Windsor's Way Updated Edition

By Tony Windsor

Traitor or saviour? Tony Windsor has been called both in his 22-year political career, but never more often than when he supported Julia Gillard's government in 2010. And now he's back.

After three years in retirement, Tony Windsor refuses to stand by and watch regional Australia relegated to being taken for granted. In the forthcoming election he will go head to head with the leader of the National Party, Barnaby Joyce in the seat of New England.

Windsor's Way reveals Tony's courageous political path—as a young branch member he moved a no-confidence motion against the National Party leader. He conducted a rigorous 17-day assessment period of Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard's promises following the indecisive 2010 election and then seized the opportunities of the subsequent hung parliament.

By staying true to his values and beliefs in difficult and challenging times, Tony Windsor has become an emblem of integrity and decency in Australian politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: May 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9780522870497

Book preview

politics.

1

BUSINESS AS USUAL

I WAS IN MY Tamworth electorate office a few weeks after the 2013 election, but by then it was Barnaby Joyce’s office. He was the new member for New England. It was odd being on the other side of the desk, the one I had used since being elected the Independent MP for the area in 2001. During the recent election I had had a coffee with Barnaby and proposed we meet to ensure a smooth changeover of constituent issues and key electorate projects. I had announced previously that I wasn’t re-contesting the seat and in that circumstance it was a given he was going to win. The aim was to brief him about the ongoing files. This was a different approach to my predecessor, who cleaned out the office of all pens, paper and every constituent file. When that happened I had to put out a media release calling for anyone in the electorate who had unfinished business with the previous government to make contact with me so we could keep working on their case. So much for representing your people.

To his credit Barnaby accepted my offer and there we were in his new/my old office. Despite me being at ease about leaving politics and him being relaxed about being given a background briefing, it was a little bit uncomfortable to start with. After all, I had called the man a fool on the 2010 election night and we had had the odd head clash during the last parliament. I had always been disparaging towards him ever since he sold out country people on the full sale of Telstra just after he became a Queensland Senator in July 2005. So understandably we were both a bit standoffish to begin with but then we settled into having a yarn and going through a number of important issues.

I commended him on employing three of my former staff. Barnaby had not lived in the area for many years and they were clearly going to be a great support in providing him with continuity of constituent issues. He told me he was glad the campaign was over, saying it had been stressful. That struck me as odd because he didn’t have any competition, but clearly aspects had been difficult. I had heard him on the radio some days earlier talking about the Tamworth-based British Aerospace Defence Force Basic Flight Training contract issue that was expiring in 2016. There were rumours it would be taken away from Tamworth and transferred to Sale in Victoria. Barnaby had stumbled with the details and I had wondered why he hadn’t been better advised. We talked about it and how to deal with the issue in a strategic sense and the key people to contact.

We also discussed the upgrade of Chaffey Dam, upstream of Tamworth. It had been a long-running saga. While the dam is important to the people of Tamworth for its water supply it was not a national issue, but it suddenly became one in the week prior to the 2010 election. Senator Penny Wong, the Minister for Water, announced funding for the upgrade. Two days later the Leader of the Nationals, Warren Truss, matched this funding. This indicated something very interesting: polling by Labor and the Nationals must have suggested a closer result than any of us realised, and hence they began to pay attention to the issues that Independents had been arguing for over a number of years.

I raised the issue of the Armidale Hospital with Joyce, and whether he was on top of it. A twenty-first century hospital for a catchment of about eighty thousand people was needed and the long-term success of the medical school would depend on it. And then, without any shame, he said it.

‘You know, Tony, until you had decided not to run I had the money for the Armidale Hospital, as well as funding for the Legume to Woodenbong Road.’

I was outraged. I sat there thinking this bloke is an idiot to tell me this. This is a classic example of why the Nats are a waste of space. Here they are back in business but even before they are elected the first thing they do is take the electorate for granted by withdrawing funding from vital projects because they think they have the seat in the bag. He said the decision had come from Abbott’s office. Everyone, other than four people, had thought I would contest the 2013 election. Barnaby’s leadership ambitions meant he wanted a lower house seat so he had decided on New England. And here was Barnaby, sitting there blithely telling me the consequences of that decision for the people of New England, as if in some way it was my fault for not standing.

