Matters of Interest

Hanretty MBE, Miss E.R.

The Hon. R.B. MARTIN (15:23): I want to place on the record my recognition of the South Australian Labor Party's longest serving official. Had circumstances been different, it is a person whom history might have long remembered.

Despite serving an astonishing 39 years as the South Australian Labor Party's assistant state secretary, today Elizabeth Rose Hanretty MBE is virtually unknown. As a long-serving party official myself, and a keen student of Labor history, I first encountered her name just a couple of years ago, and only by chance. Her absence in modern Labor folklore beggars belief.

During Liz Hanretty's lifetime, across her decades of service to the labour movement and the Labor Party, she was a local identity of some repute. She was a prominent figure in the movement, well known and well liked in political circles. She was a regular subject of reporting in both local and interstate newspapers.

It can only be a reflection of the misogyny that prevailed for far too long in our society that Liz Hanretty's memory has been relegated to the archives. Had Miss Hanretty been born Mr Hanretty, the subject of this speech may well instead have been the storied career and achievements of a well-known Labor minister.

Elizabeth Rose Hanretty was born in 1881 at Tynte Street, North Adelaide, the fifth of 11 children in a working-class Irish family. Her father's death in 1888 left her mother struggling to support them, and at age 12, Liz left school to go to work. She was employed as a housemaid, as a shop assistant in Rundle Street and eventually as a presser in a laundry. At the laundry, the young Hanretty, who was by her own account already interested in politics, joined her newly formed union, the Women Employees' Mutual Association.

In 1905, aged 14, she joined the North Adelaide local committee of the United Labor Party. She became deeply involved in the union, at some point occupying each of its executive positions and serving as its representative to the United Trades and Labour Council of South Australia, which is today known as SA Unions. The long list of Hanretty's association and board memberships before she became an organiser for the ULP reveals an untiring drive to organise and agitate for better conditions for workers.

By the time she was appointed as 'lady organiser' for the United Labor Party in April 1914, the Adelaide Daily Herald described Liz Hanretty in its report as 'exceedingly popular in trade union and political circles'. During her 18 months in that role, Labor won the 1914 federal election and the 1915 South Australian election. For reasons that are not explained, Hanretty resigned after 18 months and returned to pressing laundry, meanwhile serving as vice-president of the Anti-Conscription League during the 1916 referendum on introducing conscription.

The following year was when she began her service as assistant state secretary of the South Australian Labor Party, remaining in the role until 1956. She ran for the office of party secretary in 1924 but was defeated. At last, in 1947, she eventually had the opportunity to serve as party secretary, but only on an acting basis for four months following the resignation of one man until another man was appointed. She thus became South Australian Labor's first woman state secretary.

The modern observer is frustrated by the question of whether Liz Hanretty had by that point decided she did not want to be secretary or whether it was others who were determined that she would not be. I will not do her the disservice of assuming her mind at the time, but it is impossible not to feel indignation on her behalf, no matter the truth of the situation. She continued as assistant secretary into her late 70s. Her length of service to the labour movement suggests an unrelenting moral commitment and a fiercely authentic person.

The most visible modern recognition of Liz Hanretty that I have found is in the form of Hanretty Place, a small cul-de-sac in the Canberra suburb of Bonython. This year, my goal is to make her a household name in South Australian Labor circles by establishing the annual Elizabeth Rose Hanretty oration. I hope that all Labor members, and anyone else who wishes to, will get behind this small act of recognition for an extraordinary person on whose shoulders each of us stands, a fact we should never have forgotten and never will again.