Introduction
In May 1970, a young academic named Brian Laver stood at the edge of a moratorium march in Brisbane, attempting to address the crowd. He represented the New Left—a loose coalition of students, intellectuals, and activists who had cut their teeth on the anti-war movement, the counter-culture, and a profound suspicion of established authority. As he tried to speak, he was physically manhandled by a group of Communist wharfies, members of the old guard who had spent decades building the labour movement through patient organising, industrial action, and unwavering loyalty to the party line. The image captured that day—a university man being hustled aside by blue-collar militants—seemed to encapsulate everything that divided Australia’s left in the late 1960s and early 1970s .
And yet, within a few years, many of those same wharfies would be marching alongside students against the Vietnam War. Union officials who had once dismissed student protesters as middle-class dilettantes would find themselves sharing platforms with young radicals, coordinating strikes, and defending the right of university activists to organise. Builders labourers, the most militant of the blue-collar unions, would impose green bans at the behest of inner-city resident action groups—many of them led by the same kind of people who, a few years earlier, would have been dismissed as “the chardonnay set” .
This article examines the strange and often fraught alliances that developed between the Old Left and the New Left in Australia during the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that these alliances were never easy, never complete, and always marked by suspicion on both sides. But it also contends that they were transformative—for the labour movement, which was forced to confront questions of gender, environment, and culture it had long ignored; for the student movement, which gained access to organisational resources and industrial power it could never have mobilised alone; and for Australian politics more broadly, which was permanently altered by the coalition that briefly brought the pint and the picket together.
Two Lefts, One Pub
To understand the alliances of the 1970s, it is necessary first to understand the divisions that preceded them. The Old Left in Australia was not a single entity, but it had a coherent core: the trade union movement, the Australian Labor Party, and the Communist Party of Australia. These institutions had been built over decades, through depression and war, through strikes and lockouts, through the slow, grinding work of organising workers and winning incremental gains. By the 1960s, the union movement had secured for its members a standard of living that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier: the 40-hour week, penalty rates, award wages, and a seat at the table with employers and governments.
But these achievements had come at a cost. The Old Left was hierarchical, male-dominated, and culturally conservative. Its leaders had learned their politics in an era when the enemy was clearly defined—capital, the bosses, the arbitrated compromise they had fought to achieve. The Communist Party, which had emerged from World War II with some 20,000 members, had been battered by the Cold War, the Petrov Affair, and the bitter 1955 split that drove many of its most effective organisers into anti-communist militancy . The survivors were battle-hardened, disciplined, and deeply suspicious of anyone who had not shared their struggles.
The New Left, by contrast, was born of affluence, not scarcity. Its members were the children of the post-war boom: university-educated, culturally literate, and accustomed to a degree of personal freedom their parents could barely imagine. They had been radicalised not by the Depression or the fight for union recognition but by the Vietnam War, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the growing awareness that prosperity had not delivered justice. They read Marcuse and Fanon, not Lenin and StalinStalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician, dictator and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. Read More. They listened to Bob Dylan and the Doors, not Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers. They were as likely to organise around questions of personal liberation—sexual freedom, drug use, rock music—as around wages and conditions.
The two lefts inhabited different worlds, and they regarded each other with a mixture of contempt and incomprehension. For Old Left militants, the students were soft, undisciplined, and prone to theoretical posturing that bore no relation to the realities of the workplace. For New Left activists, the union officials were dinosaurs, trapped in outmoded categories of class struggle that could not account for the new forms of oppression they saw around them. The Communist Party, which might have served as a bridge between the two, was itself riven by generational conflict; its older members struggled to understand why young radicals were more interested in “cultural revolution” than in building the party .
The Fissures That Held
The Brisbane confrontation between Brian Laver and the communist wharfies was not an isolated incident. Similar scenes played out across the country as the anti-war movement gathered momentum. Union officials, mindful of their members’ conservative social attitudes and suspicious of student radicalism, were often reluctant to endorse moratorium marches. The Australian Council of Trade Unions did not formally support the anti-war movement until 1970, and even then, many individual unions held back .