‘When you were still the member and running,’ he said, ‘Abbott’s office said we could have a range of things, including $50 million for the hospital. But when you didn’t run they withdrew the money for the hospital and the road.’

My darkening mood mustn’t have registered with him because he then said, ‘You know the other day, when I was struggling with the flying college issue on ABC Radio and there was a possibility of it being removed from Tamworth, I rang Abbott’s office and said the only thing I have going for me up here is the smile on my face. That was when they said I could have $5 million but that was it.’

Barnaby spent that money on the Armidale airport and additional money on Chaffey Dam. That this could happen infuriated me. This is exactly the reason why I have always argued for competition in these country seats. As soon as you remove any sense of challenge the major parties think, ‘talk the talk but don’t walk anywhere’. The fact that the bloke who could one day be the deputy prime minister sat there telling me why he couldn’t achieve an outcome for his electorate was extraordinary. It demonstrated the real problems ministers have in terms of their electorates. Instead of being more powerful as the mythology would have people believe, ‘being at the decision-making table’, they become more submissive and willing to give way on electorate matters at the behest of the prime minister of the day. Their electorates take one for the team.

I had difficulty working out why he was telling me this but on reflection I think it was in some way a genuine confession. I think he felt guilty and he wanted to talk about it. But that doesn’t absolve him from not being able to do anything to rectify the situation. He couldn’t say publicly that Abbott took $50 million from the Armidale Hospital—that would be admitting that the target of the spending was to buy votes in a tight campaign and get rid of a political opponent, not funding infrastructure for New England. This is why political competition in the country areas is desperately needed.

There was a lot of background information. It read like a story of political intrigue with all the ingredients of politicians saying one thing and doing exactly the opposite. I explained that when we agreed to support the formation of government with Julia Gillard one of the key points had been that 100 per cent of the Health and Hospital Fund would be for regional Australia. Previously it had only been 13 per cent, despite 30 per cent of the Australian population living in regional areas. Rob Oakeshott, the Independent Member of Parliament for Lyne, and I had seen this as an area of neglect that could be partly rectified with the remaining $1.8 billion in the fund that was set up by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2009 being quarantined for country health services.

All country health services were able to apply for money from the fund through specific criteria. It resulted in 135 country health services receiving finance. The Armidale Hospital was a priority for our region because of the introduction of a medical school at the University of New England. The first doctors graduated in 2011. The students needed access to a teaching hospital. The Armidale Hospital required refurbishing and upgrading. It was designated as the number one priority in the Hunter region for the final round of the fund that had $475 million available to be allocated.

The NSW Coalition Government had publicly said it was a priority but when it came to applying to the Commonwealth at the start of 2011, State Health Minister Jillian Skinner wouldn’t allow the application to proceed. There were no technical reasons for this. The only logical reasoning was that if the application was okayed then the NSW Coalition didn’t want any kudos going to me or Richard Torbay, then the NSW State Independent for the Northern Tablelands. The major parties have never had any love for Independents and they didn’t want the application to succeed because it might suggest two Independents had delivered for their people. In the end there were thirty-two applications put forward by the NSW Government to the fund and the Armidale Hospital was the only one removed from the list. The state health minister had every right to prioritise and could have made it thirty-third on the priority list, but it was removed altogether. To do that was unforgivable.

It was important for me to explain all this to Barnaby. Everyone in the region had worked long and hard to get funding to upgrade the hospital.

Within a matter of days of winning New England, the Nationals had reverted to type. The frustration in his voice demonstrated that he now understood how the system works for country people and that he was powerless to do anything about it. The issue obviously played on his mind as he has mentioned it to others. It struck me that what I had just heard encapsulated the reasons I stood as an Independent in the NSW Parliament in 1991 and reinforced the logic behind supporting Gillard in 2010: the need for country people to use their vote more strategically. It also strengthened my belief that the Nats will eventually disappear up the rear end of the Liberals. It showed how loyalty is a casualty of politics, how political competition is the missing ingredient in many electorates, and why people like Cathy McGowan, the Independent member for Indi, and community groups like the Voice of Indi are incredibly important for the future of regional people.

