Half an hour later the parliamentary leadership began ringing the Hotel Kingston to see how things were going. Calwell and Whitlam, who had both addressed the conference, were in their offices at Parliament House waiting for a telephone call to tell them of the conference’s decision. The conference assembled at Canberra’s Hotel Kingston on Monday, March 17, 1963, and ran through the next couple of days before coming to a head in the wee hours of Thursday morning.Īt 8pm on that endless Wednesday night, Reid could see that “delegates were still running around” with no decision, compromise or otherwise, having been reached. This was not a clear-cut majority at all. Relying on an inside source, whom Uren later suggested was NSW MP and former Packer journalist Les Haylen, Reid wrote in The Daily Telegraph that the Left could count on having 17 to 19 votes in the 36-member conference. A minority report opposed the base under any circumstances. The committee produced a majority report that accepted the American base provided certain conditions were met. The federal executive, in calling the special conference, directed the relevant conference committee to prepare a policy report on North West Cape. A special federal conference, the first since Labor prime minister John Curtin’s conscription initiative in 1942, was called for March to determine the issue. He could not, Reid reported, “take a trick” the executive referred the issue to the party’s federal conference, where the left faction, with the support of the West Australian, Victorian and Queensland branches and a couple of Tasmanian delegates, had “a clear-cut majority” of the 36 delegates (six from each state).
It was surely a sign of instability and weakness that Calwell, worried about the attitude of NSW federal MP Tom Uren and other leftists, twice sought a favourable ruling on North West Cape from the ALP federal executive. Veteran Canberra gallery journalist Alan Reid, then of Sydney-based media owner Sir Frank Packer’s The Daily Telegraph, sensed that a great story was in the offing. Some federal members began to treat the WA resolution as official party policy, but Labor’s federal opposition leader Arthur Calwell and deputy leader Gough Whitlam felt that support for the base was not in conflict with party policy provided the base was subject to joint control. A resolution from Labor’s WA state branch opposed “any base being built in Australia that could be used for the manufacture, firing or control of any nuclear missile or vehicle capable of carrying nuclear missiles”. The agreement provoked clamorous opposition. In the autumn of 1963 the major national political issue in Australia was the Labor Party’s response to the Menzies government’s new security agreement with the United States, under which a communications station to control Polaris nuclear-armed submarines was to be established at North West Cape (also known as Exmouth Gulf) in Western Australia. The biggest scoop, by one of the most fearsome in their ranks, Alan Reid, is chronicled in a new book. THE Canberra press gallery was once prowled by political reporters said to be more influential than many Ministers.
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