by John Howard
Our internal qualitative research was mixed. Some of it showed a generalised fear, not based on actual experience, but rather on what ‘other people have told us’. Other research data suggested that some concerns were subsiding and that the public could see the benefit of a number of the WorkChoices changes, particularly in the area of unfair dismissals.
I spent Easter 2007 at the Lodge with most of my family, and during the break, carefully digested three separate sets of research material. The first lot was from our regular pollsters, Crosby/Textor. To provide further views, two other polling firms with which the Liberal Party had done business over the years were asked to contribute.
The message from this material was that although WorkChoices was not exercising the minds of voters on a daily basis, there was an underlying fear that the changes made could work against the position of average wage-and salary-earners. The depressing reality from this and all other research was that the contribution made by industrial relations changes to lower unemployment meant nothing to the voting public. The individual citizen was interested in unemployment only to the extent that it affected him or her or their family. If unemployment was not rising, and that was certainly the case in 2007, then it was not seen as any kind of threat to the bulk of the Australian workforce. Therefore the human benefit of WorkChoices — still lower unemployment — was of no political value at all to the Coalition.
As Easter ended I knew that the Government had to do something to soften the perceptions of WorkChoices. I didn’t like this. I knew that it was good policy and, objectively assessed, it was not unfair to the Australian workforce. The cumulative impact of our industrial relations changes over more than a decade had proved highly beneficial to individual workers, as well as the Australian economy as a whole.
What was needed was the restoration of something akin to the old no-disadvantage test. Cabinet met in Brisbane on 24 April 2007, and there was overwhelming support for a change in policy. There was near unanimity in the view that the deepest area of public concern was the possible loss of penalty rates and overtime loadings. Employees regarded these payments as an integral part of the weekly pay package. With a booming economy, there were plenty of opportunities to work overtime or at weekends. The extra money received for this work was not seen as some kind of one-off bonus but rather the properly expected reward for a good worker in benign economic conditions. People had borrowed money on the strength of the aggregate wage package including penalty rates and overtime loadings. Any suggestion that they might be at risk was seen as a direct threat to a worker’s standard of living.
We decided to fight back by introducing a fairness test. For any future AWA with a remuneration of $75,000 a year or less which modified or removed any of the so-called protected award conditions (eg, penalty rates and overtime loadings), the total salary under the agreement should at least equal what the remuneration would have been if those protected award conditions had not been removed. We had decided to restore the old no-disadvantage test, under a different name.
I strove hard to give this new announcement every amount of political exposure. Working from my office in Melbourne, on the night of 3 May I telephoned more than a dozen senior journalists and commentators around Australia, briefing them for their papers the following day with the details of the changes.
In doing this I hoped to put the changes in context. I wanted them to be seen as a response to people’s concerns, yet not a wholesale retreat from industrial relations changes. I had also telephoned the leaders of key industry organisations. Some were disappointed with the change, yet others were quite supportive. All of them understood the political challenge the Government faced. Peter Costello and I had agreed that it would be a good idea for the changes to be out and at least initially understood before the budget was brought down just on a week later.
Press coverage of the changes was comprehensive and fair. But, as time went by, it became clear that the changes had had little effect on public opinion. Despite the positive reaction to the budget, the Government continued to languish badly in the opinion polls.
The changes involved in the Fairness Test allowed the Government to run an extensive information campaign about the legislation. Although there were many hard-hitting things that could be said in a government-funded campaign, such a campaign could not include the direct political material so essential at that stage of the electoral cycle. This is where the absence of a really well-funded business campaign was keenly felt.
Sections of the media remained obsessed with WorkChoices. As late as the last week of the campaign, Channel Seven ran a story about the options which had been presented to the Government two years earlier about possible changes to the Workplace Relations Act.
One of the options was obviously to have gone further than we ultimately did with WorkChoices. The fact that we had specifically rejected this more radical path and, in any event, through the Fairness Test, had overturned one of the biggest changes in WorkChoices, was utterly irrelevant to the author of the Channel Seven story. What was presented to the Australian people in that news report was that the Government had considered even more draconian changes to workplace relations law. The subliminal message was that, if re-elected, the Coalition might just revive that more drastic option. The ACTU could not have written a better script.
We were never able to get clear air on WorkChoices. The attacks came from every direction. No matter how good the economic news was, and it continued to be so, individual hard-luck stories or allegations of unfairness always attracted far more media coverage. They were easy stories. Good economic news had become pathetically boring and uninteresting. To use that old cliché, we had become victims of our own success in managing the Australian economy.
Elsewhere in the book I have written of both the polling evidence and the field evidence I accumulated throughout my political life of the attitudes of the voting public. I obtained my field evidence on WorkChoices on 9 October 2007 when I visited the Williamstown Dockyard near Melbourne for the signing ceremony for the first of the RAN’s amphibious ships, to be built by Tennix.
