Lazarus Rising
It had been a big mistake going for Drummoyne, but I didn’t think so when I nominated. Even more importantly, it was a blessing that I had lost — I certainly didn’t think that then! I thought that I had let down the party and had blown a golden opportunity to get into parliament at the age of only 28. Moreover, I felt the loss had put paid to my future prospects of preselection, federal or state. I went through the miseries for quite a while. Amongst other things, I had failed all those family and friends who had toiled for me. My mother had upended her life by moving house with me to Drummoyne, and had then worked incredibly hard in the campaign.
That was the jumble of thoughts that consumed me in the wake of the Drummoyne defeat. It became crystal clear later, after I had won preselection for Bennelong, that my loss in Drummoyne had been a huge stroke of good fortune. If I had won Drummoyne it would have only been by the narrowest of margins, the demographics of the area were to move for some years against the Liberals, and with the natural swing of the pendulum I might have had no more than two terms and then lost.
Perfect field evidence for this piece of ex post facto rationalisation was, ironically, provided by my marginal-seat candidate in arms from 1968, Peter Coleman. He succeeded in Fuller where I had failed in Drummoyne. Sir John Cramer, the member for Bennelong, which enveloped Fuller, announced in 1973 that he would not fight the next federal election, and predictably Peter Coleman sought Liberal endorsement for Bennelong. So did I, and I was successful, beating him in the final ballot. So the 1968 state election failure had defeated a 1968 success, for a much greater prize than either had been aiming for in 1968. Apart from again demonstrating the vagaries of politics, it illustrated the difficulty of transferring from state to federal politics, particularly when any degree of marginality is involved.
Drummoyne had one marvellous human interest story which was a reminder of the often conflicting loyalties in politics. For many years Bill Brown had been the superintendent of the Sunday school at Earlwood Methodist Church, which I attended from early childhood. He was a Geordie, having come from Newcastle-on-Tyne as a young man to work with Dorman Long, the company that built the Sydney Harbour Bridge. He was a staunch unionist and Labor supporter. Bill typified the strong link there had always been between the organised labour movement and the Methodist Church in Great Britain. One wouldn’t meet a finer practical Christian. For a number of years I had helped him in running the Sunday school at Earlwood.
Bill and his wife had moved to Drummoyne to live, and I caught up with them when I began attending the Drummoyne Methodist Church. As the election approached, he sought me out to discuss the voting intentions of him and his wife. He said that in other circumstances both of them would have followed their normal loyalty and voted Labor. My being the Liberal candidate had complicated things. Bill told me that, after a lot of soul-searching, they had decided that one of them would vote for me and the other, as usual, vote Labor. I didn’t ask which would be which. I was pleased to know that I would receive at least one vote from the Brown household. I was quite touched by their gesture.
4 REGROUPING AND REBUILDING
I stayed in Drummoyne after my 1968 loss, even though I knew that I would never run for the seat again. It was a question of regrouping, and working out where I went next in politics. Besides, I had more or less agreed to be Malcolm Mackay’s campaign director, in the federal seat of Evans, at the election due at the end of 1969. It was going to be a tough fight for him; Gough Whitlam had given the Labor Party a new edge, and at least some movement back to Labor from the devastating loss of 1966 seemed likely. Evans would need a lot of work to hold. Mackay was a good local member. He listened well to people’s concerns, and both he and his wife, Ruth, had established close links with key organisations.
We had become good friends. The Mackays welcomed me into their home and we swapped thoughts on all political issues. I was in constant touch with Malcolm through the drama-packed days which followed Harold Holt’s drowning on 17 December 1967. In fact I had been at his home in Haberfield when news that Holt was missing came through. It was such an Australian tragedy. The Prime Minister had apparently drowned after plunging into a rough surf at Cheviot Beach near Portsea in Victoria. His body was never found.
