Machine Rules: A political primer

By Stephen Loosley

But does a powerbroker like Stephen Loosley ever leave the political word?
In his candid memoir, Loosley writes about defending the indefensible, the best way to start and kill off rumours, the value of truth in campaigning, how to use humour to squash a scandal, the key to fundraising and why bullshit always comes back to smother you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Aug 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9780522867411

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Index

Preamble: Knees up Mother Brown

The thin blue line looked distinctly menacing. On the western side of George Street in Sydney’s CBD, across from Australia Square, the New South Wales Police were assembling. Some had already removed their identifying numbers. They were intent on inflicting a coordinated physical assault on the people across the street, some of whom had spilled onto the roadway.

It was late one spring afternoon in September 1970. The best part of 30 000 people had assembled in Wynyard Park for a moratorium meeting and march against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Twenty-year-old males were being conscripted for service in the Australian Army. Considering that twenty-year-old Australian males did not even have the vote, it seemed more than a shade unfair that they should die in paddy fields for questionable causes without even having the franchise.

Among the university students, unionists and just plain ordinary folk were four young Sydney Tech High School kids who had skipped their afternoon classes to participate. The deputy headmaster at Tech would later refer to our actions, which we repeated for anti-war demonstrations on other occasions, as the ‘Moratorium sneak-out’. No matter. My mates and I were strongly opposed to the US and Australian intervention in the war, with its tapestry of lies and indiscriminate slaughter. So we stood up, to oppose what we believed was wrong.

I was genuinely scared as I watched the cops across George Street link arms and advance in a canter towards us. They finished at speed and crashed into the protesters, some with their knees up. People went backwards. People went down; some were down for the count. Everyone was crushed together on the sidewalk and against the buildings.

Knees up Mother Brown.

I knew this expression from having played Rugby League (with real enthusiasm but without much skill). It referred to a tackle where a defender leapt into the air and, gripping the ball carrier around the neck and shoulders, slammed their knees into the opponent’s chest. It was a devastating play that was eventually banned, obviously for good reason. You think the shoulder charge is dangerous.

But on that day in Wynyard Park, we were not on the football field. We were trying to protest peacefully, albeit noisily, in the tradition of Australian democracy. I did not see a single demonstrator raise a hand in anger. This was a peaceful assembly. However, the following day, there was to be a by-election in a southern Sydney marginal seat called Georges River. The ALP candidate was the youthful and energetic Frank Walker. NSW Premier Robin ‘Bob’ Askin wanted a police riot on the streets of Sydney, to lift the conservatives’ chances of winning. His police—brutal and venal in equal measure—obliged.

Askin is still widely derided as having been among the most corrupt of the state’s premiers, linked closely to both crooked cops and illegal gambling interests. But there was something else to him. He was a thug, as confirmed by his declaration to ‘run the bastards over’ during an anti-war demonstration in Sydney in 1966 against visiting US President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

On the afternoon of the September 1970 moratorium march, there were some 300 arrests, and the violence was ongoing for hours. Overwhelmingly, the cops caused the trouble. From the provocative confiscation of anti-war signs and demands that other protest banners be dismantled, to more heavy-handed tactics, this was a determined police effort to confront the demonstrators.

This was a new experience for me, a view of police work that was alien. Here was the state, my home state, deploying its uniformed agents against its own citizens in pursuit of a political objective for Bob Askin and the conservative parties. It was a revelation to my seventeen-year-old student self. It pushed me firmly onto the Left of the political spectrum, making me determined to change a system that produced state-sponsored violence.

And as it turned out, the voters were not fooled, despite the headlines. Labor won Georges River with a bit to spare.

Adding fuel to my idealism, the following year there was a Springbok Rugby tour of Australia. The South African team had, of course, been selected on a racial basis, as apartheid still reigned in the Republic. The Australian Council of Trade Unions, whose president was Bob Hawke, stepped up to the crease and applied a transport ban to the tour. Demonstrations greeted the Rugby team just about everywhere (funnily enough, a young Graham Richardson narrowly avoided arrest in one of the Sydney demonstrations). The flashpoint came when the Liberal prime minister of the day, Billy McMahon, offered to deploy the Royal Australian Air Force to transport the Springboks around, thereby negating the trade union ban.

