The Way They Were: The View from the Hill of the 25 Years That Remade Australia

By Alan Ramsey

For many years in Australia, reading journalist Alan Ramsey's vitriolic, insightful, and always engaging pieces in the Sydney Morning Herald was a standard feature of Saturday mornings. This book is the compilation of Ramsey's best work, granting ample access to Australia's national parliament and politicians. Reflecting upon how 25 years of national leadership by Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, and John Howard changed the nation forever, this collection also includes a discussion on the tumultuous political events of 2010 as well as the classic Ward O'Neill cartoons associated with Ramsey's weekly column.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Apr 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781742240879

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Departures

PROLOGUE

‘Men and Women of Australia’

ONE late spring night 38 years ago, in a crowded outer Sydney hall, Gough Whitlam touched the shoulder of his friend, speechwriter and political alter ego, Graham Freudenberg, and said: ‘It’s been a long road, comrade, but we’re there.’ It was November 13, 1972. The hall was the Blacktown Civic Centre. Four thousand people were jammed in and around it. I was among them, part of the Canberra press gallery baggage train. Whitlam was about to make the policy speech Freudenberg had written for the ‘It’s Time’ election that would return Labor to power after 23 years in despair and make Whitlam our 21st Prime Minister.

Freudenberg would recall that night in A Certain Grandeur, his elegant 1977 book on the Whitlam years. In those days political leaders still campaigned before real voters at sweaty, night-time rallies in front of live television, not as they do now in the middle of the day to vetted audiences of a few hundred faithful who applaud by rote for that night’s TV news bulletins and later party political broadcasts. Freudenberg remembered Whitlam’s policy speech that hot November night as ‘not so much a public meeting as an act of communion and a celebration of hope and love’. And that was the speech Whitlam began, so dramatically and theatrically: ‘Men and women of Australia.’

Twenty-nine years later, Kim Beazley would seek to invoke similar enthusiasm for his second – and last – policy speech in October 2001 by reviving the salutation for the first time since Whitlam’s fifth and last campaign as leader in 1977. What nobody on the day seemed to remember was its origins. The words were neither Whitlam’s nor Freudenberg’s creation, as Freudenberg later acknowledged. The line comes from another Labor icon, John Curtin, in the winter election of wartime 1943 that Labor won in a landslide, and, before that, from Matt Charlton, the Newcastle boy miner who led Labor as Opposition leader at two Federal elections in 1922 and 1925.

In May 2001, at the True Believers’ Federation dinner in Melbourne, Whitlam, then 85, brought the house down by addressing, as ‘men and women of Australia’, an adoring audience of 1600, but adding: ‘... as John Curtin said in 1943’. There is no record of its use since World War Two until Freudenberg adopted it for Whitlam’s policy speech 29 years later. He did so by chance. Election year 1972 was also the year of publication of the celebrated Lloyd Ross biography on Curtin. Ross wrote of the 1943 policy speech and Curtin’s simple but dramatic opening. Reading it, Freudenberg thought, as he recalled many years later, ‘That will do me.’ Or rather, do Whitlam.

And it did, very nicely. There is no better known or more commanding salutation in the history of political speechmaking in this country. Ironically, the Freudenberg speech of 1972 has linked it forever to Whitlam, not the wartime Labor Prime Minister more than a generation earlier, or the barely remembered Matt Charlton a generation before that. Then another Labor leader sought inspiration from it 29 years after Whitlam.

Curtin, July 26, 1943: ‘Men and women of Australia. As head of the Government which for 20 months has had the solemn duty and grave responsibility of maintaining intact our country, I give you an account of the Government’s trusteeship.’ And he did, in a two-hour radio broadcast to a national audience from an ABC studio in Canberra, his simple prose concluding: ‘Our country has withstood the direct trials, it has lived through its darkest hour, it is now confronting the dawn of a victorious and a better day. The Labor Government has done its duty.’

Whitlam, November 13, 1972: ‘Men and women of Australia. The decision we will make for our country on 2 December is a choice between the past and the future, between the habits and fears of the past, and the demands and opportunities of the future. There are moments in history when the whole fate and future of nations can be decided by a single decision. For Australia, this is such a time ...’

Beazley, October 31, 2001: ‘Men and women of Australia. Today I offer myself as Prime Minister of this great country. I want the job. I’m committed, I’m qualified, and I’m here for the long haul. I have a plan to deliver a fair share, and a secure future, for all Australians ...’

Voters heeded two genuine national leaders. The third they buried. Kim Beazley’s flaccid leadership arguably lost Labor two elections; and though the Caucus factions recycled him in January 2005 – the only ex-Federal Labor leader ever brought back from the political dead – voters fortunately were denied the opportunity to repudiate Beazley a third time after Kevin Rudd beat them to it on December 4, 2006. A year later Rudd was Prime Minister and Beazley was history.

Before that, following Labor’s struggling resurrection after the political turbulence and vice-regal treachery of the Whitlam years, and the Hawke takeover after the hard graft of the Hayden years, we got the highs and black lows of the 13 Hawke/Keating years before the deceit, debauchery and sly opportunism of the 12 Howard years. Between them, across a quarter of a century, these three latter Prime Ministers re-made the insular and still largely Anglo-Celtic Australia of the 1960s and ’70s into the self-absorbed, debt-ridden, ‘modern’, and too often ugly community of the still-evolving multicultural Australia’s new century.

The starting point is easily dated. It was the day of Bob Hawke’s lunchtime election campaign speech on February 16, 1983, that would culminate 17 days later in his election as our 23rd Prime Minister. Unlike Whitlam, who’d opened his ’72 campaign in the Labor heartland of Sydney’s unsewered outer western suburbs, Hawke launched himself as Labor leader a decade later from the Big City harbour glitz of Sydney’s Opera House. The choice of venue said much about who and what was coming. So, too, Hawke’s opening line that day. The words were no more dramatic than the prosaic: ‘My fellow Australians.’ After eight years of Malcolm Fraser, reviled as much as John Howard would become 25 years later, nothing more inspiring was needed; Labor under Hawke swept up 75 seats in a 125-member House of Representatives. But from there, for the better part of the ensuing nine years, the swaggering personal pronoun from Melbourne’s trade union hierarchy strutted national political life like no Labor prime minister before him.