John McEwen, Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the Country Party, announced that the Country Party would not serve in a government led by Holt’s Liberal Party deputy and Treasurer, Bill McMahon. That complicated the imminent leadership stoush within the party. Due to the McEwen veto, McMahon ruled himself out of contention. Mackay started out as a supporter of 64-year-old Paul Hasluck, but over time, I watched him shift to John Gorton, who was energetic in pursuit of his leadership ambitions. This contrasted with Hasluck’s ‘merit unheralded’ approach, which shunned overt convassing for support.
The real clincher for Gorton, however, was his appearances on television in the lead-up to the leadership vote. His relaxed laconic manner, coupled with his crumpled war-hero face, really appealed to viewers. He was new. Most Australians had not previously noticed him. On first blush they liked him a lot; he gave direct answers and clearly wanted the job. He was the first person to win the leadership of a major political party in Australia largely through the force of his television appearances.
I remained on the party’s state executive and, therefore, heavily involved in the party’s organisational affairs. This was also the time when I went into partnership with Peter Truman, and the following year we were joined by John Nelson to form the firm Truman, Nelson and Howard. Although my passion for politics never receded, this was a period when I derived considerable satisfaction from the practice of law. The firm had offices in Pitt Street, Sydney.
There was nothing quite like having a direct stake in the business. It was a mixed practice, and I handled any variety of work. I had carriage of any litigation which came the firm’s way, including divorce work. I didn’t like doing divorce work very much, but it was part of the practice and someone had to look after it. Time and time again I was reminded of how irrational people would become when a formerly close relationship had broken down altogether. Levels of intelligence or wealth made no difference to the degrees of irrationality.
I drew much professional encouragement from a personal injury case I ran on behalf of a man called Bozanic. He was an immigrant from the old Yugoslavia, and had been injured whilst working on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. The injuries he sustained resulted from his being thrown from a loader. Bozanic had tried a number of solicitors who, after a while, told him he did not have a strong enough case. I felt sorry for him and took his case on, essentially on a speculative basis.
It took a long time for a hearing date to be fixed, and at times I wondered about the wisdom of having taken on the matter in the first place. The poor man had been referred to me by a friend in the Liberal Party who felt that because of his age and poor language skills Bozanic had been pushed around. The date of the court hearing finally arrived; the case went extremely well, and Bozanic was awarded $40,000 plus costs. In 1969, given the nature of his injuries, this was a terrific outcome. To me this was a good example of how the law could be used to help someone who really needed assistance.
The 1969 election saw Harold Holt’s 1966 majority of 38 reduced to seven. Whitlam outperformed Gorton during the campaign. At one stage, there had been real concern that Gorton might lose. He came to Mackay’s electorate, where I presided at a Liberal Party dinner held at the Western Suburbs Leagues Club, in Ashfield. He was late for the dinner because he had detoured to the members’ room of the club to have a game of darts and a beer with local club members. Some at the dinner were aggravated by this, but next morning a marvellous photo appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald showing the Prime Minister throwing darts. This kind of behaviour now by prime ministers would be regarded as quite commonplace and natural, but 40 years ago it was seen by some as unconventional.
John Gorton made no secret of his liking for parties and conviviality. This would not have mattered if he had applied more discipline and routine hard work to the job of being prime minister. He had an appealing personality, a direct style and was extremely intelligent. It was his lack of general discipline over such things as punctuality that did him damage. I had not been attracted to him when he was chosen as the party’s leader and would have preferred Paul Hasluck, but several people close to me, such as Tom Hughes, were strong Gorton supporters, and suffered in their own careers when Gorton was later removed as prime minister. I maintained my scepticism throughout his time in office. In later years, however, I changed my mind about Gorton.
The experience of government led me to identify more strongly with Gorton’s nationalistic views. During the last few years of his life I saw him and his wife, Nancy, often, and I felt that we had become quite good friends, overcoming earlier estrangement on account, firstly, of my closeness to Malcolm Fraser, whom he loathed, and my rivalry with Andrew Peacock, who had been a Gorton supporter. I spoke at a wonderful dinner to mark Gorton’s 90th birthday on 7 September 2001 and felt honoured to launch his biography, written by Ian Hancock.
