Kenneth Shaw Wriedt
Born Melbourne July 11, 1927
Died October 17 2010.
Aged 83
“One of the things that comes home loud and clear to me now that I’m out of politics, is the extent to which politicians in Canberra are so completely and utterly divorced from the reality of everyday life for the ordinary person.”
— Ken Wriedt, The Bulletin, November 6 1990
Ken Wriedt, still a tall, handsome and well-read man as he approached his 80s, made a personal and honorable commitment to Australia, to Tasmania and to the ALP.
It has never been fully recognised.
His moment was the moment of Australia’s greatest political crisis in November 1975, The Dismissal. Wriedt was Leader of the Government in the Senate, trying to get the Whitlam Supply bills through and, apparently, unaware that Whitlam had been dismissed, Malcolm Fraser was the new Prime Minister and this was a Supply for a new Government. Wriedt insisted that his Labor senators would not have engaged in an act of hypocrisy – to reject their own Supply bills once the Whitlam Government had been dismissed.
Five years later he gave up the security of a safe seat in the Senate to attempt to take a seat from the Fraser Government in the House of Representatives, an act that former ALP president Barry Jones described as being quite beyond the call of duty, but one which Wriedt saw literally as a duty, given what Fraser had done.
He failed to dislodge Hodgman but was soon catapulted into the leadership of the State ALP when he was elected to State Parliament, to try to bring about a renaissance after its debacle over the Franklin Dam.
He was a true believer.
Ken Wriedt was born in Melbourne in July 1927, of mixed Danish-Scottish stock. The spelling of his surname gave him grief all his life.
“My staff in Canberra once counted 28 different spellings of my surname,” he told me.
Wriedt’s father Frederick was a Dane, a fitter and turner by trade, his mother a Scottish-born schoolteacher. He had two elder brothers, Christian and Frederick, named after Danish kings.
“I was the token Scot,” Wriedt said.
The family lived at Fairfield.
“They were tough times, even tougher when the Depression hit.”
Wriedt attended Fairfield State School and University High at Parkville before leaving school in 1942. He took a temporary job with the Melbourne City Council, working at the city abattoirs. Then he became a marine apprentice, earning a pound a month, but his wage quintupled with a monthly war bonus of four pounds.
Being a marine apprentice involved Wriedt in merchant “sailoring”, as a mate on BHP ships like Iron Warrior and Iron Monarch. They worked around the coast, carrying iron ore, steel and coal. Black and tans they called them. Two mates shared a cabin, two metres square. He had two hours off each day to study.
In 1947 he went ashore in Sydney to study for his second mate’s certificate. He then worked on ships owned by the Australian Shipping Board and the Australian National Line – ships like Delungra, Delamere, River Mitta and River Hunter. He also served on the three-masted, gaff-rigged schooner Coomonderry.
In 1959, after voyages to Japan, the Philippines, Nauru, Christmas Island, the Persian Gulf, Wriedt left the Merchant Navy.
He had first sailed up the Derwent in the summer of 1948 and saw Hobart for the first time. He was intent on settling here.
“This will do me,” he said to himself.
In Hobart, Wriedt met Helga Burger, a shorthand typist with a local fruit shipping company. They married in 1959.
His decision to step ashore in 1959 was colored by an incident off the Tasmanian north-east coast, a collision between his ship Karoon, bound for Newcastle, and the steamer Warringa.
They collided in fog off Eddystone Point on November 24 1958. Both vessels suffered considerable damage.
“Both ships were on the same run. Each voyage we would meet in about Banks Strait. Well, we certainly met on this day,” he said.
“We were traveling very slowly. The Warringa came charging out of the fog. I could see her bow wave. I was up on the bridge. I could see our watchman was still on the fo’c’stle. I grabbed a megaphone and told him to get off.”
Wriedt made his first foray into politics in 1964, when he tried unsuccessfully to win one of the seven seats in the Tasmanian House of Assembly electorate of Franklin. The ALP was his natural constituency. He believed in socialism.
“I was a member of the Merchant Services Guild, I was brought up in Melbourne in a Labor household. My prime motivation was saving the world,” he said.
