So finally, after a lot of stupid and offensive speechmaking from all sides, the NSW Legislative Assembly rejected George Petersen's law reform bill by 67 votes to 28 on a free vote. Premier Neville Wran, with his deputy Jack Ferguson and his Attorney-General Frank Walker, supported the bill, but a majority of his Cabinet opposed it and the ALP Caucus split 39-26 in opposition.
All 28 Opposition MLAs opposed the bill, while both Independents supported it. The Speaker and three other ALP members did not vote. The assembly also rejected Michael Egan's attempt at a compromise bill by 65 votes to 28. This bill was supported by six Liberals (including Opposition Leader John Dowd) and by 19 ALP members who had opposed the Petersen bill, but was voted against Petersen and 24 of his supporters on the grounds that it did not establish the principle of legal equality.
Viewed from Melbourne, the failure of the Petersen bill seems difficult to understand. The Labor Party has been in power in NSW for nearly six years. Since 1978 it has had an enormous majority (currently 69-30) in the Legislative Assembly, and a comfortable one in the Council. Under the able leadership of Neville Wran, the ALP appears to have given NSW modern, liberal-minded and moderately progressive government. And it is, after all, nearly ten years since the Dunstan Labor Government passed a homosexual law reform bill in South Australia. In 1980 in Victoria even a Liberal government summoned the nerve to do so, with the ALP's unanimous support. Even the Queensland and Western Australian branches support law reform, though they are of course powerless to do anything about it.
How is it then that the NSW Parliament cannot bring itself to grasp this particular nettle? Why are the majority of NSW Labor MLAs, fresh from their second enormous election win in a row, so afraid to pass a measure that has majority community support, is Party policy, is opposed only by their traditional enemies, and has been passed elsewhere without any political consequences whatever?
To answer this question, we have to go back to the great ALP split of l954-1958. At that time, the right-wing Industrial Groups, which were controlled by Bob Santamaria's semi-secret Catholic organisation, The Movement, were defeated in their attempt to take over the ALP and finally driven, amid great turmoil, from the party. In Victoria, where the Groupers were strongest, and had the full backing of the Catholic Archbishop, Dr Mannix, the split went very deep. The breakaway DLP took whole branches and affiliated unions with it, and pro-Grouper Catholics were systematically expelled. The Cain Labor government was brought down by a faction of Grouper MPs, and the Liberals have been in power ever since. The ALP was left firmly in the hands of supporters of the federal Leader, Dr Evatt; an alliance between the Trades Hall and the left-wing activists in the branches. This left bloc continued to control the party until federal intervention in 1970, and, as the Socialist Left, still has great influence over policy and preselection.
In NSW, however, things were different. The Labor Premier, Joe Cahill, was both a conservative Catholic and a wily operator who was determined to keep his state party intact. In this he was supported by the Sydney Catholic hierarchy, led by Cardinal Gilroy and Bishop Carroll. These two did not share Mannix's high opinion of Santamaria and his plan to convert the ALP into a European-style Christian Democratic party. They were in favour of preserving the traditional alliance between Church and Labor, which dated back to 1916 and had more to do with Irish solidarity than with Labor politics. Carroll and Cahill worked to isolate both the hardline groupers and the pro-Evatt left. Carroll used the full authority of the Archdiocese to suppress Santamaria's activists in the parishes, and in the end only a handful of irreconcilable groupers were expelled from the party. There is no doubt that this failure in NSW meant the long-term failure of the DLP, and Santamaria in his memoirs is particularly bitter about the Sydney hierarchy's attitude.
The upshot was of course to leave the state ALP heavily in the Church's debt and successive Labor premiers have not been unmindful of this. While Wran is not a Catholic he is a shrewd opportunist who knows which side his political bread is buttered on. The social composition and ideology of the ALP in the states continues to reflect its differing historical background. In Victoria, Irish Catholics, to the extent that they are still an identifiable grouping, mostly passed over to the Liberal Party as the DLP folded in the 1970s. The Victorian ALP is ruled by a secular alliance of middle-class activists and centre-to-left union officials. Catholics are thin on the ground and are still viewed with active suspicion. In NSW, the party is still firmly in their hands, and the State caucus is still replete with O'Neils, Flahertys, McCarthys, Clearys, Sheahans and Mahers. A cabinet minister, Kevin Stewart, is a patron of the Right to Life movement.
Among the consequences of the NSW ALP's essential conservatism and its complete domination of the centre ground in NSW politics has been the bottling up of the Liberal Party on the far right, and the reduction of its influence vis-a-vis the National Country Party. In Victoria the Liberals have a broad (though declining) base of moderate middle-class support, and have nothing to fear from the NCP, which has been reduced to a remnant. They can therefore afford to make occasional progressive gestures, such as homosexual law reform. Indeed, the nature of the political conflict in Victoria requires them to do so. The NSW Liberals, by contrast, have, in their isolation, fallen into the hands of a far-right clique of evangelical crazies such as the appalling Jim Cameron, and are very vulnerable to pressure from the even more appalling NCP leader, Leon Punch. This process has been hastened by the attitude of the Anglican Church, traditionally influential in Liberal politics. The Sydney leadership, Archbishop Loane and Dean Shilton, are both committed partisans of the Right, particularly on social questions.
The extreme and aggressive conservatism of the NSW Liberals on the homosexual question is not without a certain tactical logic. The Liberals cannot hope to regain power in NSW unless they break the Catholic-Labor alliance, as it was broken in Victoria and Queensland in the 50s. Their best hope of doing this lies in the exploitation of the ALP's divisions on defence-of-the-family type issues, trying to drive a wedge between the Catholics and the secular-left-union bloc that is slowly and inevitably gaining ground in the party as the Irish Catholic working class disappears as a cohesive force. The reaction of the ruling faction in the state machine is naturally to do as little as possible to aggravate these divisions. The Keating-Unsworth junta, as well as their front-man Neville Wran, obviously regard the homosexual dangerous to touch.
Thus the middle-class Protestant conservatism of the Liberals and the working-class Catholic conservatism of the ALP are mutually reinforcing, and they have now conspired to sink homosexual law reform in NSW. Both Wran and Dowd are relative moderates, and left to themselves they would probably work something out. But the ruling right-wingers in both their parties have filled their backbenches with a quite extraordinarily unrepresentative collection of wowsers and troglodytes, who have created an atmosphere of hysterical moralism that is outstandingly hypocritical even by Australian political standards. The political leaders of NSW preside over a state where enormous drug, prostitution and gambling industries flourish openly. where gangsters and land sharks rule unchallenged, and where the agencies of law and order are spectacularly and notoriously corrupt. Yet these people feel able to sit and sermonise about the dangers of homosexual law reform to the morals of the youth of NSW.