In this interview with Rock Chugg, commissioned some twenty years ago by then-editor Nathan Hollier for a monographic issue that didn’t eventuate, Australian historian Humphrey McQueen discusses the arming of state police in Australia. As Rock writes, “since the interview below took place some time ago, in this era at best standing-still and at worst looking-backward, the very serious concerns considered here with Overland have not gone away”. Looking back on the dialogue, Humphrey has added the following comment:

“When we talk about police shootings – the death penalty in effect – I have long proposed that tactical response squads should be trained in Kendo and use Kendo sticks to whack the knives out of the suspect’s hand, breaking their arm is better than killing them. Those carrying a gun are a different matter – but that is very rare.”

A wide range of his writings are downloadable CopyLeft on www.surplus-value.org.au.

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ROCK CHUGG: Throughout most of the twentieth century and what could well be seen as the civilised post-convict phase of the nineteenth, the social environment of Australia had been characterised by peaceful, violence free suburbs, town and country, or so it seems. Unarmed police and security guards were the distinguishing feature of what was known as progress and civilisation. This tradition seems to have changed since the 90s, why do you think it has happened?

HUMPHREY MCQUEEN: Obviously one of the signs of those changes is more general, and that is the move away from any kind of government activity. So, there has been an interesting reversal amongst those people on the right who were “law-and-order” people, who wanted strong government, big armies, strong police forces attached to government in that way. They have not so much in Australia as in the United States where it is much more extreme, but there are elements of it here as well, have seen that they want to turn into commercial activities for profit a great number of those law-and-order activities that had previously been undertaken directly by the state. Now I think one has to be clear that, in moving them into private corporations, they are not fundamentally changing their basic function in the society. We haven’t had so much of it in Australia again as the United States, but most of the strike breaking in the United States or much of it, was conducted by Pinkerton detectives in the nineteenth century. Which was a private detective agency. They were backed up, of course, in many ways by the National Guard, which was a sort of volunteer force from the state. So, I think it is always important to be clear that there are certain functions going on, and it doesn’t really matter so much as to whether the state or corporations or volunteers are in fact performing these.

ROCK: Have you come across some of the histories of the American labour movement like Jeremy Brecher and Scott Lash and PK Edwards’ work on the question? Because it’s quite surprising the strength of the labour evolution there, and it seems to be much underpublicised by the media, whereas we get the cowboy kind of Pinkerton imagery coming through which is very refined. Even perhaps going through the British media, the Birmingham School have perhaps, commented on that. We do not get a really illuminating picture of what happened with their labour struggles and victories, and so forth.

HUMPHREY: It is very often asked why the trade union movement in America and the labour movement in America seems to be much less organised, much less political. That it doesn’t produce a labour party in the way in which the British colonies do. And part of the answer to that is, of course, the degree of direct violence that was directed at the labour movement for over a hundred years. Even today, and of course what is happening there now, and I think we have seen bits of it here with people like Kroger and Costello and the Dollar Sweets case, and then the Northern Territory meat workers, where instead of using the police directly, they use the law. Because of their greater resources in finance and time, they are able to break down the unions. That happened in Victoria, I understand with the fire-fighters under Kennet, that as much as they were prepared to go fighting, they simply didn’t have the financial resources to go on employing the lawyers needed. If they were going to keep going back to the courts and all the appeals and counter appeals. And they make a practice of it. They think up as many different legal actions as they can bring simultaneously, in order to stop the unions from being able to do anything. In America there is a very, very organised movement to prevent people joining trade unions. Although the figures are if you ask them independently, the numbers who want to join now would put the union movement’s share of the labour force up to its peak in the late 1940s.

ROCK: The apparent silent changeover of civil defense to what sociologists have unsubtlely called “paramilitary policing” in the late 80s in Australia, seemed to have temporarily at least, abandoned any concerns about progress or even consensual democracy. Government by agreement rather than force. This is only a superficial kind of perspective, but nonetheless that seems to strike you prima facie. Do you think there is a crisis of the political at the moment, symptomatised in the civil regime itself?

