Lazarus Rising

by John Howard

  Janette’s support and counsel throughout my career has been invaluable. To share a common interest in one’s vocation with one’s life’s partner is a real blessing. I know many politicians whose wives or husbands simply do not like politics and are constantly urging them, in one fashion or another, to leave the political arena. That never happened to me. From the start of our relationship Janette knew that my heart was set on a political career.

  We became engaged in January 1971, and married on 4 April 1971 at St Peter’s Anglican Church, Watsons Bay, the local parish church attended by Janette and her mother. It is a beautiful church, perched on a cliff right beside the ocean, and close to the lighthouse at Watsons Bay. My best man was Alan Plumb, a fellow Young Liberal, who remains a close friend.

  After we married, Janette and I rented a home unit in north Lane Cove, in the electorate of Bennelong. The Bennelong Liberal MP Sir John Cramer was 75 and would likely retire in the near future. I had firmly fixed my sights on winning preselection for that seat when Cramer went.

  1970 ended poorly for both John Gorton and the Liberal Party. The Coalition fared very badly at a half-Senate election held in November. His detractors quickly blamed Gorton for the result. This added to the pressure on the Prime Minister.

  The legendary political journalist Alan Reid had a colourful saying to describe a situation within a political party where an event, coming from nowhere, could bring about sudden change, usually of leadership. He would speak of there being ‘plenty of dry grass around’, meaning that the leader’s position was inherently unstable, and all that was needed was for someone to throw a match to the dry grass. That was the position for John Gorton early in 1971. The person who threw the match was Malcolm Fraser.

  Fraser had been one of John Gorton’s principal backers in 1968, when Gorton secured the leadership to succeed Holt and became PM. Yet it was Fraser quitting the Government, followed by a searing resignation speech, which triggered the events producing Gorton’s removal. Fraser had resigned because of what he regarded as Gorton’s disloyalty to him as Defence Minister, concerning press reports damaging to Fraser of army activities in Vietnam. He believed that Gorton could easily have stopped the story appearing, but had been content to let it go ahead — to Fraser’s embarrassment. In his speech Fraser went way beyond the immediate cause of his resignation, delivering a general broadside against Gorton’s style of government. This provoked the moving of a motion of confidence in Gorton in the party room which was sensationally tied — 33 each. Gorton used his casting vote to oust himself, thus surrendering the prime ministership.

  The totally chaotic, and hopelessly compromised, way in which the Liberals changed from Gorton to McMahon was a symptom and not the cause of the party’s malaise after so long in office. Contested leadership changes should only occur where a majority clearly believe that an alternative to the incumbent can do a better job. In 1971, McMahon was not the preferred choice over Gorton. Rather, half the party room, for a whole variety of reasons, could no longer stomach Gorton. This was as much a reflection on their lack of foresight as it was on Gorton’s failings as a leader. They must have known that McMahon was the only alternative to Gorton.

  The personal animosity which flowed from the manner of Gorton’s removal as prime minister was the most intense that I have ever seen in politics. Gorton never forgave Fraser for his perceived betrayal. In March 1975, when Malcolm Fraser was elected Leader of the Liberal Party, Gorton, who had voted for Snedden, immediately the result of the ballot was announced, walked out of the party room, slamming the door behind him, and never returned to the room again. In the 1975 election, sadly, the former Liberal Prime Minister contested a Senate seat from the ACT as an independent.

  On two occasions I witnessed the refusal, some 30 years after the events of early 1971, of John Gorton to speak to Malcolm Fraser. One was at a Liberal Party dinner in the Great Hall of Parliament House to mark the 50th anniversary of the election of the Menzies Government, when Malcolm Fraser, John Gorton and I, with our wives, were left together as the last entrants to the dinner. Janette looked after the Gortons; I entertained Malcolm and Tamie. The other occasion was a formal dinner hosted by the Queen and Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace, where the six of us plus Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke and their wives, Margaret and Blanche respectively, were also present. This dinner was one of a series of events honouring the centenary of the passage through the British Parliament of the Australian Constitution Act. With typical Buckingham Palace efficiency, the seating arrangements made appropriate allowance for all sensitivities, and no difficulties arose. I have reflected since that Her Majesty would not have minded Gorton’s intransigence, because he was the only one of her former Australian prime ministers who would have voted for her in the republic referendum in November 1999!1

  Thirty-one years after Gorton’s deposing as leader, Tom Hughes, his former Attorney General, delivered the eulogy at Gorton’s state memorial service in Sydney. It consisted, largely, of a blow-by-blow account of what he saw as Malcolm Fraser’s dishonourable role in Gorton’s downfall. In the eulogy Hughes traversed many of the points of criticism of Gorton contained in Fraser’s resignation speech, rebutting all of them. It was an amazing performance, and largely reflected Hughes’ loyalty towards Gorton.

