The March Of Patriots

The Struggle For Modern Australia

Paul Kelly

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780522859416
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The March of Patriots is the inside story of how Paul Keating and John Howard changed Australia. It sees Keating and Howard as conviction politicians, tribal warriors and national interest patriots.
Divided by belief, temperament and party, they were united by generation, city and the challenge to make Australia into a successful nation for the globalised age.
This book is about the making of policy and the uses of power. It captures the authentic nature of Australian politics as distinct from the polemics advanced by both sides. Its focus is how Keating and Howard as Prime Ministers altered the nation's direction, redefined their parties and struggled over Australia's new economic, social, cultural and foreign policy agendas.
A sequel to Paul Kelly's bestselling The End of Certainty, it is based on more than 100 interviews with the two key players, politicians, advisers and public servants. It relies heavily on 'on the record' disclosures and new documents from the period. Its theme is that Keating and Howard, as rivals and unrecognised collaborators, are best seen together, and that their legacy is impressive, contradictory and incomplete.

PART I
THE KEATING MIRACLE:
BACK FROM THE DEAD

1
A NEW LEADERSHIP

There are two things in leadership: imagination and courage.

—Paul Keating, May 2008

It was the Lodge that disappointed him. Devoid of classical design, it was a comfortable provincial barn made for the bush capital. Hawke had wanted to remain in the Lodge until the New Year and he had agreed. But the house smelt of Hawke, his cigars and his complacency, the carpets stained from the Bob-and-Hazel television dinners. Paul Keating felt it belonged to a nation that had failed to unpack its past.

For his twenty-two years in parliament Keating had longed for the Lodge, yet his arrival came as a surprise. As late as November 1991, four weeks before he rolled Hawke, Keating was resigned to defeat. ‘I felt we were unlikely to get the numbers and I was thinking about my life beyond politics.’1 His numbers man, Graham Richardson, said it was virtually over. Loyalist supporter John Dawkins had seen Keating gearing for departure. Victory was almost a consolation surprise.

Keating won, but it was a scramble. On 18 January 1992 he was celebrating his forty-eighth birthday at the Lodge and was spinning new myths. The near-disastrous campaign against Hawke had become an act of precision. ‘We had to knock him senseless without leaving any bruises,’ Keating boasted.2

He was happy to have made it to the Lodge, yet he was also unhappy. When Don Watson was interviewed by Keating for the job of speechwriter, his impression of the new prime minister was sadness and melancholy.3 There was an aura of disappointment. His political adviser, Stephen Smith, never forgot the look on Keating’s face when he put the phone down having been told that Hawke would call a ballot, a ballot that would make him prime minister. ‘What’s the matter?’ Smith asked. Faltering at the precipice, Keating replied: ‘Mate, I’m carrying such a crushing burden. You know, all this should have happened three years ago.’4

In Keating’s mind he had arrived in the wrong summer; it should have been the summer of 1988 that brought him to power. In the intervening years no conversation with Keating was possible that did not include Hawke’s infamy at clinging to office. It produced in Keating a cultivated anger, depression and self-pity. He raged about Hawke, blaming him for every mishap in his life—for denying his career, costing his health, sapping his energy. Above all, he blamed Hawke for denying him the prime ministership in 1988, when Keating believed he had reached the height of his powers and readiness. And he would not forgive.

This is because Keating brought a secret fear with him to the Lodge, a fear that he could never purge—that his best years were behind him. This was the demon of his Prime Ministership and it never left.

