Leading Left-winger
In Canberra, Cairns became a leader of the left. He was a highly effective debater and was soon feared and disliked by ministers in the Liberal government of Robert Menzies, although his relationship with Menzies himself was warmer than might be expected. Cairns was also disliked by many in his own party, who saw him as an ideologue whose political views were too left-wing for the Australian electorate.
Nevertheless Cairns's abilities could not be denied. He completed his doctorate in economic history in 1957, and by the 1960s he was among the Labor Party's leading figures. At this time he also lectured on Marxist and socialist history, and taught at free seminars for working people in Melbourne unable to afford tertiary education. He was to travel overseas for the first time including to the United States and Asia. These experiences had a great effect on him. In 1967, when Arthur Calwell retired as Labor leader, Cairns contested the leadership, but was defeated by Gough Whitlam. The following year, when Whitlam resigned as leader as part of his fight with the left-wing of the party, Cairns again contested the leadership, but again narrowly failed. Whitlam appointed him shadow minister for trade and industry.
One of the reasons Cairns did not become leader of the Labor Party was that through the late 1960s and early 1970s his main focus was not on parliamentary politics but on leading the mass movement against the Vietnam War, to which the Menzies government had committed combat troops in 1965, and against conscription for that war. Until about 1968, most Australians supported the war, and opposition to it was led by the Communist Party and the trade unions. After 1968, however, opposition grew, and Cairns came to see this movement as a moral crusade. In 1969 he was assaulted by a group of men who broke into his home.
In May 1970, Cairns, as chair of the Vietnam Moratorium, led an estimated 100,000 people in a "sit-down" demonstration in the streets of Melbourne. This was the largest protest in Australia until it was overtaken by the anti-Iraq war protests in February 2003. Similar protests of proportionate size took place simultaneously in other Australian cities. There was none of the predicted violence, and the moral force of the (mainly young) protesters had a major effect on Australian attitudes to the war.
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