In the process, as Australia began changing remorselessly, so the disintegration of Australia’s oldest political party into another misleading label, as meaningless as the ‘Liberal’ Party and the schizophrenic ‘Nationals’, gathered pace unchecked. Six Federal ‘Labor’ leaders came and went – one of them twice and three who made it all the way to The Lodge. Four of the changes owed their fealty to factional arrangement. Only Paul Keating, Mark Latham and Kevin Rudd arrived with the political legitimacy and internal authority of having won a contested Caucus ballot.

Yet not one of the six, however anointed, did anything meaningful to stem Labor’s internal rot. Instead, either through malice, indifference or ignorance, each of them fuelled the decay. What remains 27 years after what Hawke seized when Bill Hayden gave up the unequal struggle on February 3, 1983, and gave in to the white ants, is, in structure, tradition, sentiment, principle, policy and membership, unrecognisable. Somewhere between the Hawke ascendancy and the self-immolation of Kevin Rudd in June 2010, the ‘Labor’ Party disappeared up the flab of its own backside. All that was left was yet another leadership change, yet again arranged, this time to embrace the accidental novelty of what looked and sounded like Mrs Stringbag from a West Footscray council byelection, and a corrupted organisational husk that could well be anything you like. Anything except Labor. The Australian ‘Labor’ Party, as such, is dead. Only its users and abusers survive in an ill-named collective.

Australia is not dead, only different and much greedier. The political rhetoric would have us believe we’ve ‘grown up’ and ‘joined the world’. Instead, what has been happening, ever since the Hawke/Keating Government ended political control of our financial system in December 1983, is that a shrinking world is absorbing ‘old Australia’. That single decision handed the valuation of our economy – and thus our currency – to international banks, financial institutions and other ‘free-market forces’ and opened the door ultimately to massive growth in Australian household debt and obscene corporate salary excess. Whatever it did for the Australian economy, financial deregulation unbalanced our largely classless society and pretty much destroyed the egalitarian cohesion of the Australian community, already under stress from the accelerating influx of Vietnamese and Chinese refugees, economic and political.

At the same time, manufactured politicians, such as the likes of Sydney’s Graham Richardson, Anthony Albanese and Mark Arbib, Brisbane’s Wayne Swan and Kevin Rudd, Perth’s Stephen Smith, Adelaide’s Gary Gray and Melbourne’s Stephen Conroy, Bill Shorten and Julia Gillard, began replacing conviction politicians such as Gough Whitlam, Lionel Murphy, Paul Keating, John Button, Peter Walsh, John Kerin, Gareth Evans, Bill Hayden, Lionel Bowen, John Dawkins, Don Grimes, Michael Duffy, Jim McClelland, Ralph Willis, Susan Ryan, Gordon Scholes, and many others.

Ironically, Whitlam Labor’s 1974 abolition of university fees bred 20 years of Labor careerists who, after completing a tertiary education few could otherwise have afforded, were recruited into trade union bureaucracies, State ALP machines, ministerial staffs and MPs’ offices, before graduating to parliamentary politics without ever having worked in a real job in real Australia. It is this manufactured political bloodline with no experience of real life that behaves as if ‘old Labor’ is old hat and ‘new Labor’ is the ‘new way’ in ‘moving forward’ in the 21st century. Self-interest has always been a goer in politics, as Paul Keating liked to remind us 40 years ago, but in the ’80s,’90s and noughties it became a deep-rooted pox across the Australian lifestyle, never more so than among the evolving generations of the political class.

So too intolerance, social and political. The diseased Howard years were a travesty of the best of the comfortable if indolent Menzies years and the legislated compassion for Aboriginal Australians and ‘boat people’ refugees of the bitter Fraser years. Political intolerance heaved and rolled with the decades. By Christmas 1976 the only Labor Government anywhere in Australia was Neville Wran’s in NSW, holding a one-seat majority! By Christmas 1989, after State Labor under Wayne Goss had ended a 32-year electoral drought in Queensland, the nation’s only non-Labor Government was Nick Greiner’s Coalition in NSW, excepting the ‘toy town’ hybrid Country–Liberal Party administration of ‘chief minister’ Marshall Perron in far-off Darwin.

Yet by the end of the ’90s, Victoria’s Jeff Kennett, Queensland’s Rob Borbidge, NSW’s Greiner and John Fahey, South Australia’s Dean Brown and John Olsen, Western Australia’s Richard Court, and Tasmania’s Ray Groom and Tony Rundle – all Liberal premiers, except for the Nationals’ Borbidge – had come and gone. Labor was in office everywhere, except Federally, by the end of the year 2000. Then in November 2007 Federal Labor swept away the Howard Government too and its odious Prime Minister with it, leaving Australia wall-to-wall Labor holding all nine of the nation’s governments.

Only they were not ‘Labor’, they were incestuous political fiefdoms of production-line careerists increasingly indistinguishable in attitude and ambition from their conservative ‘Liberal’ opponents; while the most self-obsessed of the nine leaders was the one sworn in on December 3, 2007 as Australia’s 26th Prime Minister – Labor’s 10th in 106 years – yet one who lasted just two years and seven months, at which time his Government turned on him and forced his resignation in a matter of hours. So remote had Brisbane’s Kevin Rudd become from his ministers and backbenchers alike that he had no inkling – and neither did most of his stunned Cabinet – of the putsch engulfing him on the night of June 23, 2010, until the ABC broke the news in its main evening bulletin. Melbourne’s Julia Gillard was Prime Minister by lunchtime the following day after Rudd raised the white flag and declined to openly test the numbers at a Caucus meeting that same morning.

