Warren Mundine has lived an adventurous and complicated life. The former ALP president is now a Liberal candidate in the next election for the seat of Gilmore on the New South Wales south coast, parachuted in by prime minister Scott Morrison over local objections. A Bundjalung-Gumbaynggirr man from Grafton, Mundine has never been afraid of controversy. His autobiography Warren Mundine: in Black and White was written in 2017 before he stood for election as Liberal but after his departure from Labor and charts his political journey and his Aboriginal heritage. The book is also painfully honest about his personal life and his relationship with three wives and wider family.
Mundine was born in 1956 in a separate wing of Grafton Hospital for Aboriginal mothers and babies. Segregation was commonplace in regional Australia before 1967 and Mundine tells how his ancestors went from being masters of their country to slaves in a century. Survivors were removed to reservations and missions, and their lives were controlled by police and Protection and Welfare Boards who removed children to institutions and white families.
Mundine carried Irish heritage on his mother’s side through Corkman William Donovan who married Yuin woman Catherine Marshall. They moved to Kempsey in 1870. The Mundines called the Donovans the Black Irish as they also lost their land to the British. Warren’s mother Dolly inherited the Donovans’ religion and married Roy Mundine in Bowraville Catholic Church. Roy laboured at Naryugil near an asbestos mine where Warren’s uncles worked and later died from mesothelioma.
With union help Roy got equal wages with whites and the family bought a house in Grafton where they raised 11 children. Roy had the infamous “dog tag”, a certificate of exemption which allowed him assimilate in white society, but Dolly scratched out the photo, believing her husband shouldn’t need the tag to do what others took for granted. The couple passed on this determination not to be treated like second-class citizens to their children though Warren darkly remembers when two policemen strip-searched his father beside his car for no apparent reason. “You might own a house, but to us you’re still an abo,” they told Roy.
When older siblings got scholarships the family moved to Sydney in 1963. Warren was seven. They lived in Auburn which he called “an exemplar of multiculturalism – long before any politician dreamed up the name”. Racism was rife against all minorities but they were no longer under the stultifying control of the welfare boards. Warren was introduced to football and players would not believe he came from Grafton until he told them of his Bundjalung heritage. “Ah! So you’re a real Aussie, an original!” they replied.
Through older sisters, Warren became politically aware and watched the 1967 referendum on television, cheering the result. Warren was proud of his siblings working in the campaign. However Warren’s grades were poor and he ended up in a trade not in university like his sisters. He became an apprentice fitter and turner and studied at TAFE. When cycling home one day he was hit by a truck and suffered a spinal injury which laid him off work for a year. Warren moved into a rental house and discovered drugs and women.
Aged 19 he met Jenny Ross, 17, and she fell pregnant after a couple of months. They married, Jenny gave birth to “Little Warren” and Nicole was born three years later. Warren was a labourer with the Water Board, focused on his future as a dad. He completed his HSC, sat the public service exams and got a job at the tax office. The couple bought a house in St Mary’s and Warren took a second job bartending at Bankstown town hall. He returned to Baryulgil on weekends with his sisters and joined a board that managed Aboriginal land rights in the region.
The tax office offered Warren a university scholarship in Adelaide. His parents offered to look after the children, but he left alone and the marriage disintegrated. At SAIT in 1982 Warren became politically active, describing himself as “radical and left wing”. He was also exposed to the free market ideas of Milton Friedman, though he believed solutions should be driven by communities and governments not individuals. He was helped by Don Dunstan’s programs to train Aboriginal students and studied everything from leadership to negotiation. In 1982 he was part of the Aboriginal protests against the Brisbane Commonwealth Games and met other emerging Aboriginal leaders including Marcia Langton, Gary Foley, Charlie Perkins and Michael Mansell.
He also met Kevin Cook who headed up Tranby Aboriginal College in Sydney. Cook taught him that business and enterprise in a cooperative model was the key to moving people out of poverty. Mundine learned about the worldwide indigenous and black activism and worked with Cook on land rights. He was influenced by New Caledonian Kanak independence leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou who wanted to embrace the best of the modern world. Modernisation was not a threat to independence and culture but essential to its survival.
Mundine’s second wife Lynette Riley was a friend of his sister Olive who was working on an Aboriginal teachers’ program with NSW Education. They met at an education conference and it developed into a relationship. They worked together at Tranby and travelled the state promoting land rights and the Aboriginal Land Rights Act passed by NSW’s Labor government in 1983. They got married, had children and moved to Armidale where she worked for the university and he worked for the land council. His political vision crystallised about the need for commerce, private ownership, jobs and education to improve the lot of poor people. “I realised government could only do so much,” he said.
He saw segregation was gone from regional NSW but Aboriginal kids were not going to school and people were surviving on handouts. Welfare dependency and “sit down money” replaced low-wage jobs and land rights alone would not solve the problem. Inexperienced land councillors were not up to running businesses and managing land as an economic resource. Mundine felt activists were no help blaming problems on the past and looking to governments for assistance.
In Canberra, Hawke and Keating were enacting economic and structural reforms which resonated with Mundine. He ran unsuccessfully as an independent for Armidale City Council in 1991 and was elected in 1995. He called council a “hothouse learning in the art of politics” and learned the importance of authenticity and “speaking with the right people through the media”.
He ran for the 1998 state election in Dubbo, a safe Nationals seat. Mundine polled well for Labor, and independent mayor Tony McGrane won the seat by 14 votes in a three-way split. Mundine’s strong performance attracted the attention of party bosses Karl Bitar and Mark Arbib. Mundine was named number three on the Labor Senate ticket for New South Wales for the 2001 federal election.