Federally, the conservative parties were led by people who were particularly difficult to respect. Indeed, McMahon was an utter joke, including to more than a few in his own party.

McMahon had followed Jolly John Gorton into The Lodge following an internal party coup. Gorton, like others before him, had been almost sycophantic towards the United States in pursuit of favour. While his predecessor, Harold Holt, had declared that he was ‘All the way with LBJ’, Gorton had made absurd noises to the effect that Australia was simply part of the American posse, thereby planting the seed for the role of ‘deputy sheriff’ embraced so willingly by the Howard Government many years later. This was stuff that caused reasonable Australians to cringe. Patrick White, the Nobel prize–winning author, described Gorton as giving the world the impression that we were a ‘nation of rustic clowns’.

On the Labor side, however, things were very different. Enter Edward Gough Whitlam. Whitlam had ideas, and an eloquent way of arguing his case. He also had the sharpest wit heard in federal politics for a very long time. Whitlam had reformed Labor internally by democratising the Victorian and NSW branches and affording the federal parliamentary Labor Party a far greater role. Labor’s platform was immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and an end to conscription, and it was committed to universal health care.

The ALP also embraced an independent foreign policy, which included recognition of the People’s Republic of China. Indeed, when Gough led an ALP mission through China in 1971, he broke open ground in a way still remembered in Beijing. McMahon was caught short, so he described Whitlam as having been played by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai ‘like a trout’. But even the most reactionary of Australian newspapers produced cartoons ridiculing McMahon when it was revealed that US President Richard Nixon’s special envoy, Dr Henry Kissinger, had also been in Beijing at the time. He’d been negotiating a presidential visit that ultimately would lead to diplomatic recognition of China by the United States for the first time since 1949.

At the state level, Neville Wran was shortly to step up as the NSW Labor leader: another moderniser and visionary who would do great things in state politics. Bob Hawke, meanwhile, commanded both enormous respect and affection within the Australian community, while at the same time remaining anathema to Australian conservatives.

So there was much to admire about the Labor side, and little but contempt could be felt for the McMahons, the Askins and the official conservative parties. This was particularly true in Victoria, where Liberal premier Henry Bolte actually boasted that one way to win a general election was to have a hanging. He spoke from cold experience, having presided in 1967 over the execution of Ronald Ryan, the last person to be legally hanged in Australia. Clearly, I was set to become a man of the Left.

I first considered public office while studying politics and history on the Kensington campus of the University of New South Wales. Defeating the Tories meant joining the ALP. That was the way forward. If I really wanted to change things, then I had to go out on the field and leave the grandstand behind. Only by playing the game and taking risks can you seek to reshape the political landscape. So, in early 1972, I joined the ALP.

In the years to come, I would meet many people of the conservative persuasion who were decent and honourable, who had gone into politics for the best of reasons. I learned that no-one has a monopoly on wisdom. That is why, regardless of why you enter politics, it is critical to remember the reasons why you took that step.

Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, actually invented a family that kept him centred in what he considered and voted upon in the US Senate. While I was in the Australian Senate, I always asked myself if what I was doing made the lives of assembly line workers at the Ford Motor Company plant in Homebush better or worse. This kept me centred in terms of values. At least, it did until Ford closed the assembly line.

But such lessons were ahead of me. In early 1972 in Sydney, I found myself with a ticket, as a paid-up member, in the Carlton/West Kogarah branch of the ALP.

1

From Laughter to Loathing

My background is hardly traditional Labor. Far from it. My parents, Jean and Bernie Loosley, were salt-of-the-earth, working-class people. They were good people. Great people, actually. But they were Tories, and Sir Robert Menzies was the political figure most respected in our home.

Dad was a clothing employee who had begun his working life as a strip cutter and worked his way up to be superintendent of the plant. Mum worked in the home, raising three children: I was the eldest, then there was my brother Robert and my sister Jennifer. Mum also cared for her ageing mother, who was from Edinburgh.