Rudd’s removal was as ignominious and as humiliating as Bob Hawke’s had been 19 years earlier. They were incumbent Prime Ministers who’d taken Labor into power after multiple years of opposition; yet each was blinded by ego or ignorance as to how vulnerable his leadership had become – Hawke after four election victories across the better part of nine years, and Rudd after less than a single term. Neither one could or would read the frustration and/or resentment of Caucus colleagues ready to tear their house down rather than go into an impending election that could end individual careers or, worse still, put them back into the dread of opposition wholly because of perceived wilful leaders with a Napoleon complex who refused to listen, to consult or to acknowledge political reality. And when an utterly shocked Rudd got on the phone that Canberra winter night after the ABC news had told him what his colleagues had not, he learnt just how blind or stupid or wilful he’d been.

Hawke’s and Rudd’s ascension as prime ministers are the book ends of the 25 years that The Way They Were broadly encompasses. Here are events from across the Hawke/Keating years that the stoic John Howard toiled unrelentingly to survive, so as to be there, still waiting, once Labor had worn itself out and the voters too, and the keys to The Lodge (and, it turned out, to Kirribilli House, too) were his (and hers) for the taking, in March 1996. Here too is more of the administrative and political sleaze that disfigured so much of the Howard years, although these are dealt with in greater detail in my earlier book, A Matter of Opinion. Between the three of them, whichever way politics bends you, they have much to answer for. Read the columns in this book from among the near-2300 I wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald from 1987 onwards and make up your own mind.

That said, the Hawke Government in its early years from March 1983 until its winter victory of June ’87, was the most talented and genuinely reformist of the last half of the 20th century, certainly much better than Australians were used to. Significantly, it included MPs who’d come to politics from real life – among them, Peter Walsh, a West Australian wheat farmer; Bill Hayden, a Queensland country policeman; Paul Keating, a Sydney County Council pay clerk who left school just weeks before his 15th birthday in January 1959; Don Grimes, a Launceston family GP; Gordon Scholes, a Geelong train driver; Tom Uren, a World War Two POW; Michael Duffy, a Victorian country solicitor; Mick Young, a South Australian shearer; Kim Beazley, a Perth academic; Barry Cohen, a Sydney men’s-wear shopkeeper; Gareth Evans, a Melbourne barrister whose father was a tram driver; Susan Ryan, a Sydney school teacher; Neal Blewett, an Adelaide university professor; John Button, a Melbourne solicitor whose father was a clergyman; John Kerin, a NSW Southern Highlands chook farmer and orchardist; Ralph Willis, a trade union industrial advocate; and the remarkable Barry Jones, history teacher, early radio talkback host and, to his colleagues, too often an infuriating ‘know-all’.

These were the sort of politicians who made up Hawke’s ministry in its first five years. Hawke had inherited Bill Hayden’s frontbench and he kept it intact until after his third election victory 52 months later. You won’t find the same broad mix of backgrounds in any government, State or Federal, since. But Labor’s Mick Young, as Hawke’s Special Minister of State (known to his colleagues as the ‘Minister for Keeping Labor in Office’), expanded the House numbers the year after Labor came to power from 125 to 148, boasting that the Government would double its majority (25) in that year’s election. Instead Andrew Peacock’s Coalition almost halved it (to 15), leaving Hawke sulking for weeks; and then, following Labor’s ’87 election win over John Howard’s Opposition parties, which pushed the Government’s majority back out to 24, Hawke increased his ministry from 27 to 30 by allotting an extra portfolio to each of the Government’s Left, Right and Centre factions.

From there, with the makeup of the executive now influenced more by factional numbers and patronage than by ability, the Hawke years rapidly went to seed. This was the ministry – and six months of reshuffling that followed – that brought in the Right’s Graham Richardson, Robert Ray, Gary Punch, Ros Kelly and Ben Humphreys, the Left’s Gerry Hand, Peter Staples, Nick Bolkus and Peter Duncan, and the Centre’s Peter Cook. Three ministers (John Brown, Mick Young and Susan Ryan) resigned – all in ugly circumstances. A fourth (Tasmania’s Don Grimes) had had enough after a heart attack and took a diplomatic posting in Europe. A fifth (Adelaide’s Chris Hurford) got an offer he couldn’t refuse and was given a cushy Australian consulate slot on the US West Coast to make way for Robert Ray’s ascension. All five departees were Cabinet ministers. And five of the ten MPs promoted were factional logrollers. Hawke’s Government was never the same.

Yet it stumbled through one more victory (March 1990) before Hawke himself was gone, tipped out by his own party six days before Christmas 1991 for Paul Keating, Hawke’s self-exiled former Treasurer and the heart and soul of the Labor Years, despite the flaws. Keating’s Government managed another hugely improbable victory in 1993, mostly thanks to the Liberals’ John Hewson, a political amateur who tried to win honourably from Opposition by laying out, in all its detail, his multi-billion dollar plan for a new tax regime built around a ‘big new super tax’, the GST Keating had wanted to adopt seven years earlier, except Hawke killed it after Bill Kelty and the union movement said no. Then when Hewson quit politics in February 1995 by resigning, again honourably, before his peers on the floor of Parliament, Keating was one of the few to publicly pay Hewson his due and wish him well. So, too, did John Howard, though less generously.

Howard at the time was back as his party’s leader after an absence of almost six years, having been dumped in May 1989 for Andrew Peacock’s second leadership run; and three months after Hewson quit, Howard made his infamous promise ‘never ever’ to introduce Hewson’s GST (‘It’s dead. It was killed by the voters last election. It’s not part of our policy and won’t be at any time in the future.’). That was on May Day, 1995. A year later Howard was Prime Minister. A further two years after that, in May 1998, and Howard was brazenly offering voters the ‘never ever’ GST he’d promised three years earlier would ‘never ever’ be Liberal policy ‘at any time in the future’. Yet another year on, in May 1999, Howard’s Government, with Democrat support, got its ‘never ever’ GST through the Senate and into law. Our tax system will never be the same, either.

Understand, most politicians lie if they think they have to. Howard lied to voters about a GST in 1995 to protect what he saw as his last chance to become prime minister. After he was elected in 1996, Howard then lied about his lie to protect his credibility in the 1998 election, by which time he was flogging his ‘new’ GST as hard as he could as a you-beaut tax, thank you voters. Similarly, Bob Hawke lied about his confidential ‘pledge’ to Paul Keating in November 1988 to step down as Prime Minister after the 1990 election so Paul could have ‘his turn’. Bob lied to voters before the election and he lied to Keating before and after the election. He did what Howard did: he told a bare-faced lie to protect his prime ministership.