  Towards the end of 1971, Tom Hughes presented me with an unexpected opportunity to obtain preselection for a safe seat in federal parliament. Disillusioned with federal politics, he had decided to retire from parliament and return full-time to the Sydney bar. McMahon had sacked him as Attorney General. Few people saw this as anything other than a pay-off to Gorton’s opponents within the party. It was an unwise and spiteful act. Hughes had been an extremely good Attorney General; on merit he should have been left there. His seat of Berowra was very safe and attracted a huge field. I lived a fair distance from the area, however had lots of Liberal Party contacts there, including my eldest brother, Wal, who was the president of one of the local branches.

  Several people encouraged me to stand, including some who wished me out of the way of their own ambitions in other seats they believed would become vacant through retirements within the next few years. The party was fast reaching a stage when there would be a batch of sitting members retiring in seats like Bennelong, North Sydney, Mackellar, Bradfield and Wentworth. These were safe Liberal seats, and a once-in-a-generation cornucopia of opportunity for those wanting to get into federal parliament.

  The fact that I did not live in Berowra at the time was not a problem. I had not long married and it would be quite easy for Janette and me to move to the electorate. My pitch to the preselectors was very much that, although young, I had a lot of political experience on my side. Preselection campaigns then were not as ‘full on’ as they are now. Too much overt campaigning could be counter-productive. Making sure that, on the day, the speech delivered and answers to questions were the best possible meant everything — even more so than now.

  I didn’t win the preselection; it went to a local resident, Dr Harry Edwards, who was a professor of economics at Macquarie University. It became apparent prior to the ballot that many local branch members wanted somebody strongly identified with the electorate. I did, however, poll much better than anyone expected. I finished third behind Edwards and the local state member, Jim Cameron.

  This surprised a lot of people, particularly given the high profile of other aspirants, such as the Commonwealth Solicitor General, Bob Ellicott QC, and Dr Peter Baume, a highly respected consultant physician. They both won seats in parliament at the 1974 federal election. The outcome boosted my stocks in the party. Incidentally, my brother Wal was precluded by party rules from sitting on the preselection committee. The Liberal Party in New South Wales, to its credit, is a lot stricter about family influences than is the Labor Party.

  My morale-boosting performance in Berowra was followed by an unexpected request to assist the Prime Minister, Bill McMahon, in the two months immediately prior to the 1972 election. By
that time I was metropolitan vice-president of the party in New South Wales. I was asked to go full-time onto his staff, to assist with liaison between his office and the party organisation as well as provide some campaign advice and help out with speechwriting. After some arm-twisting by my two partners (one of them kept saying, ‘John, it’s time’), I secured the necessary leave from my practice and hurled myself into what turned out to be the final weeks of 23 years of Coalition Government in Australia.

  I travelled around Australia with McMahon and, despite some hilarious and erratic moments, took from the experience a healthy respect for the dignified manner in which he accepted defeat on 2 December 1972. Janette and I were both with him at his home in Drumalbyn Road, Bellevue Hill, and he showed a lot of grace under pressure. Later, we drowned our sorrows with those great Liberal stalwarts John and Sue Atwill, at their nearby Woollahra home. Whitlam, despite the length of time the Coalition had been in office and the skill of Labor’s advertising campaign, won by only nine seats. As was the case in 2007, the swing in Western Australia was to the Coalition and not to Labor.

  Having spent so long in the wilderness, it was natural that Whitlam and his colleagues would luxuriate in the very experience of being in government. Yet shrewder political heads would have detected warning signs in the narrowness of his victory. It was not the clear rejection of the Coalition that the Fraser defeat represented in 1983, and it was narrower than Kevin Rudd’s victory in 2007. And on the other side, of course, it was nothing like the thumping victories achieved by the Coalition in 1975 and 1996. The truth is, despite all the hype and mythmaking of a generation, the Australian public barely thought that it was time in 1972.

  The obverse of this was that a narrow defeat for the Coalition left it with a false sense of complacency about the need for fundamental policy reassessment. Both the ALP and the Coalition went to the watershed election of 1972 on the assumption that the good economic times would continue to roll on. In his Blacktown policy speech, Gough Whitlam declared that Labor would fund its vast public sector expansion from ‘the huge and automatic increase in Commonwealth revenue’.2 He fantasised about annual growth rates of 6 or 7 per cent a year, displaying fearful ignorance of the economic task ahead. When the economic upheaval flowing from the quadrupling of oil prices and the collapse of the old Bretton Woods-inspired fixed exchange system hit Australia, the responses of the ALP Government would massively aggravate rather than mitigate their effects. Labor would be hounded from office in 1975, with its economic reputation in tatters.

  The early 1970s were a period of huge global economic change and turmoil, yet the two major political parties in Australia contrived in their different ways to ignore this. Whitlam had no coherent economic plan for government; that is why he proved completely unable to handle economic adversity when it confronted him.

  Most in the Coalition felt that having only just lost, there was no need for a full policy appraisal. There were plenty of reviews, but there was no fundamental examination of such things as the heavy regulation of the Australian economy, our high tariffs or our increasingly out-of-date taxation system. As for any questioning of centralised wage fixation, that was not even thought to be a problem.

  Like most people, I assumed that Whitlam would govern uninterrupted for three years. There was no perception of what lay ahead, or what Labor had in store for the Australian people.

