The new Labor government in Canberra felt some ambivalence over the pull of an American puppet and cosying up to a despot. It announced a review of foreign aid, keen to demonstrate judicious use of Australia’s largesse. However, like probably all Australians back then, Hayden was a supporter of foreign aid. ‘There are major benefits for Australia in investing in a poorer country in the region … Turning it on or off like a tap, no I’m not in that business at all,’ he told us.
This was sensitive terrain for the government and for journalists. The Philippines, despite its dictatorship, was an ally.
Finally our Four Corners team was granted a visa — conditional on the approved itinerary and the company of a military minder. The ABC film crew — the wily, decorated and hilarious producer Allan Hall, who became a lifelong friend, cameraman Chris Doig and young sound recordist Scott Hartford-Davis — and I sensed the delicacy of the assignment. Did Jonathan counsel us? I don’t remember that specifically but I do know we carried the stringent Four Corners ethics — be fair, tough, balanced and always question the official line — almost by osmosis. I think we knew, though Allan and I had not directly discussed it, that we would somehow have to ditch the government minder if we were to have any chance of testing the truth of this massive aid project. To record the reality on the ground of where the roads were being built and who was using them, we would have to become, to turn today’s foreign correspondents’ patois on its head, ‘unembedded’.
In the Philippines there were hot days of glowing testimony and buoyant government-sponsored interviews and pictures, then the weather changed. As tropical sheets of rain whipped and lashed the island, we eluded the military meant to monitor us and were driven deep into the jungle by political activists wearing the priest’s collar. This was my first encounter with Liberation theology, a potent form of political activism practised particularly by Jesuits in the Third World; Catholic priests and nuns worked in the dirt-poor hamlets while their bishops mollified Marcos from gilt-edged pulpits in Manila.
The vehicles bogged on the crude tracks but before frustration or the soldiers could engulf us, silent villagers working with these men of the cloth rescued the convoy. One woman offered me tea. Her weather-beaten face creased into deep tired lines as she smiled; strong black tea and a gentle touch on the arm, a gesture of encouragement to a stranger. A stranger she and her family were trusting to understand. Simple grace. These brave people were farmers and rebels taking huge personal risks, like the priests, in non-violent protest — a lopsided struggle against a murderous regime.
What the tea lady knew of international diplomacy and Manila politics I cannot say. But as I sat across from her and other determined locals in a Jesuit safe house, through many discussions by candlelight with the priests and leaders, I learned she could not feed her family, though the land they worked was fertile. No rebel uniforms, guns or swagger, instead a powerful intellectual and moral consistency. To survive they needed some of the land and profits enjoyed by their feudal landlords — fruits of their labour, almost biblical — and the Jesuits saw the justice in their cause.
They all took risks to hide us, show us the actual destination of the disputed roads and trusted us to tell the real story on national television in Australia. What they helped us uncover was that while our embassy officials and Filipino functionaries lauded PADAP, Marcos’s men — particularly the egregious local governor of Mindanao — were conniving in a dirty political harvest. Yes, the roads were shiny and storm-proof, but they were empty of farmers’ produce moving merrily to market; indeed many didn’t even go towards a commercial centre. Instead they snaked deep into rebel territory carrying armed platoons to harass civilians.
In fact peasants were being forced off their land in a brutal strategy known as ‘hamleting’ — a straight steal from Vietnam. To supposedly cut off the rebels’ supply lines and effectively surrender plots for the oligarchs to plant with lucrative export crops, whole families were herded into confined hamlets far from their source of food. It was a grim picture.
Yet the governor could grin and chirrup for our camera, ‘The people are happy about everything. Me and all my other candidates win the elections hands down.’
Not surprisingly, he told us, ‘We want the Australians to stay forever.’
‘And what of the “hamleting”, the killing?’ I asked him.
‘The army are not here to kill, they are here to help.’
Governor Corrilles is probably long gone but the civil war in this place festers on 30 years later.