And Paul Keating? Keating lied, too, when it suited. He promised, as Treasurer, just as Hawke had done in 1986, not to sell Qantas, TAA (as it then was), or the Commonwealth Bank. In 1987 Keating asserted that to do so would be to ‘vandalise Australia’s greatest public assets’. Yet between them, Keating and Hawke sold all three of these ‘greatest assets’ between 1991 and 1996, even though they were not theirs to sell. They were ours, and we’d been told they were not for sale. They lied. Labor amalgamated Australian Airlines (TAA) with Qantas, sold off 49 per cent, including 25 per cent to British Airways, then sold the rest in 1995. Having pledged not to sell the Commonwealth Bank, Labor sold 49 per cent before telling Parliament and the rest of us it would keep the remaining 51 per cent in public hands. But Keating reneged after winning the 1990 election and his Government sold the Bank off totally in 1995. A year later Laurie Brereton, Keating’s oldest political mate as well as his Transport Minister, set about selling all Australia’s capital city and major country airports too, but voters had had more than enough of Labor and turfed them out, and John Howard’s Government happily picked up where Labor had left off and completed the fire sale.

If you want a simple benchmark as to the extent Hawke, Keating and Howard between them, wilfully or negligently, set about (excuse me) fucking over the public interest, a moral standard that used to matter in this country, consider this. As I’ve been writing this prologue, Australia’s rapacious Big Four banks have been getting some stick over higher home mortgage rates, as they count up their record collective $21 billion in latest annual net profits. New Zealand’s Ralph Norris, managing director of the Commonwealth Bank, was particularly ‘disappointed’ about what he called the ‘personalisation’ of politicians’ criticisms, particularly of the Commonwealth. ‘My job is not to be popular’, Norris was reported as saying. ‘It’s to run a bank.’ Indeed it is, for which, we were told, his salary plus incentive bonuses this latest year amounted to $16.2 million, a 75 per cent increase. All New Zealanders must be laughing all the way to the bank.

I dug into the files and had a look at what Australia’s taxpayers paid the managing director of the Commonwealth Bank, the so-called people’s bank , in calendar year 1983, 11 years before the Keating Government sold it. 1983 also was the year Hawke Labor came to power and got rid of currency exchange controls that made it possible all these years later for somebody like Ralph Norris from New Zealand to be paid $16.2 million, now that the Commonwealth Bank is owned by private shareholders and not by the Australian people.

In those days, executive salaries in publicly-owned business enterprises like the Commonwealth Bank , Qantas and the Post Office were set by the Remuneration Tribunal, an agency independent of politicians set up by the Whitlam Labor Government in 1974. And I can tell you that in 1983 the annual salary package of the Commonwealth Bank’s managing director was $85,322, which included a ‘special allowance’ of $4759. It was the same salary paid to the general manager of Qantas, the managing director of Telecom, and the Governor of the Reserve Bank; and $7769 more than we paid the managing director of the ABC ($77,553), but more than double a Federal MP’s basic salary ($40,156), some $23,000 more than Gough Whitlam’s total salary package ($62,000) in his last year as Prime Minister in 1975 but $32,500 less than we paid Bob Hawke ($117,879) in his first year in 1983; and more than $270,000 less than the $357,656 (plus unlimited free first-class travel in his publicly-funded Air Force jet, 40-plus personal staff, armour-plated limousines in every capital, and free bed and full board in two of the finest homes in Australia) we were paying John Howard the day Maxine McKew saw him off the premises on November 24, 2007. The way they were, indeed.

Which leaves just Mrs Stringbag, even though this book is about The Way They Were, not The Way They Are. Julia Gillard is very much of the Are, and, for now, the Are still has a way to go before they Were. Yet how far Gillard gets before she Was, I don’t know. I do know she’ll need to be a far better Prime Minister than she was an election campaigner or the Are will consume her just as unsentimentally as it did the bloke she replaced. Though Gillard was ten years in Parliament before I quit journalism, I never could take her seriously. Her colleagues, Nicola Roxon and Penny Wong, seemed to me more able and much less egocentric. Later, she was just filling the space, in Opposition, of Labor’s deputy leader, which is what her fellow Victorian, the Left’s Jenny Macklin, had been doing after she got the job, uncontested, by factional negotiation when the Right’s Simon Crean became ‘Labor’ leader, uncontested, in December 2001.

Macklin was still there five years later, after Crean, Latham and Beazley each had tried and failed the leadership, one way or another, and Rudd arrived to seize the prize from Beazley in December 2006. And the only reason Rudd’s Mrs Stringbag replaced Beazley’s inherited Mrs Handbag was because Kevin Rudd, who came to detest Gillard, needed a Victorian woman on his leadership ticket as a political convenience to counter Macklin. The very fact Jenny Macklin was deputy to three leaders across five years as four male colleagues elbowed past her and not once was she considered, says all you need to know about what the blokes in ‘Labor’ really think is a woman’s place in political leadership.

Victoria’s Joan Kirner in October 1992 and Western Australia’s Carmen Lawrence in February 1993 both got it ‘where the sun don’t shine’. They were short-term premiers flogged at the ballot box after the blokes had all but bankrupted their respective States and anointed women to dampen the blame. The same wrath, come next March, will be visited upon NSW’s Las Vegas-born Kristina Keneally, Ms Hairdo USA, 2009. And after four ‘premiers’ shared 16 years of ‘Labor’ government, the worst administration run by the most arrogant bunch of political thugs in Australia will get exactly what it deserves.

