The term razor gang was very common in the context of the 2007 Federal election. It was introduced by Kevin Rudd early in October: ‘In a newspaper interview published yesterday, Mr Rudd said a Labor Government would set up an expenditure review committee, or razor gang, to identify savings for its first budget’ (Canberra Times, 3 October). After the election, Prime Minister Rudd warned that Labor’s ‘razor gang’ would wield ‘a meat axe’ (Canberra Times, 21 January 2008).
Razor gang in the sense ‘a parliamentary committee established to examine ways of reducing public expenditure’ was first used in association with the Fraser Government in the early 1980s. On 5 May 1981 the Bulletin stated: ‘Canberra reports said that Sir Philip Lynch’s “Razor Gang” had recommended an overall staff cut in the Federal public service of 2 percent.’ This sense of the term razor gang is Australian, and after the Fraser Government the term continued to be used to describe drastic cost-cutting measures by both Federal and State Governments.
In 1988 the Melbourne Age reported: ‘How these committees work provides a clue to the real power structure of the Hawke-Keating Government in crucial economic matters. The key has been the razor gang. This has become Hawke’s “kitchen Cabinet”’.
By 2007 the term was used in a wide variety of contexts. Although in 2007 it is especially associated with the Labor Party and its election win, at the beginning of 2007 it was used of the Howard Government: ‘A $100 million-plus plan to tackle childhood obesity has been dumped by the Howard Government’s budget razor gang, despite the runaway economy adding billions of dollars to Treasury coffers’ (Australian, 19 March 2007). By the middle of the year Rugby Union officials were talking about introducing cost-cutting measures: ‘John O’Neill warned yesterday there is pain on the way for Australia after all five home Tests this season recorded below-budget returns… If there is one area that needs to be quarantined from the razor gang it surely must be in the field of talent identification, recruitment and development’ (Australian, 6 July 2007).
The outbreak of equine influenza raised the possibility that a razor gang would have to get to work on prizemoney for races: ‘Unless a government compensation package can be structured, a razor gang will be formed to slash prizemoney levels on Group and Listed races’ (Australian, 24 September 2007).
Where does the term razor gang come from? In the sense ‘a gang of thugs armed with razors’ it is first recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1957, and this sense has international currency. In Australia, razor gangs were especially associated with criminals in Sydney in the 1920s and 1930s (see the transcript of an ABC radio program on the topic).
In 1927 the Sydney Truth (12 June) described one of these gangs: ‘The Razor Gang has terrorised the underworld of Darlinghurst, that region of bohemia, crims and mystery. The razors its members carry in their hands are feared far more than the revolver of the ordinary crook.’
It is possible that the Australian political use of the term alludes to these ruthless criminal gangs, but even before the transferred Australian political uses of the term, the same transfer had occurred in ‘Railway Slang’ in Britain in the 1960s.
The Oxford English Dictionary quotes two British texts. First, H. Sheppard in A Dictionary of Railway Slang (1966), defines razor gang as ‘economy men from Headquarters’. Second, G. McKenna in Glossary of Railwaymen’s Talk (1970), defines razor gang as ‘an investigating committee, searching rosters and rotas for “unproductive time”’. This is very similar to the Australian political sense, and it would be interesting to know if the British railway slang had somehow found its way to Australia. The precise political sense, however, is uniquely Australian.
