by Anne Summers
We were running early for our event so Paul took us to the shop at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, which was near the venue where he was due to speak.
‘Hi, Paul,’ said the women behind the counter.
They were totally unfazed by the sight of the Prime Minister and his entourage filling-up their tiny space; it turned out he was a frequent visitor. While the rest of us pretended to browse, Paul went straight to the section containing books on architecture.
‘Have you read this one?’ he asked Mark Ryan, showing him a slim volume. ‘I’ll buy it for you.’
But when he put his hand in his pocket, there was no money so Ryan ended up paying for his gift. It was not the first time this had happened, Ryan told me as we trooped out, farewells from the shop women ringing in our ears.
‘I’ve got quite a collection of art books Paul thinks I should read,’ he said.
I remembered how in May 1980 I’d run into Keating, then an Opposition frontbencher, just outside the new High Court building which had been officially opened by the Queen the night before.
‘What a shocking waste of public money that building is,’ I’d said to him, echoing the cynicism that was popular among journalists and some Labor politicians.
‘You can never invest too much in the public,’ he’d said with an intensity I found surprising.
It was unexpected to have my complacent disparagement challenged. Exciting even. Who else in cosy, self-reinforcing Canberra ever did that? I realised then that there was a lot more to Paul Keating than politics and self-promotion. He proceeded to treat me to a passionate defence of public buildings, arguing that such investment was integral to civic pride. ‘That place up there,’ he said gesturing up the hill towards where construction of the new Parliament House had just begun, ‘will ensure that local manufactures and crafts are maintained. Every element of that building will be a tribute to the Australian people, including the skills of the carpenters and stonemasons and all the craftsmen who will make that place.’
Back then I did not know about Keating’s appreciation of music, architecture and the decorative arts, or that he was in the process of becoming a world-renowned collector of furniture and other objects from 1795 to 1799, the Directoire period, the final five years of the French Revolution that was succeeded by Napoleon’s military rule. For those few years an executive of five men (the Directory) and a bi-cameral legislature governed France. Keating has been known to talk in almost reverential terms about this period, not just as the apogee of classicism, which he considers was reached in 1800, but as a time when many of the political values and freedoms we enjoy today were both established and confirmed. All I knew back in 1980 was that this young Labor politician from the western suburbs of Sydney knew enough to tell me, when he heard I was going to Paris for a holiday, not to worry too much about the Louvre, but to spend every moment I could at the Jeu de Paume.
There were many sides to Paul Keating, I learned during the eleven months I spent working for him. I thought I’d known him well enough, that I’d understood this man to be a unique combination of hard and soft, as well-versed in the finer points of Georgian architecture as in the robust requirements of politics and government. But I came to appreciate that these various strands were not just seemingly conflicting elements that he somehow managed to reconcile; each of them was essential to who he was. He is a complicated and arresting man, capable of moving in the one conversation from the complexities of the design of his beloved superannuation scheme to the unique elements of a pair of American girandoles and then returning to the subject in hand which, if it was me sitting patiently through this exposition, might be how we were going to design a new childcare scheme.
One afternoon as we advisers watched Question Time on the television set outside my office, we heard the Prime Minister refer in one of his answers to ‘the laminar flow’. We looked at each other. Nope. No one had a clue. We knew better than to ask him when he returned from the chamber because we knew how draining Question Time was. He always needed some time to recover because, as he told the singer Tom Jones over dinner in Canberra one night in April 1993, it left him exhausted. I was lucky enough to be at that small dinner, and in fact had helped arrange it. The promoter of Jones’ 1993 Australian tour, John Hanson, was a childhood friend of mine; he’d got front row tickets at the Royal Theatre in Canberra for Paul and Annita—and me—and then set up the dinner at Belluci’s Trattoria in the Canberra suburb of Dickson. Annita and I were very much on the sidelines as the two great performers, who took to each other instantly, compared notes on what it was like to put on a show.4 Paul admired Jones’s voice but, he told him, he thought it was wasted on popular music.
‘You should sing opera,’ Keating urged the Welshman.
Jones laughed it off, but after this tremendous compliment from the Prime Minister, the two men could not stop talking.
After Question Time that day it took us some time, in those pre-Google days, to learn that the laminar flow is a scientific term that refers to the flow of viscous fluid, in which the various elements—or laminates—remain separate and unique as they move. Keating used the term again when talking with Laurie Oakes on the Sunday television program in March 1994. He referred to ‘that laminar flow from various parts of the community into employment, one of those laminations has to be from the long term unemployed’.5 It was a somewhat arcane form of political communication, as not many people would be familiar with the term, but when I thought about it, I realised that it was the perfect language with which to describe Paul Keating himself. He exemplified the laminar flow. Many laminates, or layers, made up his character, his skills and his panoply of expertise and interests. There was no one else like him in politics, and the only person I could think of who had come even close in complexity, erudition and range was Gough Whitlam. The difference between Whitlam and Keating was that Keating was self-taught. Whitlam could converse in Latin but Keating had something else. In delivering the eulogy for an old friend, Keating said: ‘With his own eyes and his own taste, and without any specific education in the arts, he developed an acute sense of shape and form both of decoration and of architecture …’6 He was referring to the antiques dealer Bill Bradshaw, but he could just as easily have been talking about himself.
