by John Howard
Earlwood Primary School reflected the locality which it serviced. About half of my final-year class had fathers who were tradesmen, and in most other cases they worked in banks, insurance companies or utilities, with just two or three in small business.
In my last year at Earlwood, I had a wonderful teacher, Jack Doherty. He constantly fed my interest in current affairs and conducted plenty of additional question periods on the news of the time. A very fine ABC Radio program called The World We Live In, narrated by H.D. Black (later Sir Hermann and Chancellor of Sydney University) and which extensively covered world affairs, was a regular part of our class work. This was in 1951, and the Korean War was still raging. One of the hotly debated issues then was the sacking of General Douglas MacArthur by President Harry Truman. This was a big call by Truman. MacArthur was an iconic World War II figure who had established his headquarters in Brisbane after being pushed out of the Philippines by the Japanese. From there he led the Allied fightback, which ended in victory. When the Korean War started in June 1950 with communist North Korea invading South Korea, MacArthur was the Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific.
He clashed with Truman over the conduct of the Korean War, wanting to carry the fight against the Chinese, who had come in on the side of the North, over the North Korean border into China itself. Truman opposed this and when their differences could not be resolved, Truman, as Commander-in-Chief, sacked him. I followed these developments avidly.
At the end of primary school, when I was 12, I made my first public speech, at the school presentation day at the local Mayfair Theatre in Earlwood. The headmaster was retiring, and I gave a short speech of thanks on behalf of the teachers and pupils, and presented him with a watch. I was nervous, but it seemed to go well. My father and mother were both there and appeared very proud. Dad was so pleased he gave me my first fountain pen to mark the occasion. I needed one for high school.
My interest in politics mounted during my years at Canterbury Boys’ High School, where my active participation in school debates and as a member of the school’s debating team in the Combined High Schools’ (CHS) competition laid the groundwork for such speaking skills as I was able to bring with me into public life years later. I learned then the great value of speaking ‘off the cuff’, because a significant part of the debating curriculum required me to speak in an impromptu fashion on subjects of which I had no prior notice. It was marvellous training. It was invaluable during my early years in parliament when, at a moment’s notice, I was able to respond to the whip’s call and jump into a debate.
The immense merit of formal debating is the discipline of having to articulate the reasons for holding a particular opinion. Years later, in public life, I learned that it was not enough simply to assert a strongly held view. Logically arranged arguments, explaining why that view was held, were crucial. My friend and long-time advisor Grahame Morris would often say to me, when discussing an announcement, ‘Boss, what’s the why?’ In other words, he wanted to hear my explanation.
Perhaps my love of debating, or the chronological memory gifted to me by my mother, or both of them, meant that I never felt comfortable reading a prepared speech. In senior office, it was essential, on certain occasions, to do so. Nonetheless, less than 10 per cent of the speeches I gave as Prime Minister were read from a prepared text. I feel that I always give my best speeches when, having thought about what I will say, I then eyeball the audience, and speak directly to the people in it. Never in my life have I used an autocue or teleprompter. I hold them in contempt as rhetorical crutches.
Canterbury High wasn’t all debating though. I played both cricket and rugby in the school’s second XI and second XV respectively, in the CHS competition. History and English were far and away the subjects I enjoyed and excelled in most. History fascinated me. One of my real educational regrets was that I never did an arts or economics degree as a precursor to law. Amongst other benefits, it would have allowed me to further indulge my passion for history.
My Leaving Certificate exams, in 1956, were sat against the backdrop of the brutal Soviet invasion of Hungary and the controversial Anglo-French Suez operation. On the happier side there was the great excitement of the Olympic Games coming to Melbourne. It was also a time when Robert Menzies appeared to have established a stranglehold on Australian politics, courtesy of the bitter Labor split of 1955 and the ultimate emergence of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), initially called the Labor Party (Anti-Communist), which in 1961 would save Menzies from otherwise certain defeat.
Both of my parents were fierce believers in private enterprise. This was barely surprising, given that my father had worked incredibly long hours for more than 20 years in building up his garage business in Dulwich Hill, an inner suburb of Sydney. He was a qualified motor mechanic, and the garage he ran provided the full range: not only did he serve petrol, but he also serviced and repaired cars. In my lifetime, Dad always opened the garage on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Only on Christmas Day, Good Friday and Anzac Day was the garage closed all day. Years earlier it had been even tougher, with Dad not getting home until about 10 o’clock at night, after he had closed.
If you ran a small business, there was nothing particularly strange about this. Both then and now, running a small business of the sole trader or sole owner type entails a total commitment of time and energy. There are no guaranteed market shares, and no penalty rates or overtime for effort beyond normal working hours. The qualitative difference between owning and operating a genuinely small business and working, even at a senior executive level, in a large corporation is immense and rarely understood by those not involved in it.
