I’d been dispatched to the outfield, out of harm’s way, when Tubby, having dug in for a long innings, took a swing at a slow ball from boxer Anthony Mundine and skied it. It ended up coming my way under a blaze of lights. ‘Catch it!’ shouted my teammates, and Mike Whitney, who was umpiring close by, yelled out, ‘Run, Pete, run!’
I fastened my eye on the ball, ran as instructed and managed to hold it—no matter if I fell, I was determined to clutch that red bullet.
After the game, Taylor seemed miffed and didn’t shake hands—a surprise, but then again maybe he didn’t like the look of the scorecard: Taylor (Australian captain, Liberal supporter), bowled Mundine (champion boxer, Aboriginal man, Muslim identity), caught Garrett (Labor politician, green activist).
The Oils geared up when approached to play at Sound Relief, a fundraising concert for the bushfire victims and their families organised by Michael Gudinski and the Melbourne music crew. We’d be sharing the bill with some good mates, Split Enz and Hunters & Collectors, as well as contributing to the cause. We had an affinity with the Melbourne-based Hunters, who had morphed from a uni student art band into a thundering, blue-singlet pub rock band. They blasted out big singalong anthems, underpinned by John Archer’s rumbling earth-shaking bass, fleshed out by a brass section that included Jeremy Smith and trumpeter Jack Howard, who went on to play in the Break. We toured Europe together in the early 90s, and with seven band members interested in a wide range of subjects, from the latest injury count for the Bombers through popular culture to quantum physics, they were sterling companions. I liked singer Mark Seymour; he was intense—a trait we shared—and worried away at things, including politics, which showed up in their songs. On one of the rare nights that I went out with them and tore up the town—Frankfurt, as it happened—he was good company till sun-up.
I’d need to shake out the cobwebs, so I reacquainted myself with the Oils’ albums while flying back from a ministerial meeting in Papua New Guinea—‘So that’s what we sound like.’
On the way in to Canberra I swung past Jim’s place to catch up with the band so we could run through some songs on acoustic guitars. But we ended up talking the afternoon away, just catching up and seeing how everyone’s kids, originally called the Baby Oils when they travelled with us years ago as toddlers in little Oils T-shirts, were faring.
With much inane speculation over whether the band would play ‘US Forces’ (we did), we then swung through a couple of warm-up nights in Canberra. By the eve of the first show, we’d still had no time to rehearse. But the reason for playing—doing something for others—was the driving force, so it didn’t really matter. Michael Lippold couldn’t get down for the shows, but most of our longtime road crew—including production manager John ‘Ozzie’ Vasey, lighting engineer Nick Elvin, monitor engineer Ben Shapiro and sound engineer Colin Ellis—had materialised for the warm-ups. They would make sure the wheels were firmly bolted back on.
The boys had kept at it—playing, recording and producing—so it didn’t sound too flabby. Bones was a revelation. Having by now spent a couple of years as a session muso in Nashville, his bass was stronger than ever. Once we got out in front of 80,000 at the MCG, with Melbourne’s strong community spirit ignoring the rain and filling the stadium, energy from every quarter propelled us over the line. The night was a gladdening reminder of the power of music to bring people together.
The Kinglake senior constable Cameron Caine, who’d been smack bang in the middle of the conflagration and witnessed too much trauma, asked me to return after the media circus had moved on, and so I visited again a year or so later.
While the slow pace of rebuilding was frustrating some locals, it was the time the emotional scars were taking to heal that was the hardest thing to cope with. In Australia, governments provide a fair level of support for people after natural disasters, and there was plenty of evidence of that in Kinglake, but the sadness was palpable, a black cloud hanging between the hills.
After leaving parliament, I was invited to go back again and spend some time at the Kinglake Football/Netball Club. I travelled up to the hills to see that much of the razed and blackened forest had, almost miraculously, come back to life after a few seasons of good rains. The lives of the residents, however, were still in abeyance, with outstanding legal cases and insurance claims unresolved. Many had rebuilt and moved on, some had moved out, but for others the wounds were as raw as yesterday. Still, people didn’t want to be defined by the tragedy, and who could blame them?
