Australian Dictionary of Biography

Norm Gallagher, c.1970s

Noel Butlin Archives Centre

Norman Leslie Gallagher (1931–1999), trade union official, was born on 20 September 1931 at Carlton, Melbourne, youngest of three children of Tasmanian-born Minnie Gallagher, née Carrick, boot factory worker, and her Victorian-born husband Alfred Gallagher, builder’s labourer. Particularly close to his mother, Norm later recalled: ‘Mum was tough. Mum had my temper … or I had my mum’s temper’ (McQueen n.d., 6). Raised in Collingwood, he was educated at St Joseph’s School, where the Sisters of Charity beat him often enough to cause a temporary speech impediment and encourage him to learn boxing. Expelled at thirteen, he found work as a jockey on fruit delivery trucks at the Queen Victoria Market.

At age sixteen Gallagher took a builder’s labourer job with his brother on the Australian Paper Mills site at Fairfield. Conscious of the long-term damage of the Depression and the indignities suffered by builder’s labourers, he joined both the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and the Australian Builders Labourers Federation (BLF). On 12 April 1952 he married Jean Iris Bennett, a boot machinist, at St John’s Catholic Church, Clifton Hill. They moved to Reservoir and had two children, Wayne and Sharon, but he saw little of his family due to his dedication to the union and the CPA. The couple would divorce in the 1970s.

In 1951 Gallagher had attended the third World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin, also touring the Soviet Union and China. Upon his return the Victorian secretary of the BLF, Patrick ‘Paddy’ Malone, recruited him as a full-time organiser. In 1958 he joined the federal council of the BLF and three years later he was elevated to the position of federal secretary (1961–92). After Malone’s death in 1970, Gallagher also took on the more powerful role of secretary of the Victorian branch. His tenure as BLF boss was profoundly shaped by the split in world communism. In 1963 he had joined Malone, Ted Hill, and others in leaving the CPA to form the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) (CPA-ML), which looked to Mao’s China as a truer expression of Leninism than the Soviet Union. He made several pilgrimages to China in the late 1960s, meeting both Mao and Zhou Enlai.

Informed by Maoist doctrine, Gallagher helped steer the BLF into anti-imperialist causes, including the anti-Vietnam War movement, the anti-apartheid movement, and Aboriginal land rights. In line with Mao’s approach to national liberation, he also introduced the use of ‘guerrilla tactics’ to industrial disputes—including the infamous ‘interrupted concrete-pour’—as an alternative to the all-out strike. Gallagher never accepted the legitimacy of Australia’s arbitration system, once remarking ‘I would not even take my mother-in-law to the (Arbitration) court, let alone my union’ (Robinson 1985, 2). He preferred direct confrontation and negotiation with employers rather than relying on parliament or the courts. With Malone he fought the Bolte government’s use of penal powers against trade unionists, joining with other left-wing ‘rebel’ unions to campaign against the gaoling of fellow Maoist and Victorian Tramways Union boss Clarrie O’Shea in 1969. He seemed to relish violent confrontation with the police and was arrested several times for assault.

The BLF under Gallagher’s leadership was also notable for its worker-student and worker-community alliances. The former was built through anti-Vietnam War activism, the latter through land-use conflicts and the imposition of ‘black bans’ to save sites of urban heritage (such as the Queen Victoria Market and Regent Theatre) or of community value (including a campaign to save a North Carlton park, during which Gallagher was controversially gaoled for fourteen days in 1971). The project of worker-community alliance-building was more famously taken up by the New South Wales branch of the BLF, via the ‘green bans’ of Jack Mundey and his allies, who were not Maoists but members of the old CPA. In the early 1970s the green bans grew into a high-profile movement, holding up major construction projects and resulting in the temporary deregistration of the New South Wales BLF.

Rather than supporting Mundey’s successful elaborations on his own tactics, Gallagher instigated a hostile federal takeover of the New South Wales BLF branch in 1974, expelling Mundey and other key green ban leaders. The takeover was an expression of the rivalry between the original CPA and the CPA-ML. Gallagher also needed to regain registration for the BLF in New South Wales so he could continue his battles with a rival union, the Building Workers Industrial Union, led by Pat Clancy. Like Gallagher, Clancy was a former member of the CPA, but he had become president of the Moscow-aligned Socialist Party of Australia in 1971 and was thus unacceptable to the Maoist Gallagher.

Once Gallagher had set upon destroying an enemy, internal or external, he would pursue that cause aggressively and mercilessly. While his ruthlessness and discipline were assets in dealing with employers and the state, allowing the BLF to make remarkable gains in terms of wages and conditions in a brutal, often highly corrupt industry, they also cut the union off from potential allies. The New South Wales BLF takeover, Gallagher’s most brutal internal purge, saw many of his supporters on the Australian left turn into bitter enemies, laying the groundwork for the BLF’s isolation in the 1980s.

In 1981 the Federal Fraser government, together with the Thompson Liberal government in Victoria, began proceedings to deregister the BLF, and established a joint royal commission to investigate the union. The next year Gallagher was gaoled for three months for contempt of court. In its final report, the commission produced evidence that Gallagher had accepted kickbacks from major contractors and developers, including free materials and labour to build a holiday home on the Gippsland coast. Though he remained defiant, deploying BLF members to fight his subsequent prosecution, and though some critics argued the findings were politically motivated or trumped-up, the revelations were devastating to Gallagher’s credibility. In June 1985 he was convicted in the Victorian County Court of twenty counts of accepting secret commissions. While hundreds of BLF members laid siege to the courthouse, he was sentenced to four years and three months in gaol. He appealed, securing a retrial, which nonetheless convicted him on seventeen counts, with the lesser sentence of eighteen months and a $60,000 fine. Further appeals were unsuccessful.

When Gallagher was released from Pentridge prison in October 1986, the BLF was in the fight of its life, as its tendency toward violence and contempt for the law had prompted Labor governments and peak labour councils to move finally to smash the union. The governments of Neville Wran in New South Wales and John Cain in Victoria had deregistered the BLF in 1985. Having halted the deregistration push of the Fraser government when first elected in 1983, the Hawke Federal government similarly legislated to outlaw the BLF in 1986. To enforce deregistration, police in Victoria attended building sites en masse, forcing labourers to sign BLF resignation forms or be banned from the industry. Brother unions, supportive in earlier fights, now swooped in to poach members. In 1987 the police raided the BLF headquarters in Carlton, seizing the union’s assets. By 1988 its Victorian membership had shrunk to just 500, having sat at 13,500 only two years prior. By 1992 Gallagher had been ousted from his leadership positions in the rump of the BLF and had become a politically isolated figure.

Plagued by health troubles in the 1990s, Gallagher suffered three strokes and a nervous breakdown, and battled diabetes. Survived by his two children, he died of heart failure on 26 August 1999 in the Western Hospital, Footscray. Described as ‘Australia’s most notorious union official’ (Browne 1991, 10), he left a vexed legacy. ‘Pint sized [and] aggressive’ (Robinson and Ambrose 1999, 13), he was a working-class hero and martyr to many unionists and builder’s labourers. To others, including employers and both Liberal and Labor politicians, he was a corrupt megalomaniac and thug. Most acknowledged, however, that he was an effective trade unionist who helped to lift builder’s labourers from their lowly status, which he had described as ‘on the last rung of society, worse than second-class citizens’ (Stannard 1986, 44).