Although he won the 1969 election, Gorton lost a lot of seats and had to beat off leadership challenges from both David Fairbairn, a senior minister from New South Wales, and Bill McMahon, then still deputy Liberal leader. By this time, John McEwen had dropped his veto of McMahon, a sure sign that the Country Party had grown uneasy with Gorton’s governing style.
It was an inauspicious start to a new term of government, having an incumbent prime minister challenged by two of his ministers. Gough Whitlam’s impressive performance in the campaign added to the list of ominous signs. Yet so lengthy had been the Coalition’s grip on power that the possibility of being defeated by Labor was still not seriously entertained by many people.
About this time, my brother Bob began to question his earlier support for the Liberals, and by the early 1970s he had joined the ALP. I respected his right to change his opinion and his political allegiance and, for that reason, I never asked him exactly why he had shifted. Over the years I divined that it had been a case of two people growing up in the same environment ultimately having a different take on events and society. For example, where I responded positively to people defeating disadvantage by personal initiative, Bob was repelled by the disadvantage and the fact that not all people could overcome it. That is where he saw a larger role for government. He opposed Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, but that was a companion to his change of political heart, not the main driver.
For several years Bob had been a Liberal Party member. Like me, he is an activist, and he became quite heavily involved in the local branches in the Earlwood area. He and his wife were living there. Later, and after they had moved to Armidale so that Bob could continue his studies at New England University, his political leanings shifted.
Although her personal commitment to the Liberal cause never faltered, our mother worried that politics would divide Bob from the rest of the family. Sometimes she asked that we steer clear of too many political discussions when all of us were together. Mum was especially anxious about our traditional family gathering on Christmas night, 1975. Bob, by then a staunch Labor man, was in high dudgeon about the dismissal of the Whitlam Government, and had been shattered by the electoral rout of his party. To cap it all, his young brother had just been made a minister by the dreaded Malcolm Fraser. It was a bit tense, but we made it.
Both of us were determined not to allow our political differences to come between us and, although we had plenty of intense arguments, particularly over the 1975 dismissal of Whitlam, this did not happen. By contrast Wal and Stan, my other brothers, who had always been Liberal followers, increased their active involvement and support, particularly after I entered parliament. Wal had been an enthusiastic branch office-bearer for years, and Stan would help out in a variety of ways, including with fund-raising.
In the 33 years that I was in parliament, including some of those difficult opposition years, Wal and Stan were loyal and consistent backers. They were the ultimate in true believers. And it was not just the loyalty that I valued. As a small businessman for much of his working life, Wal was a constant window into a world so important to the Liberal Party’s base of support. Stan was a senior partner for many years in one of Australia’s largest legal firms (Mallesons) and his professional activities gave him insights into the thinking of corporate Australia. In different ways they were both great sources of counsel and advice.
During the years that I was Prime Minister, Wal, Stan and their families joined Janette, me and our children in election-night celebrations (commiserations on one occasion), as well as other landmark events. Naturally Bob did not. He did, however, find personal ways of marking my success, consistent with his ongoing Labor convictions. When I was sworn in as Prime Minister on 11 March 1996, Bob came to the first part of the ceremony, when I took my oath of office alongside Tim Fischer as Deputy Prime Minister. Bob gave the rest a miss; that involved the swearing in of the remainder of the new Government. ‘You’ve got to draw the line somewhere,’ he joked. Likewise, he didn’t come to a large Liberal Party celebration of my 30 years in parliament in 2004, but instead asked me and my family to his home for a dinner to mark the occasion. Today we continue to discuss politics in an avid fashion, but with a sense of detachment.
My mother left me with a fount of old aphorisms and sayings, some of which endure today, others having slipped out of usage. ‘It’s a long road that has no turning’ is one that has largely disappeared. ‘Blood is thicker than water', though, remains a reasonably commonplace expression. It most certainly applied to the way my family handled political differences within.
