page_title: Jim Cairns
section_title: Leading left-winger
hierarchical_section_title: Jim Cairns / Leading left-winger
caption_attribution_description: English: A 1962 black and white portrait of Jim Cairns, MHR for Yarra
context_page_description: James Ford Cairns, Australian politician, was prominent in the Labor movement through the 1960s and 1970s, and was briefly Deputy Prime Minister in the Whitlam government. He is best remembered as a leader of the movement against Australian involvement in the Vietnam War, for his affair with Junie Morosi and for his later renunciation of conventional politics. He was also an economist, and a prolific writer on economic and social issues, many of them self-published and self-marketed at stalls he ran across Australia after his retirement.
context_section_description: In Canberra, Cairns became a leader of the left. He was a highly effective debater and was soon feared and disliked by ministers in the Liberal government of Robert Menzies, although his personal dealings with Menzies himself, who nearly always felt a healthy respect for an intelligent and principled adversary, were more cordial than might have been expected. Cairns was also disliked by many in his own party, who saw him as an ideologue whose political views were too left-wing for the Australian electorate.
  Nevertheless, Cairns's abilities could not be denied. He completed his doctorate in economic history in 1957, and by the 1960s he was among the Labor Party's leading figures. At this time he also lectured on Marxist and socialist history, and taught free seminars in Melbourne for working people who were unable to afford tertiary education. His first overseas trip, which he took place at this time to the US and Asia, had a great effect on him.
  Early in 1967, the septuagenarian Arthur Calwell retired as Labor leader, and Cairns contested the leadership, but lost to Gough Whitlam. The following year, when Whitlam briefly offered his resignation as part of his fight against the left wing of the party, Cairns again contested the leadership. Although he again failed to win, the margin was much smaller than in the previous year, and  if four ALP parliamentarians had changed their minds, Cairns would have been successful. Whitlam appointed Cairns as shadow minister for trade and industry.
  One of the reasons Cairns did not become leader of the Labor Party was that in the late 1960s and early 1970s his main focus was not on parliamentary politics but on leading the mass movement against the Vietnam War, to which the Menzies government had committed combat troops in 1965, and against conscription for that war. Until about 1968, most Australians supported the war. Whitlam himself was cautious about publicly committing the ALP to an explicitly anti-war stance. Opposition to Australia's role in Vietnam was led by the Communist Party and the trade unions. After 1968, however, non-communist opposition grew, and Cairns came to see the anti-war movement as a moral crusade. During the election year of 1969, a group of men broke into Cairns’ home, assaulted him and seriously injured his wife.
  In May 1970, Cairns, as chair of the Vietnam Moratorium Campaign, led an estimated 100,000 people in a "sit-down" demonstration in the streets of Melbourne. This was the largest protest in Australia until it was overtaken by the anti-Iraq war protests in February 2003. Similar protests of proportionate size took place simultaneously in other Australian cities. The predicted violence did not occur and the moral force of the, mainly young, protesters had a major effect on Australian attitudes to the war.
caption: Jim Cairns c. 1962
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