His loyal adviser Mark Ryan sensed he was not as sharp. ‘As PM he didn’t have the same laser-like focus and discipline that he had as treasurer,’ Ryan said.5 Treasury Secretary Tony Cole said that Keating as PM never found the discipline, efficient delegation and organisational control that had stamped Hawke’s leadership. At their first meeting Keating told Watson he had ‘wanted the job badly three years ago’ but now he was tired.6

Keating’s spirit fluctuated wildly. He was obsessed with the ‘cycle’ of politics—that Hawke had left him with the recession and a tired team. The 1992 winter provoked Keating’s pessimism. His friend Bill Kelty, impatient at his black dog, said:

I remember I went to see him and Paul was sniffling away with his cold. He was down and complaining, saying that Hawke ‘didn’t give me enough time and stayed too long, I’ve got the wrong end of the cycle and I got this bastard Hewson’. So I said, ‘Well, give up mate. Just fuck off. If you don’t think you can win, then leave. But you can beat him. He’s an academic, people don’t like him. You can actually beat him. But stop whingeing and complaining. Don’t ever give me this speech again about Bob and the political cycle. I’m not fucking interested in the political cycle. Just remember this bloke wants a GST in the middle of a recession.’7

In office, he was disorganised and unpunctual. Cabinet ministers who knew him well were surprised. Sometimes he would arrive in cabinet not having read the cabinet submissions. Dismayed at Keating’s style, his former treasurer, Dawkins, lamented: ‘The essential discipline of the Hawke era was gone.’8 And Dawkins was the politician who had demanded of Hawke that he resign in Keating’s favour. Another supporter, John Button, said that Keating’s ‘best playing days were over, he kicked some brilliant goals and missed some easy ones—the team had declined in quality’.9

His biographer and adviser, John Edwards, wrote: ‘Hawke’s days had been filled with an orderly procession of appointments. Keating refused. He would not normally see delegations, ambassadors, public servants, backbenchers, members of the outer ministry, reporters, trade union officials or business people unless there was a particular and pressing piece of business to justify the appointment.’10

In his private domain Keating was devoid of any triumphalism. He knew his legacy was the fag end of an era. While liking most of his ministers, he didn’t want ministers to bother him with tiresome detail. ‘Paul didn’t give his ministers enough attention,’ Ryan said. ‘He hated being constrained by a timetable and diary, and preferred to follow his instinct and mood.’11

The 24-hour media cycle was transforming politics—against Keating. He thrived on ideas and strategy but detested the view of modern politics coming from the ALP national secretariat. He distrusted Bob Hogg as national secretary and then loathed Gary Gray, his successor. Technology was privileging a new politics based on instant response and repeated media appearances geared to talkback radio, photo opportunities, extensive domestic travel and a relentless daily control of the news cycle. John Howard and then Kevin Rudd would master this process, but Keating loathed it. Often he just refused to participate. He mocked Hawke for being in ‘shopping centres tripping over TV crews’ cords’.12 But Hawke was being a professional and feeding the media beast.

When Keating did engage, he was peerless, but this brand of 24-hour public relations politics fitted neither his temperament nor his physical capability. Before he became leader he promised to ‘throw the switch to vaudeville’ but Dawkins lamented years later that ‘unfortunately he never did it’.13

There was a ripple of excitement in the caucus but morale was weak. Keating’s staff were gloomy about the next election. Australia’s economy was bouncing along the recessionary trough, with the jobless rate heading above 10 per cent. The public was despondent. Keating was neither loved by the party nor liked by the people. Once hailed as the world’s greatest treasurer, he contemplated a landscape of economic desolation and personal political ruin. Within the Press Gallery there was a loud whisper: Keating was doomed. The smart money said he got the job too late.

Yet Keating, though wounded, was lethal still. A born political warrior, he was unmatched for vision, brains and persuasion. Keating moved effortlessly between the political violence of the street and the high ground of public policy. He had a capacity for political demolition rarely equalled since Federation and an ability to mobilise public support behind new policy such that Treasury officials of the 1980s were left agog as they saw him market a succession of economic reforms that recast much of the nation’s political culture. Then he had persuaded the ALP caucus to execute the party’s four-times-election-winning prime minister in favour of one of its most unpopular treasurers who had presided over a recession. Future historians would puzzle over how this could have possibly happened. But those who watched at close quarters knew: it was merely the latest demonstration of his remarkable persuasive powers, powers long familiar to the inhabitants of Parliament House and whose exposure to them from one year to the next never diminished the impact of the manipulative genius that Keating was able to summon up and deploy.