There were more than 1000 people present, most of whom would have worked on the construction of the ship. They gave a friendly response to my short speech and to me personally as I moved through the crowd after my speech. I then came head to head with field evidence 2007.
An amiable man in blue overalls and in his middle 30s engaged me in quite friendly discussion about his work. He then said, ‘John, what about this WorkChoices business?’ He said that he had voted for me at the previous election. I asked him whether he had been affected by the new industrial relations changes. He said that his position was perfectly okay and his pay and conditions were not in any way under question. ‘But I hear around the place that other people might be affected. Are you sure it is all going to be okay?’ he said. I gave him that assurance, pointing out that changes which made the economy run better helped everyone.
I left that conversation feeling quite uneasy. I reckon that man voted Labor on 24 November, not because he was angry with me. In fact he displayed genuine warmth and friendliness, but the cumulative effect of the union/Labor Party campaign had instilled in him the belief that his working conditions might, in the future, be threatened by WorkChoices. He epitomised the sort of problem we encountered from the time we introduced our changes. Those changes were good policy. They helped many unemployed people into work; they were beneficial for the economy overall, but there was a severe political downside. The contribution of that downside to our election defeat is something that I will analyse in more detail later in the book.
43
SHOPPING CENTRES, BOARDROOMS AND DRESSING ROOMS
So much of this story of mine has been a narrative of my actions as a politician, within the political institutions of Australia or the rest of the world. Cabinet meetings, parliamentary question time, Liberal Party gatherings of all different kinds, bilateral meetings with other leaders, Commonwealth and UN me
etings and APEC councils — the list is endless. They have in common that they are political gatherings, of political decision-makers of various kinds. Participation in them is the meat and vegetables of a senior politician’s life, particularly that of a PM.
Being an effective PM of Australia compels scrupulous attendance and informed involvement at, and in, such gatherings. Much of what I have written in this book is the story of what went on, or was decided, at these myriad meetings. After all, they shaped the economic and diplomatic direction of our country for more than a decade.
There were other meetings, though, and far more numerous ones, which often only involved one politician — and that was me — when I came face to face with a cross-section of the people of Australia, to whom I was accountable and whose best interests I was sworn to advance. These encounters took place in an endless variety of places. Many were organised encounters, some gatherings were small, others large. Necessarily, some were one on one.
Many were random. Most were polite and friendly, even when the political message I was delivering was deeply unpopular. Some were heart-wrenching.
When I left politics, I received thousands of letters and other messages. I replied to them all. In those responses I said that of all the experiences I had had, none would be more memorable than the wonderfully open and positive spirit I encountered amongst Australians from all walks of life. More than anything else, that experience sustained and refreshed me through the challenges, reversals and pressure of my years in the Lodge. I never tired of meeting other Australians. I never will.
These other meetings, shared experiences or chance encounters, I hope gave me the wisdom to take the right decisions at all of those political meetings, which I, along with other elected representatives of the public, attended.
Being successful requires a politician always to ‘be in touch’. Part of keeping in touch is closely following what is said in the media. I don’t believe those politicians who say they don’t read the papers. It is impossible to do your job properly without knowing what the press is saying. It is arrogant beyond belief to completely ignore what is being said in the media. It is always a question of balance. Never be deterred by the media from a course you are convinced is right, but don’t be so conceited as to think the attitude of the media is irrelevant. It isn’t. As PM I would frequently say that there were three institutions which truly guarded freedom in Australia: our competitive parliamentary system, an incorruptible judiciary, and a free, robust press. I will pit them any time against a Bill of Rights, which would reduce the power of citizens to control their own lives by handing political decision-making authority to judges.
I used talkback radio more than any other PM because it was the most effective way of getting across an unfiltered message.
An hour can be spent doing a Canberra press conference, yet what appears on the TV that night, on the radio or in the newspapers is entirely at the discretion of journalists or news editors and might bear little or no relation to the central purpose of the news conference. At the very least the talkback radio audience hears your message directly, and many of those audiences are very large. I still did the press conferences; it’s just that I did the talkback as well as a form of communications insurance.
Working journalists as a class have progressive, centre-left political views. This applies especially to those in the federal parliamentary press gallery, who report exclusively on national politics. Many of them have signed up to the climate-alarm agenda; they were overwhelmingly republican 10 years ago — so much so that their bias hurt the cause they supported. They strongly supported the giving of an apology to Aboriginal Australians, and thought that I was too hard on asylum-seekers. A lot of them thought my social values were too conservative.
The bulk of them, however, generally support economically rational responses. A prime example of this was the willingness of most journalists to give the Government a fair hearing on the GST, despite Labor’s spoiling tactics.