There was also, of course, the Paul Keating who was the familiar tough political operator, who took no prisoners and who often used crude language to bludgeon opponents into shocked submission. This was another essential layer of the whole man. I’d witnessed that side of him plenty of times, but no more spectacularly than in late October 1992, when he summonsed the heads of the television networks to Canberra to demand they ‘do something’ about screening violent movies. A week earlier, his youngest daughter Alexandra, who was aged seven, had a nightmare after watching on television a movie based on a Stephen King horror story. Keating was outraged that such fare was on early enough in the evening for young children to be exposed—and he said so, very publicly. Some of us in the office felt that parents ought to be supervising their children’s television-watching and did not think it was an issue for government, so we were totally unprepared for what followed. There were hundreds of phone calls, letters, and faxes from parents, overwhelmingly from women, and all of them with the same message: Please do something about violence on television. A large number of women wrote: ‘I’ve always hated you, but if you get rid of violence from our television, I will vote for you.’ That certainly got our attention. It was quickly decided that the Prime Minister should invite the TV network chiefs to an emergency meeting, to sort out what to do. Because it was judged to be a ‘women’s issue’, I was put in charge—which is how, a few days later, I came to be sitting with the four network chiefs and the head of their industry association, while we waited for the Prime Minister to join us. Unlike today’s confected confrontations between Prime Ministers and industry bosses, there were no cameras present and no press release afterwards.
Keating strode in and wit
hout handshakes or any other niceties, pointed out to the five men—in extremely crude and forceful terms—that the current licensing arrangements provided extraordinarily profitable protection from competition, and suggested they see it in their interest to do something about this issue of overwhelming public concern. The meeting lasted less than half-an-hour, and ended with the television stations proposing a new category of program rating, the MA, which would denote that a film contained violence and which could only be screened after 9 p.m. It was one of the fastest policy developments I had ever witnessed. Although it might have seemed liked a small change, it did Keating an enormous amount of good because he was seen to have responded to parents’ worries—and to have done something about it. The MA rating and 9 p.m. screening time for violent programs is still in force today.
‘She came back to Australia, to join my staff, and then set about feminising me, which she knew was basically a hopeless task,’ Keating said in 1994, a year after I’d left his office.7 In fact, he was not ‘hopeless’ at all. Mostly, he was willing to listen to what I put to him and to grapple with issues that had not previously been on his radar. But it was always easier when he could make a connection from someone or something he already knew. I organised a small roundtable in his office with Susan Ryan, Labor’s first female cabinet minister and a former Minister assisting the Prime Minister on the Status of Women; Jennie George who was President of the ACTU; Mary Ann O’Loughlin, and me to talk about women and the economy. It was a good and easy meeting. Keating got on well with all of us. It was a background session, designed to introduce him to current issues in the area rather than ask for specific policy changes, and of course it was closely related to a subject he knew backwards: the economy. I was frustrated that Treasury and the other economic policy analysts never thought to include women’s labour-market participation, and the policy tools such as childcare needed to support it, in their analyses or forecasts. It was as if they were oblivious to this major force that helped shape outcomes. Not only that, as I’d found at OSW, they often actively resisted even wanting to consider the impact of millions of women becoming economically active. Keating was not like that. He understood the points we were making and, as he’d tell me many years later, having three daughters in a world where women’s fortunes were changing rapidly made him think about the opportunities he wanted them to enjoy—and what might be necessary for governments to do to facilitate that.
Several of the girls Keating had been to school with were now single mothers, struggling after their husbands had walked-out on them. He responded with both anger and sympathy, and understood the government had a role in supporting them. Similarly with carers. He met regularly with his mother, Mim, and a group of her elderly friends. Several of them had ill or disabled husbands to care for, and he could see at first-hand how debilitating and exhausting it was to have to care full-time for another adult human being.
‘Let’s give the old darlings something,’ he’d said during preparation of the 1992/93 budget, one that all current polling suggested was going to be his last. There had been no departmental submission seeking extra money.
But domestic violence was utterly beyond his personal experience. He knew no one who had been a victim, or at least no one who had talked about it. I had to find a way for him to understand what it was like for women who had been subjected to such violence. I also needed to convey to him, and to his office, how big and how terrifying an issue this was for so many Australian women. Not all of them were convinced, despite the results of the research. In his biography of Keating, John Edwards recounts a staff meeting in August where we all argued about the best way for Paul to improve his sagging popularity. Don Watson, Mark Ryan and I—the so-called ‘bleeding hearts’ of the office—all argued that he needed to talk about subjects other than the economy. I reminded them of the research about violence. But Edwards, Don Russell and the other economists—who Watson had labelled ‘the pointy heads’—would have none of it.