HUMPHREY: I think it is certainly true that the old political system, the old two-party system no longer contains the political. And I don’t just mean that in terms of breakaways like One Nation or independent Labor candidates, or the direct electioneers for the Republic. In general, the realm of the political has moved outside that parliamentary activity. So that there are a whole range of activities going on that can’t be controlled and directed in the way that they used to be. You get a whole group of people who are accustomed to being the directors of ideas and policies in the society, many of them who think they are on the left, who get very upset with what they call “populism”. That is people doing things for themselves, rather than coming to government agencies and getting support through that. On the one hand, we have got that non-parliamentary set of activities going on. When you mentioned about a paramilitary approach to policing, it is also of course, that is one hand that is the iron fist. But there is also the velvet glove of how they present it as Community Policing, Neighbourhood Watches, trying to engage more of the citizenry in a police surveillance system.

ROCK: Do you think that there might be some implication about, perhaps as you referred to it ‘velvet glove’, which is possibly a convention by now. The relation between that and something like the picture of the police in every street, in every suburb of large cities. The implication of that seems really not quite to correspond to the intention behind it doesn’t it. It sounds a bit like Fahrenheit 451 or something?

HUMPHREY: It tends always, I mean, in how these things are made to work. Some years ago, now, I spent a few months in Munich. In fact, while I was there, or a month before I got there, there was a major assassination by one of the revolutionary army groups. They had blown up a banker on his way to work and I had said to a number of students I had got to know there, “there aren’t any police on the streets here, I’m amazed”. They said, “you do something and you see how long it takes for a policeman to appear”. And they explained to me that every street corner was fitted with cameras, and there were policemen in police boxes really at every street corner. That there was a very covert, but very powerful system of police surveillance in that city. Although you were never accustomed to it. A couple of years later I went to live in Japan where, of course, the police box system is the public community method of policing. And of course, it does a great deal more than that. The police are very much involved in everyday social, community activities through this place. So that you see the police as a much more visible presence there than it was in Germany. But in terms of the effectiveness of it, whether you see them or whether you don’t is not the real question. It really is a matter of how they are structured to operate and how effective they can be at getting their forces to the points where they decide there is going to be trouble.

ROCK: Do you think that possibly these countries, who have gone through great trauma in the twentieth century, do you think that they have — for instance Japan, Germany, and perhaps Italy, and some of the eastern European countries and so forth — a lot to tell Western countries, who seem to be at least exposed to the dangers of those traumas of a police state, or political crises, now?

HUMPHREY: Yes. I think one of the things, if you think about Germany and Japan, as you may remember Barrington Moore’s book about the social origins of dictatorship and democracy? He makes the point that those countries, like Japan and Germany, which didn’t have popular revolutions to establish a bourgeois democracy, the way that England did or that France had, have revolutions from on high. And that they never entirely break from the old regime of power from the top-down. What my Japanese student friends called the “emperor system”. Even if you don’t have an emperor, you can have an emperor system. And that there is a combination of ideological memory of political structures and of power structures in those societies.

But although in the post-war period there have been enormous changes in Germany and in Japan, they do linger on in a way in which we don’t have them in Australia. There are things, which we won’t put up with here that they would take for granted there. But equally, I was back in Germany two years ago, and I was struck yet again by how heavily they all smoke in public in ways in which would just never happen in Australia. I mentioned this to somebody and they said “well that’s one of their revulsions against Hitler”. Hitler, because he was a health fanatic, had tried to stamp out all kinds of smoking in private and in public. So, the attempt by the German government, twelve or so years ago, to stop smoking in public was resisted by the German populace because it was one of the few areas left to them where their lives were not regimented. They were hanging on to this bit where we would think, well it would be a good thing to give-up. But because they were regimented in so many other ways, and they associated this with the 1930s compulsory health and fitness programs of the Nazi regime, that they were going to stand out against it.

ROCK: Do you think that there may be a parallel in Australia with the bohemians at the Bulletin sort of concept of “Wowserism”. I don’t know how far that extends into the present, but you would perhaps have a certain sentimental attachment to it if you have seen some of the anti-smoking ads?