Many talkback radio hosts — Alan Jones, Neil Mitchell, Ray Hadley and previously John Laws — don’t fit any stereotype. Often contrarian, they can take a more conservative stance, and to much effect. Jones had a big impact on the republican debate in Sydney. He had an even bigger impact on the global warming debate late in 2009, especially on attitudes amongst Liberal supporters. Too many Canberra journalists take a patronising attitude towards talkback radio presenters. My experience has been that both their intelligence and detailed knowledge of individual subjects match that of their colleagues in the national capital. Pity help any MP who agrees to be interviewed by Alan Jones on a subject that interests Jones if he or she has not done their homework.
The Australian public has a great capacity to filter out some of the bias when it is displayed by journalists. It happened with the republican issue. It is happening with the global warming debate.
The net of all this is that the media is a critical part of the equation for a senior political figure, particularly a PM. He must deal with them, and on a civil basis. That doesn’t mean that he won’t have favourites, but he shouldn’t ignore the adversaries either. The politics of Kerry O’Brien, presenter of the ABC’s 7.30 Report, were a mile away from mine. Yet I appeared regularly on his program, because it was a serious current affairs presentation; he had usually done his homework, and the show was widely watched by other politicians and journalists.
Other PMs and senior ministers have had fixed groups of businessmen from which they have drawn economic and business advice. This approach has often worked, but it was not one that I tried. I wanted to avoid going to the same people all of the time, preferring to consult as widely as possible. Given the importance of small business to the Coalition, a wide network was essential.
The ubiquitous boardroom lunch was an indispensable part of the keeping-in-touch process. The economic success of Australia in the past 15 to 20 years owes so much to the energy and skill of our men and women of business. They have been an integral part of our success story. They have proved adaptable and innovative. They have been praiseworthy wealth creators, and without them the Australian economic story would have been utterly different.
I have watched some businessmen transition from apostles of industries demanding high protection to effective players in the new export culture which developed following the dismantling of protection. I think here of John Uhrig. When I first encountered him, he ran Simpson Pope, a white goods manufacturer. This was in an industry which historically had argued for continued tariff protection. Uhrig was a supporter of lowering tariffs and opening up our economy. He demonstrated his versatility through his effective chairmanship of both Conzinc Riotinto Australia (CRA), now Rio Tinto, and Westpac. Some, such as Hugh Morgan, joined the intellectual debate, arguing over long periods of time for reform and restructuring of the economy. Running a successful company by day and arguing for change and innovation by night can be a powerful combination.
As a cohort, business leaders were usually advocates of the reform agenda my Government wanted to pursue. This was certainly so in relation to taxation reform. At critical stages of the IR debate, we could have done with a few more bodies on the line; a few more like Chris Corrigan would have been of much assistance in the workplace relations debate during our last year in office.
I never met a more astute businessman than Kerry Packer. His intuition was legendary and he had the common touch. It was a rare achievement for the richest man in Australia also to speak for a sizeable chunk of the population. He did this when he told a Senate inquiry in 1991 that the public was not so impressed with the job the Government was doing with their taxes that people were queuing up to donate extra.
No one has gone near him in understanding the mood and tastes of Australian television audiences. Packer’s impact on sport, especially cricket, has been immense. Once again he displayed a rare instinct in detecting what the sporting public would warm to.
Frank Lowy and Arvi Parbo personified a distinct part o
f the Australian achievement. They came to Australia from war-ravaged Europe after 1945, embraced this country with a passion and went on to make a lasting contribution to Australia. Some of Frank’s family died in the Holocaust. He went first to Palestine, where he fought in the Israeli Army against the Arabs in the 1948 War of Independence, then settled in Australia and, with the late John Saunders, built the Westfield shopping centre empire. Not only is it vast, but now it is the largest shopping mall chain in the USA.
Over the years that we have been friends I have always valued Frank’s advice and opinions. As was Kerry Packer, he is always worth listening to. Frank Lowy has also pursued a sporting passion; in his case, soccer. At the age of 79 he is leading the push for Australia to host the 2022 World Cup.
Arvi Parbo is a splendid example of the migrant-boy-makes-good story. Born in Estonia in 1926, Parbo went to Germany for a time after the war and then came to Australia, speaking virtually no English. A mining engineer by training, he helped build Western Mining into one of the preeminent mining houses of our country. The expansion of that company, involving major discoveries as well as astute investments, was a metaphor for the growth of the mining industry, now so important to our economy, in the 1970s and ’80s. In 1989 Sir Arvi Parbo became chairman of BHP, then ‘the Big Australian’.
As well as his business interests, Arvi Parbo maintained a lively interest in public affairs, never forgetting the brutal treatment of his native Estonia by the Soviets. He treasured the freedom Australia had given him and took opportunities to tell his fellow citizens not to take it for granted.
John Ralph, former boss of CRA, former chairman of the Commonwealth Bank, once deputy chairman of Telstra and president of the BCA, was as regular a business advisor as any that I had in my political life. He was a shining example of how success in business and ethics are not mutually exclusive. John Ralph was tough and uncompromising in his business judgements, but always straight.