Curiously, given the family’s roots and the lack of Labor influence, Mum’s father, Robert, had become a waterside worker after retiring from the Royal Australian Navy. Grandpa had been a proud member of the rifle team aboard HMAS Australia, the flagship of the RAN, built on the Clyde in the UK and delivered into Australian waters in October 1913. Grandpa was also a keen photographer and he left a superb visual record of the Australian experience during World War I, covering everything from the action at Rabaul in Papua New Guinea, to a visit from His Majesty King George V.

As I grew older, there were frequent and fierce arguments at home over politics. My father, for example, objected to a sticker on the back of my car that read: ‘Stop work to stop the war’. It was an anti-Vietnam slogan, of course, and Dad, ever the dedicated breadwinner, had taken it literally.

My parents had a very great deal to recommend to their children about all facets of life. In particular, they drilled into me the importance of studying hard. Dad had left school at age twelve and knew better than most the value of a sound education. It always struck me as odd that although my father’s father had been a country schoolteacher, Dad had never gone to high school. Australia was a different place in those days.

There was a selective school no more than 2 kilometres from home on Forest Road in Bexley: Sydney Technical High School. Tech had moved from Paddington in the early 1960s and attracted young men who seemed to have potential, judging by their school results. I was determined to secure a place there and did so in 1965, arriving from nearby Carlton Public School.

When I look back now, I realise my parents did something that was unbelievably valuable to me. As a keen reader, I was always looking about for something to digest. This caused Dad to bring The Daily Telegraph home every night from work and leave it on the kitchen table. I read it almost every night.

The impact of this first became apparent when I was in Year 2. My teacher, Miss Cleaver, who was also the headmistress of the Infants School and who I remember fondly, encouraged everyone to produce a new word each school day. One morning, I was summoned to her desk for an explanation of the word I had written down.

‘Tell me what this word is, Stephen’, she inquired.

I replied: ‘Katanga, Miss’.

‘What does Katanga mean?’ she asked gently.

I replied without hesitation: ‘That’s where the UN dropped its paratroops’. I had recently read a newspaper report about the strife in the Republic of Congo.

Miss Cleaver said nothing. She merely smiled and hugged me. Even then, aged eight, I knew I was on to something.

Mum and Dad also insisted on books being given to their children on birthdays and at Christmas. Early on, they discovered an American set of books called The How and Why Wonder series. The first volume in this series was on the American Civil War. It was well written for a youngster of nine or ten, and lavishly illustrated, in colour. The American narrative resonated with me then, and it still does. In 2012, as I stood on the old battlefield at Vicksburg, Mississippi, where the Civil War was decided in the American summer of 1863, I thought about my parents having the foresight to give me The How and Why Wonder books.

•  •  •

In my young adulthood, after I’d joined the ALP, my parents’ politics changed. They became fairly solid Labor voters. It had very little to do with me, though, and everything to do with a Labor alderman on the Rockdale City Council.

Tom Hanratty was a classic Irish-Catholic loyalist. He and his wife Josie were great Australians. My parents had a problem with the Rockdale Council and alderman Tom went about remedying it. Mum and Dad never forgot this, and Tom came to replace Bob Menzies at the top of the political tree. Tommy, who was an active member of the ALP’s Carlton/West Kogarah branch, was also one of the people who encouraged me to go as far as I could within Labor’s ranks, to contribute as much as I could muster.

The Carlton/West Kogarah branch of the ALP was sited in the drowsy suburbs of southern Sydney. It met in the old Carlton School of Arts, which had definitely seen better days. To emphasise its proletarian heritage, the branch convened its get-togethers at the back of the shabby school in an even more derelict room, which had been an afterthought to the original building.