When I first stood as an Independent in New England the Nationals used to say that if New England votes an Independent in it would be penalised. John Anderson, then leader of the Nationals, stated this publicly. But the reverse is true. Competition gets results. It was gratifying to read the award-winning author and Paul Keating’s speech writer Don Watson’s letter to me in the Monthly’s August 2013 issue. It highlighted that I was not the only one who thought this way:

Dear Mr Windsor,

I can find no elegant way of saying this, so I will use plain terms: I have a kind of crush on you. Don’t worry, I’m not after a date or anything. I won’t be stalking you round the hills of New England. It’s more the sort of crush I had on James Stewart after I saw The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, or Yves Montand whenever he played a resistance fighter. It’s a political kind of crush.

I know when it started, to the day. I was at a cattle sale up your way—not to buy or sell, only to look. You and Rob Oakeshott had just signed up with Julia Gillard, and many of the men in moleskins would have thrown you in the river and held you under with their cattle prods. The bulls were all Angus and all black; the buyers were all farmers and all in RM Williams—boots, trousers, shirts and hats. I believe some of their socks and under-wear were RMW. Bulls being bulls, they were all snorting and pawing the ground like Barnaby Joyce, but compared to the farmers they were cool reason itself.

I might have it wrong, but one way or another I thought you were telling the electors of New England that they should get that creaking, maudlin, passive-aggressive bush romance out of their heads and start bringing to politics the same sort of acumen that got them into crop rotation and no-till farming. Much as Labor gave up the socialisation objective and calling each other ‘Comrade’, you wanted them to give up their habitual allegiance to the major conservative parties and feeling hard done by all the time. As Labor found that there were all sorts of creative combinations to be forged while managing a capitalist economy, a less reflexive and herd-like approach in rural politics might not only produce material rewards for farming enterprise and effort, it might also see those fine rural values we hear so much about actually get a foothold in the nation itself. Your constituents looked at a hung parliament with a Labor prime minister and could see only misery. But you, sir, saw opportunity.

Shocking as it was to do a deal with the Labor devil, your deeper offence was to break ranks with the herd. The best way to turn intelligent human beings into dumb animals is to fire up the herd instinct. It works in war and football, and it works in politics. The union (including the farmers union) makes us strong, but it can also make us forget our capacity for rational thought. The same goes for mateship, in some ways the dopiest union of all. You committed heresy, and for that you got what Socrates got—poison: ‘vitriol’ you called it at your last press conference. Your wife was given it, too, you said. It turns out that a lot of bushies—as they call themselves nowadays—are just as consumed by a sense of their own virtue as everybody else. All they want is a fair go and someone to blame.

And think what they have to blame you for! All those millions for hospitals, roads and universities; all that investment in the national broadband network, climate research, clean energy, agriculture; all the concrete expression of regional policy that usually receives only lip service. Has anyone done more to bring the regions into the national story and the national future? It was unbearable for them! Then there’s the Murray–Darling Basin Plan you did much to modify and bring about: it seems to come down fairly solidly on the side of farmers.

Now you’re gone, the natural National Party order will be restored in New England, if any order built around a cultivated hysteric like Barnaby Joyce can be called natural. But New England is the smaller element in the loss the country suffered when you decided to leave after the final spill. With hacked limbs and Labor blood all over the stage, it was like the last scene in Julius Caesar; but bad as it was to lose Gillard and Greg Combet and some of the others, losing you felt worse.

A good bloke lost as collateral damage, people are saying. If that is all we can make of it, we will only deepen the folly. You could be the dead-set best bloke in history and be no loss at all. What matters is that you were a good politician: good enough to be the measure of what’s missing in modern politics.

I mean the qualities that the media no longer much values or, in its more extreme and youthful forms, even recognises, and which the major parties only sometimes reward. Not ‘the vision thing’—though I suspect you have one—but the dependable, intelligent, worldly, unbreakable, character thing, on which democratic politics and our faith in it depend. This is more than ‘good blokeism’—or ‘good sheilaism’. It is having good judgement, including the judgement of others’ character. It means hearing and representing the people, but neither aping them nor manipulating them; nor being only for them, whatever the broader interest; nor telling them only what they want to hear, or only the messages that your spin doctors reckon they must hear to the exclusion of both the demands of intellect and the refinements of civilised discourse.