  The story of the disintegration of the Whitlam Government has been told in much detail many times. Labor inherited a strong economy, with low unemployment and apparently good prospects for growth. Whitlam assumed that the benign economic conditions, which he had seen as the natural order of things in Australia, would simply go on. From the start he was uninterested in economic issues and paid little attention to mounting inflationary pressures. By October 1973 when OPEC countries quadrupled the price of oil, with all the inflationary consequences that entailed, inflation in Australia already stood at 10 per cent — well above what it had been less than 12 months earlier. Worldwide inflation became the big problem, and national governments were required to manage their economies with imagination and flexibility and take hard decisions which courted short-term unpopularity, not lazily assume that the good times would always be there.

  Whitlam found economics irksome, far less exciting than the foreign excursions and progressive social posturing that he had been elected to champion. This disconnection between the needs of the nation and the disposition of its leader was to prove very damaging to the former and fatal to the latter. Although the chaos of 1975 is seen as basic to Labor’s annihilation at the end of that year, the Government’s fate was really sealed in 1973 when, in the face of a clear need for a fresh policy direction, Whitlam ploughed on regardless.

  He never once confronted the Australian people with the reality of the times and, therefore, the need for a different approach. He may well have been surprised with the response he would have received.

  Australians are pragmatic, worldly people who respond well to governments which ask of them difficult things, provided they are taken into the confidence of the Government, and the nature of the national interest is laid out.

  If Whitlam had told the people very directly in 1973 that the altered world circumstances meant that many parts of his electoral platform must either be put to one side or at least deferred, the popularity he still then enjoyed as the first Labor prime minister in a generation would have carried the day.

  When the people decide to change their government, they cut the new man a lot of slack. They are slow to admit to themselves that they may have made a mistake. As a consequence, the public will accept a change in the direction of a fresh government early in its new term, provided a proper explanation is given. Gough Whitlam seemed oblivious to these political realities. He received an early warning from the electorate that they were not all that enchanted with the beginnings of his Government when Labor suffered a swing of 7 per cent against it in the Parramatta by-election held in September 1973. The seat was won by Philip Ruddock. He became a close and trusted colleague in my Government. Philip was an excellent Immigration Minister and Attorney General. In March of 2010 he became the third-longest-serving member of the House of Representatives since Federation.

  The swing in the by-election was much larger than might have been expected for a newly elected government after less than 12 months in office. A lot of this was due to growing unease about the economy; some to the already apparent erraticism in the new Government’s style; and, as a local issue, Gough Whitlam’s arrogant declaration that the people of western Sydney would have the city’s second airport at Galston (which was close to the Parramatta electorate) didn’t help matters for Labor.

  The by-election should have been a real warning for Whitlam, but it wasn’t. If anything, he pushed even harder on the accelerator. It gave Bill Snedden, the Opposition leader, a huge boost, perhaps engendering some of the false optimism which led the opposition to threaten the blocking of supply some months later.

  The Liberal Party of late 1973 was static, policy-wise. Its personnel were beginning to change, but only gradually and not at the top. Certainly McMahon had gone from the leadership, but not from parliament. Nigel Bowen had gone to the Bench, but other big names from government days, such as Snedden, Lynch, Fraser, Peacock and Chipp remained, as did the National Country Party trio of Doug Anthony, Ian Sinclair and Peter Nixon. In fact, given the length of time the Coalition had been in power prior to 1972, there was remarkably little turnover. That was because those occupying senior positions were still relatively young themselves. Those on the backbench tended to be older, and it was there that generational change would begin in 1974.

  Meanwhile, Janette and I had scraped together enough money to buy a home unit near Wollstonecraft station, in Sydney. It is the suburb in which we lived until I became Prime Minister, and the suburb to which we returned after the end of my parliamentary career. One of our happy recollections of living at the unit was to wake up on Su
nday mornings to the sound of tennis being played on the grass court in a large home next door. That home was owned by the L’Estrange family. Dr Jim L’Estrange was one of Sydney’s most respected paediatricians. He was highly regarded in the Catholic Church, which conferred on him the honour of a papal knighthood. One of his sons, Michael, would become one of my closest advisors as PM.

  6

  A SAFE SEAT

  As 1973 drew to a close, Australians had begun to feel nervous about Whitlam’s lack of interest in economic matters. They were also troubled by Lionel Murphy’s provocative ‘raid’ on the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), when, accompanied by federal police, he marched unannounced on the agency’s headquarters demanding access to papers. The Attorney General did not usually behave like this. ASIO may not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but it was pledged to protect the national interest. Murphy also tried to radically change the divorce laws by regulation, rather than legislation. Inevitably this was blocked by the Senate. The new Government was beginning to unsettle people.

  Ensconced in our unit in Wollstonecraft, Janette and I were blissfully enjoying the early years of married life. Politics remained the main preoccupation. From almost the moment we had met, it was common ground between us that I would go into politics. I wanted it, and Janette wanted it for me. I had standing and respect in Liberal circles, but the challenge was to realise my ambition.