A Secret Country

by John Pilger

  Carroll got quickly to his subject – the rise of Bob Hawke. At that time Hawke, having completed his term as ACTU President, was a newly elected Labor member of Parliament. Carroll said he knew Hawke ‘pretty well’ and ‘basically Hawke will be [Labor Party] leader by the middle of next year; and that’s my business, and we won’t go into that in any great depth. But he will be there. It’s all under way. The game plan is totally under way, and I forecast 3 to 5 on a Hawke Government in ’83!’

  He did not say how he knew this, and added that ‘basically Hawkie wants to be Prime Minister for ten years, not for three . . . No Labor Party has ever held power, other than in wartime, for more than one term . . . We [Business International] had a meeting with him about one month ago and we’re meeting with him every six months from now. It’s terribly important.’26

  It was not only Alan Carroll’s forecast that was correct in almost every detail. Shortly after the coup against Whitlam, a top-secret CIA briefing document for the President described Hawke as the ‘best qualified’ to succeed Whitlam as Labor leader.27 The CIA’s judgment on what was best for Australia came true in February 1983. Three weeks before an election was due, Hawke and others on the party’s right wing mounted a successful putsch against Hayden. With the slogan, ‘Bob Hawke, Bringing Australia Together’, the Silver Bodgie became Prime Minister.

  To Bob Hawke the future lay not in Whitlam’s ‘dream’, but in the world of ‘consensus’, a word which was to pepper his speeches. But what he meant was not immediately clear. Whose consensus was he referring to? Indeed, what consensus was there between the rich suburbanites of Toorak and Bellevue Hill and Aboriginal Australians who possessed not even running water; between those who sailed luxurious cruisers in Sydney Harbour and those who sweated for a dollar an hour over a sewing machine in a tin shed in their backyard; between those who dominated the Australian property markets and the elderly who peered from behind lace curtains in rented slums? Labor’s great post-war reformers, Ben Chifley and Gough Whitlam, subscribed to no such ‘consensus’, rather to modest application of white Australia’s egalitarian dream: a ‘fair go for all’. The beneficiaries of Hawke’s ‘consensus’ would not be the same people.

  Those who ran the ‘big end of town’ would build this consensus. They would provide the money and the power. Their values would be the values of the consensus; and, of course, their own wealth and power would be reinforced by it. Without such Mates, Hawke would argue, he, the ‘best qualified’ of his party, might never have come to office.

  The principal Mate in this reconstruction was, and remains, Sir Peter Abeles. ‘Bob and I’, said Abeles, ‘dreamed dreams together.’28 Abeles is mightily rich. He is head of the multinational trucking and shipping corporation, Thomas National Transport (TNT), which operates in some eighty countries and employs more than 50,000 people. With Rupert Murdoch, he controls Ansett Airlines and most of the Australian airline industry. Abeles, who came to Australia from Hungary in 1949, understood ‘influence’. From gifts of perfume and whisky to favoured journalists, trips and other ‘facilities’ to politicians and trade-union officials, the urbane Abeles became, according to the National Times, ‘the godhead of an extraordinary network of power, patronage and influence’.29

  For example, one of Abeles’s oldest Mates was the Liberal Party Premier of New South Wales, Robert Askin. Abeles and Askin played poker together; and Askin saw that his Mate was knighted by the Queen in 1972 for ‘services to transport, charities and universities’ (Askin had himself knighted on the same day). When Askin retired as State Premier in 1975, he joined the board of Abeles’s TNT. Four years later an independent member of the New South Wales Parliament, John Hatton, alleged that ‘under the Askin Government in the 1960s, the real penetration of organised crime by overseas gangsters, mobsters and the Mafia took place. I have no doubt that ex-Premier Askin knew and may have encouraged these activities.’30 In 1981, on Askin’s death, David Hickie wrote in the National Times:

  When Sir Robert Askin was in power, organised crime became institutionalised in New South Wales for the first time. Sydney was, and has remained, the crime capital of Australia.

