Under Belsham and his successor, Sue Spencer, Four Corners has pursued ruthless art dealers; examined the reform agenda of Noel Pearson and the progress of John Howard’s Northern Territory intervention; reported yet more deaths in custody, the sad fate of bilingual schooling and the continuing breakdown of black communities. ‘The Road to Nowhere’ (2006) led Jackson to Impanpa, a settlement in complete collapse, only a few kilometres from Alice Springs. Michael Charlton was sure Box Ridge could be fixed. But this cemetery for the living left Liz Jackson with no such confidence. ‘Tonight,’ she said, ‘Four Corners travels to one small remote community — not notorious, not in the news — to witness the results of the failure of Indigenous policy over the last 30 years. It’s time to ask the hard question — do communities like this have a future?’
The old sense of obligation to take television cameras into black Australia has not left Four Corners. The focus has shifted. Old hopes have died. New problems have arisen. But the underlying ambition of the show hasn’t really changed in 50 years. Four Corners can boast bringing clarity to a subject that’s difficult for television and appallingly hard for Australia. So much has changed but the obstacles to change remain formidable. Peter Manning identifies the deepest of them all as ‘the persistent, horrible reality in Australian life which is called racism’.
11
COMFORTABLE AND RELAXED: ENCOUNTERS WITH JOHN HOWARD, 1994–2007
by Liz Jackson
JACKSON: Do you like television?
HOWARD: Love it.
JACKSON: What do you watch? What’s your favourite show?
HOWARD: Ah, well, I watch the news and current affairs [laughs]. Four Corners, I always watch Four Corners.
[Four Corners interview, 1996]
I had never met John Howard before the first time I interviewed him back in 1994. He’d been a Member of Parliament for 20 years, I’d been at Four Corners about eight weeks. It was for the first Four Corners program I’d ever made, and the first of many with Howard over the next 16 years.
When I moved into my new ABC office, pinned above my desk was a scrap of paper on which someone had written, ‘No-one ever died from being asked a question.’ I took the anonymous message to heart as I interviewed John Howard over those years, following his ascension to power, his time as Prime Minister, through to his final downfall, watching his capacity to duck, weave and deflect questions grow as his power and authority increased.
The program was also my introduction to the potential for Four Corners to be a player in the political events of the country. The morning before the show went to air, the National Party leader, Tim Fischer, told his colleagues: ‘I note the Four Corners program tonight. It will be very interesting to see what happens in the aftermath of that Four Corners program.’
The program was ‘Bishop’s Move’, where the Bishop was Bronwyn and the move was against the then Liberal leader, Dr John Hewson. My assignment was to investigate the depth of leadership tensions in the Liberal Party after Dr Hewson lost the so-called ‘unloseable election’ in 1993, handing then Prime Minister Paul Keating what he called ‘the sweetest victory of all’. It was a loss that galled political professionals within the Liberal Party, who felt that Keating didn’t win on ideology but because Hewson was a political novice. ‘We should have beaten a government that had been there for ten years in the middle of a recession, with a million people out of work,’ John Howard told me, and pointedly added, ‘We have to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’
From the moment of Hewson’s loss, Howard was after his job, and a year later he had not given up. But there was a new contender, Senator Bronwyn Bishop. She had surprised many colleagues by emerging in the polls as a serious leadership rival, a populist conservative who was doing an efficient job of destabilising Hewson. But would the party choose her as a replacement? Or John Howard, Peter Costello, Alexander Downer or even Peter Reith?
It was not a good time for Howard. Five years earlier he’d been dumped as Liberal leader, famously conceding that his return to the leadership would be ‘like Lazarus with a triple bypass’. He was well aware that a return to him would be regarded by many of his colleagues and much of the media as a return to the past.