Labor usually won three seats in a NSW half-Senate election but this was not a normal election. After the Tampa crisis and the events of 9/11 Prime Minister Howard increased his majority, the Labor vote collapsed in NSW and they only won two Senate seats. Mundine returned to Aboriginal roots.
For him, “Mabo changed everything”. The High Court judgement handed down in 1992 eventually led to PM Paul Keating’s native title legislation a year later. In 2003 Mundine moved to Sydney to take a job as NSW Native Title Services Ltd’s CEO representing holders and claimants across the state. He was selected as the Labor right candidate for national president and finished third. He served two years as vice president and became national president in 2006.
His term as president brought a national profile, notably with his interview with ABC’s Kerry O’Brien where he spoke out against party disunity memorably peppered with several uses of the word “bloody”. By this time the tide was finally turning against Howard and Labor looked likely to win in 2007.
Mundine’s career took a new turn under the influence of Bob Carr’s advisor Walt Secord. Secord grew up on a Canadian reservation and believed Aboriginal land should become economic assets. Mundine wanted to move away from communal land ownership and non-profit community businesses and take up home ownership, economic land development and profiting businesses. It was an incendiary idea and it made him “one of the most loathed people in Indigenous Affairs, a puppet of white establishment and a conservative government, wanting to stop land rights”.
Mundine said he didn’t believe land rights or native title should be abandoned but could be leased out with the head title staying with traditional owners. He saw this as a way of removing dependency on handouts and becoming “full participants in all that Australian society had to offer.” That was not music to the ears of the National Native Title Conference in 2005 where he was heckled and booed. But the Howard government was interested in his ideas of individual rights and home ownership.
Around this time he had an affair and his marriage to Lynette broke up. Professionally, things also went awry as his hopes of being preselected for the Sydney seat of Fowler for the 2007 election fell apart without explanation leading to a falling out with Labor. Howard appointed him to the National Indigenous Council and while Mundine was critical of Howard’s handling of the Apology he supported his policies to remove disadvantage and poverty. Mundine said that for true reconciliation Aboriginal people also needed to forgive, draw a line in history and “feel a part of Australia as a nation, in addition to their own first nations”.
Mundine supported Howard’s Northern Territory Intervention believing it would enable people to own homes and Aboriginal communities could operate like towns with small businesses and commercial activities. He also supported the needs of Aboriginal victims of violence and the objective of getting Aboriginal children back to school. The reason the intervention failed, Mundine said, was an “invasion of bureaucrats”.
Mundine was initially excited about Kevin Rudd coming to power in 2007 and worked well with Indigenous Affairs minister Jenny Macklin. He supported the 2008 Closing The Gap initiative as a scorecard to show if programs were working though he believed the way to close the gap was through economic participation and “governments don’t create jobs”.
He supported the Rudd-Gillard plan to shift Indigenous mindsets from welfare dependency to jobs and education. But on other matters he was disappointed. He said the carbon tax, the mining tax and increased workplace regulation stifled growth and productivity. He made one final attempt to secure a Labor seat in 2012 when Mark Arbib left the Senate but the casual vacancy went to Bob Carr instead despite numerous denials, further damaging his trust in the Labor machine. He resigned his Labor membership that year.
Mundine’s drift to the right continued when he met Elizabeth Henderson at an event organised by the Sydney Institute, run by Elizabeth’s parents, Gerard and Anne Henderson. He and Elizabeth developed a relationship. Mundine also developed a professional relationship with opposition leader Tony Abbott and his chief of staff Peta Credlin accompanying them on a three-day working bee to renovate Aurukun’s library. Aurukun was a tough community with 120 times more murders than the Queensland average. Mundine saw a communal-run town with no commerce, agriculture or tourism and a community “locked in some kind of social and cultural museum”.
In 2012 Mundine had major heart surgery, a “brush with death” which led to his departure from Labor. Mundine used his new platform of CEO of Generation One, an Indigenous jobs finding organisation funded by Twiggy Forrest, to frame arguments on home ownership and Aboriginal land. When Abbott was elected in 2013 Mundine chaired a new Indigenous advisory group and said special governance was only needed for use of traditional lands, native title rights. community assets and heritage but not for regular municipal services.
Mundine spoke weekly with Abbott. They were both focused on practical outcomes in schooling, jobs, business and community safety. An early initiative was Remote School Attendance Strategy which employed attendance officers to work with families to reach the crucial 90% attendance threshold for effective education. Mundine was frustrated state governments would not provide the information. Mundine also supported cashless welfare. He said encouraging people via welfare payments into long-term poverty was “cruel” and authorities needed to stop payments if people refused to participate in job programs.
Abbott went the way of the two previous prime ministers and Mundine found it harder to connect with his replacement Malcolm Turnbull who was uninterested in Indigenous affairs. Turnbull called a Royal Commission into the Don Dale detention centre following an ABC report but did nothing over the 75,000 cases of domestic violence in the NT in three years. Mundine said “whichever dickhead came up with the idea was wasting taxpayers money”. Turnbull warned him to back off. Mundine offered his resignation from the Indigenous Advisory Committee, which Turnbull accepted.
Mundine’s book came out before Turnbull was deposed like Abbott, Gillard and Rudd. But Mundine’s ideas were increasingly in tune with the Liberals despite his lack of rapport with Turnbull. Scott Morrison did not merit a mention in the book but it is not hard to believe they saw eye to eye on economic development. It’s also not hard to believe Morrison liked the cut of Mundine’s jib. “I like to talk in a way people understand, say sensible things and inject common sense into a political debate that has become too focused on vested interests and not focused enough on regular people,” Mundine wrote. The people of Gilmore will now have a chance to judge for themselves.
Woolly Days 