So you see, Julia Gillard is wholly an accidental Prime Minister. She came as an add-on with Rudd to the leadership four years ago and was still there a year later to become Deputy Prime Minister – or ‘the DPM’, as she liked to be called – after Rudd’s discipline and energy swept ‘Labor’ into Government; then when a majority of Rudd’s colleagues tired of his dictatorship, as well as the forestalling excuse ‘but he got us here’, there was Mrs Stringbag ready, indeed panting, to ‘move forward’ after a similar factional family of white ants to the one that had eaten Bill Hayden’s leadership 27 years earlier feasted on a stationary target who would not be told. Not that anyone of consequence did any telling. Rudd’s Cabinet ministers, without exception, across the two years and seven months he was Prime Minister, just sat there like dummies and said and did nothing except take the money. Spine, like the Emperor’s clothes, was nowhere in evidence.

The last ‘word’ goes to John Kerin, an ‘old Labor’ lag of the Hawke/Keating years and likely the best Primary Industry Minister Australia ever had. We are friends of many years past, and for much of this year his anger has lit up a string of emails. Examples:

MAY 11: ‘Rudd has to go if the one true party crawls back after the election. The punters are well awake to him now. Yours in disgust, old-style, old-thinking (apparently), Kerin.’

JUNE 9: ‘I have now officially resigned from the ALP... The problem I have with Rudd is not policy but his style (sic) of government. He simply does not believe in responsible Cabinet government.’

AUGUST 1, from a diatribe entitled ‘Being the Musings of one Simply Going Mad’: ‘...Rudd near totally destroyed the processes of good government and effectively denied ministers the chance to shine, or sucked the oxygen from them e.g. Roxon on health, Wong on climate change. Ministers have surrounded themselves with inexperienced minders consumed by politics and media management. Gillard’s fixes have been hopeless. She now comes over as a creature of the NSW Right – timid, pragmatic and without long-term goals. The choice for voters is an incompetent Government or a potentially dangerous one. The bottom line for me is the Coalition is still the same old dishonest mob that got us into two unwinnable wars, costing tens of thousands of civilian lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, doing nothing but building terrorism up; turned a relative handful of asylum seekers into vote bait; chopped $5 billion out of the universities; downgraded the intellectual capacity of the Commonwealth Public Service, wiping out much of the capacity of policy and service departments; ran on the coat-tails of the Hawke/Keating economic reforms; failed to invest in infrastructure; attempted yet again to get absolute wage deregulation; and stupidly made deficits out to be the greatest no-no and economic ignorance the greatest virtue. I mean, this is the mob that made us a far less egalitarian society, and the ALP has gone along with it or said nothing.’

AUGUST 23: ‘I thought you were a bit hard on Julia in her first weeks as PM, but turns out you weren’t hard enough. I have serious doubts about her capacity to stand for anything. Her hopeless campaign could only have been masterminded by the idiots of the NSW Right. I went through the debacles of 1966 and 1975 but we still at least had something to believe in. Perhaps a dose of the Mad Monk and the coming slaughter in NSW will wake them up, but I doubt it.’

AUGUST 24: ‘June agrees with your analysis. I’m just bitter and twisted and desperately want to meet Bitar and Arbib in an airport or somewhere to abuse the bastards publically. Serves the party right. When Rudd said the ETS was off until 2013 you can almost physically feel the sag in support. That’s when we found out we had a PM who believed in nothing. Ah, bugger it all!’

SEPTEMBER 8: ‘You were right, we got a Labor Government, but did we? Seriously worried Gillard seems to have no philosophy and her calls on policy hopeless. Perhaps she is in love with the right-wing bunch, the cancer destroying the ALP. Because my old mob seems to believe in nothing, they can’t rebut the Libs’ nonsense on climate change, debt, the mining tax, asylum seekers etc. Will they change? I doubt it.’

OCTOBER 10: ‘Why doesn’t someone write a piece on Where are They Now? I’m so angry about this amateur Gillard/Labor? government. Why not ask what the Hawke/Keating ministers think about it all? I’m slowly going mad, but fellow maddies feel the same. Maybe I should take up knitting?’

OCTOBER 24: ‘Out of loyalty to once what was, I have decided not to buy the lying, snivelling little bastard named Howard’s book. Nor that of [Rodney] Cavalier’s (for balance); and besides, he is only saying what we know and no bastard will do anything about it. We need another Whitlam to take on the machines and the State Labor execs. Yours affectionately, totally disenchanted and disfranchised voter, John.’

Men and Women of Australia, the way they were!

– Alan Ramsey

Canberra, November 10, 2010

Chapter 1

PEOPLE

The Numbers Man

July 18, 1987

IN THE beginning was the word, and the word was numbers. Robert Ray came to the numbers game in politics in the early to mid-1970s. The ABC discovered Ray on election night last weekend. Labor discovered him 15 years ago. He has been around a long time, waiting for TV to find him.

Robert Francis Ray is an extraordinary political talent who looks like a slob. Unlike Sydney’s Graham Richardson, his Right-wing factional soul-mate in the Hawke Government, Melbourne’s Ray seems anything but one of the more significant figures in Labor politics. They reflect, in a sense, the differences between their home cities.

Take Richardson. A snappy dresser with a mind like a nest of snakes. He cares what people think of him. He’s made it up out of working-class redbrick and wants the world to know it. He wears good suits, fluffs his hair, lives with the nobs on the North Shore, and flaunts his considerable power and patronage.

And Robert Ray?

Most times Ray looks like something the cat dragged in. You see him around the Parliament, a big, shambling bear of a man, never a tie on, sometimes unshaven, his shirt sleeves pushed up, slouching around sucking a pipe, often the tail of his shirt hanging out. At home in Melbourne he lives in an unassuming house in unassuming, working-class Oakleigh and drives a battered 1960s Holden.

The Left’s Gerry Hand says: ‘Robert doesn’t have any of the surface bullshit that Richardson goes on with. Watch Graham in the lobbies; he does up the coat, strides around, everyone bows and scrapes, lots of show. Talks about himself as a humble backbencher when he knows he’s not and he knows you know he’s not. RR just follows on, taking it all in, looking like the dog’s dinner. He comes in and sits down with the troops in the members’ dining room in the morning for breakfast, sits with anyone, wherever there’s a spare seat, talks about all the stuff, not heavy politics, anything. No pretensions, no aroma around Robert, absolutely none. Straight as straight.