HUMPHREY: It could be. I think there is a new Wowserism, I don’t think there is any doubt about that. Whether it is the one that David Marr has pointed to recently or whether it has wider origins from that, I can’t be sure. But certainly, some of things that we used to be Wowserish about we aren’t any more. And indeed, I think because so many of those things have changed. The Wowserism about gambling, when I was a boy, was about things that were so silly. At a local scout fete, you could not have a raffle. But you could have a guessing competition of how many beans there were in a bottle, on the grounds that this was supposed to be a competition of skill. This was complete garbage about the real difference between them. But because the scouts were under the influence of the Protestant churches mainly, they were not having any kind of gambling in a way that the Catholic schools would have a raffle or a chocolate wheel, or something. But the difference between whether you guessed the number of beans in a bottle, or whether you buy a 10-cent ticket in a chocolate wheel, there is really no difference between those two things. But a huge difference between both of them and the arrival of the casinos.

So that the Wowserism that is sometimes pointed to by the ex-premier of Victoria in saying “people opposed to having fun”, that people who would have opposed the earlier Wowserism, are now finding themselves in a position where they oppose the mass commercialisation of what he calls fun or gambling on this massive scale. There has been as there is with sport, for example, the whole connection between gambling and sport has been transformed, because both of them have become commodities. In America, there is this wonderful generic term they use called “bizball”. For all kinds of games, whether it is netball, baseball, football or anything that have become simply business operations.

ROCK: I was just going to mention that if you look at American baseball compared to AFL football, or British soccer, or even the international cricket, they don’t have ads on the players, and it seems like they have been able to retain a greater integrity with deference to the fans than perhaps we have here. So that looks very impressive in contrast.

HUMPHREY: Yeah.

ROCK: Speaking of the casino, and what some people are referring to very pessimistically as a casino economy in the offing, this next question sort of relates to that generally. The free trade or appeasement economic approach has a long history in Australia in conflict with protectionism. You might remember Golan’s research into this question? Also known in Neville Chamberlain’s time as the ‘Manchester Creed’ or today as ‘Economic Rationalism’. Do you see the unexpected re-emergence of appeasement as only a predictable corollary of political crises, largely unresolvable in the present context…not unrelated to later Trotsky in the early 40s or Mandel later in the 60s and 70s – a pretty cut and dried, conventional question perhaps?

HUMPHREY: I think that there are areas of the world now, which are almost on the boil as it is. The news is monumentally selective, so that what we get to know about and what we get to see, only happens when the volcano manages to erupt. But in terms of some of the crises that can be managed and how they can be managed, what we now see I think is that after the ‘97 financial crisis in East Asia that then spread to Brazil and Russia, and all sort of places. Up until then the official line from the IMF, less so from the World Bank, but basically putting out the same line that the state had to get out of the way. The moment the crisis developed they then moved to a World Bank position away from an IMF position and said, well what we really meant by this is not that we get rid of the state, but that what we have is an “effective state”. And they used that phrase. What the effective state was, of course, was that it had to be powerful enough to control the social forces that were unleashed by the collapse of the financial and then the economic system.

This notion that you had to weaken the state, you had to reduce its powers, and all the things that it was doing then suddenly had to be refashioned, so that it was powerful enough to contain the street violence. But, also effective enough to do as much social amelioration as was necessary to hold the system in place. The attitude that we have seen in those countries towards the state and the change that has happened there, we haven’t yet seen so much in the countries like Australia and the United States. That financially and economically are doing well still, and have not undergone that big dip that overtook those other places. What would happen here and in the United States, if the crisis were to come home and how they would then have to deal with that, both through using the state as a weapon to contain protest, and as a kind of soporific or opiate in order to make sure that it didn’t become too extreme, in terms of the impoverishment and the things that people could not cope with, we are yet to see. But I would think that in Australia there would then be more of a move back not to the old Keynesian notions, but to certainly a more combination of a carrot-and-stick approach, in order to get them through in any crisis that they would run into. And how effective that would be, of course, would depend on the depth and the length of the crisis that they encountered.

