Rex Connor
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Reginald Francis Xavier "Rex" Connor (20 January 1909 - 28 August 1977), Australian politician, was a senior minister in the Whitlam government, until his forced resignation.
Connor was born in Wollongong, New South Wales, an industrial town where he lived all his life and which he represented in the New South Wales and federal parliaments. He was educated at state schools and became an articled clerk. He qualified as a solicitor but never practised law. Instead he went into business as a car dealer and later took up farming. Despite these middle-class occupations he was a dedicated socialist. From 1938 to 1945 he was an Alderman on the Wollongong City Council.
Connor was a member of the Australian Labor Party from his youth, but it was suspected that he was also a secret member of the Communist Party of Australia. In 1940, when the NSW ALP was split into three factions, he contested the federal seat of Werriwa for the so-called "Hughes-Evans Labor Party", the left-wing faction closely aligned to the Communist Party. Nevertheless, when most of the Hughes-Evans faction were expelled in 1941, Connor remained in the ALP.
In 1950 Connor was elected to the New South Wales Legislative Assembly for the seat of Wollongong-Kembla, where he served for 13 years. Since he was not a supporter of the dominant Catholic right-wing of the NSW ALP, he remained a backbencher. In 1963 he quit state politics and was elected to the Australian House of Representatives for the Wollongong-based seat of Cunningham.
In Canberra, Connor developed a reputation as an eccentric. A large, shabbily dressed man who always wore a hat long after hats had gone out of fashion, Connor seldom spoke in the House and never spoke to journalists. He kept his real age a secret. He had a terrible temper and was known as "the strangler" after an incident in which he ripped a clock off a wall in Parliament House and threw it across the room in a rage. His earlier socialism had evolved into a fierce economic nationalism, directed mainly at foreign-owned banks and mining companies.
In 1972 Labor came to power under Gough Whitlam, and Connor was elected to the front-bench and appointed Minister for Minerals and Energy. In this portfolio he sought to develop an Australian-controlled mining and energy sector, one not controlled by the mining companies he disliked. Among his plans were a national energy grid and a gas pipe-line across Australia from the North-West Shelf gasfields to the cities of the south-east. He liked to recite a piece of poetry by Sam Walter Foss (who was, ironically, American):
- Give me men to match my mountains,
- Give me men to match my plains,
- Men with freedom in their visions
- And creation in their veins.
Connor's economic nationalism was popular with the Labor rank-and-file, and the 1973 energy crisis seemed to many to be a vindication of his views. After the 1974 election he topped the Caucus ballot for the second Whitlam ministry. But the flood of petrodollars which accompanied the energy crisis proved to be Connor's undoing.
During 1974 Connor sought to bypass the usual loanraising processes and raise money in the Middle East through an intermediary, a Pakistani banker called Tirath Khemlani. Because of strong opposition from the Treasury and the Attorney-General's department about the legality of the loan and Khemlani's bona fides, Cabinet decided in May 1975 that only the Treasurer was authorised to negotiate foreign loans in the name of the Australian government. Nevertheless, Connor went on negotiating through Khemlani for a huge petrodollar loan for his various development projects, confident that if he succeeded no-one would blame him, and if he failed no-one would know.
Unfortunately for Connor, Khemlani proved to be a false friend and sold the story of Connor's activities to the Liberal Opposition for a sum which has never been disclosed. Connor denied the Liberals' accusations, both to Whitlam personally and to Parliament. When the Liberal Deputy Leader, Phillip Lynch tabled letters from Connor to Khemlani, he was forced in October to resign in disgrace. A few weeks later the Governor-General, John Kerr, dismissed the Whitlam government.
After the 1975 election, in which Labor was heavily defeated, Connor was unexpectedly re-elected to the Opposition front bench. This was seen as a gesture of defiance to the Murdoch press, which had played a leading role in bringing down Whitlam's government. Connor died suddenly in August 1977.
The journalist Paul Kelly wrote in his book 1975: "It was the national interest that drove Rex Connor. He can be criticised for his naivety and poor judgement. But there is no charge against Connor's integrity... The Opposition implied in the lobbies that ministers were chasing personal gain. There is no evidence for this." Nevertheless, by the time Labor returned to office in 1983, Connor's economic nationalism and dreams of massive state investment in energy projects had been totally rejected.