‘And I’ll tell you something else. If we were in a room and Robert said it was raining outside, I wouldn’t even look up. But if the other bloke said it was raining, I couldn’t help sneaking a look just to check.’

Bob McMullan, Labor’s national secretary, puts it only slightly differently: ‘Robert’s bright, he’s tough, he’s very fair. He’s the guy who makes things work in the Labor Unity [Right] faction in Victoria. When he makes a deal it sticks. He has one of the best intellects in the Parliament, a sophisticated thinker, a mile ahead of most. He should be a minister. If he only looked the part he would become an outstanding talent.’

John Button, Hawke’s Senate leader, agrees. ‘Yes he’s tough, but he’s straight, and if he hates the independents [the small group Button leads in the Victorian ALP] it’s probably because it upsets the symmetry of his counting. And I like him. Why? Well, to put it crudely, if he’s going to kick you in the balls, he’ll tell you first, unlike some I could name.’

It makes Ray sound larger than life. He isn’t, except in physical bulk. Peter Steedman, a Victorian Left activist, calls him the Sydney Greenstreet of Labor politics. It is meant to denote more than size. Yet Robert Ray is more complex, more subtle than his credits suggest.

Yes, he’s straight, everyone says so. He keeps his word and does not tolerate liars. He never forgets a bad turn. One colleague calls him a good friend but a terrible enemy. He won’t suffer fools. He’s unpretentious, self-effacing and loyal. He is not interested in outward show. He is acquisitive of very little except political influence. He is a gourmet who doesn’t drink, a student of history and a sports fanatic, particularly in his support of Collingwood Football Club. He has a passion for card games, films and trivia quizzes. Many say he is good company with a biting sense of humour.

But first and foremost he’s a politician. And for a numbers man, particularly with the Right-wing, with its deserved reputation in NSW for brutalising, Robert Ray commands broad and increasing respect in the Labor movement. ‘I can’t recall anyone who’s ever been ratted on by him,’ says a close friend. Someone not so close says: ‘If anyone knows of an occasion when he gave his word and went back on it, I’d like to know about it.’

Hand, who counts numbers for the Victorian Left, gives Ray his due. ‘Robert plays politics very hard,’ he says. ‘He doesn’t tolerate wimps. I don’t mind that; I think politics is a very serious business. And he has a lot of integrity. I go to Robert to find out what’s happening, and what he tells me, happens. It’s as simple as that.’

Well, not quite. There’s another perspective to Robert Ray. It’s the one that sees Richardson as the bad cop and Ray as the good cop, Richardson as the political head-kicker and Ray as the political plotter in the shadows. Both working in unison for the same objective. Both extremely effective.

‘Don’t be fooled by the different ways they go about things’, says a factional opponent. ‘They are very different personalities, sure, but both are obsessed by the factional power game. They play in tandem and they play it very well. Nobody plays the game better.’

The Centre Left’s Peter Cook insists that to understand how Robert Ray operates you have to accept that he works with a chess board in the front of his mind all the time so as keep him ‘10 steps ahead of everyone else.’ Cook explains: ‘He is single-minded, painstaking in his preparation, and ruthless in making his moves. He is expert in making the offer you ought to refuse but find too attractive not to accept. And, really, there are three constants in everything he does: how to get more numbers for his own faction, how to get control of the party’s National Executive and therefore control of the party, and how to get control of the Caucus. He never loses sight of these goals, just as Richardson doesn’t either’.

And self-effacement? ‘Look,’ says Cook, ‘Robert was having an orgasm [in the national tally room] on Saturday night. He was seen by everybody to be smarter than all the others, the computers included. And Robert likes everyone to know he knows more than they do, which he usually does.’

Ray, now 40, has a classic Labor background: a poor family broken up by an alcoholic father, mostly raised in south-east Melbourne by his grandmother, joined the ALP at 18 motivated by the Vietnam war issues of the mid-’60s. He got an Arts degree with honours from Monash but detested student politics as trivial. Steedman, a fellow student, remembers Ray as spending all his time in the university billiards room. Ray remembers Steed-man as starting his degree four years before he did and finishing four years after him. ‘The thing about being working class was that you couldn’t afford to fail a year,’ Ray says.

In the early ’70s Ray, then 25, was a leading figure in a group known as the Henty House Mob. Some remember the group as the stormtroopers of Joan Child’s Right-wing political machine in Henty, a marginal Federal electorate in south-east Melbourne. Ray ran against the sitting Liberal MP in 1969 and got thumped. Three years later, he stood aside for Joan Child, the titular head of the Henty machine.

‘Robert was the real power,’ a colleague recalls. ‘That’s where he first learned the importance of getting the numbers together.’ Ray says the Henty group was the young campaign team behind Child. All its members lived at one time or another, between 1972 and 1974, in a big brick house in Oakleigh, hence the name the Henty House Mob.

In 1974, Child won Henty but lost it in the 1975 Fraser landslide. Five years later, in Bill Hayden’s only election as Federal leader, Joan won it back again. She has held it ever since. Robert Ray built her local organisation. In February 1985, he delivered Joan Child, now a grandmother, the factional numbers in the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party that made her Australia’s first woman Speaker.

Ray says of those early years: ‘Once you’re a member of a political party, the internal dynamics take over. You make friends, you get interested, you enjoy their company and it’s a natural progression from there. I didn’t join the Labor Party with a view to a parliamentary career or anything like that. It never would have occurred to me’.

It didn’t occur to anyone else, either. During the ’70s, Ray was a relative minnow in Bill Landeryou’s mis-named Centre Unity faction in Victorian Labor, the Right-wing organisation built round the union power base of the Storemen and Packers union. Landeryou was Bob Hawke’s numbers man in those days. Simon Crean was part of the push, too.

Later, after Hawke won Labor pre-selection in 1979 for the safe seat of Wills in a bitter stoush against the Socialist Left’s Gerry Hand, whom he defeated by eight votes, Landeryou’s influence began to diminish. By contrast, Ray’s star was in the ascendancy; he made his mark in his party machine coup against Senator Jean Meltzer. In a classic numbers exercise, Ray replaced her on the Senate ticket for the 1980 election and came into Federal politics in the same year as Hawke.