But the fissures on the left were not simply generational. They were also strategic, ideological, and cultural. The Old Left thought in terms of class, the New Left in terms of oppression. The Old Left sought to capture the state; the New Left sought to transform civil society. The Old Left organised workers; the New Left organised consumers, residents, students, and women. The Old Left believed in discipline and hierarchy; the New Left celebrated spontaneity and direct democracy.
These differences were real, and they could not simply be wished away. Yet they did not prevent alliance. In part, this was because the two lefts shared a common enemy: the Liberal-Country Party coalition, which had governed Australia since 1949 and showed no sign of loosening its grip. In part, it was because the Vietnam War, more than any other issue, created a moral urgency that transcended tactical disagreements. And in part, it was because individual activists on both sides—people like Jack Mundey, the builders labourers’ leader who had come of age in the Communist Party but was open to new ideas; or Brian Laver himself, who despite the wharfies’ hostility continued to seek labour movement support—refused to accept that the divisions were permanent .
The result was a series of fragile, contingent alliances that shifted with circumstances and personalities. In Sydney, the anti-war movement drew support from left-wing unions like the Amalgamated Engineering Union and the Seamen’s Union, whose members marched alongside students despite their private misgivings. In Melbourne, the Builders Labourers’ Federation, under the leadership of Norm Gallagher, adopted a militant industrial stance that sometimes brought it into conflict with student activists but also created space for joint action on issues like the green bans . In Perth, the 1972 Labour Day march saw anti-war protesters, women’s liberation activists, and Aboriginal rights campaigners marching behind union banners—an image of coalition that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier .
The Union That Said Yes to Bans
The most durable and celebrated of these alliances was the one that produced the green bans. The story is well known: in June 1971, the New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation imposed the world’s first green ban to protect Kelly’s Bush, a tract of bushland on Sydney’s Lower North Shore that had been slated for luxury housing development . The ban was requested by a group of local residents, mostly women, who had spent months lobbying government and developers without success. When they approached the BLF, they found a union ready to listen.
The BLF was, in many ways, an unlikely partner for middle-class environmentalists. Its members were overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly blue-collar, and overwhelmingly concentrated on the kinds of construction sites that environmentalists often opposed. Its leader, Jack Mundey, was a Communist who had cut his teeth in the labour movement and retained a strong commitment to class politics . But Mundey and his colleagues had also developed a concept they called “the social responsibility of labour”—the idea that workers had a right to insist that their labour not be used for socially harmful purposes .
This concept did not emerge from nowhere. It drew on traditions within the labour movement that emphasised the dignity of labour and the importance of producing socially useful goods. But it also reflected the influence of the New Left, with its emphasis on direct action, participatory democracy, and the interconnection of different forms of oppression. Mundey himself was open to these influences; he had read widely, engaged with student activists, and recognised that the environmental movement was not simply a middle-class distraction but a genuine expression of popular concern about the quality of urban life.
The alliance that formed around Kelly’s Bush was replicated across Sydney in the years that followed. The BLF imposed bans to protect historic buildings in The Rocks, to prevent the construction of a carpark in the Botanic Gardens, to stop a concrete stadium being built in Centennial Park, and to defend working-class communities in Woolloomooloo from the depredations of developers . In each case, the union acted in response to requests from local residents, and only after public meetings had demonstrated genuine community support. The bans were not imposed by fiat; they were negotiated through a process that brought together union officials, resident activists, and sometimes student radicals in an unfamiliar but productive collaborationCollaboration
Full Description:The cooperation of local governments, police forces, and citizens in German-occupied countries with the Nazi regime. The Holocaust was a continental crime, reliant on French police, Dutch civil servants, and Ukrainian militias to identify and deport victims. Collaboration challenges the narrative that the Holocaust was solely a German crime. across Europe, local administrations assisted the Nazis for various reasons: ideological agreement (antisemitism), political opportunism, or bureaucratic obedience. In many cases, local police rounded up Jews before German forces even arrived.