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After a natural disaster like Black Saturday, or hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the urgent need to face up to dangerous climate change was indisputable. Yet once Tony Abbott was elected leader of the Coalition by just one vote in 2009, he went on a mission of national destruction, repeatedly lying about the effect pricing greenhouse gas emissions would have on the economy: the towns of Whyalla, Port Pirie, Gladstone and more were to be wiped off the map, he asserted, and at one point the Coalition claimed the price of a leg of lamb would rise to $100.
As soon as he won office in 2013, Abbott moved immediately to repeal the existing ‘carbon tax’, replacing it with a policy that made taxpayers, not polluters, pay for emissions reduction. He prepared to wind down the Climate Change Authority, cut funding to the CSIRO, ceased support for the Climate Commission and signalled his willingness to do the same for the solar roofs program, and later the Renewable Energy Agency, while reducing the Renewable Energy Target. Fashioning himself as the infrastructure prime minister dedicated to building new roads, Abbott retreated to an ‘asphalt economy’, a grotesque and costly public policy failure. Meanwhile, the multibillion-dollar revenue stream from Labor’s scheme, which was funding new low-emissions technologies and businesses, was gone. So too was the income source that enabled Labor to deliver tax cuts and pension increases so low- and middle-income households were not negatively impacted by the price on carbon.
The scheme Labor ended up with was a levy on big polluting industries, as well as a limit on pollution from around 60 per cent of the economy. Unfortunately, the decision by Rudd’s inner circle to focus on the price rather than the pollution limit, on the economy rather than the environment, turned the debate technical, and the Opposition’s cliché factory went into overdrive. Yet the ‘cap and trade’ emissions trading mechanism Labor delivered was backed by almost all economists as the cheapest way to start bringing planet-heating emissions down. And it unambiguously worked: contributing to the biggest-ever drop in Australia’s emissions, with a reduction of 40 million tonnes and a cost-of-living impact of less than 1 per cent following the introduction of the carbon laws. It will take a lot of time and money to recover from the black hole of the Abbott years, however long they last.
The perverse nature of the climate change debate in Australia was striking, but for the incoming Labor government, managing its dynamics was equally vexed. At the time the government, especially Prime Minister Rudd, was trying to keep business and the hypercritical Australian and News Corporation tabloid newspapers onside. It was a fruitless exercise and many ministers knew it, but the flow-on effect was to weaken the government’s resolve as climate change committee meetings were cancelled and the policy constantly reworked. The doubters in the cabinet were always dropping dissent to the press gallery. Having opponents in the ranks like Joel Fitzgibbon and Martin Ferguson didn’t help.
As recorded by accounts of the period, there was a window of opportunity for bipartisan action. During that brief period of time the Opposition was led by Malcolm Turnbull, who was willing to take action on climate change by supporting a full legislative package.
However, Rudd was intent on inflicting political pain on the Coalition and on Malcolm Turnbull in particular, and drew out the negotiations seeking support from minor parties in the Senate with the aim of denying Turnbull the opportunity to take some credit. Meanwhile Greens party leaders Bob Brown and Christine Milne wanted to do the same to Labor by refusing to support the propo
sed scheme on the basis the emissions targets were too modest, thus denying the government the achievement.
One day after finally agreeing with the government to pass the legislation, Malcolm Turnbull was deposed as leader and the Greens voted with the Abbott-led Opposition to defeat the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. The nail in the coffin for the original scheme as we envisaged it in Opposition was the ultimate failure of conviction by Rudd and those close to him at the time, who were opposed to it going ahead in the aftermath of the disappointments of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference.
Rudd’s eventual decision to delay the bill wasn’t communicated to the cabinet before being made public. In walking away from the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, which by then had been rejected by the Senate twice, thus setting the ground for a double dissolution election, he missed the opportunity to take the issue back to the people, still willing to see strong action on climate change.