5 ‘THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN’
The year 1970 was to be, for me, at a personal level, momentous. On 14 February I met Janette Parker, and was immediately smitten. She was a fantastic mix of brains and good looks. Fittingly, I suppose, the meeting had a political context. There was a by-election that day for the seat of Randwick, in the NSW Legislative Assembly. The previous incumbent, Lionel Bowen, had been elected as the federal Labor member for the seat of Kingsford Smith at the election late in 1969. The Labor candidate for Randwick was a very youthful Laurie Brereton, who became a senior minister both in state and federal Labor governments.
Janette had agreed to hand out how-to-vote tickets for the Liberal candidate, John McLaughlin, who, by coincidence, had been a law school colleague of mine a decade earlier. He had no chance of winning, and the Liberal campaign was very much a flag-flying exercise.
I had played cricket in the afternoon, but arrived in the electorate to help with scrutineering after the close of the polls at 8 pm. When the count had been completed, Liberal workers gathered at the Centennial Park home of a barrister, Malcolm Broun, to engage in the obligatory wake. It was there that Janette and I met.
From then on, we saw each other constantly. Janette was a high school teacher. She taught English and history at St Catherine’s Girls School, at Waverley, in Sydney. Before and after being at St Catherine’s Janette also taught, respectively, at Randwick Girls High School and at Killarney Heights High School. Though Janette never harboured a desire to enter the political arena herself, she was fascinated by the ongoing nature of the political contest. Over the years we have often agreed that politics is ‘the only game in town'.
Our views were similar on many issues, and she was a natural Liberal supporter, but her assessments were always self-generated. Like me, Janette had grown up in a household where both of her parents discussed politics. Her father, Charles Parker, had worked for the NSW railways, having joined the railway workshop in Newcastle as a young man prior to World War II. By the time of his retirement in 1973, he had risen to the position of Chief Civil Engineer. Although he held conservative views on most issues, because he had always been a public servant, he came at them often from a different perspective to mine.
Janette’s support and counsel throughout my career has been invaluable. To share a common interest in one’s vocation with one’s life’s partner is a real blessing. I know many politicians whose wives or husbands simply do not like politics and are constantly urging them, in one fashion or another, to leave the political arena. That never happened to me. From the start of our relationship Janette knew that my heart was set on a political career.
We became engaged in January 1971, and married on 4 April 1971 at St Peter’s Anglican Church, Watsons Bay, the local parish church attended by Janette and her mother. It is a beautiful church, perched on a cliff right beside the ocean, and close to the lighthouse at Watsons Bay. My best man was Alan Plumb, a fellow Young Liberal, who remains a close friend.
After we married, Janette and I rented a home unit in north Lane Cove, in the electorate of Bennelong. The Bennelong Liberal MP Sir John Cramer was 75 and would likely retire in the near future. I had firmly fixed my sights on winning preselection for that seat when Cramer went.
1970 ended poorly for both John Gorton and the Liberal Party. The Coalition fared very badly at a half-Senate election held in November. His detractors quickly blamed Gorton for the result. This added to the pressure on the Prime Minister.
The legendary political journalist Alan Reid had a colourful saying to describe a situation within a political party where an event, coming from nowhere, could bring about sudden change, usually of leadership. He would speak of there being ‘plenty of dry grass around', meaning that the leader’s position was inherently unstable, and all that was needed was for someone to throw a match to the dry grass. That was the position for John Gorton early in 1971. The person who threw the match was Malcolm Fraser.
Fraser had been one of John Gorton’s principal backers in 1968, when Gorton secured the leadership to succeed Holt and became PM. Yet it was Fraser quitting the Government, followed by a searing resignation speech, which triggered the events producing Gorton’s removal. Fraser had resigned because of what he regarded as Gorton’s disloyalty to him as Defence Minister, concerning press reports damaging to Fraser of army activities in Vietnam. He believed that Gorton could easily have stopped the story appearing, but had been content to let it go ahead — to Fraser’s embarrassment. In his speech Fraser went way beyond the immediate cause of his resignation, delivering a general broadside against Gorton’s style of government. This provoked the moving of a motion of confidence in Gorton in the party room which was sensationally tied — 33 each. Gorton used his casting vote to oust himself, thus surrendering the prime ministership.