My father was always very tired when he came home from the garage, particularly on Saturdays, when he would often spend most of the afternoon resting. The business was discussed over the dinner table. My brothers had helped out, serving petrol and doing other tasks at the garage. I couldn’t wait until I was old enough so I could have a go as well. I started when I was about 14. I loved it. It was a real buzz serving petrol, checking oil levels, pumping up tyres and trying to sell a few ‘sundries’, such as new spark plugs. Years later Paul Keating would sneeringly refer to the ‘bowser boy from Canterbury’ (sic). To me it was a badge of honour.
I enjoyed meeting the customers, who, my father reminded me, were always right. I had quite an argument with one customer, who insisted on smoking a cigarette as he stood beside me while I pumped petrol into the tank of his car. In the end I pulled the nozzle of the pump out of the tank. Then he put out his cigarette. I hope he stayed as a customer.
Like all service stations of that time, my father’s sold all different brands of petrol. Unlike many others, though, Dad owned the freehold of his garage. From the early 1950s onwards, the major oil companies began an aggressive ‘one brand’ service station expansion policy of either building new service stations or doing deals, of various kinds, with existing operators, so that only one brand of fuel was sold at a site. This intensified competition as the number of sites expanded rapidly, with new operators often being obliged to open for longer hours. It was hard for someone in my father’s position to match this. The inevitable business pressure affected Dad’s health. Although he didn’t want to go one-brand, it became a commercial necessity as there was a small rebate per gallon paid to owners who sold only one brand. He signed up with Mobilgas in 1954.
The one-brand switch badly affected Dad’s business, but it had to be accepted as a tough but unavoidable competitive development which could occur in any market. What could not, however, be viewed in the same light was an arbitrary edict delivered by the local Marrickville Council later in the year.
The council told him to remove his petrol bowsers from the kerbside in front of his service station, as it wanted traffic lights installed on the street corner where the garage stood. This was tantamount to telling Dad to close down his business. Neither the council nor the NSW Government authority, at whose instigation the council would have acted, offered
any compensation for the potential destruction of my father’s business. It dealt a real body blow to my father and, coming on top of the market-related setbacks he had suffered, left Dad deeply dispirited and worsened his health.
As a 15-year-old boy, I thought that my father had been treated outrageously by an insensitive, high-handed council, against which he had no redress. This edict hung over my father and was still there when he died at the end of 1955. Exchanges went on for some time after that, and it was not until the early ’60s that traffic lights were finally installed on the corner.
This incident reinforced the feeling in my family that governments, generally speaking, weren’t all that sympathetic to small business; that if you had one, you were very much on your own. Big companies could look after themselves and unions were strong, but the little bloke got squeezed. Such attitudes weren’t entirely logical, and in government I always emphasised the common interests of businesses, large and small. Yet, when on-balance judgements were called for, I confess to usually siding with the small operator, even if some violation of free-market principles might be involved; my support for newsagents and pharmacies come readily to mind.
As I’ve said, politics and current affairs were frequently discussed, not only around the dinner table, but also in direct conversation between my mother and father. There was no particular starting point for the discussion of politics at home. I can remember it always being there. My eldest brothers usually joined the discussions quite freely.
Occasionally, my father would listen to important parliamentary broadcasts on the ABC. We all followed the events leading up to the double dissolution of federal parliament obtained by Bob Menzies in 1951. It was the first time that a double dissolution had been sought since World War I, and — particularly given the political antecedents of the Governor-General, Sir William McKell, who had been the Labor Premier of New South Wales — there was much conjecture as to whether he would agree with the advice offered by Menzies supporting the request for a double dissolution.
In the end, McKell did the right thing and granted the dissolution. For doing his sworn duty he incurred the lifelong hostility of some Labor people, who simply believed that he should have done the bidding of his old political party rather than discharge his constitutional responsibility. This was a precursor to a much more savage application of the Labor belief that the party always owned the man, irrespective of the circumstances, some 25 years later.
Although my parents were united in their commitment to the Liberal Party, I suspect that they voted differently on one important occasion, and that was the referendum, held on 22 September 1951, to ban the Communist Party of Australia.
At that time the Cold War was intense, the communists had taken over in China only two years before, and Soviet communism was seen as a real threat to the peace of the world. On top of this, communist officials held many senior positions in Australian trade unions. The Communist Party in Australia was regarded by many as a subversive organisation because it sought the overthrow of the economic and social order under which Australians then lived. Menzies had secured passage of a law which declared the Communist Party an illegal organisation.
The validity of that law was challenged, and the High Court of Australia declared the law unconstitutional, as being beyond the power of the federal parliament to enact. Menzies’ response had been to propose a referendum asking the people to agree to change the Constitution of the Commonwealth to give the federal parliament the power to pass the law which had previously been ruled invalid. The referendum campaign provoked intense debate and division. Menzies and his followers argued that the free world was engaged in a life-and-death struggle against communism, and Australia should not tolerate what he believed amounted to a fifth column in our country. Against that, many argued that the proposal violated free speech, and that it was never desirable to drive political movements underground.