‘As an economic adviser, I disagreed,’ Edwards wrote. ‘I said we had not talked nearly enough about the economy, that we had a good story to tell, and that Keating should go after Hewson day after day on economic issues.’8
I was exasperated that the economic advisers could not seem to understand that a Prime Minister had to talk about a whole lot of different things. Keating was no longer Treasurer. He could not just talk about the economy. I argued whenever I saw an opportunity that Keating should include references to women in his speeches, and I became quite creative at devising plausible excuses for him to do this. But I often found myself nagging, because without my interventions, it never happened. It was not something the speechwriters did without prompting. I got worried I would wear out my welcome, but I was also annoyed that it was so hard just to do what I thought was the job they had brought me in to do.
At the same time, I was worried about what to propose in response to the research. Childcare and health were relatively straightforward, although probably expensive, but Mary Ann and I were less certain how to achieve something immediate, tangible, credible and effective on violence. We decided to make it an agenda item for the Premiers’ Conference in October. The premiers had never discussed violence against women, so this was at least a gesture of our intention to take it seriously. There was, I discovered, a Violence Against Women Strategy document that had been tortuously developed by a group of Commonwealth and state bureaucrats. OSW wanted the Prime Minister to launch it. Getting him to launch a dry bureaucratic ‘strategy’ seemed inadequate, insulting almost, given the passion with which the women in the focus groups had talked about violence. We had to do something big. This would do for now but it was not enough.
I thought the best way to introduce Keating to the issue would be for him to meet some ordinary women who could tell him their stories about suffering domestic abuse. That would be more effective than any amount of briefing I could give him. I decided we would arrange for him to visit a women’s refuge. Something very low-key, no media, no publicity of any kind. The best place to do it, I figured, would be in his electorate.
I rang the area coordinating group (few individual refuges were in the phone book, for security reasons) and explained what I hoped to do. The woman who took my call was suspicious; she did not want to get caught up in any publicity stunt. I did my best to reassure her; just three or four people, I said, and no pressure at all on the residents of the refuge if they did not want to meet the Prime Minister. She said she’d have to take it to her committee.
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘When does it next meet?’
‘In three months’ time.’
I explained we could not wait that long, but thanks anyway.
Next I tried a Catholic refuge, run by St Vincent de Paul in Sydney’s Arncliffe. Again, I thought Paul might feel more comfortable if he could identify with the religion of the people who ran the place. But when I visited I found that not a single resident spoke English. There were Vietnamese women, Turkish women, Chinese women, dozens of them with their children, most of them recently arrived in the country. I was stunned by the appalling realisation that for so many women, their first experience of Australia was brutality at the hands of their husbands. These men were no doubt angry, bitter and frustrated at how they were being treated by their new country, but it was their wives and kids who were bearing the brunt. But this was not the right place for what I had in mind. There were just too many other issues involved and, besides, the women would need interpreters. This was not the way for Keating to hear women telling their own stories.
In the end, I found a place in suburban Perth. It was a modest dwelling and the residents were all young working-class women; Keating would be able to talk easily with them, I thought. I explained to the very accommodating woman who ran the place that they need not do anything special, that we would be there for an hour at the most. The federal police would come the day before to check the place out—that was a routine security requirement—but on the
day it would just be Paul and me, with possibly one of the advisers and a federal policeman, who would stay in the car with the driver.
‘Offer him a cup of tea, if you like,’ I said. ‘But don’t go to any trouble.’
‘There was just one thing,’ the refuge manager said. ‘We’ve got an application for funding in. Do you think you can help with that?’
I promised her I’d do what I could.
It turned out Keating was going to be in Perth in just a few weeks. We’d go to the refuge on 8 December 1992. The day before, I went there with federal police officer Peter Holder, a friendly relaxed guy with a wide smiling face, who immediately put the women at their ease.
‘You see,’ I said to them as we left, ‘there’s nothing to be nervous about.’
As it turned out, I was the one who should have been anxious.
As we drove into the street the next day I had trouble recognising the house. Then I saw a huddle of people and a couple of cameras.
‘I’m really sorry,’ I said to Paul. ‘This was supposed to be a totally private visit.’
Instead, we had a reception committee. The mayor was there, and the local state member of Parliament and Stephen Smith, who had been on Paul’s staff when I’d first arrived but was now a full-time candidate for the federal seat of Perth. (He would win the seat and go on to be Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence Minister during the Rudd and Gillard governments.) And, being politicians, these people could not go anywhere without the media.