ROCK: In Australia the arming of the police was accompanied by an outbreak of massacres – Melbourne, Sydney, Hobart. Yet no-one seems to have made any logical connection between the two events: increased environment of violence from politics and violent events. Do you believe that it is possible to assess the correlation from the available evidence?

HUMPHREY: I think that you would have to go through each of the incidents and separate them out. I wouldn’t think that the Tasmanian Martin Bryant case could be attached to anything outside whatever personal strains he had gone through. The availability of guns to him is another matter. But that the provocations for him I think were indeed peculiar to him. Beyond those, I think that if you look at the run of bikie gang violence. I think that it is still true to say that it is a bit of a toss-up in many cases as to whether some young blokes join a bikie gang or join the police force. And that, for them, the police force becomes the official bikie gang. They can roar around in their cars or their bikes and have the same kind of power and things.

ROCK: My perception of people who are enthusiastic towards motorcycles is that they have got a kind of obsession or real reverence for their machinery. And it is not based on the negative, like they want to injure things, or go out and sport and display the weaponry so much to intimidate people, as just a kind of liking for their, I suppose consumer product. But nonetheless, there seems to be something of a different slant and not necessarily a ready comparison between the two.

HUMPHREY: We are talking about those bikie gangs that have been involved in these fights among themselves for power. We are not talking about everybody who belongs to a motorcycle club.

ROCK: Do you think there might be something of the, I am not going to say doctoring, but maybe filtering of media imagery which is presented to us from a target many in the esteemed profession might consider fair game. And therefore, they can take a few extra liberties with, a la what the Birmingham School saw with the British media and American crime reportage?

HUMPHREY: Oh yeah. It now becomes very easy to attack anybody with a motorcycle who is involved in any kind of offence at all, then falls into the category of a violent motorcycle gang. But I would have to say that unless there had been things, like the Milperra killing, it wouldn’t have been possible I think for the media just to invent that. They couldn’t have invented it out of people’s memories of seeing Marlon Brando in The Wild One. But it did have to have that degree of reality.

I think Adorno was perfectly right to remind us that people aren’t so stupid as to believe the wink of propaganda unless it strikes a chord in their own experience. Now it may be that the chord it strikes is a very distorted one. But they won’t accept something that has no connection to some sense of reality that they have actually experienced. So that to be able to make that projection there needed to have been a couple of incidents, like the Milperra one. But the connections between those criminal bikie gangs, and I am not just saying they are criminal because they went off and killed each other, but because of whatever other criminal activities in relation to drugs and things they may get involved in. Of course, again this is a parallel with the members of the police force who are engaged in exactly the same activities.

ROCK: It would be nice to disbelieve that an environment of violence, that may or may not have been provoked by the recent change in civil regulation to carriage of arms, was not in any way connected to violent incidents that occurred simultaneously. But it does not look all that plausible, does it? You could say in a very general sense, without looking at the details, which of course we would have to do.

HUMPHREY: One of things which I think is quite noticeable, which does connect to the way in which the culture of violence is not just some ambience that floats around, but is a structured, organised, learned activity within organisations, is the much higher kill rate in Victoria than in any other state. If you look at state police forces say Queensland, for example, you wouldn’t actually think you were dealing with the most benign police force in the world. And yet if you look at the number of people who they have managed to shoot in the street over the last ten years, the period in which they have been carrying guns openly in the way they have, they don’t appear to have had inculcated into them the belief that the first thing you do is to pull out a gun and shoot somebody.

And the Victorians do appear to have acquired that, and I mean it is peculiar in that Victorian situation. It also is peculiar, and I think relates again to this notion that the culture only comes into existence when people are taught how to do it, and told that they should do it. And it is legitimised through their training, through their experience. Because what struck me about the Victorian thing was not that the first few happened, but that they kept on happening. That the police didn’t, the police hierarchy and the training system then didn’t intervene in order to say, no there are other ways of going about this. So that to talk about a culture within any organisation, whether it is a police force or anything else, I think you always have to see that that culture requires really drummed in learned experience.

