Launching Race Mathews: A life in politics

Melbourne, 24 October 2024

In this era of totally leader-focused election campaigning, and presidential prime ministers, it is not surprising that political biographers tend to focus almost exclusively just on those who make it to the very top. But, while it might not be a truth universally acknowledged, the reality is that whether parties actually win office, and the extent to which governments achieve anything memorably worthwhile if they do, often depends at least as much on those who never make it quite so far up the greasy pole.

Such has been the reality of Race Mathews’s contributions to Australian government and public policy, which now get the full recognition they have long deserved in Iola Mathews’s splendid biography, which I am delighted and honoured to be now launching in Victoria. Her book, as I will come back to, is about much more than Race’s very public achievements, but it really is an extraordinary record of accomplishment here that she records. Among his public contributions, there are six in particular, all of them meticulously and I think very objectively described in Iola’s account, which really stand out to me.

The first came in the early 1960s with the important role he played, with others, in building the foundations for the federal intervention into the Victorian Branch of the ALP, without which (as became clear in 1969) the Whitlam Government could never have been elected. It began when Race and his close friend and mentor David Bennett were invited by the young and electorally hungry MP Clyde Holding to join a new Education Policy Committee, and began to work away at replacing the manically anti-State Aid policy, supported by the then ruling Trades Hall junta, which had become the most visible barrier to the ALP’s wider community acceptability.

This enterprise later morphed into a wider crusade in favour of fundamental reform of the State Party’s representational and decision-making structures. Race worked closely with the newly formed Participants group, led by lawyers and fellow Fabians including John Button and John Cain, and initiated a series of grass-roots branch-led challenges of his own to the ruling hierarchy, all of which created momentum for the ultimately successful 1970 Federal Executive intervention. Party democracy, and membership empowerment, remained a lifelong preoccupation for Race, and one in which he immersed himself organisationally again in the early 2000s, as Iola records in her second last chapter, although then with rather more mixed results.

The next step in Race’s public life was a momentous one, which he describes to this day as “the most tumultuous, and by far the most rewarding, five years of my career”: his appointment in 1967, at the age of 32, as Gough Whitlam’s Principal Private Secretary. That happened on John Menadue’s recommendation, Gough’s retiring PPS having been much impressed by Race’s great ability to organize networks of policy experts.

Race rapidly became an indispensable member of Whitlam’s small-but-perfectly-formed staff, working on research, campaign organization strategy, and most of the huge policy issues – including education, urban and regional development, and above all the absolutely groundbreaking new national universal health insurance scheme, Medibank (later Medicare) – which were crucial to the new Leader’s messaging, and ultimately his 1972 victory.

No-one to my knowledge ever said of Race what Whitlam once famously said of Keating, with his infatuation with Jack Lang and Rex Connor, “Paul has always preferred older men”. But Race did say of Gough, as Iola quotes him, “I was in awe of him, and I loved him”. Certainly bits of Gough rubbed off on him for decades thereafter, not least his wonderfully stentorian speaking style. It isn’t as breathy, and it probably also owes something to Race’s first career as a carefully enunciating speech therapist, but it is memorable, and did occasionally lend itself to parody…

Race’s third big public contribution was to stand for and win the highly marginal seat of Casey in 1972, which along with the victories of Tony Lamb in Latrobe, David McKenzie in Diamond Valley, and Max Oldmeadow in Holt, with all of whom he worked closely, was critical in at last getting Labor over the line. He was, as Iola describes, a brilliant electoral technician, introducing modern campaign techniques including targeted direct mail and a sophisticated door-to-door canvassing strategy, as well as being his usual indefatigably energetic self in personally knocking on thousands of doors and organizing and speaking at countless local meetings.

The fourth big public contribution Race made, after the crushing blow of the defeat of the Whitlam Government and the loss of his own federal seat in the 1975 Dismissal election, was to the election – after an even longer period in the wilderness than federal Labor – of a Victorian State Labor Government. Initially by becoming Principal Private Secretary to Opposition Leaders Clyde Holding and Frank Wilkes from 1976 until 1979, then by winning in 1979 (and holding until 1992) the seat of Oakleigh, and then by acting as Secretary to the Shadow Cabinet in the run up to John Cain’s victory in 1982.

Race’s basic, and indispensable, contribution here, applying all his experience with Whitlam, was to turn the Leader’s office into an effective professional operation of a kind capable of winning government, and staying there long enough to work substantial change, as John Cain and his long-governing successors certainly did. It should be acknowledged that there was nowhere to go but up when he first arrived in Clyde Holding’s office: Robert Ray tells me that one of Race’s first discoveries was three tea-chests full of not only unanswered but unopened correspondence, with quite a few of the letters containing cheques…

His fifth contribution, and much bigger than summarisable in a few sentences, was as a highly effective State Minister for the Arts, and for Police and Emergency Services and later Community Services, from 1982 to 1988.

As Police Minister he developed a very productive relationship with Mick Miller, a Commissioner ahead of his time in his respect for decent values and standards, in achieving new levels of professionalism in a force not previously notorious for them. As Emergency Services Minister he had to meet the challenge of the Ash Wednesday bushfire disaster; and repairing afterwards the organisational deficiencies shown up by it. As Community Services Minister he initiated major reforms in child protection and intellectual disability services.