You reminded us that a good politician is more than the confection of a good media manager. You had force without it. In fact you showed us that a lot of what passes for media management is really something got up for the satisfaction of media managers. Julia Gillard had a media manager, and no doubt a very able and up-to-date one, but I’m sure there were days, if not whole weeks, when it would have made no difference if she had employed a billy goat or the auctioneer at the cattle sale.

Every time I heard you in the media, I found myself in a remarkable state of listening. Not wincing or groaning or cursing, or desperately seeking some less enervating experience. You made the others look and sound like early-model robots. Speech is humanity’s ‘connective tissue’, as your fellow New Englander, the historian Alan Atkinson, once explained. By heeding this simple fact about language, you also heeded a simple one about democracy and public life: that insofar as they depend on knowledge, trust and engagement, they depend on language. You spoke as good politicians used to: as if your brain was working at the same time as your voice and governing what you said. You sounded thoughtful, considered and frank. You sounded interesting.

A year or so after the Walgett Bull Sale, in the midst of the uproar over the Murray–Darling Basin Plan, I went to a meeting of farmers just outside Mildura. The hats were smaller, but the mood was much the same. Some of them were ropeable, and I imagine it was for good reason, but none of them was ropeable enough for the man who is going to replace you in New England. There was Joyce, screeching like a galah going home at dusk. It is ‘the whole aim of practical politics’, HL Mencken said, to frighten people with imaginary hobgoblins and make them ‘clamorous to be led to safety’. He was on the money, as usual. Yet word has it that a lot of New Englanders have come around, and you would have beaten Joyce at the next election. There is the saddest thing: not only will a base politician replace a good one, but the lesson you taught by your example, that democracies need not be governed by hobgoblinry, is much less likely to be learnt.

Might you not change your mind?

Yours in faint hope,

Don Watson

For twenty-two years Independents had achieved real outcomes for the seat and Barnaby was sitting behind his new electoral desk saying that that was all gone now. With no competition there was nothing to get. For twenty-two years we had kept the focus on our region and country issues. After the 2013 election I was told ‘the Nationals had their seat back’ but all I heard was country people being taken for granted.

I had had twenty-two years in two parliaments, seven elections as an Independent, two balance of power situations, one in favour of Liberals, one Labor, and here was this guy regurgitating his guilt as though he was asking to be absolved of the burden of belonging to a major party. When will country people wake up to these political frauds?

I had no party crutch to support me—just my own moral compass to tell me what was right and wrong.

2

I WAS NEVER GOING TO

BE ONE OF THEM

MY FATHER WAS KILLED in a tractor accident in 1959 when I was eight years old. My mother, Ruth, age only forty-one, suddenly was a single mother on a farm with three boys. The eldest, Michael, was age fourteen, Peter was ten and I the youngest.

We were fortunate to have good family friends who kept an eye out for us Windsor boys. Legacy, the organisation with the aim of looking after descendants of veterans, was also very supportive of us. One neighbour, Andrew Taylor, was our family’s Legatee for fifty years. Another neighbour, Les Squires, gave us incredible support running the property. Fred Pursehouse, a local businessman, also had a major influence. He and his wife Marj were key figures in our early lives, and their sons Malcolm, Clive and Andrew have remained lifelong friends. In a lovely twist of fate Andrew married my wife’s sister Cynthia.

When I was about twenty-seven I was whinging to Fred about how government policy was impacting on the farming community and he said, ‘If you want to do something, you should really get involved in politics.’ He was a member of the National Party (then the Country Party) and lamented that he didn’t think any of his kids were going to get involved. I hadn’t been interested in politics at university and only slightly took notice when I’d been called up for National Service in 1970. But Fred was someone I had always admired and after that conversation I took his advice and joined the National Party’s small branch of Werris Creek, some three kilometres from our property and where I had been to primary school. It was 1977.

Werris Creek was the first railway town in New South Wales and the site of the first branch line in Australia. This was where the track opened