Before our interview with Howard began, while the crew set up the camera, he took me and producer Mick O’Donnell aside. His tone was urgent. The message he wanted to impress on us was that he was again a serious leadership contender, that we would be wrong to write him off as yesterday’s man. He would, he assured us, ride out the nay-sayers. It was a combination of dogged self-belief and vulnerability that I hadn’t expected, born of an awareness that how Four Corners presented him would matter.
We did the interview in his office in Sydney, where his minders had left a high-backed upholstered swivel chair for Howard to sit in. Swivel chairs do not work well on camera so we swapped it for an ordinary office chair, the same kind and level that I would be sitting in. When he saw what we’d done, Howard would have none of it. It was the high-backed chair or nothing he insisted, and made us change it. The appearance of authority was crucial, and he didn’t trust us.
We sat down to do the interview. I asked two questions about Bronwyn Bishop; his answers were, ‘Next question’ and ‘I’m not going to talk about Bronwyn, I’m not.’ In those days Four Corners used ten-minute rolls of film, so every ten minutes we needed to stop the interview and reload the camera. I moved on to the more important questions, about Howard’s own leadership ambitions. I had spoken with Bill Taylor, a Queensland MP and an old Howard loyalist. He had told me that Hewson had to be dumped, but that he had switched his support to Bronwyn Bishop. Howard, he said, had ‘missed the boat’ as he would be seen as ‘a recycled leader’. Taylor added that as a friend he had told Howard this, and agreed to say so on Four Corners.
I needed to put this to John Howard, and it was a delicate question. This was, after all, an unexpected arrow from a friend into his Achilles heel.
‘John,’ I said, with the camera rolling, ‘I have spoken to some of your parliamentary colleagues who voted for you in the last leadership ballot, and they are saying that they have said to you, you must publicly bow out. You must accept that you have missed the boat, that you will never be the leader of the Liberal Party.’
Before Howard had a chance to respond the cameraman informed us we were out of film. He needed to reload the camera. It took around two minutes; it seemed like ten. We sat in our set positions, facing each other, in more or less silence. He was stony-faced. Small talk seemed inappropriate somehow; he didn’t offer any so neither did I. The camera was reloaded, and I started again.
‘John,’ I repeated, as if nothing had happened, ‘I have spoken to some of your parliamentary colleagues …’ and continued to the bitter end ‘… you will never be the leader of the Liberal Party.’
‘Well,’ he responded, having had two minutes to think about it, ‘I haven’t had any such conversations so they must have mistaken me for someone else.’ I pushed on.
JACKSON: And why don’t you?
HOWARD: Why don’t I what?
JACKSON: Why don’t you say publicly, ‘I will not lead the Liberal Party. I do not —’
HOWARD: Look, I have said to you before and I will say it again that the question of the future leadership of the Party is a matter for the Party room. I am not really required, nor am I going to say anything more on the subject.
The following morning the Four Corners program was front-page news. The gist of the headlines was that the public disloyalty to Dr Hewson showed his leadership position was weakening: ‘Liberals Hit Hewson Again’ (Sydney Morning Herald); ‘Outspoken Libs Turn Up Heat on Hewson’ (Australian). A statement from Paul Keating’s office described it as Hewson’s ‘slow death by television’.
Within four months Dr Hewson was dumped. The Liberals initially replaced him with Alexander Downer, but within a year John Howard had won the Liberal leadership. One year later he would be the Prime Minister of Australia.
So much for being yesterday’s man.
JACKSON: Are you the most conservative leader the Liberal Party has ever had?
HOWARD: Probably, you’d have an enormous debate on that.
(‘Average Australian Bloke’, Four Corners, 19 February 1996)
I met John Howard again at the Adelaide Oval in January 1996. Australia was playing the third Test against Sri Lanka. The leader of the Opposition was in a good mood. The first Newspoll of the year had just put the Coalition ahead of Labor by 10 percentage points, and Prime Minister Paul Keating had lost his lead over Howard as to who would make the better PM. Things had picked up since I’d last seen him two years earlier; John Howard was smiling.
