The autobiographical memoir of Frank Rooney 1914-2005
"Dictators of the Labor Party in Australia"

The Luncheon will commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the first legislation in the world - to initiate a reform sought by workers like Frank Rooney & Chartists since 1829, that an election be conducted by a secret ballot late 1856 (passed on 18 December 1855 and HS Chapman's "secure vote" system solving the means (devised on 19 January 1856).

Foreword to Dictators of the Labor Party by Amy McGrath: Frank Rooney gives a compelling, disturbing insight into his life as a member of the Australian Labor Party in New South Wales. From his harsh, deprived youth in the mining region of the Hunter Valley, during the depression of the 1920s-30s, to his emergence as one of the leading organisers on the East Coast of Australia engaging in the fight by the moderates to dislodge the Moscow-driven idealogical warriors of the Australian Communist Party from the power base they had won in key unions during the 1940s against the day of a major uprising. Laughable as it may seem now, they could, and did, cripple Eastern Australia with major political strikes in the 1040s and 1950s.

Frank Rooney was one of the "unsung heroes" who foresaw the gravity of the threat when the Communist Party had achieved control of sufficient unions to win control of the Australian Congress of Trade Unions in 1945. He began to organise a counter-attack in Newcastle by forming "industrial groups" that were not singularly Catholic as has later often been said. Heroes, like Frank Rooney, of that decade-long battle to demonstrate Communists had gained their power by "foul means" not "fair", and to unseat them, have been ignored by a history dominated by Communist apologists and their progeny of "true believers".

Hence it is most fortunate that Frank Rooney, in his keen-witted eighties, at last took up, not his pen, but his computer and told his tale of leadership with Jack Kane and their eventual fate in the "Split" in the Labor Party in the 1950s. By that schism, the victors became the defeated, driven from the ALP by ALP and Catholic hierarchical rivalries, compounded by the "blind eye" of Evatt to the re-emergence of old Marxist enemies, Stalinist and Trotskyite, as Ben Chifley had predicted, to pursue power within parliaments rather than unions. Frank Rooney argues this had adverse major long-term consequences for the ALP that still persist.

Frank Rooney has been, as he insists, above all an honest loyal Labor man who gave years of dedication to the ALP as an outstanding organiser only to be thrust aside, along with others, by the intrigues that saw the ALP, led by Dr Evatt, once more trading with the "enemy" after the rout of the "industrial groups". The harvest of this treachery is with the ALP still.

Enquiries if you wish to attend the Launch to Amy McGrath email: amy.mcgrath@optusnet.com.au or (02) 9599 7915.

If you wish to order the book, write to The Treasurer, HS Chapman Society, PO Box 159, Rose Bay, NSW 2029. Copies are $20 each (includes postage).