Mumble
Labor veteran warns PM return home
By Phil Robins
"Beware the ides of August!" That warning to the Prime Minister not to call a winter election comes from 85-year-old Harry Krantz, former trade union leader and lifelong political activist.
Mr Krantz believes he is the sole surviving candidate from the 1943 federal election - the only August poll in the 103 years since Federation.
He well remembers that day on August 21 when John Curtin - a Mark Latham lookalike - led Labor to a crushing victory over the conservative parties. It was Labor's first federal election win since the Great Depression a decade before and only its second victory since the party split over conscription in World. War I.
"And it will happen again if John Howard defies the ides of August," says Mr Krantz, echoing the soothsayer's warning to Julius Caesar in 44BC: "Beware the ides of March." Caesar ignored that advice and was assassinated by his political enemies.
Mr Krantz was just 23 when he was granted 17 days' leave from the 2nd AIF in Darwin to oppose the formidable Archie Cameron in the blue-ribbon seat of Barker in 1943. The only time Labor has come close in Barker was on that August day when Sapper Krantz trailed by just 376 primary votes before a leakage of preferences enabled Major Cameron to limp with over the line by a mere 1.65 percent.
At the declaration of the poll, Mr Cameron, a former Country Party leader and later Speaker in the Menzies Government, remarked that he was the only surviving conservative MHR west of Bendigo. Labor garnered half the first preference vote nation-wide, winning the House of Representatives by 49 seats to 23 and taking all 19 Senate seats that were up for grabs.
"When I didn't win, my friends joked that I was a failure," says Mr Krantz, who finished his army service before returning to his peacetime job as South Australian secretary of the Federated Clerks' Union, a position he held for 43 years. He was, at 21, the youngest union secretary in Australia when he first took the reins in 1941. Another Labor luminary, Clyde Cameron, now 90, became South Australian secretary of the Australian Workers' Union at the same time.
Living in retirement at Wattle Park with his wife Joan, Harry Krantz remains a True Believer who reflects on colorful career, keeps abreast of the times - and tries his hand at a little political soothsaying.