I was excited that the area was home to leading researchers at the University of New South Wales, including Dr Martin Green, who with his colleagues had developed one of the world’s most efficient solar cells, and Professor Matthew England and the team at the Climate Change Research Centre, experts on the science and impacts of global warming.
An economic system that penalised pollution and facilitated renewable sources—sun, wind and ocean—could help stabilise the planet’s temperature. The innovative ideas and technologies that made this happen could be the industries of the future. This was the vision—a virtuous circle of fixing the environment and creating jobs—that Labor subsequently pursued, and then years later strained to put into practice.
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The fabric of the community—and the rents within it—came into clearer view as race-based issues swept across the electorate.
The riot in 2005 by young surfers and locals from the predominantly Anglo Sutherland Shire, about forty minutes south of Kingsford Smith, exposed deep animosities still lurking in the Australian psyche. Australia Day had already taken on a quasi-fascist flavour for some, who, draped in the flag and with a belly full of beer, were only too ready to abuse anyone who appeared different.
The 2005 incident followed the assault of two young lifesavers at North Cronulla by a gang of Middle Eastern youths, and stemmed from incidents of sexist and often aggro behaviour from some young Middle Eastern men who frequented the beach in summer.
Across Sydney, the airwaves crackled with the outrage of those who resented sharing the beaches and the public spaces of the city with crowds of the recently arrived. The division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ was fostered and encouraged by right-wing radio shock jock Alan Jones, whose tirades later saw him fined for breaching the radio code of practice.
The night following the assault, after an ugly mob attacked and abused groups of Middle Eastern men around the beach at Cronulla, came reprisals by Lebanese groups from the south-west of Sydney. A church in Auburn was torched and cars trashed as far away as the beachside suburb of Maroubra, in my electorate.
Here the ‘locals only’ culture was deeply ingrained, personified by the Bra Boys, a gang led by local surfers the Abberton brothers, whose notoriety had seen them feted in the surfing and Fairfax media. They too weighed in, threatening to storm the mosque in Lakemba before relenting and offering to make peace with Muslim youth—culminating in a staged photo op that sucked the media in yet again.
In this climate of hysterical claims and festering racism, I feared the situation could easily get out of hand and escalate further. My office had kept in touch with the local police area command, and the following evening I joined young officers as they patrolled the shabby shopping strip and 1960s apartment blocks on the Maroubra foreshore. Here a smattering of locals were now arming themselves with cricket bats and assorted weapons stored in garages and hidden under bushes in nearby parks to repel foreign invaders—many of whom had attended school only three suburbs away to the west. Fortunately, it turned out to be a quiet night, but the atmosphere was deeply unsettling.
Next morning, all the staff collected in the office for urgent discussions. I was intent on us mounting some kind of response in our area to a festering boil that needed lancing. Members of the public, unhappy with the way events were unfolding, had called in offering to do something, anything, positive. Following discussions with a larger group of constituents, including film director Rowan Woods, we decided to hold a march called ‘Wave of Respect’. The idea was simple: to broadcast a positive message and provide a counterpoint to the hate-filled hype from extremists on both sides. We would try to persuade as many well-known faces as we could to join us in order to generate media coverage for our theme of inclusion.
A series of quick calls to friends and sympathetic celebs was answered with a rollup, only two days later, of around fifty, including rugby league great Mario Fenech; singer Jimmy Barnes; comedian Anh Do; part owner of the South Sydney Rabbitohs Peter Holmes à Court; actors Claudia Karvan, Bryan Brown and Cate Blanchett; and a host of others, decked out in Wave of Respect T-shirts courtesy of Remo. The march was well covered by the media—as it deserved to be. At the least, a marker had been laid down showing there were people in this part of Sydney who believed in respecting one another, regardless of how anyone looked or how long they’d been in the country.
Sad to say, racism was hardly a new issue. Despite our success in building a modern nation based on immigration, Australia was not immune to the welling-up of racial hatred, seen in the recent past by the rise of the far-right One Nation party and lately in the outbreak of mass booing directed at Adam Goodes, the Indigenous Australian footballer. The Oils had had a go at One Nation and all that it stood for when we recorded Redneck Wonderland. To kick off the Redneck Wonderland tour, we ventured north, where the vote for One Nation was highest. In a Queensland state election, it had ratcheted up to around 28 per cent. In the 1996 federal election, party founder and star candidate Pauline Hanson had ended up with a seat in the House of Representatives, so we headed to the town of Ipswich, where she had famously launched her career. We searched far and wide for someone who’d voted for Pauline, without success. The bubble had already burst. As a local said to me, ‘She got all big-headed when she went to Canberra to play with the big boys.’ As far as he was concerned, Hanson didn’t represent the people of Ipswich at all.
In the next federal election, Labor won the seat back. Hanson, after failing to win a Senate spot and with the party in disarray, then had a shot at the New South Wales parliament. Despite some serious campaigning in the Sutherland Shire, she failed again, receiving only around 2 per cent of the vote. Whether this was a testament to Australians’ underlying decency, or simply the fact that Hanson’s stance had been appropriated in soft focus by John Howard, who famously refused to condemn her outright, is a question that can be argued endlessly. But either way, our system was still mainly operating as a bulwark against ideological nastiness.
