Australian Dictionary of Biography

Clifford Ormond Dolan (1920–2000), electrician and union official, was born on 23 January 1920 at South Grafton, New South Wales, fourth of eight children of Percy George Dolan, gardener, and his wife Alice Margaret, née Ormond, both New South Wales-born. Cliff was raised in the Sydney suburb of Meadowbank, where his family relocated in the early 1920s. He attended Meadowbank Public School and Sydney Technical High School, and in 1936 began an apprenticeship with the electrical contractor F. T. S. O’Donnell Griffin and Co. Ltd. Dolan’s father was active in the Australian Labor Party (ALP), and in 1935 Cliff joined its Younger Set, his strong Catholic faith drawing him to the party’s right-wing faction. Upon finishing his apprenticeship in 1941 he joined the Electrical Trades Union (ETU). On 14 October 1944 at St Michael’s Roman Catholic Church, Meadowbank, he married Alice Gertrude ‘Peg’ Cordwell, a process worker from North Ryde, who privately called her husband Bill.

In 1945 Dolan became a full ALP member, and the following year he was elected to the ETU State council. He was one of the union’s three full-time organisers from 1949, covering major sites such as the Lithgow Small Arms Factory, the Kurnell oil refinery, and the Snowy Mountains scheme. This last assignment won him widespread attention when in 1955 he convinced the State Trades and Labor Council to challenge the scheme’s constitutional validity as part of a successful bid to prevent its management from consolidating relevant New South Wales and Federal industrial awards into one Federal award. He nonetheless became known for his caution, having concluded that ‘you didn’t win by charging up to the cannon’s mouth’ (Hewett 1981, 7). Deeply committed also to his local community, he was briefly an alderman of Ryde Municipal Council (1954–56).

Support from the ALP right won Dolan a place on the New South Wales Labor Party’s State executive in 1960. In November that year he temporarily filled the position of ETU State secretary, and in September 1961 secured a further term in this position when he defeated the left’s J. V. Benson. Three years later he became the ETU’s Federal secretary. He broke with the right in 1969 by supporting his friend Bob Hawke as the left’s candidate for the presidency of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). This cost Dolan his position on the State executive, but helped him win the junior vice-presidency of the ACTU in 1971, followed by its senior vice-presidency in 1973.

Holding these positions concurrently with his ETU secretaryship, Dolan was now counted as a centrist and committed Hawke supporter. An exception to the latter concerned the issue of uranium mining, about which he and Hawke held strong but conflicting views. Dolan’s opposition dated from 1945, and was strengthened by a 1967 visit to Japanese nuclear installations which he discovered were prone to breaking down. By the mid-1970s uranium had become a contentious issue within the union movement: the ACTU supported a mining and export ban, but was reluctant to enforce it against unions covering the industry. Hawke sought to soften ACTU policy at its 1979 congress, only for Dolan to move the key amendment that maintained the status quo.

This disagreement did not create a personal breach with Hawke, who urged his senior vice-president to nominate to succeed him as ACTU president. Dolan, acceptable to both right and left, was accordingly elected unopposed in September 1980. The contrast with the flamboyant Hawke was striking: Dolan had an understated and seemingly deliberate manner, dressed conservatively, used brilliantine, and declared that the ACTU would be ‘a more low-key operation than it has been under Bob’ (Gordon 1979, 9). He also brought his anti-uranium stance to the role, with the convenor of the Movement Against Uranium Mining, Joe Camilleri, appearing at the new president’s first press conference. In June 1980 Dolan was appointed AO.

Another contrast with his predecessor emerged in early 1981 when, during an industrial dispute involving Qantas, Dolan eschewed Hawke’s frequent success as a peace-broker on the grounds that ‘the role of the ACTU is simply not to settle disputes, but to win disputes (Wild 1981, 8). Dolan did, however, negotiate an end to a major transport workers’ strike in July. He also oversaw the effective abandonment of the uranium policy that he had championed, accepting that union resistance had rendered it unenforceable.

Dolan spent much of 1982 and early 1983 dealing with major developments in wages policy. The ACTU declared in November 1982 that it was open to the Fraser government’s proposed wage pause under some conditions, but during January 1983 campaigned against the pause when the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission refused to ratify an oil industry wage rise. Dolan was simultaneously involved in negotiating an agreement on a prices and incomes accord between the ACTU and the ALP, but at a crucial point in February delayed concluding it to prevent the then Federal Opposition leader, Bill Hayden, from announcing it, thereby assisting Hawke’s bid for the party leadership. Dolan was subsequently praised by Prime Minister Hawke for his role in securing trade union support for the accord.

After 1983 Dolan was sometimes overshadowed by the ACTU secretary Bill Kelty, whom he thought effective but uncommunicative. Their relationship was partially formalised by a 1985 change to ACTU rules which defined discrete roles for the president and secretary, giving the latter clear primacy in administrative matters. Still, Dolan was more than a figurehead. He played a significant part in the tax debates of 1984 and 1985, opposing a consumption tax more vocally than either Kelty or the senior vice-president Simon Crean.

Dolan’s proudest achievement as ACTU president was the 1984 launch of an ACTU-sponsored foreign aid organisation, Australian People for Health, Education and Development Abroad. Based on a proposal put to him by the aid worker and unionist Helen McCue, APHEDA initially provided training to Eritrean and Palestinian primary health workers. Dolan had been instrumental in securing ACTU backing for the new organisation, and served as its inaugural chair.

In September 1985 Dolan was succeeded by Crean as ACTU president. He continued to chair APHEDA, taking on related roles as chair of the African National Congress Support Committee (1985–90), and of the Australian Cambodian Support Committee (1986–93), before resigning from APHEDA in September 1995 due to ill-health. Dolan died of lung disease complicated by cigarette smoking and asbestosis on 7 December 2000 at West Ryde, survived by Peg and their sons Kerry and Paul, and was buried at the Field of Mars cemetery. A street in Ryde was named for him.