By then, Robert Ray had helped build a formidable factional organisation. For six years, until his marriage in 1977, he drove a taxi on shift-work for a living so he could spend time consolidating his political base. In the late ’70s, just before he went to Canberra, he taught for a while but without real interest. Politics was his passion.

He was a whizz at electoral figures, though he insists he’s barely numerate. ‘I can just add and subtract. If I have to divide or multiply I get out the calculator. I failed fourth-form maths.’ No one has ever suggested he can’t count. Yet to be a numbers man, he says, you must know about rules and policy and loyalty. ‘And you don’t double-cross people.’

In the December 1982 Flinders poll, the losing by-election for Phillip Lynch’s seat that really destroyed Bill Hayden’s leadership, Robert Ray was in Labor’s campaign rooms with his calculator on the night of the count. He was there for Hawke, not Hayden. Labor lost by 1600 votes. Two months later Hawke was leader.

These days, the Right-wing in Victoria and NSW call themselves Labor Unity, as much a misnomer as Centre Unity. With Labor in power in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra, the interstate alliance is formidable. Richardson and Ray are the respective factional powers. In Canberra, they jointly run things. Hawke listens a great deal to Ray. Richardson, too. In the view of some, Robert Ray is gradually supplanting Richardson’s influence with the Prime Ministerial ear. Maybe.

Says Peter Cook: ‘Robert is a tough political operator but he’s more than just somebody with a calculator. He’s a very good politician with a good nose for trouble. He can smell it coming 100 miles away. Hawke knows this. He also knows Robert won’t tell him bullshit.’ And Ray himself? ‘I enjoy it. If you don’t enjoy politics, it’s a terrible job. I guess it’s also something I can do reasonably well. I wasn’t a very good teacher.’

– Alan Ramsey

postscript: Robert Ray became a minister a week later, on July 24, 1987, in the junior portfolio of Home Affairs. He remained a minister for the next nine years, including in the Cabinet portfolios of Immigration and Defence, until Labor lost office in March 1996. By choice, Ray then spent the entire 11 years 8 months of the Howard Government on the Senate Opposition backbench before quitting politics, aged 61, only after voters had rid Australia of John Howard and re-elected Labor in November 2007.

The Night Porter

November 2, 1994

THE first time I ‘met’ Graham Richardson he was putting John Ducker to bed. It was in Canberra in 1976. Ducker, then the power in NSW ALP machine politics, was in town for a Labor national executive meeting. The meeting had gone badly for him, though I don’t recall the detail. A hard drinker in those days, Ducker took refuge from his defeat by getting absolutely blotto.

Paul Keating, back in Opposition after the fall of the Whitlam Government, had wanted to commiserate with Ducker. I drove him to Ducker’s hotel that night. When we went up to his room, we found Richardson wrestling the clothes off his semi-conscious State president and easing him into bed. After 10 years writing about national politics, it was the moment I realised the full import of exactly what was meant by the NSW Labor Right-wing machine being a tight, close-knit family.

I recall exchanging some mumbled words with a sullen Richardson who looked anything but pleased at seeing Keating wasn’t alone. We stayed only an uncomfortable few minutes. When we left, Richardson was still ministering to his horizontal boss. I never forgot the incident. I’ve not seen anything like it since.

Richardson at the time was a minor flunkey unknown outside Labor politics. He’d been at head office in Sydney a few years as a Ducker protege, first as an organiser and then as assistant secretary. He was fiercely protective of his boss. He was also very aware, even then, on which side his bread was buttered and where the jam would be coming from.

Not long after, Ducker, whose power in NSW was absolute, secured the removal of the then NSW ALP general secretary, Geoff Cahill, someone who foolishly forgot who really ran the party machine, and promoted Richardson into his place. Graham was on his way. Years later, when the mythology of the extent of Richardson’s later power and influence had reached heroic proportions, aided and abetted by too many sheep around him and too many gullible journalists too easily smarmed and charmed, I thought about that night and the context into which it fitted in Richardson’s career.

And I realised that, while being smart, cunning, ruthless and, when necessary, utterly politically immoral had helped him, Richardson long ago worked out the surest and quickest way to success was to catch a ride by making himself seemingly indispensable to whoever ran whatever heap he was climbing at the time.

Thus Richardson always had a patron, though not just any patron. And for each successive patron, as the title of his book acknowledges, he would do whatever it took. First it was Ducker, then Hawke, and finally Keating. For all three, in turn, Richardson promoted, with ruthless single-mindedness, their political well-being. In doing so, he promoted himself.

As they succeeded so did he. And when each stopped being successful he moved to the next. He was loyal to each in turn but only ever completely loyal to himself. He always knew when to get off one bus and onto another. His sense of direction was unerring.

So was his timing. It is a hallmark of Richardson’s career that, from the moment he reached a position of prominence in Labor politics in 1976, the year he became general secretary in NSW at the age of 26, he always worked for a party in government or was a part of that government. It was like that for all of 18 successive years. He never knew Opposition.

First it was the Wran Government in NSW, elected in May 1976, two months before he became NSW ALP general secretary. And when he switched to Federal politics, he did so the year Labor under Hawke defeated Fraser. It meant Richardson always dealt with real power, for it was always his patrons who had hold of it.

It also meant Richardson always got his hands on more than his share. And didn’t he flaunt it! It made him insufferably arrogant, to the point he now shamelessly argues, in his autobiography, that all politicians have to be liars because of the realities of politics and the conventions of the Westminster system.

This is as self-justifying as so much of his book is self-serving. Politicians do not have to lie. Many, I’m sure, do not, just as I’m equally sure many don’t share Richardson’s political morals. He was always a political thug and, I felt, often a political spiv. The real danger always in dealing with him was you were never sure when he was telling the truth. His is a lazy book by someone writing in his own image and to make money, the two things Richardson most cares about.

