December 2001 Volume 82 Number 12 "serving the protectors"
A Century of Struggle
By John Ballantyne

How completely policing has changed can be seen by comparing it with what it was a century ago.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when police were sworn into the force, they automatically gave up certain civil and political rights, and had very little capacity to defend themselves as employees.

The police administration was largely exempted from legal or political scrutiny. Until the early 1930s, commissioners had powers to dismiss constables at will. They did not have to give any reasons for their actions, and constables had almost no avenue of appeal.

This was the picture of early Australian policing given by Griffith University historian, Professor Mark Finnane, in an address to the Police Association annual conference in October.

According to Finnane, the struggle of police unions to win the right to speak for their members and fight for better workplace conditions was a slow, difficult and tortuous process.

The Police Association of SA – founded in 1911 – was, of course, the first police union to be established in Australia.

In Queensland, in 1920, the police union there won two remarkable victories for its members: registration for the union – thus gaining access to the arbitration court – and the establishment of a police appeals board, with a tribunal that included the secretary of the police union.

The legal standing of police employees Australia-wide took a turn for the better in 1932, when the High Court decisively rejected the old-fashioned idea that police should be run like an arm of the military. This change of attitude, said Finnane, “was to bring police departments closer to the world of everyday employment.”

Commenting on this High Court decision, Mr Justice Evatt observed that “officers of the police are seldom engaged in operations of a military character.” Much police work, he said, involved things such as controlling traffic, administering licensing regulations, and registering dogs. This, he said, “is not different in kind from what is done by many of the departments of the executive government”.

Finnane warned, however, that police union legitimacy “is built on a shaky structure of legal authority, political approval, media affirmation and membership confidence.”

While 99 per cent unionization of police around Australia is a good indication of membership confidence, approval by political parties has by no means been a foregone conclusion – as every police union has found, whichever party has been in power.

As for legal authority and media perceptions of police unions, Finnane suggested that many lessons could be learnt from the Queensland police union’s controversial role in the February 1996 Mundingburra state by-election, which toppled Wayne Goss’s state Labor government.

The Queensland police union on this occasion ran an political campaign, warning members of the public about the dangers to their safety from inadequate police staffing levels.

To drive the point home, the union spent $20,000 in the Mundingburra by-election on advertising and publicity.

Early in the campaign, the union negotiated a secret memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the then Queensland opposition leader and shadow police minister, in which it sought to extract political pledges from the National Party.

The demands of the union, said Finnane, included “a writing down of some of the Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) powers of investigation into police discipline matters, a union say in the appointment of the next commissioner of police, and the sacking of a number of named senior police.”

A month after this pivotal by-election – which saw Labor fall from office – the Brisbane Courier Mail triumphantly revealed the secret MOU’s existence.

This created a political storm, with the Queensland police union’s relationship with the National Party – the grateful beneficiary of the Mundingburra by-election – being portrayed in a very negative light.

The new police minister, Russell Cooper, felt obliged to refer the matter to the CJC, which thereupon appointed retired NSW Judge Carruthers, QC to investigate whether any electoral act had been violated or any police misconduct offences committed in the signing of the MOU.

The new government, however, was less than happy about the conduct of the CJC and Carruthers, so it also set up the Connolly-Ryan Inquiry into the CJC, and granted it quasi-royal commission powers. This led to a dramatic clash between the rival inquiries as they disputed their overlapping jurisdictions.

While the Queensland police union’s conduct in the Mundingburra by-election made dramatic newspaper headlines, its controversial strategy of contesting the commissioner’s powers and seeking to have a say in the appointment of senior police personnel, was not as unusual as might at first appear, according to Finnane.

Only two years ago, Victoria’s police commissioner, Neil Comrie, joined a long list of Australian police commissioners who have had votes of no confidence passed against them by police union conferences.

Nor was the Mundingburra’s MOU’s concerns about the appointment of future commissioners without some historical rationale, according to Finnane.

To put the Queensland police union’s controversial actions in clearer perspective, Finnane said that he aimed to “resurrect some forgotten histories – and show how they might help to explain where we are today.”

Finnane looked at the bitter battles between the wars between the Police Association (Victoria) and Victoria’s iron-fisted chief police commissioner, General Sir Thomas Blamey, after he was appointed to this post in 1925.

In 1929, the Police Association (Victoria) lobbied parliamentary candidates for a forthcoming state election about its opposition to departmental changes sought by the commissioner, whereupon Blamey retaliated by waging a relentless battle to break the association.

He sent one of the association’s executive members back to uniform duties in Mildura. He secured the prosecution, conviction and imprisonment of the association’s secretary for supposedly attempting to subvert police discipline. Then he ordered association members to resign their membership from what he now declared was an illegal body. In the meantime, he organized a group of his loyal supporters to take over the association so that it would no longer be independent, but subordinated to his authority.

A decade later, Blamey’s near-contemporary, NSW Police Commissioner William MacKay, who had initially enjoyed good relations with the Police Association of NSW after his appointment in 1935, nonetheless came into conflict with the association owing to his conception of the force as akin to an arm of the military.

In 1942, after a dramatic clash with the association over a defamation suit by a constable over an adverse inspector’s report on him, MacKay attempted to settle some scores with the association by resorting to a Blamey-style strategy of punitive transfer. He assigned association members to temporary transfers to country postings far from Sydney.

But where Blamey had succeeded, MacKay failed. The new NSW state Labor government took up the cause of the police officers. It not only reversed Commissioner MacKay’s directive on the allocation of his officers, but also secured the temporary removal of MacKay to a Commonwealth wartime post.

MacKay returned as NSW commissioner a year later and became embroiled in an even more serious controversy.

In a city park toilet in January 1943, two constables arrested a man on a charge of indecent exposure. The man identified himself as “Charles McNally”.

Mysteriously, the charges against the accused were later dropped, the files including fingerprints were removed to police headquarters, and the two arresting constables were suspended.

The Police Association of NSW, outraged by MacKay’s high-handed actions, lobbied state parliamentarians about its suspicions that the commissioner was attempting to “discredit the constables with the object of protecting a man in a highly placed position”.

The man against whom charges had been dropped was indeed highly placed. The so-called “Charles MacNally” was none other than Clarence Sydney McNulty, editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph.

Immediately after being released from the police station, McNulty – along with his boss, Frank Packer – had gone to Commissioner MacKay’s home. According to MacKay’s own testimony in a later libel hearing, the police commissioner and the newspaper owner were on “Mac” and “Frank” terms.

Historical episodes such as these, said Professor Finnane, illustrated that the Queensland police union’s secret memorandum of understanding (MOU) before the Mundingburra by-election, far from representing an abnormal departure from police union practice, was not without some dramatic historical precedents.

“Police unions,” he said, “have long aspired to affect the fundamentals of police organization – especially with respect to limiting the powers of a commissioner and even to having a say in the appointment of a commissioner and other senior officers… just as did the Queensland union in its wish-list presented to the opposition in January 1996.”

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