by John Howard
I had not calculated that more time and another failed leadership was needed before the Liberal Party turned back to me. Those with long memories, like Andrew Peacock, rallied behind Hewson. So did John Elliott and Ron Walker. One exception to this, interestingly enough, was John Moore, who made it clear to me that he would support my return.
In the ballot, Peter Costello ran as deputy leader, effectively partnering me. John Hewson defeated me by 47 to 30. Michael Wooldridge was elected deputy leader over Peter Costello by a slightly smaller margin.
I was completely deflated by the result. The scale of Hewson’s win told me in no uncertain terms that there was still huge resistance within the party to my return and that at that stage, even in the wake of the shock defeat, a sizeable chunk of Liberal MPs would not have a bar of my again leading them. For some of them, it was a continuation of old animosity. For others, it was a simple unwillingness to go back in time to find a new leader for the party. They held the view that once someone had led the party and had been removed, then it was untenable to bring that person back. The absurdity of Hewson’s re-election was that virtually no one saw him as a viable leader in other than the short term. Having lost in 1993, very few people thought that he could win in 1996. Most assumed that he would be replaced by someone else well before then. The question was — who?
Reith went to the backbench after the 1993 election and Hewson had therefore need of a new shadow Treasurer. He was not going to give the job to me and opted for Alexander Downer. This was the move that would deliver Downer the leadership of the party just over a year later. Usually in opposition the only prominent position other than that of leader is that of shadow Treasurer. An intelligent, energetic media-savvy shadow Treasurer can obtain constant, and often saturation, coverage in the media. Downer was all of these things and he did an excellent job in 12 months or more in the position. Hewson returned me to essentially my previous position and added the responsibility of manager of opposition business in the house.
Postmortems on the 1993 election frequently attributed the Coalition’s loss to the radical nature of Fightback! That was never a balanced judgement. John Hewson will always deserve credit for directly confronting the nation’s economic ills in the early 1990s with a comprehensive plan. The tragedy for him was that, having knee-capped Bob Hawke with policy boldness, he could not match Paul Keating as a political scrapper.
Keating’s better political skills proved decisive. In the process, however, he surrendered policy credibility by deriding Hewson’s GST, a likeness of which, namely a 12.5 per cent consumption tax, had been the centrepiece of his grand vision for Australia’s taxation system eight years earlier.
19
LAZARUS HAS HIS TRIPLE BYPASS
There was a widespread assumption that John Hewson had been retained as leader after the 1993 election as a stop-gap measure and would not lead the party to the next election. There was still reasonable public support for me, but the parliamentary party had knocked me back quite emphatically. If there were any hope of my ever returning to the leadership, it would have to be by way of a draft and not an orthodox challenge. I still thought about it, despite the setbacks. This was because Hewson’s position seemed unsustainable and there appeared no other alternative.
As some years had now passed since the May 1989 coup, I increasingly felt the need to bury the hatchet with Andrew Peacock. I had a mixture of motives. It was because Andrew had been my open competitor for the party’s top job that I did not feel any strong sense of grievance against him. Andrew’s ambition I could understand all too well, as I shared it.
I also knew that if there were to be any hope, however remote, that I might return to the leadership, then at least to have the acquiescence of Andrew Peacock would be crucial. So I began to take what opportunities I could to engage Andrew in friendly conversation and safe reminiscences about shared political experiences. He responded in a friendly manner. This process had begun before the 1993 election. His attitude to me had not altered by the time of the 1993 election, as he supported Hewson being re-elected as leader.
Although I had an interest in reconciliation with Andrew Peacock, I nonetheless believed that it should happen. We had each committed our active adult years to the Liberal Party, loved politics and wanted a federal Liberal Government returned to office. Both of us were becoming more than a little weary with almost reflex blame being fixed on our rivalry whenever the party had a problem. We had had furious differences and been fierce rivals, hurting the party in the process, but through all of that had maintained a certain civility towards each other. By the beginning of 1994, a good deal of the old tension in our relationship had begun to dissipate.
Then there was the Bronwyn Bishop phenomenon. Vacuums in politics are always filled, and in the case of the leadership of the Liberal Party, the public began to fill that vacuum with its support for Bronwyn Bishop. She had been a Liberal senator from New South Wales since 1987 and had a high media profile of a populist kind. For close to 12 months she was never out of the headlines as a potential leadership rival to John Hewson. She enjoyed a short-term but quite intense popularity spurt with the Australian public.
This was understandable. There was a novelty about her. She was the first woman to be seriously debated as a potential leader of the Liberal Party. She had appeal to conservative voters. Bronwyn made simple, straightforward statements on nationalism and foreign policy. Quite assiduously, she cultivated comparisons between herself and Margaret Thatcher. The fact that she was still a senator at that stage was no more than a minor technical detail. Ironically, attending to that minor technical detail played a major role in the unravelling of the Bronwyn Bishop public phenomenon.