The evidence of Australian aid unwittingly abetting Marcos was compelling. And I was never the sort of journalist who sat on the fence when the facts, honestly researched and tested, held a truth that needed clear telling, regardless of the risks. And the risks, freely confronted, were magnified for the men and women who ferried us from safe house to safe house, staying ahead of embarrassed minders sent out to find us.
In a war zone you never really know where danger lurks, and we were careful. I certainly never felt the white-knuckle fear of witnessing the colour drain from the face of our interpreter as fast-talking militia held us at gunpoint during an assignment covering the civil war in El Salvador. Death squads were executing Western journalists there to intimidate the media just as the Indonesians had murdered the Balibo Five and another Australian journalist in a calculated attempt to hide the facts of their 1975 invasion of East Timor. Of course these deaths cast a shadow over our work, but though ‘going underground’ was risky and losing contact with minders and the Australian Embassy worried some at home, I never felt in the Philippines the deep anxiety I would later feel on occasions in politics. In the Philippines I was confident of the people closest to me during those weeks in the jungle. Confident that their networks were secure, that Jesuits aren’t foolhardy and that they wanted our footage to prove the abuse of Australian aid on Mindanao. Indeed they would organise a trusted courier to spirit the critical canisters out of the country.
Back in Australia Bill Hayden was grumpy. We had been out of contact with the embassy and Australia for weeks and it was diplomatically awkward to lose an ABC journalist and crew in the middle of an ally’s jungle. Perhaps he wondered if Four Corners was intent on embarrassing the new government. Remember, this was the same year that ‘The Big League’ went to air, the Chris Masters exposé that had caused Hayden’s Labor colleague, Premier Neville Wran, to step down until he was exonerated by an investigation that led the chief magistrate and others in New South Wales to be jailed. Or maybe Hayden, the ex-Queensland copper, was as dubious of Marcos and his corrupt cronies as we were.
Dirty, hungry and exhilarated, we returned to Manila. We had a ripper story ‘in the can’, with the most telling footage, we hoped, already on its clandestine way to Sydney. Australian Embassy officials turned up the next morning at our hotel, anxious to know where we had been and why we were out of contact for so long. There was mutual suspicion. Had they got some grief from Canberra? The armed forces of the Philippines, they implied, were negligent in losing us. There was a lot of double talk. Government flunkies from both nations were particularly curious about the film of our travels. The Filipino officials who also arrived were direct in asking to see it. Under no specific obligation but not wishing to prolong our stay on these lovely islands, we agreed to show them our footage — some of it, at least. Crammed into a hotel meeting room solid with the fug of cigarette smoke, Alan Hall rolled the travelogue version: shiny military men hosting shiny road construction, optimistic departmental plans of what we would now call ‘infrastructure fostering development’, local town mayors on Mindanao Island buoyant with supportive script. It was all resolutely ‘on message’. None of this ever went to air!
The showing tickled the men from Manila. Soothed by picture postcards of terraced plantations, beaming workers and exquisite sunsets, no one asked about the jungle footage of the Australian-funded roads. The Australian diplomats crammed into that room appeared sceptical — Four Corners
doesn’t have a reputation for cant — but fortunately they remained diplomatic enough to encourage our hosts to stamp our exit visas.
I remember that first drink on the Qantas plane swooping away from the archipelago towards home, a toast to the Jesuits and a job well done. Relief. We were meticulous about protecting the identity of those brave souls who harboured us so no film was taken of them. No images remain but I’ll never forget their faces.
A good story grips you until you get it on air. We landed and practically headed straight into the editing suite, Jonathan cracking the whip. Around the time of the final edit, perhaps after the first ‘promo’ for the show, the Foreign Minister fired a shot across our bow during a bellicose media doorstop.