“I believe in good government operations competing against the private sector. You improve your performance when someone breathes down your neck.”
His first daughter Sonja was born in 1963, and second daughter Paula in 1968. She is the former Tasmanian Minister for Education.
Ken Wriedt was elected to the Senate in 1967 and took his seat on July 1 1968, replacing former Minister Senator Nick McKenna.
When Labor won power in 1972, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam appointed Wriedt Minister for Primary Industry, soon to be renamed Agriculture, and later Minister for Energy.
In the 12 months leading up to the Government’s dismissal, Wriedt was Leader of the Government in the Senate at a time when the Liberals and Nationals under Malcolm Fraser were intent on forcing an election over the Overseas Loans affair.
“Any Ministerial job in the Senate in those days was tough,” he recalled. “I took on responsibility for five other portfolios including Trade and Treasury as understudy to Jim Cairns.”
After visiting the Middle East in April 1975, Wriedt returned to Australia “feeling somewhat uneasy about the way loan arrangements had been dealt with and were being dealt with from our end, particularly where such discussions involved people outside of the Government and the Treasury” (as he wrote in May 2005 wrote in Sybil Nolan’s The Dismissal.
“On the loans affair I answered more questions than Whitlam or (Minerals Ministers Rex) Connor.”
In later years Wriedt was sometimes called on to explain why, on the afternoon of November 11, after the Government had been dismissed, he gave the new Fraser Government Supply by passing the Appropriation Bills that the conservatives had previously stalled in the Senate in a bid to force the Government to an election. He claims he and his fellow Labor senators, bar one unnamed, knew nothing about the Government having been sacked earlier in the day. When the bills unexpectedly passed on the voices in the afternoon, neither Wriedt nor his deputy Don Willesee nor Manager of Government Business in the Senate Doug McClelland knew what had transpired, according to Wriedt.
Besides which, he said, it would have been irrelevant. The new Government, with its majority in the Senate, would have passed the Bills in any case.
“It is unlikely that the Labor senators would vote against their own legislation or even abstain from voting.”
Of the dismissal itself, Wriedt said in the Sybil Nolan book:
“The events of November 11 1975 were evidence that when the ‘Establishment’ is under challenge, it will resort to whatever tactics it deems necessary to maintain its position in Australian society.”
In 1980 he left the Senate to contest the House of Representatives’ Hobart metropolitan seat of Denison, held by Hodgman.
“I was no enemy of Michael Hodgman. I wanted to knock off the Government,” Wriedt said. “I was 53, I had had a gutful of travel and I couldn’t stand the thought of languishing in Opposition.”
Wriedt failed to take Denison and turned his attention to State politics.
This period in Tasmanian politics saw the ALP at its nadir, torn apart by indecision over the Franklin Dam. The issue had destroyed the premiership of Doug Lowe and was doing the same to that of Harry Holgate.
Wriedt stood for the State House in 1982, anointed by Labor as the man to steer them out of the doldrums after the election they could not win.
Robin Gray annihilated Labor. Wriedt immediately became Opposition Leader, a rare if not unprecedented feat.
After another defeat in 1986, Neil Batt took over the leadership. In 1966 Wriedt had doorknocked 3500 electors of Denison for Batt.
“Twenty years later he told me to piss off. I was too old,” Wriedt said.
Wriedt topped the poll in Franklin at the 1989 State election, at which Michael Field led Labor into a doomed accord with Dr Bob Brown’s five Green MPs.
A year later, Wriedt quit with high blood pressure.
Paul Lennon took his seat on a recount.
Out of politics, Wriedt’s blood pressure returned to normal. He sailed his converted cray boat, a 41 foot ketch named Helga Ann, on the Derwent and down D’Entrecasteaux Channel.
He spent long hours of his retirement in a chalet at the front of his Hobart home, reading from his library of more than 1000 maritime books, writing and listening to CDs and cassettes of the classical music, his passion for which he attributed to one Anders Ekblom, the second mate on Iron Warrior, with whom he shared that small two metre square cabin.
Helga predeceased Ken Wriedt by a month. They are survived by Sonja and Paula.
