THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT: Jack Mundey, Green Bans Hero
JAMES COLMAN
NewSouth Publishing, 2016, 356
pages
Review by Phil Shannon
Pavlovian hostility to construction
industry unions, and venom-flecked hatred of the environment movement, is far
from a new development amongst conservative commentators, notes James Colman
(Sydney architect, urban planner and university lecturer) in his book, The House That Jack Built, on Jack
Mundey, the 1970s New South Wales State Secretary of the Builders Labourers’
Federation (BLF) who originated the world’s first ‘green bans’ to save working
class housing, historic buildings and urban bushland from the developers’
bulldozer.
Colman cites the Daily Telegraph’s Miranda Devine, for
example, who could simply cut-and-paste her comments (the ‘disgraced’ BLF’s
‘stand-over tactics’, ‘intimidation’, ‘greed, thuggery and graft’) from four
decades ago into her jeremiads against Australia’s current construction union.
The object of Devine’s wrath
back then was a Queensland dairy farm boy and apprentice plumber who moved to
Sydney in 1950 to play first-grade rugby league for Parramatta before finding work in the construction and
demolition industry where Mundey joined the Communist Party of Australia as, in
his words, ‘a militant worker who judged communists … as people who wanted to
make life better for ordinary workers’.
Elected as BLF leader during a building
boom, union militancy, wages and working conditions flourished under Mundey’s
guidance. Whilst his Marxism informed the
traditional industrial struggle around the means
of production, Mundey’s embrace of the new social movements also meant that
the ends of production mattered, too.
If ‘development’ meant the
destruction of city green space, working class homes and colonial-era buildings
to make way for towering luxury high-rise apartment complexes, plush hotels,
identikit malls and “lifeless citadels of commerce”, then Mundey’s builders
labourers would try to thwart it.
If residents’ pleas against
the despoliation of their pleasant urban landscape got bogged in ‘official
channels’, then they would turn to the industrial clout of the communist-led
BLF. Since the core political value of
Mundey’s socialism was democratic decision-making (in the union, in politics, in
society), the BLF required demonstrated resident support and majority rank-and-file
BLF endorsement of any green bans. From
1970 to 1975, dozens of publicly-owned
or community assets were saved by the BLF withdrawing union labour.
The end came with the
deregistration of the NSW BLF, the state Industrial Court agreeing with the black
propaganda of the peak building employers' body, the Master Builders'
Association (MBA), that the BLF had flouted the law and used intimidation on
site.
Whilst the MBA may have popped
the victory champagne corks in their battle with the union, however, the longer-term
environmental war was another matter.
Mundey’s BLF had decisively shifted the strategic balance of
forces. Fifty years ago, heritage and environmental
preservation had no standing in law or government policy but there has since
been a steady accretion of legal reforms, development assessment protocols and
planning statutes.
Mainstream politicians now
find it obligatory, because there is “useful political mileage” (votes), in
conservation to pay attention to environmental considerations which they once
dismissed as extremist, back-door routes to socialism. Mundey, himself, was elevated from communist
villain to the chair of the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, a government
body.
The Green Tape that has
displaced the Communist Menace as the object of developers’ ire has its red
roots but whilst Mundey explicitly saw a direct link between his environmental
and socialist values, his chronicler, however, is more reticent. Colman, who might be best characterised as
one of the “enlightened middle class” who constituted some of Mundey’s green
ban clientele, believes that conservation is now respectable and politically
“middle-ground”, and this requires him to dilute its more disreputable Marxist
roots.
Indeed, in Colman’s book, Mundey
the Marxist is rarely sighted whilst the man himself is frequently submerged beneath
the history of heritage architecture. Mundey’s
textual semi-obscurity is partly his own fault (in self-effacing socialist
style, Mundey requested that societal forces take precedence over the personal
in his ‘biography’) but Mundey’s Marxist modesty is misplaced because, as
Colman does briefly note, Mundey’s personal qualities and political beliefs
ably fitted him for his pivotal historic role.
In the face of reinvigorated threats to the
urban environment from the weakening of environmental laws, cuts to funding,
and legislative strong-arming of uppity unions, Mundey’s red-green palette still
offers much to study and to apply.