Keating injected the government with political electricity. Social Security Minister Neal Blewett found his tone in cabinet was usually quiet, unlike Hawke’s hectoring. Occasionally he delivered a tour d’horizon. Blewett described one report to caucus as ‘full of substance, frank, low-key, self-deprecatory, a far cry from the orotund, rhetorical mush provided by Hawke in the latter stages’. Above all, at a time of desperation, Keating had a sense of direction and purpose. Yet, summoned to meet Keating at 8.30 p.m. on 28 January 1992, Blewett was taken aback because he ‘looked exhausted—has not the physical stamina of Hawke’.14

The heart of Keating’s administration lay not in the cabinet but in his office. Within the inner sanctum Keating was respected; sometimes he was loved. It was a family affair. He was among friends who were chosen. He flattered them by saying it was the best PM’s office in history. With his staff Keating was at his best—unpretentious, open, funny, creative and infuriating. ‘Paul talked about being another staff member,’ his office chief, Don Russell, would say. The fierce loyalty and affection ‘for Paul’ knew few bounds.15

Yet it was a protective arrangement: Keating used his office and the Lodge as a refuge. Ryan conceded that ‘the office management was pretty hopeless, we were too isolated’.16 Tony Cole felt Keating struggled with the bigger job, saying ‘he was not a good delegator and he lost balance and perspective’.17 Mike Keating (no relation), the head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, lamented that he ‘did seem to drop the ball in engaging with key constituencies’, revealed by the ‘relatively few invitations he accepted’ and ‘even worse his failure to reply in a timely way’.18

The head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Michael Costello, admired Keating’s mind but saw the chink in his temperament. ‘Paul himself is the first to admit that the other side of genius can be a certain craziness,’ Costello said. ‘You’d give Paul some advice. He’d consider it, turn it around, apply his highly original mind and send it back as a better proposal.’19

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet was filled with quality people but Keating rarely read its material. Edwards judged ‘much less than a tenth’ of its paperwork was read by Keating. Nor did Keating encourage his department to ‘dictate’ across the public service.20 The message was manifest: Keating’s energy and focus were geared to selective goals.

The most selective was winning the 1993 election. The validity of Keating’s claim to the Lodge hinged on this victory. Keating deposed Hawke not on policy grounds; his sole claim was to revitalise the government. For some Hawke supporters this was fantastic nonsense. A bitter Hawke was sure Labor had signed its death warrant. With his legitimacy, reputation and prospect for a worthwhile prime ministership at stake, Keating would focus his entire political capital on a 1993 victory. Nothing would be allowed to impede this goal. As a professional, Keating gave himself a chance.

Keating carried into office one great conviction: the need to find a new political position for Labor. Long convinced that Hawke had been finished, Keating was equally convinced that his government must carry a different brand. Mike Keating said, ‘Paul was absolutely determined that he would make a difference as prime minister. He was critical of Hawke. He felt Hawke had spread himself too thin, [that] he covered everything but made a difference to nothing.’21

The key to Keating’s prime ministership was ideas. ‘He was at his best when he had a rich menu of ideas,’ Don Russell says. ‘This was the role of the office and made it so special.’ The staff felt Keating’s ambition was for the nation, not for himself. His foreign policy adviser, Allen Gyngell, said: ‘Paul was never the barrister in politics like a Peter Costello. He never saw the job as just mastering a brief. Paul was driven by ideas, and ideas are dangerous—you were never sure where he would...

Table of contents

• THE MARCH OF PATRIOTS
• PART I THE KEATING MIRACLE: BACK FROM THE DEAD
• PART II THE BIG PICTURE
• PART III THE SHOWDOWN: KEATING VERSUS HOWARD
• PART IV THE HOWARD SYSTEM
• PART V THE CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY
• PART VI JOHN HOWARD DISCOVERS THE WORLD
• PART VII HOWARD UNLEASHED