This debate spilled over into the kitchen of our household. I recall quite clearly my mother’s strong reservations about the additional power being sought by Menzies. One night she said, ‘Menzies would be a bit of a dictator, if he had his way.’ My father would have none of this. This was the one particularly short and sharp exchange on the subject, and after that I heard nothing more. Knowing my mother’s determination once she had made up her mind, I am sure that she ended up voting against the proposal. If such loyal Liberals as my mother had reservations, then it is not surprising that the referendum went down.
This incident said a lot about my parents. They were both politically and socially conservative, but that was the result of their separate convictions. In no way did my mother automatically embrace the views of my father. Although in so many ways Mum fulfilled the traditional homemaker role typical of the times, she was a woman who held fiercely to her own independent opinions. Like my father, she had a well-developed interest in politics, and for years after Dad’s death she and I would have quite lengthy discussions about political events in Australia in the 1920s and ’30s.
I became totally absorbed in the Petrov Affair. Vladimir Petrov had been the third secretary in the Soviet Embassy in Canberra (but in reality a low-level spy) when suddenly, in April 1954, he defected and sought political asylum in Australia, which was granted in return for Petrov providing details of Soviet spying in Australia. It was a dramatic event, complete with KGB agents arriving to take Mrs Petrov back to Moscow. There were wild scenes at Sydney Airport as, seemingly against her will, she was taken on board an aircraft, Soviet-bound. On instructions from the Government, police intervened when the plane stopped for refuelling at Darwin, and having satisfied themselves that she did not wish to return to Moscow, relieved her KGB escort. The agents returned empty-handed to an uncertain welcome in Russia, and Mrs Petrov rejoined her husband. They spent the rest of their lives in Australia.
Menzies swiftly established a Royal Commission to examine the extent of Soviet espionage in Australia. This happened on the eve of the 1954 federal election. When the ALP lost that election quite narrowly, its leader, Dr Bert Evatt, convinced himself that the whole Petrov Affair had been a giant conspiracy, orchestrated by Bob Menzies to damage the ALP by raising the communist issue on the eve of the election. As a barrister, Evatt had appeared before the commission, representing people who had previously worked for him. He attacked the Royal Commissioners who, ultimately, withdrew his right to appear.
Dad and I both listened in astonishment as Evatt told parliament that he had written to the Soviet Foreign Minister, Molotov, asking whether or not Petrov had been a Russian spy. Molotov had written back denying that Petrov had spied for the Soviet Union. Evatt actually believed Molotov. This extraordinary incident did immense damage to Evatt’s credibility, and was a clear sign of the paranoia that he had developed as a result of losing the 1954 election. It was a forewarning to many in his party of the erratic behaviour of his which was to come, and which contributed so much to the momentous split in the Labor Party in 1955.
My parents held conservative foreign policy views. They were staunchly anti-communist and saw Britain and America, in that order, as our real friends. Whenever we talked history, and this would have been in the 1950s, when memories of World War II were still relatively fresh, I was left in no doubt that my parents felt that the appeasement policies of the ’30s, espoused by Neville Chamberlain and supported, to varying degrees, by most Australian leaders, including Robert Menzies and John Curtin, had been wrong.
Mum and Dad, especially the latter, were ardent admirers of Winston Churchill. I was born on 26 July 1939, at a time when Churchill was still out of favour, regarded as too belligerent and scorned by many in the British Establishment as temperamentally unsuited for leading the nation. Few thought that just 10 months later the House of Commons would, in desperation, turn to him. My parents gave me Winston as a second Christian name because my father had strongly supported Churchill’s opposition to appeasement and shared his forebodings about its consequences. All my life, I have
taken quiet pride in the fact that my own father was on the side of history in his attitudes to the 1930s, and I have a second name and a birth date to prove it.
I have often wondered how it was that I developed such an intense interest in politics so early, and why it was that it became such a lifelong passion. A big reason was that politics was talked about at home from as long as I can remember. Being the youngest, I was exposed to politics from an early age, with my parents being willing to explain issues and never hustling me away because I was too young. My parents often disagreed with actions of governments, but were not cynical about them and always encouraged in their children respect for society’s institutions. I was brought up to believe that governments could do good things, if only they were comprised of the right people.
These were all influences which meant that I saw politics as good public service, as a way in which change could be achieved. That was important, but not as crucial as my seeing politics as an arena in which ideas and values could be debated, contested and adopted. That was the foundation of my lifelong view that politics is, more than anything else, a battle of ideas. Not only did I enthuse about the contest of ideas, I revelled in the experience of the contest itself. Debating, arguing, testing ideas about how society could be improved energised me.
The influence of parents on their children’s political views is a fascinating study. I embraced most of my parents’ political attitudes, particularly their support for private enterprise and especially of the small-business variety. Mum and Dad were often quite tough on people who worked for the Government. They thought that people in the private sector did all the work. In politics, I encountered numerous public servants who worked very hard indeed.
Dad had been a heavy smoker all his life, which no doubt aggravated his lungs, already damaged by the gassing he had suffered close to 40 years earlier during his war service. With all that is now known of the harmful consequences of smoking, we tend to shake our heads at the foolishness of a generation which so extensively embraced the habit, often, as in my father’s case, worsening a war-caused condition.