I would grow to respect Bill Hayden as I travelled with him overseas; or rather, tagged along with the media pack into foreign parts, on stories I can’t always remember. But my feelings of dread and determination still spark across the years to touch a particular memory into life, the memory of his press conference on our Philippines story. There was nothing in Hayden’s public life, before or since, that suggested a vindictive man, yet at this Canberra press conference he turned verbal bovver-boy, or at least that’s how I recall his words, relayed sharply down the line from colleagues on the spot: there would be ‘strategic consequences … if Four Corners gets even one fact wrong’.
We made sure we didn’t. The threat of litigation is like a cattle prod to journalists. So we started to sift through what was hard-sourced fact, what was gleaned from conversations on and off the record, what had been confirmed in interviews and by the camera’s keen eye. Seven months in the making, this hour-long documentary held attributable facts that had been tested over time by researcher, journalist and producer. I worked through the night confirming their attribution. What had grown on us as fact had to be proved again, a defence against an irritated government. It wasn’t needed. The indefatigable Alan Hall drove home the edit, with Jonathan like a hot but totally supportive breath on our necks.
The report was awarded the Gold Walkley; Australia stripped aid money from Filipino army roads and promptly transferred it to clearer humanitarian projects.
Deeper satisfaction came later. In February 1986 the world watched a ‘velvet’ revolution in the Philippines. I was at the ABC Melbourne news desk by then, so found myself presenting nightly reports from our correspondent in Manila of a sustained non-violent protest that eventually tipped Marcos and Imelda from their thrones. I saw again calm on the faces of silent citizens in serried rows before government tanks. Not so many farmers this time but the priests were there, standing with a well-heeled congregation of the middle classes and students in school uniform. Nuns in crisp white habits prayed the Catholic rosary.
When the doomed president finally fled in a military helicopter — he with bags stuffed with gold, his wife with bags stuffed with shoes — they left a presidential palace with corridors of rooms devoted to storing their indulgences. Another dictator plundering a hungry nation.
At its best, journalism seeks the truth. It is often an inconvenient truth for governments balancing multiple objectives, as I now keenly appreciate after seven years as a state government minister. Certainly Four Corners exposing the foreign aid duplicity of Marcos made for an uncomfortable realignment in Canberra. Yet I don’t remember any political dissembling. Rather Hayden, his department and the government responded with a clear policy shift and the issue was over. It was good, smart politics and a useful public-benefit symbiosis of politics and journalism.
Looking at our doco nearly three decades later I am comfortable with its balance, though it is almost tropically languid in its pace! There is solid evidence of Jonathan’s quest for, and belief in, hard facts and revealing pictures. What strikes me though, in this soggy era of spin and obfuscation, is the directness of the interviewees. There are no weasel words in these interviews; no PR flaks steer an Aussie road contractor away from speaking of aid dollars sticking to the fingers of local officials, or a former Philippines senator from bluntly declaring the cost of corruption to his country, or even the chuffed local governor happily admitting himself a ‘freeloader’ on the Australian gift.
But until I clicked onto the Four Corners archives recently, I had forgotten the benefit to our report in the timing of a tragedy. Six days before our documentary was aired in the familiar Four Corners time slot, Filipino opposition leader Benigno Aquino was assassinated on the tarmac in Manila. Returning home from exile, the admired senator and Marcos political prisoner had spoken to reporters aboard the plane with him about the risks. ‘I suppose there’s a physical danger because you know assassination’s part of public service.’
Minutes later he was dead on the runway, surrounded by soldiers and a supposed ‘lone gunman’.
These prescient words from a martyred man formed the platform of moral outrage against Marcos and his cronies that cushioned our case for review of aid used by his government.
Good journalism, the journalism I have long admired on Four Corners, often captures a current, a wave of indignation or inquiry that connects with community instincts. Our report definitely rose on the revulsion of the killing of a patriot.
Sometimes journalism operates at a juncture, a small turning point that is read later as a fulcrum. Aquino’s assassination and Marcos’s gormless lies about who actually did it were the beginning of the end for the despot. It certainly was the end of the Marcos gravy train of Australian aid. It took three years of persistent people power to force him out, led by the widow Cory Aquino, who was elected president in 1986. Their son took the same office in 2010.
