Frank
McGrath AM OBE MAHons LLB PhD
A leader in a 1941-1951 battle againsts Communists.
* to win 1945 FIA Balmain Branch elections
* as secretary Balmain Branch for 2 years
* as clerk with Caroll O'Dean 1946- 1951
* as solicitor to prove the 1949 FIA national
officers' election was won by forgery & fraud.
Chief Judge Compensation Court 1966-1993 |
Books on
Potential Fraud in Elections
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back
 The Forging of
Votes
“This book was written to remind our present ambitious
power-brokers of the small blow the faceless men of the
Balmain branch of the FIA struck for freedom. They were men
who wanted to maintain their democracy as it was until
communist ‘true believers’ turned it into a dictatorship."
Amy McGrath
preface p.8
The Forging of
Votes is the story of the rise of the Communist Party in
Australia and the fight of the 3,000 members of the Balmain
Branch of the Federated Ironworkers of Australia, in the
Balmain shipyards of Sydney Harbour, against that Communist
Party, which had seized majority control of the Australian
Congress of Trade Unions by capture of such key unions by
seizing the official management of all branches first, then
centralising control of them in federal offices.
After seizing
control of the Balmain Branch, its moderate officials fought
a prolonged battle through the courts with the Communist
central council until finally, in 1951, they proved, in a
long-drawn out court case, backed by Cecil O’Dea of Carroll,
O’Dea Solicitors that the communist officials had only
seized power throughout their union and the union movement
by fraud, forgery and irregularities ‘on a grand scale’ in
their elections.
Amy McGrath
describes these methods in the preface thus:
“The argument
exposed a variety of methods by which cynical manipulation
by communist officials had occurred in the FIA as in other
unions. Vitiated returning officers guaranteed to overlook,
even participate in, the cynical manipulation of the voting
process, standing for election at branch meetings. Such
meetings were stacked not only by members but by non-members with
membership OK cards issued for the night. Extra ballot
papers printed. Votes gathered by, even filled in by,
communist delegates on the shop floor. Voting papers marked
in bulk, and posted in batches. Ballot boxes held in, or
even removed from, union offices.
“The
electioneering process itself could be weighted against
candidates opposing communist officials or their
fellow-traveller nominees. The latter given the full use of
union resources – transport, printing of election dodgers,
space in the union journal, time on air. Those standing
against the power brokers given nothing; worse attacked with
the full propaganda resources of the sitting union
government – by abuse, libel, character assassination,
smear, satire, caricature. Sometimes also ‘heavied’ by
physical violence. They also demanded unity, consensus
or loyalty while branding any dissent as disruptive,
reactionary, backward and disloyal whether to union, country
etc.
Almost all the
rank and file of the Balmain Branch understood this cynical
ploy of the Communist officials, when they voted their
dissent against the Communist officials time and again from
1945-8. They continued to vote against a dictatorship that
had protected itself by debauchery of the voting process,
and by centralised punitive constitution instituted in
order to destroy any opposition.
They understood
all too well, as victims, that the forging of votes is a
debauchery of the voting process. It can only occur through
debauchery of the election process. It is facilitated by
debauchery of the electioneering process.
The debauchery of
the right to vote in unions - not exclusive to communist
dominated unions, but pursued more ruthlessly by them – has
infected the body politic and society at large; a cancer not
altogether resolved by the fact some 800 union elections
are conducted by the Australian Electoral Commission.
The same
unprincipled, manipulative practices, that debased the
morality of some union elections, are all too often obvious
also in major parliamentary elections. If this growing
corruption is not opposed, as it was in Balmain, we are all
at risk of the debauchery of democracy which the 20th
century knows as the consensus state of “Fascism, where
unity was not right but might.”
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