Critical Perspective:This term reveals the fragility of social solidarity. When their Jewish neighbors were targeted, many European societies chose to protect their own national sovereignty or administrative autonomy by sacrificing the minority. It complicates the post-war myths of “national resistance” that many European countries adopted to hide their complicity.
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The green bans were not universally popular within the labour movement. Other unions accused the BLF of grandstanding, of stepping outside its proper sphere, of depriving workers of jobs and wages. The New South Wales Trades and Labor Council suspended the BLF twice, and the federal government deregistered the union in 1974—a decision that was later reversed but that signaled the depth of opposition to its tactics . Mundey and his colleagues were attacked in parliament, vilified in the press, and subjected to bribery attempts and even death threats . Yet they persisted, and the bans held.
What made the green bans possible was precisely the alliance between Old Left and New Left that the Brisbane confrontation had seemed to foreclose. The BLF provided the industrial muscle—the ability to stop work, to impose costs on developers, to make defiance of community sentiment expensive. The resident action groups provided the legitimacy, the local knowledge, the capacity to mobilise public opinion. And the student movement, in many cases, provided the energy, the enthusiasm, and the willingness to stand on picket lines through the night. It was an unlikely coalition, but it worked.
The Limits of Solidarity
For all their achievements, the alliances between Old Left and New Left were never stable and never complete. The tensions that had surfaced in Brisbane did not disappear; they were merely contained, managed, sometimes suppressed. On both sides, there were those who remained deeply suspicious of the other, who saw collaboration as a tactical necessity rather than a genuine meeting of minds, who waited for the moment when the coalition would fracture and the real struggle could resume.
These tensions were evident in the women’s liberation movement, which emerged from the New Left but quickly found itself at odds with both Old Left and male-dominated student organisations. Isobelle Barrett Meyering, writing in The Far Left in Australia Since 1945, describes how women’s liberation activists struggled to make their concerns heard within movements that remained fixated on class and the state . The personal, for many male activists, was not political; it was private, trivial, a distraction from the real business of revolution. Women who insisted on raising questions about housework, childcare, and sexual violence were dismissed as divisive, self-indulgent, insufficiently committed to the struggle.
Similar tensions surrounded the gay liberation movement, which emerged in the early 1970s and found itself marginalised within both Old Left and New Left. Liz Ross, in her contribution to the same collection, traces the slow and incomplete process by which the left began to recognise sexuality as a political question . For many unionists, homosexuality remained invisible or, when visible, unacceptable. For many student activists, it was secondary to the anti-war movement or the class struggle. Gay liberationists were forced to organise separately, to create their own institutions, to fight for space within movements that were often indifferent or hostile.
The limits of solidarity were also evident in the treatment of Aboriginal activists. The anti-war movement and the New Left more broadly were generally supportive of Aboriginal rights, and many activists participated in campaigns for land rights and against discrimination. But here too, there were tensions. Aboriginal activists sometimes found themselves cast in the role of authentic voices of oppression, expected to perform their suffering for the edification of white radicals. They were welcomed as speakers and symbols but excluded from decision-making, their organisations treated as junior partners in struggles defined by others.
These limits did not render the alliances meaningless. They simply meant that the coalitions of the 1970s were, like all coalitions, imperfect and provisional. They brought together people who did not fully trust each other, who had different priorities and different constituencies, who sometimes found themselves on opposite sides of picket lines and platform debates. That they achieved as much as they did is remarkable; that they did not achieve more is not surprising.
The Legacy
The alliances between Old Left and New Left did not survive the 1970s intact. The election of the Whitlam government in 1972 changed the political landscape, drawing many activists into the institutions they had once opposed. The defeat of Whitlam in 1975 and the long conservative ascendancy that followed created a different kind of politics, more defensive, more focused on survival than on transformation. The Communist Party, which had once been a significant force, dwindled into irrelevance. The student movement, which had mobilised hundreds of thousands against the war, fragmented into single-issue campaigns and identity politics.