We sat together side by side and did our best to engage in convivial chatter about the cricket for the camera. We’d been given about six minutes to film with Howard before he headed off. Four Corners was making profiles of both Howard and Paul Keating as a federal election was due to be called in the coming days, and I was on the Howard story. The sun was shining in Adelaide, and it was batsman David Boon’s last Test for Australia. My cricket knowledge was shaky but I chanced it with, ‘Is that Boon out there?’
‘Yes,’ was Howard’s reply.
‘Have you got a particular affection for him?’ I continued.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘He’s just been one of the bulwarks and the mainstay. When we went through that difficult period in the mid ’80s, he and Border between them held the show together.’
It was a good response for us, enabling Four Corners to use the cricket pictures to talk about Howard’s own difficult time in the ’80s. Like Boon he had been dropped by his team, but had persisted and returned. Howard was happy with politics and cricket analogies, and gave his view on their shared winning strategies:
HOWARD: Persistence over a long period of time, that sort of thing.
JACKSON: Yes. The sort of thing that you might see yourself as having a strength in, John?
HOWARD: That’s for others to judge, but I think sticking at it and being dogged is part of the game.
But John Howard’s long and familiar history was a problem as he approached the upcoming election. It was not so much the image of a recycled leader anymore; he’d dealt with that. It was that in his political history there were things he had said and positions he’d taken that he would prefer to put some distance behind him. Back in 1987, in a Four Corners program, Howard had stated, ‘Anyone who knows me knows that I am the most conservative leader the Liberal Party has ever had.’ His self-description as an ultra-conservative made political sense in 1987; back then Howard was threatened with an electorally lethal split among the conservatives, caused by the Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Peterson’s short-lived campaign for Canberra, and Howard needed to hold the conservative vote. But it was the wrong image for 1996. It was clear from early in the ’96 campaign that Howard was repositioning himself on the safe middle ground as an unthreatening alternative to Keating, whose big-picture policies such as engagement with Asia, reconciliation and support for a republic were regarded as having little resonance outside the urban elites. Howard, by contrast, pitched himself as being in touch with mainstream Australia; so much so that when I asked him to describe himself he offered the following: ‘I’d like to be seen as an average Australian bloke. I can’t think of a nobler description of anybody than to be called an average Australian bloke.’
Not too radical and not too conservative either, just ‘an average Australian bloke’. It crossed my mind that saying he could think of nothing ‘nobler’ was laying it on a bit thick, but maybe not for his purpose. As the campaign progressed you couldn’t help but notice a more middle-ground man in language and policy than the John Howard of old. He had been known over the years as proposing radical industrial relations reform, as a staunch monarchist, a defender of the traditional family and an opponent of Medicare, which he had branded ‘a total disaster’. What had happened to this John Howard, and when? These were questions I needed to put to Howard, and I thought carefully about how to frame them, so that his repositioning was clear.
JACKSON: I’d like to run through a few of the issues —
HOWARD: Sure.
JACKSON: — that will be big in this debate; Medicare being the first. When did you change your mind about Medicare?
HOWARD: What part of it?
JACKSON: Well, for instance, that it was a total disaster. When did you change your view that Medicare was a total disaster?
HOWARD: I have accepted, for some years now, that the Australian people like Medicare and they want to keep it.
JACKSON: When did you change your view that bulk billing was a rort?
HOWARD: Once again, the Australian people made a decision that they wanted to keep bulk billing, and they therefore — look, on all of these sorts of issues, anybody who has the same view year in and year out, irrespective of the expression of public opinion, is stupid.
JACKSON: So you changed your view on bulk billing and Medicare generally because of public opinion?
HOWARD: Public opinion played a very major part on both of those issues, yes.
JACKSON: What do you think of the view that ‘politicians should stand for what is right, not what is popular’?
HOWARD: I think on most occasions that is absolutely correct, but it must also be tempered by the recognition that if people express a definitive view, you have to accept that their right to make the decision is superior to yours.