ROCK: In Melbourne the statistics of public shooting are approaching three times nearest rival Sydney. The incidents of officers unusually endangered and fatally injured is the highest since Ned Kelly’s day. Robert Haldane in his history of the Victorian police actually mentions the accumulation of arms in country areas by authorities as a key factor behind the Eureka Stockade trouble. Do you think Australians from all walks of life may have become a little complacent about the meaning of the Southern Cross. The original meaning, “diggers” and their “little revolution”, as they called it in the movie with Chips Rafferty, already won for both sides?

HUMPHREY: If I had to answer yes or no, I would say “no”. Because one of the things that is always remarkable in Australia is that, whenever you get a group of those, particularly in a non-urban setting, whenever there is any kind of protest, or strike, or activity in a mining town, or anything, they seem to manage to make Eureka flags of their own. But there is this sense, I have actually said this in print a few times, that I don’t want the Eureka flag to become the Australian flag. Because I think we need to keep the Eureka flag as the flag of protest against whatever state system we have. So that I would want to keep the Eureka flag as the flag of resistance to an Australian Republic. We get rid of the Union Jack out of the flag by all means. But we need to keep the Eureka flag as the flag of the protestors and of the people against the state. I don’t think that in that sense it has been forgotten. Given that it doesn’t get this kind of treatment in the mass media, that it has had some unfortunate associations in the last twenty years or so, you would think people would shy-off it. But in fact, they keep on turning it out again as we saw, for example, during the Maritime Union dispute. But every time there is some kind of mining activity, or the shearers going on strike again, they always seem to get someone, no matter how remote they are, can get a bit of cloth together and run up a Eureka flag.

ROCK: What kind of actions can be taken to improve things like civil safety, for both police officers themselves and the public, do you think? And I am thinking of disarmament, just generally around the routine obviously…

HUMPHREY: Somebody said to me years ago when I first went to New York, “New York’s perfectly safe. You’ve got no more chance of being killed in New York than you have anywhere else, providing you don’t stop for drugs or sex. The moment someone approaches you in the street and offers to sell you drugs or sex, and you begin to enter into a negotiation with them, or a relationship of any kind, then the chances of violence escalate enormously”.

The answer, in a way, to your question is not a technical one. But that what the police are very much involved in is a drug culture of crime. And, that you could do something to reduce the amount crime that is driven by people’s demand for illegal substances. So that they rob banks, or steal little old lady’s handbags. Or all the kinds of things that people do in these circumstances, that then involve the police in both criminal activities on their own part, as they supervise the drug trade, and get involved with the dealers. And all those things that we know about, and we keep on finding time after time, every time they clean the police force out it comes back again. If you could clean up both of those bits, then the need for the police to feel that they needed to be armed, and also the situations in which they would then be confronted, so that they could go unarmed or with a truncheon, or with a net or something else, would become much more usual for them.

Rather than the kind of situations where you have always got the suspicion that the person you are dealing with may either have just taken some substance, and therefore is not going to make halfway rational decisions. Or they are so desperate to take something that they are not going to make that halfway rational decision. As long as you have got that element, as a major activity as a kind of criminal activity that the police get involved in, because they don’t by and large get involved in all the white-collar crime and all of that, art theft to those things which maybe are as large as the drug related crime. But the kind of street crime, the violent stuff they do get connected with is much connected with these.

The solution is about coping with that and I don’t know that, more people are moving towards the notion that if you de-criminalise marijuana and heroin and all these things then you will solve the problem. I am not so easy confident or optimistic that you can solve the problems in those sorts of ways. I would like to think that you could, and I don’t really have any old-time Wowserish objections to people taking all kinds of illicit substances in themselves. But whether, if you did that you would then solve the crime problems and all the things that people say, well these two things have now come together and if we get rid of one of them, then we’ll get rid of the other. I think that might be just a bit too easily optimistic.