It was always an uphill battle to sustain the first flush of ambition for an effective emissions trading scheme. The climate change subcommittee had initially canvassed limiting permit allocations to 30 per cent of the most affected businesses, a figure that was then lifted to 60, and finally ended at 90 per cent, and this pattern was repeated ad nauseam across most aspects of the proposal. I should have seen the about face coming, having argued for a bigger cut in emissions in the original scheme, only to find myself friendless in cabinet. Having famously declared climate change the greatest moral issue of our time, Rudd—aided and abetted by the bloody-mindedness of the Greens, who were willing to sacrifice the good for the perfect—squibbed it.
The remarkable opportunity that the 2007 election outcome offered to introduce effective emissions trading into a high-carbon economy was squandered. It was a body blow to everyone who’d worked so hard up to that point and a calamity for the nation, given how daunting the issue is. The bitter irony was that now conservative parties in other countries were adopting or championing policies diametrically opposed to their Australian counterparts. David Cameron in the UK, German chancellor Angela Merkel and even Arnie Schwarzenegger in California promoted carbon-pricing mechanisms and other clean-energy policies. And we’ve since seen the emergence of carbon-pricing or emissions trading schemes in South Korea, South Africa and China.
I visited the US early on to assess the progress of energy-efficiency programs in states like California as we planned an ambitious rollout at home. In that state, Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was delivering policies aimed at curtailing greenhouse emissions in the eighth largest economy in the world.
We met in the state capital, Sacramento, and when Schwarzenegger learned I wasn’t leaving till late the following day, he asked me to lunch at his home in the Los Angeles hills. The customary practice is for visiting dignitaries to exchange small gifts when they meet. Due to Australian sensitivities about politicians receiving any gifts at all, our offerings were usually modest, verging on tokenistic: a coffee-table book on Australia’s outback, or a native timber business-card holder were typical examples. In this case, the ‘Governator’—as Schwarzenegger was dubbed—handed me a smart boxed collection of famous American films, including a few of his that I’d never seen and probably wouldn’t have made the critics’ top-ten list, but it was an appropriate gift.
Unusually, and luckily, I’d brought a collection of Oils CDs, just in case I bumped into someone in LA who’d appreciate them. So the koala tiepin was shelved and a more appropriate exchange took place.
The next day we wended our way up to Arnie’s place, my adviser’s jaw dropping as we surveyed the length of the movie star-cum-politician’s driveway.
My view on LA hadn’t changed—too much smog and self-promotion for my liking—but perched on the top of a hill high above the San Fernando Valley with the Governator dishing up steak and swapping yarns, it felt relatively benign. We were safe from evil crime lords and at last there was someone prepared to take on vested interests, including those in his own party, and go out on a limb on the great moral issue of our time.
Once Greg Combet was appointed Minister for Climate Change and Energy in 2010, he was able to engineer a constructive process, as the second-term Gillard government legislated a price on carbon pollution. But by then climate change had gone from a political asset to a millstone around the government’s neck. Much of the government’s political capital had drained away and the scheme we ended up with was a weaker version of the original proposal.
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The sad fact is that Labor in power lacked the internal discipline to smoothly shepherd reforms as big as this one out the door. Even though it’s a truth universally acknowledged that in politics, as in marriage, disunity is death, this didn’t prevent selfish and ultimately self-defeating acts of sabotage and disloyalty from infecting the Rudd/Gillard governments from day one.
All the members of the Labor Caucus would have been aware that the Whitlam government’s rocky tenure owed much to monumental instances of disloyalty and ill-discipline. The Hawke and Keating governments fared better, as tighter factions worked to impose some discipline. Even Keating’s leadership push, which might have knocked Labor off balance, was out in the open and hardly relied on dirty tricks to see him prevail. But in the period leading up to Kevin Rudd’s ascension as leader breakouts were common, and with multiple changes of leadership, undermining and backgrounding had become de rigueur.