Now, gone from politics, he has a new patron, the richest man in the country. And you can be dead sure Kerry Packer didn’t hire him just so Graham could indulge his ego on the Nine Network and in Packer’s magazines. – Alan Ramsey

Last of the Soixante Neufs

October 29, 1994

THEY were all men, mostly young and ready to remake Australia. There were 27 of them from every State in the country, including 12 from NSW. Eight would later become ministers and two deputy prime ministers. The youngest one day would make it all the way into The Lodge. At least five are now dead. At the time they represented the most extensive generational change ever in an Australian political party. They were the Soixante Neufs, as they called themselves.

In a span of eight years Gough Whitlam, as Labor leader, would fight five elections embracing some of the most extraordinary and divisive events in Australia’s short political history. And this first lot, the Labor Class of ’69, was, numerically, Whitlam’s greatest electoral sweep.

It didn’t bring Labor government; but, excluding increases in the size of Parliament, it did bring more new MPs to Canberra in a single election than any party had previously achieved. Ironically, six years later, after John Kerr had cut Whitlam down, Malcolm Fraser’s rampant Coalition would exceed the achievement, sweeping a number of the Soixante Neufs away again.

By 1990, Bob Hawke’s last election, there were only four left. Three of them – Sydney’s Lionel Bowen, Barry Cohen and Dick Klugman – quit Parliament that year. This week, as the quarter century ticked over from that grand day it all began, the last Soixante Neuf, the most single-minded of them all, celebrated modestly. Paul Keating was alone with his staff. Curiously, and rather sadly, there wasn’t even a phone call to or from any of the others. Sentiment is rare in politics.

Even Lionel Bowen, the closest to Keating of all the ’69ers, has drifted away from the man he first shared a poky little office with in Old Parliament House all those years ago. The day after the anniversary this week, Bowen was back in Canberra, along with Whitlam and a couple of his other old colleagues, but they didn’t see Keating.

It doesn’t work like that.

Keating, always a distant and, by choice, mostly friendless man, rarely acknowledges his old colleagues these days. Barry Cohen, a former Minister for the Arts and Environment in the Hawke Government for more than four years before Graham Richardson thugged him with the numbers and took his job seven years ago, recalls going down to Melbourne during last year’s election campaign for a function attended by Keating. It was a salutary experience.

‘He wandered past me, like the Sun King. Then he paused on his way to his destiny. Well, he said, here’s a blast from the environmental past.And that was it. He moved on. We’d been in Parliament together 20 years and that’s all there was. A funny bloke. Still, I’d been noticed. I suppose he felt that was enough.’

More recently Cohen has tried for months to talk to Keating about an international garden festival being planned in association with the 2000 Sydney Olympics. He can’t get past the praetorian guard in his office, even by phone. ‘I asked one of his ministers if he could help, and he just said, If you’re lucky enough to get in to see him, will you take me with you? And he’s a member of Cabinet!’

The occasion for Bowen and Whitlam being in Canberra this week was the reopening, as a museum exhibit, of part of the old Press Gallery in Old Parliament House. Whitlam, with his sense of history, never misses such events. Sadly, few other politicians came, the few old faces present looking every bit their years, except for Bowen who, at 71, remains remarkably youthful. The Prime Minister was nowhere to be seen.

Later, after the speeches, Bowen briefly poked round the building that had been his political home for 19 years. He didn’t go back to the aptly-numbered Room L96, the basement broom cupboard he shared for three years with Keating until Labor won government in 1972 and Bowen became a minister. He remembers little about that first day in October, 1969.

‘I remember asking the Whip, a feller called Gil Duthie, what room I had, and he said I’d have to share. You’re from NSW, he said, so you can share with someone else from NSW. I asked who he was suggesting, and he said what about this young feller Keating? I said all right, and that’s how it happened. We just got put together.

‘I’d only met him once before, so I didn’t know much about him. I just knew he was a young bloke. It was a very small room, as you know; 10 by 10, two desks, a couple of phones, and that was it. I don’t remember anything else about that day but that’s how we started.’

Others remember more.

Laurie Brereton, probably Keating’s only real political friend, told Fia Cumming in her book, Mates, that Keating bought two pairs of shoes to celebrate his election. Bowen doesn’t remember them, which is probably just as well. Three years later, when Anna Johanna von Iersel first met Keating on an Alitalia flight from Sydney to Bangkok, he was, Michael Gordon would write in 1993, wearing cream shoes, blue slacks and a paisley shirt. Annita Keating, as she later became, would turn Keating into the fashion clothes horse who wouldn’t be seen dead in cream shoes. Annita said of that first meeting: ‘I thought he would look fantastic in an Italian suit.’

There were no Italian suits back in 1969. Lionel Bowen remembers Keating in those days as being more interested in elegant antique sports cars and his obsession, shared with Rex Connor, a dreamer later destroyed by the notorious loans affair of 1975, for developing Australia’s uranium industry.

Keating’s recollections of 1969 are more basic. He was always very sure of himself, even if others weren’t. Of Whitlam, Keating told Fia Cumming three years ago: ‘He’s an intellectual snob, Gough. He used to see how many degrees you had, and if you didn’t have any he didn’t think too much of you. He always had a lot of presence and style and a lot of go, you can never take that off him, and I wouldn’t want to try. (But) I knew, basically, I had more to offer than he had, so why would I want his recognition?’

Paul always was a modest man.

Bowen recalls a different Keating in 1969, one quietly ambitious but who, in the early years, kept his own counsel in a Labor Caucus dominated by much older men who’d been in politics – and Opposition – forever. ‘He was keen to get on, I remember that, but we didn’t mix a lot. He didn’t mix much with anyone.’ Cohen has a similar recollection. ‘He wasn’t the sort of person you just went and had a yarn with. He was pretty aloof. The only time you took any notice of Paul was when there was a ballot on, because he always seemed to be running it, or trying to.’

And what about relations now with his old room mate, since Bowen left politics after serving 13 years as deputy Federal leader, seven of them as deputy Prime Minister? Bowen says ambiguously but genuinely: ‘I’m a friend but we don’t see each other. That’s been the case all the way through. Our friendship goes back to L96 because that’s where we sort of lived together. But I’ve never visited his home and I think he might have dropped in on me once. So we’re good friends but we never meet,