Junie Morosi (born 26 July 1933) is an Australian businesswoman, who became a public figure in the 1970s through her relationship with Jim Cairns, Deputy Prime Minister in the Whitlam Labor government. Morosi's appointment as Cairns's principal private secretary, and the nature of her relationship with him, aroused intense media interest, and the affair contributed to Cairns's eventual dismissal from office and the fall of the government.
Early life
Morosi was born in Shanghai, China, and educated in the Philippines. Her father was Italian and part-Chinese, her mother Portuguese and part-Chinese also. The family moved to Manila when she was a child and from age 8 she experienced life under Japanese occupation. She worked as a journalist, becoming political correspondent at the Manila daily newspaper Voz de Manila. She also worked in advertising and travel consultancy.
While Morosi was still a teenager she married a Filipino. Together they had three sons. In 1958, she was employed by Qantas, the Australian national airline. In 1962 she moved to Australia, where she married a British businessman living in Australia, David Ditchburn. She continued to work in the airline and travel industry until 1974, when she was employed as an assistant to Al Grassby, the Commissioner for Community Relations. Grassby had been a minister in the Whitlam government before losing his seat in the May 1974 election. Her new job brought her into contact with other Whitlam government ministers. In Canberra she read and was impressed by one of Jim Cairns' books, The Quiet Revolution, and arranged to meet him. The attraction soon became sexual, although whether and, if so, when their relationship became a sexual one remained a matter of speculation until 2002, when it was confirmed as such by Cairns.
In December 1974, Cairns offered Morosi a position as his Principal Private Secretary, a job traditionally held by a senior public servant. Her business background made the offer at least defensible, but she had no knowledge of Australian politics or economics, and not much experience of managing a large and complex office. The offer of employment aroused an immediate storm of sensationalist media coverage which began on 2 December 1974. The fact that Morosi was "exotic" (the media's code-word for "Asian"), youngish (she was 41) and attractive was given much prominence.
Cairns's friends urged him to withdraw the offer to Morosi, but out of both personal loyalty and a refusal to be bullied by the anti-Labor tabloid press, he refused. Harris had offered to secure loan funds for the Australian government and in March 1975, Cairns signed a letter agreeing to a 2.5% commission. Many blamed the disorganised state of Cairns’ office for what ultimately turned out to be a misleading statement to parliament in June that he had not authorised any such commission. Cairns claimed that he had signed the letter in question unknowingly while signing a batch of fifty or so letters, and that it was not uncommon practice for politicians to sign letters and subsequently to have little or no memory of their content. Ironically, politicians from across the aisle – Malcolm Fraser and a number of his ministers – spoke out in defence of Cairns on this subject, agreeing that they too signed letters of which they had little or no memory. But the fact remained that Cairns did sign the letter and, as a result, Whitlam dismissed Cairns from the ministry on 2 July 1975. The supposed relevance of this incident to Morosi is the implication that, as Cairns' private secretary, Morosi was to blame for any disorganisation present in Cairns' office that may have contributed to him signing the infamous letter but not remembering having done so. However, in a 1998 interview, when asked whether Morosi was a good office organiser, Jim Cairns was quoted as saying "No. She wasn't supposed to be an office organiser. The criticism that has been levelled at her is made by very jealous and envious people, who were supposed to be organising the bloody office themselves."
In The Daily Mirror case, Morosi told the court: "I felt insulted, angry, upset and hurt. It was very demeaning to me as a woman [to be called Cairns's 'girlfriend']. I saw myself as a professional, as a competent person doing her job. It was cheap. It was as though it had nothing to do with business but everything to do with sex." The jury decided the article in question did imply a sexual relationship, but was "not defamatory." In 2002 Cairns admitted his relationship with Morosi had been sexual.