This kind of behaviour is not exceptional, nor confined to the Labor Party, but under Labor in these two terms it was endemic. Irrespective of the party or the circumstances, despite voters saying they want to hear politicians speaking plainly, once conflict is out in the open they shy away in droves.
In peace or war, depression or prosperity, one important element of stable government in our political system is the principle of Cabinet-in-Confidence. The discipline of cabinet solidarity, meaning that once the cabinet has made a decision then ministers and the Caucus lock in behind it, is crucial. If a minister feels they can’t support a decision, they can always resign.
Without this assurance of confidentiality, anyone could use the media as an auxiliary propaganda arm to attack or defend a decision, or to advance their own position. The result is that the government’s internal travails, not the reforms it is attempting to secure, become the story, and the underlying untrustworthiness of politicians is communicated to the press gallery journalists, who in turn report it to their readers. One way of understanding the Rudd/Gillard years is through this prism. Rudd was a chronic feeder of information to favoured journalists, although he was by no means alone.
The possibility of reading, even in code, what you’d said behind closed doors meant the level of trust required to have open discussion was absent. Other than in my portfolio areas in cabinet, I would contribute where I thought I could add value, and speak out strongly on propositions I opposed, such as the offshore-processing arrangements for refugees on Manus Island. But that was where the discussion should have ended. I never believed it was right to subsequently broadcast my view, nor leak cabinet decisions to the media.
People often ask how it is that the Rudd and, later, Gillard governments struggled with aspects of governing. A big part of the answer lies in the nature of Rudd’s leadership. The new prime minister turned out to be a poll-driven control freak who couldn’t bring himself to delegate and who surrounded himself with overconfident, inexperienced advisers. The business of government quickly became paralysed as he tried to micromanage national affairs and an ambitious reform agenda around the twenty-four-hour news cycle. His treatment of senior bureaucrats and colleagues was laced with contempt. Rudd liked to cite the modern saint Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a model, but he was more like Brute Bernard, the 1960s professional bad-boy wrestler, except that the Brute was just play-acting, whereas beneath his chirpy exterior, Rudd really was a brute.
Another part is that the senior leadership group—Faulkner, Gillard, Swan, Albanese, Conroy and others—didn’t put m
inisters (starting with Rudd) and backbenchers sufficiently on the spot when destabilising behaviour raised its ugly head. They may have undertaken this task individually, but the collective will to stamp out destructive behaviour was lacking. Nor did they make sure the leader stuck with the strategic direction agreed by cabinet and insist on the discipline to see it through.
It was a frustrating experience for someone new to the party. I would keep my own counsel, but I was often left scratching my head at the tolerance of errant behaviour, particularly from the leader. The absence of order at the top meant we would just have to concentrate on getting on with the job. In those lunatic days and restless nights, what else you could do?
29
DYING LIGHT
AN UNEXPECTED PART of my new role turned out to be the moving encounters I had with people, some at the end of their lives. Whether it was an intimate brush with mortality, or a throwaway conversation in a plane with a stranger about the hopes they had for their kids, these interactions underscored for me how crucial it was to cement positive things in place now that we were in government. Actions that would outlast me, and hopefully endure.
Through late 2007 I took some time to get the hang of being a minister, all the while hankering to get north and roll out some decent dollars into additional Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs).
Along with arts centres, the Indigenous ranger programs that had been established to look after these newly acquired areas had proved to be durable organisations, especially during the period of the Howard government’s intervention in the Northern Territory. The rangers were a great success story. Their on-ground knowledge was unmatched—passed down by older community members who’d walked their country for a lifetime and cherished it as a library—and was now invaluable when it came to managing the land, as well as giving people a reason to stay in touch with their country. Their tasks were diverse: controlling feral invaders, fire management, and tracking and monitoring endemic species—all part of a day’s work. Rangers needed to acquire a variety of new skills in order to take on these tasks, from motor repair to logistics and planning, and over time some ranger programs had grown into highly professional, effective organisations, crucial to increasing the number of young locals in work.
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