JACKSON: So those are your words in 1986, that a politician should stand for what is right, not what is popular —
HOWARD: I remember them.
JACKSON: But you’ve now changed that view to accommodate —
HOWARD: I remember them very, very clearly. There’s really no inconsistency.
Over a period of three weeks we followed John Howard around the country, filming him on the campaign trail. In and out of cars, on and off planes. He and I never really struck up an easy rapport. He went about his job, trying to ignore us; we went about ours, trying to get our camera and sound gear to pick up every move he made, every word he uttered. He was polite but abrupt, and naturally wary of me and Janine Cohen, the producer of the story. He didn’t know us the way he knew the Canberra press gallery, and there was for him a lot at stake in coming on Four Corners. This election was his best and last chance to become Prime Minister of Australia.
At one point, in Victoria, John Howard and I were sharing a car and the camera wasn’t running. To my surprise, out of the blue, he said as if to reassure me, ‘Liz, we are not going to cut the ABC’s funding,’ and then repeated it: ‘We are not going to cut your funding.’ I don’t remember what I replied, just that I was thrown by this. After all, the Liberal Party’s election platform promised there would be no cuts to the ABC. Why was he saying this to me at this particular time? If I’d been older and wiser, I’d have asked him that — then and there. But we just continued to the next destination, a factory where he would be filmed for the evening news talking to workers and management about industrial relations. I used the same interview approach as before:
JACKSON: I’d like to talk about industrial relations. Do you accept that you’ve changed your view on industrial relations?
HOWARD: Where?
JACKSON: Certainly your policy position has changed. Would you accept your policy position has changed?
HOWARD: No, I don’t. You tell me where I’ve changed.
JACKSON: Do you not accept that the policy —
HOWARD: No, no. You are putting to me that I’ve changed, and I say no. Now, I’m asking you to tell me where I have changed.
JACKSON: In 1993, you advocated a $3 youth wage. Have you changed your view about that?
HOWARD: I have on that.
The issue of immigration was the most sensitive to raise. In 1988 John Howard had floated the idea that Australia should slow down its rate of Asian immigration, ‘if it is [seen] in the eyes of some in the community that it’s too great’. In 1995 h
e apologised for his comment, the same year Pauline Hanson was pre-selected by the Liberal Party as a candidate for the ’96 election. She had, at the time of our interview with Howard, just been disendorsed after writing of Aboriginal people that ‘Government showers them with money, facilities and opportunities that only these people can obtain, no matter how minute the Indigenous blood that is flowing through their veins.’
But another new Coalition candidate was also causing Howard embarrassment. Bob Burgess was a member of the National Party and had just proclaimed that the sources of Australia’s immigration input should be skewed more towards European migrants. What did Howard think of this view? He was edgy.
HOWARD: We have a non-discriminatory immigration policy, full stop, and he won’t be saying any more on that subject during the campaign.
JACKSON: Does it make it difficult, though, for you to discipline somebody for saying that when you, yourself, raised the same issue in terms of the sources of our immigration?
HOWARD: Well, he’s a National Party member.
JACKSON: He’s part of the Coalition.
HOWARD: There’s a Liberal candidate in that seat, so really it’s a matter — I mean, you talk about discipline; I’ve not even spoken to him. I’ve never met the man.
JACKSON: You don’t feel, ‘Here’s an echo from my past come back to revisit me?’
HOWARD: No.
It was hard to feel I was getting closer to the man. Even with personal questions, his answers appeared political, in conformity with the new pitch: ‘I am less conservative than you might think.’ I tried asking if he had any favourite music. He nominated ‘many of the so-called protest songs — Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, I liked them immensely’. I was surprised; he’d never shared the views of the protest generation. When I remarked on this he was defensive. ‘You shouldn’t be so politically correct that somebody who may not necessarily share the views of the vocalist can’t enjoy the music.’
The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners Page 17