Bronwyn’s biggest problem was that no more than a handful of her parliamentary colleagues took seriously the proposition that she could ever become leader of the parliamentary party. She was seen as strong on simple slogans but lacking policy substance and depth. This did not in any way impede her public progress. Polls showed her not only doing well against her Liberal rivals but also Paul Keating.
In the middle of 1993 Paul Keating turned up the heat in the debate about Australia becoming a republic. He had committed to a republican referendum at the 1993 poll and shortly afterwards appointed an advisory committee chaired by Malcolm Turnbull, which included a group of hand-picked Australians with obvious republican sympathies. It was a classic committee stitch-up. He did not want a range of views. He wanted a republic, had a clear idea of what kind of presidency Australia should have, and appointed the people who would give him the advice that he sought.
Keating knew that the republican issue would divide the Liberal Party. Whilst a majority of Liberals supported the constitutional monarchy, there was a significant minority who favoured change.
I was strongly against a republic. To me it was an instinctive issue, and my Burkean conservatism drove my thinking. I was somewhat contemptuous of the equivocal response of so many of my parliamentary colleagues. I accepted that a number of them were republican by conviction but believed a lot of the other lukewarm republicans were merely adopting that attitude because it appeared the fashionable thing to do.
John Hewson seemed undecided. At that time Costello came out against change. Downer shared my views, as did Bronwyn Bishop. Andrew Peacock remained silent on the subject, although I suspect that deep down he was a constitutional monarchist.
Tony Abbott, later Opposition leader, had been John Hewson’s press secretary between 1990 and the 1993 election. It had been on my recommendation that Hewson engaged Abbott. A former seminarian, later a journalist with the Bulletin and the Australian, Tony Abbott had once thought of joining my staff when I was Opposition leader but took what he thought to be a better offer from the Bulletin. We had established an instant rapport and kept in touch. I liked his intellectual rigour and gregarious manner. He revelled in the battle of ideas, which he saw to be the stuff of real politics. I admired the fact that he was prepared to argue hi
s case no matter its unpopularity. Abbott’s personality was engaging; he had a good sense of humour, and I came to respect his capacity to quickly bounce back from a reversal.
Abbott and Hewson fell out before the 1993 election, and the former was in search of a new job after the Keating Government was re-elected. When the republican issue came into focus Abbott was approached by a number of people to become the executive director of Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy (ACM), the main organising group representing support for the status quo. At that time there was a media frenzy supporting a republic, and people willing to put their hand up for the monarchy were few and far between. Being by instinct a monarchist, Abbott wanted to take the job, but many of his family and friends counselled him against it. He sought my opinion and I told him to take it. I thought he would throw his great energy and communications skills into the task. The group needed an effective executive director.
There was another reason why I thought he should take the job. I told him that a very large number of people with whom he would have contact were active members of the Liberal Party. Branch members of the Liberal Party were overwhelmingly of a monarchist bent. Given that I knew Tony wanted to obtain preselection for a Liberal seat at some time in the future, favourable exposure to Liberal Party branch members would do him no harm. Much earlier than he expected, Tony would have good reason to thank me for this advice.
Keating had appointed John Dawkins as Treasurer after he toppled Hawke. The Dawkins budget of August 1993 was an outrageous repudiation of Keating’s campaign against Hewson in March of that year. It contained swingeing increases in existing indirect taxes, cancellation of the by-now-infamous ‘l-a-w — law’ tax cuts and just about every other budget nasty imaginable. The ‘l-a-w — law’ description derived from Keating having literally spelled out the word ‘law’ to emphasise that income-tax cuts in his 1992 One Nation statement had been legislated. To most people, it was beyond the pale that Keating had defeated Hewson on the grounds that the latter was to introduce a monster new tax, and now he was presiding over widespread indirect tax hikes for which he had no mandate.
The Keating Government’s poll position slumped. But this did not automatically translate into a consolidation of John Hewson’s position. Doubts about the durability of his leadership persisted.
Early in 1994, two long-serving NSW Liberals, Michael MacKellar and Jim Carlton, in the neighbouring seats of Warringah and Mackellar, both safe Liberal fiefdoms on the North Shore of Sydney, announced that they were retiring from parliament. This opened the way for Bronwyn Bishop to move into the lower house. She secured Liberal preselection for Mackellar, with all the attendant publicity and drama that this inevitably entailed, given her clear leadership ambitions and the support she continued to enjoy in the opinion polls.
When I heard of the vacancy in Warringah I telephoned Tony Abbott, who was holidaying at Port Macquarie, and told him that he should nominate immediately for the seat. He lived on the North Shore of Sydney and I felt this was his opportunity. He took my advice and, in part with the assistance of a glowing reference I provided for him, won the preselection. Those who attended the preselection said his presentation had been outstanding and grabbed the attention and the emotions of those sitting on the committee. The stage was therefore set for two by-elections on the same day, 26 March 1994. As both were safe Liberal seats, the Labor Party did not run candidates. The main interest centred on the respective sizes of the Liberal vote in the two seats. It proved to be a defining result for Bronwyn Bishop. Her principal rival was the ALP sympathiser, but Independent, writer Bob Ellis. She suffered a 4.5 per cent decline in her primary vote, whereas Tony Abbott’s seat saw his primary vote fall by less than 1 per cent. Unfortunately for Bishop, the enormous focus on her leadership aspirations, which she had regularly encouraged, meant that this decline in her vote, which in other circumstances might not have attracted much attention, damaged her leadership prospects. She never recovered momentum from that time onwards.