How long would this continue to be the case?, I wondered. Early in the morning of 25 April, I stood in a side street off the main road leading through the suburb of Matraville, there for the first of a number of traditional Anzac Day services I would attend that day. A handful of local politicians and a small cohort of ageing returned servicemen—and a smattering of women—all bedecked in medals, marching to the beat of a lone drummer, stepped out onto the main road. A single police car was parked across three lanes to halt occasional traffic, but it was a public holiday and, so far, reasonably quiet.
Two hundred metres up the road we paused at the Catholic church, where we were joined by a small group of children from the parish school, to listen to an address through a tiny, crackly speaker. It was turning into a glorious autumn day and the neighbourhood was starting to venture out into their gardens, or head off to the beach or local parks.
Much of what the priest said about the nature of sacrifice was drowned out by the hum of an increasing numbers of cars on the move behind us.
Across the road, in one of the flats above the shopping strip, two bare-chested young men with dark skin sat on a blistered concrete balcony sipping cans of beer—the sky a fierce blue backdrop.
They’d fired up the ghetto blaster—thudding bass beats, angry rap—in preparation for a day’s hard partying, and were looking across to the head-bowed crowd opposite. They must surely have known that this was one of the most important days in the nation’s calendar—the fact is hard to escape—but what they made of the procession as it trundled back out onto the road, I couldn’t imagine.
Did they see it as a reminder of a war waged nearly a century ago in a faraway place, a place perhaps which these young men’s own families might have come from? Perhaps they should have been invited to join us?
We headed to the final destination, the RSL Club, another 300 metres further along. By now the muffled rhythms of the ceremony were all but overwhelmed as the Last Post echoed across the sub
urban air, already thickening with engine fumes and party music, as Anzac Day came alive.
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Sometimes, for change to happen, all it takes is for enough people to say out loud that they’ve had enough; this was the principle behind the Make Poverty History movement for debt relief, along with the Jubilee Debt Campaign, both of which aimed to force the developed nations to forgive a chunk of the crippling long-term debt some small poor countries owed to organisations like the World Bank.
In support of a Make Poverty History concert organised by World Vision, in 2006 I headed down to Melbourne where, at an overflowing Myer Music Bowl, big-name imports Pearl Jam, along with Bono and the Edge from U2, hooked their way through Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’.
Bono had agreed to do Lateline, the ABC current affairs program, to publicise the cause. So with World Vision supremo Tim Costello in tow, we drove out to the studio, offering up statistics and a steer on the local political context. Tony Jones, a smart and sharp journalist, was interviewing, so the advice was simple. ‘He’ll fasten on to you like a kelpie on a sheep’s back leg,’ we told Bono.
Croaky voice from the back seat: ‘And what’s a kelpie?’
‘Anyway, just ignore the same question repeated over and over, and try to get the message out,’ we advised.
We needn’t have bothered. Bono was not about to be derailed by the inquisitorial Jones, who in any event handled the overseas talent more gently than he normally did locals (plus he clearly had some sympathy for the cause). The Irish gifts of oodles of charm and talking with conviction were on full display.
Driving back we cranked up a freshly recorded ‘Beautiful Day’, and bellowed into Fitzroy for a late-night meal and a catch-up with Eddie Vedder and a group of passionate young anti-poverty campaigners. We then escaped into the night just as the first wave of fans descended to be photographed with the Seattle and Dublin vocalists. I enjoyed these get-togethers; occasions like this would be few and far between in the long days and nights that were just around the corner as we geared up for a federal election the following year.
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I had signed up early as an ambassador for White Ribbon Day, which had been established to take a stand on violence against women, an issue that deep down nagged away at me. As a father of three daughters, I wanted them to grow up free of the fear of violence. In addition, my electorate office in Maroubra was staffed mainly by women. As is often the case in the Labor Party, women hang tough and hold the ‘show’ (as the party is colloquially referred to) together, no matter what else is going down at the time. Kate Pasterfield, with Jenny Hunter doing local media and Sandi Chick dealing with constituent issues, typified this loyalty and they stuck by me for the long haul. If they worked back late, as was often the case, the question of whether they could get home safely would have to be taken into account.
An additional reason for joining the White Ribbon campaign had to do with some of the attitudes I’d encountered since I was elected.
Perhaps because they’d grown up seeing me on TV or listening to Oils songs, people often opened up on meeting me as if we’d known one another forever. The most intimate information about my constituents and their families would be revealed to me—details of a recent domestic argument, for example—often as we stood surrounded by a crowd in a shopping centre or other public space. And I’d discovered something that initially surprised me: many older men’s attitudes to women still sucked. Given that in the majority of cases violence against women is committed by a man the victim knows, and that men are responsible for much of the violence that besets the world, I tried to confront these views whenever the opportunity arose. If humanity was ever going to make peaceful relations standard operating procedure between neighbours, countries and religions, it had to start at home.