These meetings normally comprised barely more than the quorum of seven. At nineteen, I was always the youngest person there, along with my mate Ron, who joined at about the same time. Most of the members were seniors in retirement, the backbone of the party in the state electorate of Kogarah and in the federal electorate of St George. Many of them were active in the days of Jack Lang, the legendary fiery premier of NSW (from 1925 to 1927, and again from 1930 to 1932) who inspired the young Paul Keating. They would cheerfully tell new arrivals that Lang was twenty years ahead of his time with his pioneering social legislation.

The subdivision of West Carlton was on the wrong side of the Illawarra railway line, but it had one overwhelming political virtue: the people who lived there had the good sense to routinely vote ALP. Paul Keating once said of Bankstown that it beat the hell out of most places because it still voted 55 per cent Labor even when things were really crook. This was equally true of West Carlton, which recorded majorities for Labor state and federal ballots, particularly at the Carlton Public School, where I had spent my formative years.

The state member was Bill Crabtree. In the parliamentary party room on Macquarie Street, he was referred to as ‘The Porter’, owing to his years as a porter on the railways. As he was short and stout, the local Left faction was known to deride him as ‘The Dwarf’. ‘Crabbie’, as he was more popularly known, worked his electorate hard; he knew all the people in the district who mattered. Kogarah was once considered marginal, particularly after redistributions. The infamous Askin had once chided Crabtree after one of his notorious redistributions with the words: ‘We’ve got you this time, Shorty’. But this was an idle boast. Crabtree had built Kogarah into a comparatively safe Labor seat.

Later, as the police minister in the Wran Government, Crabbie came under fire when it was alleged that he was part of the corruption that swelled around the illegal gambling industry. True or false, the allegations were personally damning, and he suffered a breakdown from which he found it difficult to recover.

Bill Morrison, on the other hand, as the federal Labor member, had been a diplomat in the Australian Foreign Service. He was part of Gough Whitlam’s new breed of Labor MPs. Recruited to contest St George in 1969, along with other promising candidates such as Barry Cohen (a haberdasher), Lionel Bowen (transferred from state politics) and Peter Young (ex-army), Morrison also worked his electorate assiduously. St George was truly a marginal seat, evidenced by the fact that Bill won it by only sixty-nine votes.

Morrison had the distinction of twice being expelled from the Soviet Union, which, for a diplomat, is an impressive achieve ment. He’d apparently courted trouble prior to this. The story goes—and it’s a tall story at that—that on one occasion, the KGB called him in for ‘a chat’. When Morrison walked into their office, he was confronted by a table covered in photographs allegedly showing the diplomat in compromising poses with various Russian females. Sensing a triumph, the KGB demanded to know what Bill’s response was to the photographs. Wandering around the table, Morrison nonchalantly replied that he would take one of those photos, a couple of those, and perhaps a whole cluster of those. If there is any truth to this admittedly unlikely tale, then Morrison would have deserved no less than the grudging respect of the Russians and legend status within the Australian diplomatic service.

The most important element of ALP branch life is that it constitutes your base. Even when occupying the role of general secretary of the NSW ALP, I never lost sight of how important it was to maintain a local majority. This was a matter of self-respect as much as anything else. And so Kogarah was characterised by constant manoeuvring over who would have the seat in the post-Crabtree period. This was at least partly because Bill did not enjoy the best of health—indeed, when the Wran Government was sworn in, the Member for Kogarah was allocated an office that backed onto Sydney Hospital, in case of an emergency.

Among the claimants was a young organiser with the NSW ALP: Graham Frederick Richardson. Unsurprisingly, Crabtree resented Richardson’s ambition and the two of them really didn’t get along. Crabtree decided at some point prior to the 1976 election that I would be a better MP than Richardson and promoted me. Given that I had become friends with Graham in the interim, this presented me with a very delicate situation. Many political aspirants have been thwarted by a retiring MP going out of his or her way to shaft a perceived threat to their legacy. So it was best to try to maintain both friendships, even though this proved very difficult.

Branch life teaches you the rudimentary art of campaigning, how to handle everything from local canvassing to the manning of polling booths and the all-important skill of scrutineering. West Carlton Labor did it well. The Tories tended to import their workers, often from Sydney’s upper North Shore,