Throughout 1994 I would remain active in talking about the party’s values and beliefs. In an article in Quadrant magazine, I articulated my strong view that the Liberal Party was a broad church, being the custodian of classical liberal as well as conservative beliefs. I also wrote, ‘Liberals should become the party of the Australian achievement’, pointing to the latent sentiment in the Australian community that legitimate expressions of pride about the past had been suppressed through fear of offending minorities.
As the weeks passed it became clear that it was only a matter of time before a spark ignited the dry grass surrounding John Hewson.
Comment, both in the press and amongst MPs, about Hewson’s leadership increased sharply in May. In a pre-emptive strike, Hewson called a party meeting for 23 May at which the positions of leader and deputy leader would be declared vacant. That afternoon Downer and Costello announced that they would run, in that order, for the two positions. They had calculated that I would not nominate and agreed on their course of action before consulting me. Their actions reflected the mood of the party. Colleagues were determined to move on in finding a replacement for Hewson. Although I was full of self-recrimination about not running, my initial instinct to stay out of the ballot was absolutely correct. I would have performed poorly.
The day before the ballot, there was an extraordinary public intervention by the federal president, Tony Staley, who called for Hewson’s removal. Hewson himself, although he had lived on borrowed time since his re-election just over a year earlier, would have felt a bruised and angry person. To make matters worse, he was ambushed on the ABC Lateline program when Kerry O’Brien confronted him with the details of some internal Liberal Party polling. The leaking of such material by party insiders, although regrettably commonplace, is never forgivable. It breaches every professional principle of private political counsel.
I told John Hewson that I would vote for Downer, who defeated him 43 to 36. Costello became Deputy Leader unopposed after Downer’s win. I would have voted for him in a contested ballot. The change was seen as the beginning of a new, younger, fresher opportunity for the Liberal Party.
The dream team of Alexander Downer and Peter Costello got off to a flying start. Alexander had impressed as shadow Treasurer and he was steeped in politics; his father had been a Menzies minister. Liberal supporters were given new heart, and the opinion polls recorded strong support for both Downer and the Coalition.
For me, the election of Downer and Costello had a real air of finality about it. That was it, so far as any lingering leadership hopes of mine were concerned. As a reflection of my mood, I wrote in my diary at the time: ‘On Friday 20 May 1994 I was given my last ever chance to reclaim the Leadership of the Liberal Party and again seek the Prime Ministership of my country. I didn’t know it at the time and I passed up the opportunity. It will never come again. I think I now feel that.’
I felt and acted as if a completely new era had arrived for the Liberal Party. My role was to stay around and help. Downer and I had a good relationship and he consulted me from time to time about issues. That relationship grew even closer in government.
For the first time in more than 15 years I felt that I was no longer at the centre of the affairs of the Liberal Party. Even though the party had reelected Hewson after the 1993 poll, there was a strong sense that the leadership issue was unresolved and would be looked at again. The party had looked at it again and gone to the next generation. I had a lot of experience, and there continued to be much goodwill towards me, but the Liberal Party could really get on without me if it had to.
That was how Liberal supporters thought too. In July I was admitted to the Mater Hospital in Sydney for a knee reconstruction operation made necessary following a skiing spill, in turn caused by trying to keep pace with my 16-year-old son, Tim. The anaesthetist, who I sensed and (remembering Ronald Reagan’s famous remark before undergoing surgery, ‘I hope he’s a Republican’) hoped was a Liberal, chatted approvingly about the
change to younger leaders and said how right I had been to stand aside for them. As I drifted into relaxed slumber, I drowsily agreed.
That was in July. By November, a bare four months later, Alexander Downer’s leadership had collapsed and I had begun to believe, as distinct from hope, that the leadership of the Liberal Party would finally come back to me.
Alexander Downer’s slide commenced during a public relations disaster he created during a visit to the Northern Territory. At an earlier meeting of the WA Liberals he had raised the possibility, rather surprisingly, of repealing aspects of the Native Title legislation. This had come out of the blue and seemed at odds with what was then the party’s policy. He then went to the Northern Territory and in a succession of interviews appeared both to contradict party policy and some of his earlier statements on Indigenous issues. When taxed with the contradictions he blamed them on the emotional impact he felt watching a corroboree. It was an unnerving performance and precipitated a big fall of 17 per cent in his approval rating. Coming as early as it did in his leadership, such a turnaround was magnified in its political significance by the commentators.
The Northern Territory incident undid his confidence and from then on he handled difficult situations with a very unsure touch. John Hewson had cut up rough since his removal from the leadership. Instead of ignoring him, which would have been the right response, Alexander overreacted by sacking Hewson from the shadow cabinet.