But the legacy of the alliances persisted. The green bans, though controversial at the time, established principles that have become central to urban planning and environmental protection. The idea that communities should have a say in decisions that affect their lives, that development should serve social needs rather than private profit, that workers have a responsibility beyond their immediate industrial interests—these are now widely accepted, even if they are often honoured in the breach .
The alliances also transformed the labour movement. Unions that had once focused narrowly on wages and conditions began to engage with a broader range of issues: the environment, gender equality, Indigenous rights, the quality of urban life. The Australian Council of Trade Unions, under the leadership of Bob Hawke, developed a more expansive vision of unionism that encompassed social as well as industrial concerns . This vision was never fully realised, and it was challenged from both left and right, but it marked a permanent shift in the movement’s understanding of its role.
For the New Left, the alliances provided something equally valuable: a connection to the lived experience of working-class Australians that abstract theorising could never supply. Student activists who spent time on picket lines, who talked with unionists at stop-work meetings, who learned the practical skills of organising and negotiating, gained a realism and a strategic sense that would serve them well in subsequent campaigns. They also gained, in many cases, a lasting respect for the traditions and achievements of the labour movement—a respect that tempered their radicalism without extinguishing it.
Conclusion: Drinking Together
The image of Brian Laver being manhandled by communist wharfies captures something about the divisions on the Australian left in the 1960s and 1970s. Those divisions were real, and they did not disappear. But the image also captures something misleading. For every confrontation, there were a dozen conversations—in union halls, in student cafes, in the pubs where both sides gathered after marches and meetings. People who had started from opposite places found common ground, not because they agreed about everything but because they recognised each other as fellow travellers on a journey that was longer and harder than any of them had anticipated.
Jack Mundey, reflecting on the green bans years later, recalled the importance of these conversations. “We didn’t always see eye to eye,” he said. “The students had their ideas, and we had ours. But we found ways to work together. We found that we could learn from each other.” That willingness to learn, to listen, to recognise the other as a potential ally rather than an enemy—that was what made the alliances possible.
The pint and the picket were not natural companions. One belonged to the pub after work, the other to the university library. One spoke the language of class and struggle, the other the language of liberation and authenticity. But for a brief period, in the streets of Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane, they drank together. And Australian politics was never quite the same.
Bibliography
Barrett Meyering, Isobelle. “Changing Consciousness, Changing Lifestyles: Australia’s Women’s Liberation, the Left and the Politics of ‘Personal Solutions’.” In The Far Left in Australia Since 1945, edited by Jon Piccini, Evan Smith, and Matthew Worley, 145–63. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018.
Burgmann, Meredith, and Verity Burgmann. Green Bans, Red Union: The Saving of a City. 2nd ed. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2017.
Colman, James. The House That Jack Built: Jack Mundey, Green Bans Hero. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2016.
Gordon, Richard, ed. The Australian New Left: Critical Essays and Strategy. Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1970.
Marks, Russell. “1968 in Australia: The Student Movement and the New Left.” In The Far Left in Australia Since 1945, edited by Jon Piccini, Evan Smith, and Matthew Worley, 109–26. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018.
National Museum of Australia. “First Green Bans.” Defining Moments. Accessed February 2026. https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/first-green-bans.
Piccini, Jon, Evan Smith, and Matthew Worley, eds. The Far Left in Australia Since 1945. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018.
Queensland Historical Atlas. “The Communist Party Is Behind This Moratorium – Way Behind, 1970.” Accessed February 2026. https://qhatlas.com.au/node/1257.
Ross, Liz. “The Australian Left and Gay Liberation, from 1945 to 2000s.” In The Far Left in Australia Since 1945, edited by Jon Piccini, Evan Smith, and Matthew Worley, 183–200. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018.
State Library of Western Australia. “380317PD: Anti Conscription and Vietnam War Message in the Labour Day March, Perth, 6 March 1972.” Accessed February 2026. https://purl.slwa.wa.gov.au/slwa_b3807803_1.
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