In the first few years of the campaign I mainly visited shopping malls to hand out White Ribbon Day material and chat with whoever we happened to bump into. Over time, as the campaign picked up speed, more local schools became involved, as did the local services: police, fire and ambulance. White Ribbon Day was increasingly well supported by the media both locally and nationally, and this made a huge difference. Within ten years of its inception in Australia, the day had grown into a major community event as reps from all tiers of government, a phalanx of local service personnel led by the police, and members of the public marched through the suburbs and down to a large park near the Coogee waterfront to make a public pledge in support of a violence-free future for women.
At last domestic violence has been dragged out from under the covers and is now on the political agenda, although the statistics are horrendous. It seems as if we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg at present; much more heavy lifting, including a massive education program and more effective regulation of the perpetrators, will be needed to quell this scourge.
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During my first term in parliament, I discovered that in the winter break many parliamentarians would head overseas on what were euphemistically described as ‘study tours’. In reality, they were soft travel rorts, and it was rare for politicians to learn anything of use to the taxpayer.
I wasn’t interested in signing up to this masquerade, but the slowdown gave me the opportunity to bring together a group of close mates and head back to the Western Desert to connect with some of the Blackfella/Whitefella communities, whose progress I’d tried to keep abreast of over the years.
Just before entering parliament, I’d joined with my old mates from Warumpi Band, George Rrurrambu and Sammy Butcher, to open a small recording studio—built with support from World Vision and other NGOs—at Papunya. I was keen to get back to see how it was going. There was no shortage of talent out there, but equally no shortage of dust and debris to clog up the complex equipment.
Sammy was aiming to encourage younger musos, getting them in to rehearse and record in a setting as far removed from the slick facilities of Sydney or LA as one could envisage. George was returning to the scene of earlier triumphs; now sober and always sartorially splendid, his was a magnetic presence around the town.
These kids had to handle a lot, and the songs, compared to the overwrought clichés that keep reappearing in western pop, were potent to the core. The Little Orphans, a group made up of young boys aged around ten or eleven, played a song they’d written for the occasion. Loosely translated, it went: ‘Brother’s sniffing petrol, sister’s on marijuana, Daddy’s on the grog and Mummy’s gambling. Who do I talk to?’ There was no question these settlements were still beset by a range of social ills, some more than others. But singing it loud and still proud could only help build confidence and self-esteem, and maybe, at a very long shot, start a career.
As we trundled and bumped further out to Kintore (Walungurru) and then back to Alice, I found the experience bittersweet. Communities were variously trying to make a go of it—organising health programs, getting people out on country, maintaining cultural sites and seeking out bush tucker—although the employment opportunities were still limited.
The maverick Northern Territory politician Alison Anderson, who hails from Papunya, makes the point that there is a vast amount of unrealised human potential in these communities. In a stinging rebuke to Utopia, a documentary made by expatriate journalist John Pilger which derided the notion that any progress had been made in remote Aboriginal Australia, she said, ‘[People] do not wake up in the morning and think to themselves, “How dysfunctional I am, how bad is life!” They wake up and think, “How lucky we are to be living on our country in full possession of our language and culture and to be a little removed from the madness, pace and poisons of the mainstream world.”’
Other than being home with Doris, or getting out with the family in tow, these trips into the Centre were my greatest solace. Here, with a group of friends—Doddo, Paul Gilding, Dames, artist Glen Preece, Richard Morecroft and others—along for the ride, we could camp undisturbed, surrounded by desert oaks, illuminated by the open fir
e, under the massive southern sky. And yet I was more than ever aware that my pleasure at travelling rough was as nothing compared to the sense of a world adrift still lingering in the subsoil of many of these remote settlements.
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In 2005, a year after I’d entered parliament, Kim Beazley gave me the role of Parliamentary Secretary for Reconciliation and the Arts.
A few months later, the Howard government introduced additional anti-terror legislation, automatically supported by Beazley but containing, as it happened, a worrying bit of overreach. This was a provision for the offence of ‘sedition’, a crime in which political language or actions can be interpreted as an intention to overthrow the state. The definition was arguably so broad that it could easily include political opinions and acts of free expression, including by artists.
Prime Minister Howard’s mantra that ‘we will decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come’ was a restatement of necessity by a sovereign leader, but the second part of the phrase (deciding ‘circumstances’) marked a hardening of attitude to the plight of asylum seekers. The timing caused much grief for Labor, as it reflected the opinion of many Australians, who were swayed by Howard’s determination to use the issue of refugees—a growing number of whom were arriving by boat—in an election campaign. The problem lay in the solution for maintaining control: establishing offshore detention centres at great cost, and keeping children in detention.
It is the case that any national government should exercise the authority to control its borders, but it is an ugly step from that proposition to demonising people fleeing their own country, treating arbitrarily those who arrive, leaving children vulnerable in other countries and confecting a larger patriotic storm around the genuine threat that terrorism poses—all in the name of national security.
Once governments start to enlarge the legal and political apparatus of the state, this in turn restricts democratic freedoms, leading, as was the case with the sedition provisions, to potentially crushing all dissent.
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