And as Arts Minister, probably the best fit of all his ministerial role, Race was almost universally regarded as an outstanding success, overseeing the development of the Southbank Arts Precinct, bringing the Spoleto Festival to Melbourne, rejuvenating the local film industry, revitalising regional art galleries and supporting community outreach programs. It was a role that he loved, and the arts community loved him.

Throughout his time in the State Parliament Race was, as he had been in the Federal Parliament, a superbly conscientious local member, kind and compassionate in responding to individuals’ problems, even when – sometimes to the understandable despair of his family – they arrived at his home in the middle of the night. He was attentive to the legion of local interest groups who clamoured for his attention, and even as member for Oakleigh developed an interest in the fortunes of his local football team, despite his interest in sport of any kind hovering somewhere on the spectrum between Barry Humphries and Philip Adams.

The remaining great public policy achievement of Race which really stands out was his leadership of the Victorian, later Australian, Fabian Society – on and off, as Iola says, over five decades, but very much more on than off. Quite simply put, the Fabian Society was the think tank that mattered most, as the Labor Party regained its feet in the 1960s and 1970s, and Race Mathews, initially rescuing and more than once re-rescuing it from dysfunctional oblivion, was its heart and soul then and since.

The pamphlets the Society published, the policy debates that it generated on all the great policy issues of the day, the public attention it so often stimulated, and the level of engagement it attracted from so many who became key ministers in the Whitlam, Hawke and Keating Governments, were achievements of long-enduring significance, not just for the Labor Party but the whole country.

Of course, not everything in Race’s political life was an unalloyed series of triumphant wins. There were plenty of losses and disappointments and embarrassments along the way, as is the almost universal experience of any of us who have spent any time at all employed in this most bloody and dangerous of trades. Some of those disappointments – including early rejected State ALP Office employment applications, pre-selection knockbacks and his despatch to the back-bench, and non-election as Speaker, toward the end of his State parliamentary career – were, as Race acknowledges, due to his almost ineradicable naivete about the conspiratorial machinations of the ALP factions.

A party apparatchik Race was not born to be, and would never become. But being an idealistic wonk – totally committed to transparent internal democracy, and much better at policy making and delivery than manipulating the system for personal or factional political advantage – is something most normal people would regard as a considerably more endearing character trait.

A less public dimension to Race’s life than all of the roles I have described – though it wasn’t for want of trying to convert a private passion into more visible practical outcomes – has been his decades-long intellectual commitment, consistent with his socialist awakening in adolescence, to the principles of distributism. As Iola succinctly describes it, this is the theory, based originally on Catholic social justice thinking, that ownership of the means of production should be widely distributed, rather than concentrated in the hands of the state or a wealthy minority.

Since his retirement from politics he has spent years on this project: researching, writing, and university teaching, aimed at achieving in Australia the retention and expansion of credit unions and mutual societies and, above all, the take-up on a significant scale of workers cooperatives on the Basque country’s Mondragon model. A huge amount of effort without, he ruefully acknowledges, a huge amount to show for it – other than not just one but two PhDs, and a book! – but such is the lot of visionaries: some flames are just harder than others to ignite.

Although Iola’s biography is subtitled ‘A Life in Politics’, much of it is also – happily – about Race’s life outside politics, including his early childhood adventures and state-school education; his Melbourne Grammar-inspired flirtation with communism; his only-slightly-longer flirtation with a private sector career; his embrace of teaching, and in particular speech therapy, as a vocation; his lifelong passion for science fiction (to me utterly bemusing); and his absorption in music, and just about every genre of film.

But, above all, Iola’s story – and Race’s story, as told in his own very lucid and compelling words in the first four chapters, when he was still up to writing them – is also a love story. A story about Race’s love for his parents and grandmother Bill-Bill. A story about his deep love for his five children – Sean, Jane and Vanessa, and Keir and Talya (although, like most professionally-consumed and often-absent political fathers of our generation, myself included, he didn’t always show it at the time to the extent they craved). A deeply moving story about Race’s intense love for his first wife Jill, who so tragically died of cancer after just fifteen years together. And it’s a story, beautifully written, about the abiding love of Race and Iola for each other, still as strong as it has ever been after more than fifty years of marriage.

To all of those who have known or worked with him in any capacity, private or public, over the many decades of his very active life, it will come as no surprise that Race Mathews is one of the most affectionately regarded figures of his time. He has always combined high intelligence, idealistic vision, compassion and courage with an almost complete lack of ego, and a capacity to accept with grace whatever the fates throw at him, including his current health challenges. His old colleague from the Whitlam days, Richard Hall, captured a sentiment a great many will share when he said, as Iola quotes him, that Race was “the most decent man I ever met”.

Iola’s writing, which seamlessly continues Race’s own after the first fifty pages, does her subject proud. Thoroughly researched and documented, written with all the easy accessibility one would expect of a journalist and much published author, and very attractive in its design and presentation, Race Mathews: A Political Life is a credit to both Iola and Monash University Publishing. It will stand as a great testament to a man of whom a legion of Australians would want to say: if only we now had more people in political and public life like him.