Four Corners over its 50 years has hammered out Australian journalism’s template for identifying social trends, picking the turning points, throwing small pebbles into large ponds and often being surprised at the magnitude of the ripples — from feminism to chronic Aboriginal disadvantage to the dark arts of politics. I put my toe in the water also that year with a look at the emerging überscience of in-vitro fertilisation. Understanding how the law lagged doggedly behind the crusading scientists and cries of the childless, we called the report ‘In Vitro; In Limbo’ — another of Jonathan’s pithy titles.
Journalism’s annual awards gala is held each year in a different capital city. In 1983 we had to cross the continent for it and I missed the plane. (There was an unfortunate symmetry in this; I had also missed the plane to the Philippines, which set me back a day behind the team who jetted off, incredulous, without me.) Getting another flight to Perth had me only a few hours behind Allan and other colleagues’ celebrations. I didn’t mind missing the speeches. I knew nothing of the Gold until it was announced. That task, as it happened, fell to the soon-to-be Australian envoy to the Vatican and not much later guest of Her Majesty’s prison in Perth. But these were still the glory days of WA Inc and the political zenith of Premier Brian Burke.
I should have stayed longer at Four Corners but another fantastic opening came along, to the accompaniment of the siren song of the new and untried. The great ABC innovator Ian Carroll had dreamed up a sort of magic carpet role of flying current affairs reporter covering Asia, a peripatetic addendum to the bureaux sited in Asia, which at that time were quarantined to news. Paul Keating had not yet arrived as PM, with his Asia focus, but ASEAN was new and shiny, Japan was challenging as our top trading partner and China was stirring.
Another opportunity of a lifetime.
7
THE BIG DIG
by Chris Masters
I have long felt I did not so much find the subject of corruption as it found me. There was more than a trace of naivety accompanying my arrival at Four Corners in the early 1980s. Not long down from the country I was, remarkably, recruited by a new English Executive Producer, Jonathan Holmes, who wanted a more local sound and feel to the program.
So I came through a side door, from the Rural department. This probably meant I carried less of the ‘can’t do’ baggage that comes with the territory in big city new
srooms. Something else I carried, not so much my own as the product of forebears, was a sense of duty.
It may be false memory but I can still conjure an image of myself at the feet of my parents in the early 1960s as they watched this brandnew current affairs program, Four Corners. There is no doubt they would have been avid viewers of the ‘landmark Box Ridge program’ broadcast in September 1961; the family home at Lismore being not far away, Mum being a journalist, and both of them connected to the plight of fringe-dwelling Aboriginals.
It was impossible to have anything but respect for the work of Michael Charlton, Bob Raymond, John Penlington, Mike Willesee, Allan Hogan, Caroline Jones and others. There was and is an understood responsibility to honour the record and seize an unusual opportunity in journalism to go the extra distance.
That partly sets the scene for my first report, ‘The Big League’, produced with Peter Manning and Jonathan Holmes in 1983. A mild enough inquiry into dirty dealings around the sporting field led to an explosive investigation of judicial corruption. The subsequent Street Royal Commission returned a mixed result, finding against rugby league boss Kevin Humphreys and former Chief Stipendiary Magistrate Murray Farquhar, and exonerating NSW Premier Neville Wran.
What the investigation revealed for me was the tawdry façade of governance and rule of law in modern, civilised Australia. This was a time when it was easy for people in the know, journalists included, to have speeding fines torn up; for prosecution briefs to go missing; for evidence to be routinely invented; for criminals who are ‘right for it’ put away despite having been nowhere near the scene of the crime; for Drug Squads to sells drugs; Armed Holdup Squads to organise armed holdups, and worse.
There was also a sense the public did not care too much as long as there was a good meal at the end of the day and the wheels of industry continued to turn. Many appreciated the flexibility of rules that could be ducked by insiders. Around the concept of public order had grown a fringe industry dedicated to avoiding compliance, with which many citizens gratefully engaged.
The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners Page 10