The Year of the Dogs

Photo by Tony McDonough

Patrick 10th anniversary

By Chris Sheils

The most outstanding general social feature of the 1998 waterfront dispute was the way that it engaged the public. When the axe fell shortly before midnight on Tuesday 7 April, word that the wharfies had been physically evicted by security personnel with guard dogs struck the nation like news of a mass murder.

From the moment that the dogs were let slip, the event became the most heavily reported industrial conflict in Australia's history. Indeed, as improbable as this might sound, it is not implausible to suggest that the 1998 dispute may even have a claim to be Australia's most heavily reported event of any kind, ever.

Although the measures of media engagement are primitive, the Patrick dispute's dominance was unequivocal on all counts. The Media Monitors Information Service, which assessed the annual coverage based on 22 newspapers, 85 television stations and 136 radio stations, comfortably calculated the dispute to have been 1998's top story.

In descending order, the other big stories during the same year that attracted less attention were the economic crisis in South-East Asia, the government's proposed consumption tax, the populist movement around Pauline Hanson, and the American President Bill Clinton's relations with the White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. The dispute attracted more than twice the media coverage of the subsequent federal election in October.

The amazing public engagement with the conflict cannot be rationalised away as displacing dull alternatives in a "slow" news year. In the electronic media, the dispute even outranked 1998's coverage of the national sport, cricket, by a margin of more then 10 per cent -- and this was during a year in which the team captain, Mark Taylor, equaled the legendary Don Bradman's highest score of 334 in Pakistan, Australia also won a series in South Africa, and four home test matches were played against England for the Ashes.

These measures imply that the dispute positively expanded media audiences. Perhaps the starkest universal comparison is with the death the year before of the Princess of Wales, Diana Spencer, which is widely regarded as among the major media events in modern history. The 1998 waterfront dispute featured three times as often as Diana had in Australia's electronic media in 1997, and prompted seven times the number of talkback radio calls.

The public attention on the conflict dazzled contemporaries. At the outset, I suggested that word of Patrick's pre-Easter overnight action struck the nation like news of a mass murder. This was an understatement. According to the Media Monitors Information Service, the news of Australia's worst 20th century mass murder -- the Port Arthur massacre of 1996 -- only ranked as that year's eighth biggest story.

In sum, for Australians, there was no story in the world that can be compared with the waterfront dispute in 1998, especially during the period of the lock-out. The monitoring firms did not maintain archives, subsequently merged, and then discontinued the publication of their annual analyses. The same measures therefore cannot be used to compare the 1998 dispute with, say, the Tampa "crisis" and the strikes on the United States in 2001, the ensuing "real-time" wars and the Bali bombing, or any other later event.

Nor, of course, does this matter. The important point -- a point that not only distinguishes the 1998 waterfront dispute from every other Australian industrial conflict but also other public events per se -- is that this was not just big news. It was amongst the most heavily mediated action in the nation's history. Well beyond the MUA and the labour movement at large, for Australians in general, 1998 was the year of the dogs.

Importantly, the media event is not to be confused with the dispute's history. The coverage constituted the main experience of the event for most Australians, along with the many others who became engaged in the conflict in one way or another around the rest of the world. The media record is, of course, also a valuable historical source.

All the same, not only did much occur outside the media's range (in cabinet, board and union rooms, for obvious examples), but even insofar as the conflict was reported, this was inevitably incomplete. At the nub, the paradox associated with 1998 is that the central action stands unquestionably among the most media saturated events in Australia's history while also continuing to be surrounded by unsolved mysteries.

In particular, the Patrick chief, Christopher Corrigan, has never opened his books to public scrutiny, despite the fact that his company's financial circumstances were the most frequently invoked public justification for the extreme action. Many public assertions were made. Yet one of the questions that any understanding of 1998 must confront is whether the "big grand plan" to break the MUA was operational from the time that Patrick's parent company, Lang Corporation, burdened the stevedore with a $270 million debt in December 1996.

Long before the dogs appeared, the evidence suggests that Corrigan locked himself into a capital structure that presumed a specific result regardless of the MUA, or bust. This means that from December 1996 up until the conflict burst spectacularly into mainstream national public affairs in April 1998, industrial relations on the Australian waterfront is best regarded as a Patrick pantomime, on its way to a predetermined explosion.

From this perspective, it is not surprising that the history of the relations on Patrick's Melbourne wharves has never been documented, even though the anti-MUA forces never tired of making allegations about poor performance. As improbable as this may sound, as a matter of Waterline fact, the wharfies were brutally sacked while they were breaking the then national records in the volume of cargo they moved.

Questions also still surround the lock-out's relationship with the prequels to the main feature, the Battle of Cairns, the Dubai debacle and the entry of the Farmer's Federation at Webb Dock.

The most outstanding questions, however, concern the role of the government. At root, was there any thing more than naked class prejudice behind the Howard government's determination to bust the MUA? Certainly there is no evidence of any substantial new government research on the performance of the stevedoring industry in the historical record prior to the conflict -- apart from a long list of secret consultancies parceled out to anti-union interests.

We know that Patrick created surplus labour by investing in new capacity and equipment in the lead up to the lock-out, but steadfastly refused to offer redundancy payments. On the one side, Patrick was making fresh capital investment; on the other, the labour adjustment valve was shut tight.

The key unsettled historical question about the causes of the 1998 dispute is whether the government made the provision of the redundancy fund conditional upon Patrick acting against the union. Unless and until the secret reports by the consultants are released, we may never know whether the Howard government was merely one of a small group of willing enemies of the union, or whether it was the ultimate author of Australia's year of the dogs.

Dr Christopher Sheil is the author of War on the Wharves: A Cartoon History (Pluto Press, 1998), and is currently writing The Year of the Dogs, a full-scale history of the 1998 conflict to be published by Pluto Press later this year.