The totally chaotic, and hopelessly compromised, way in which the Liberals changed from Gorton to McMahon was a symptom and not the cause of the party’s malaise after so long in office. Contested leadership changes should only occur where a majority clearly believe that an alternative to the incumbent can do a better job. In 1971, McMahon was not the preferred choice over Gorton. Rather, half the party room, for a whole variety of reasons, could no longer stomach Gorton. This was as much a reflection on their lack of foresight as it was on Gorton’s failings as a leader. They must have known that McMahon was the only alternative to Gorton.
The personal animosity which flowed from the manner of Gorton’s removal as prime minister was the most intense that I have ever seen in politics. Gorton never forgave Fraser for his perceived betrayal. In March 1975, when Malcolm Fraser was elected Leader of the Liberal Party, Gorton, who had voted for Snedden, immediately the result of the ballot was announced, walked out of the party room, slamming the door behind him, and never returned to the room again. In the 1975 election, sadly, the former Liberal Prime Minister contested a Senate seat from the ACT as an independent.
On two occasions I witnessed the refusal, some 30 years after the events of early 1971, of John Gorton to speak to Malcolm Fraser. One was at a Liberal Party dinner in the Great Hall of Parliament House to mark the 50th anniversary of the election of the Menzies Government, when Malcolm Fraser, John Gorton and I, with our wives, were left together as the last entrants to the dinner. Janette looked after the Gortons; I entertained Malcolm and Tamie. The other occasion was a formal dinner hosted by the Queen and Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace, where the six of us plus Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke and their wives, Margaret and Blanche respectively, were also present. This dinner was one of a series of events honouring the centenary of the passage through the British Parliament of the Australian Constitution Act. With typical Buckingham Palace efficiency, the seating arrangements made appropriate allowance for all sensitivities, and no difficulties arose. I have reflected since that Her Majesty would not have minded Gorton’s intransigence, because he was the only one of her former Australian prime ministers who would have voted for her in the republic referendum in October 1999!1
Thirty-one years after Gorton’s deposing as leader, Tom Hughes, his former Attorney General, delivered the eulogy at Gorton’s state memorial service in Sydney. It consisted, largely, of a blow-by-blow account of what he saw as Malcolm Fraser’s dishonourable role in Gorton’s downfall. In the eulogy Hughes traversed many of the points of criticism of Gorton contained in Fraser’s resignation speech, rebutting all of them. It was an amazing performance, and largely reflected Hughes’ loyalty towards Gorton.
Towards the end of 1971, Tom Hughes presented me with an unexpected opportunity to obtain preselection for a safe seat in federal parliament. Disillusioned with federal politics, he had decided to retire from parliament and return full-time to the Sydney bar. McMahon had sacked him as Attorney General. Few people saw this as anything other than a pay-off to Gorton’s opponents within the party. It was an unwise and spiteful act. Hughes had been an extremely good Attorney General; on merit he should have been left there. His seat of Berowra was very safe and attracted a huge field. I lived a fair distance from the area, however had lots of Liberal Party contacts there, including my eldest brother, Wal, who was the president of one of the local branches.
Several people encouraged me to stand, including some who wished me out of the way of their own ambitions in other seats they believed would become vacant through retirements within the next few years. The party was fast reaching a stage when there would be a batch of sitting members retiring in seats like Bennelong, North Sydney, Mackellar, Bradfield and Wentworth. These were safe Liberal seats, and a once-in-a-generation cornucopia of opportunity for those wanting to get into federal parliament.
The fact that I did not live in Berowra at the time was not a problem. I had not long married and it would be quite easy for Janette and me to move to the electorate. My pitch to the preselectors was very much that, although young, I had a lot of political experience on my side. Preselection campaigns then were not as ‘full on’ as they are now. Too much overt campaigning could be counter-productive. Making sure that, on the day, the speech delivered and answers to questions were the best possible meant everything — even more so than now.