenient for the SDA, the closed shops gave employers a key weapon in all future negotiations – influence over membership, every union’s lifeblood. Later, in Keating-era enterprise bargaining agreements, the SDA’s favoured position would be reconfirmed, but at a price to workers: a cut to penalty rates, opening the way to 24/7 trading, and ever more night and weekend shifts. The greater the number of employees on those shifts, the bigger the savings for employers from further cuts in penalties.