  Askin was central to this. His links with three major crime figures . . . allowed the transformation of Sydney’s baccarat clubs into fully-fledged casinos . . . According to a reliable source very high in the old Galea [crime] empire, Askin and [Police Commissioner] Hanson were paid approximately $100,000 each a year from the end of Sydney’s gang wars in 1967/8 until Askin’s retirement. The source is impeccable.31

  Abeles sought out Hawke almost immediately after Hawke became President of the ACTU. On the day of their appointment Hawke fell ill and Abeles took a gift to his sick bed. The two men soon developed a close relationship that was not so much one of Mates, rather of mentor and student. According to Hawke’s biographer, Blanche d’Alpuget, Abeles would sit up through the night with Hawke, listening to his problems, which often had to do with the fate of his manoeuvres in the trade-union world; and the mentor would calm him when he cried. ‘Bob shows his emotions,’ said Abeles, ‘I find that most attractive about him . . . when I’ve had personal problems, I cry. If I’ve had problems with my children, Bob will listen to me. And I will do that for him.’32 Abeles became omnipresent in Hawke’s life. He intervened during a domestic crisis and reportedly helped to ‘save’ the family. He gave one of Hawke’s daughters, Ros, a Citroën car for her seventeenth birthday; he also gave her a public relations job with Ansett Airlines. And it was the Abeles’s white Rolls-Royce which Hawke drove with such evident joy.

  Abeles is an international figure, and whenever Hawke travelled to the United States he entered an important sphere of the ‘empire of influence’. In 1978, when he arrived in San Francisco on his way to a Socialist International meeting in Vancouver, Hawke was Abeles’s guest. He and his travelling companion, David Combe, were met at the airport by a TNT manager, who drove them to a luxury hotel where accommodation had been ‘taken care of by TNT. (At the time TNT and the ACTU had a joint travel company, of which Hawke was a director.) ‘The entertainment’, the TNT man informed them, ‘has been taken care of by Rudy Tham of the Teamsters’ Union.’

  Both Rudy Tham and the venue for the ‘entertainment’, Sal’s Bar, were notorious. Sal was a minor Mafia figure who specialised in ‘private parties’ and his bar was under constant surveillance by a special intelligence unit of the San Francisco police. Rudy Tham was also an important Mafia ‘associate’, who later went to prison for embezzlement. Tham ran Local 856, the second largest Teamsters’ branch in San Francisco. Without the co-operation of Local 856, whose members included freight checkers, TNT could not function in the United States.

  During the 1970s TNT’s American operation had been beset by a series of strikes, shootings and bombings. These stopped when Rudy Tham became what TNT’s Australian manager in the United States described as a ‘co-ordinator/ intermediary in the industrial scene’. Abeles later denied that Tham held such a position. Whatever the truth, the Teamsters’ unexpected accommodation of TNT proved critical to the establishment of Abeles’s interests in the United States. When TNT first acquired an American freight-forwarding company, a loss of $US3 million was expected; with the Teamsters’ co-operation the company made a profit in its first year.

  During this time – the early 1970s – Tham visited Australia and, according to the National Times, ‘contacted New South Wales organised crime figures. Thus began a series of visits to Tham on the US west coast by Sydney businessman Bela Csidei and ex-policeman Murray Riley.’33 Csidei, who with Riley was later convicted of major drug trafficking, was a friend of Abeles. Riley had purported to represent the interests of Abeles as a prospective buyer of a Las Vegas casino; Abeles denied this.

  According to court testimony, Tham introduced Abeles to Jimmy ‘the Weasel’ Fratianno, the famous Mafia ‘hit man’, and to ‘Benny Eggs’ Mangano, who was associated with Frank Tieri, the boss of the New York Genovese family.34 In 1981
Tieri became the first mobster to be convicted of running a Mafia crime family, largely on Fratianno’s evidence. Abeles vigorously denied that he knew about their Mafia connections; but he did acknowledge that he had paid Mangano and another a ‘consultancy fee’ of $US300,000 for ‘advice’ on how to acquire an east coast shipping line, Seatrain, and other matters related to the New York waterfront.

  Fratianno testified that he had several meetings with Abeles; again, Abeles denied this. In 1977 the Crime Intelligence Division of the San Francisco police got in touch with the New South Wales police seeking information on three Australians associated with Fratianno; one of them was Abeles. A San Francisco police official said, ‘Money has been exchanged between Abeles and Tham.’ Abeles denied he had paid any money to Tham, Fratianno or the Teamsters’ Union. In 1981 US Senate hearings on waterfront corruption heard evidence that Seatrain, Abeles’s shipping line, was paying kickbacks to organised crime.35

  The Abeles’s home overlooks Sydney Harbour, and the butler wears gloves and, when required, knee breeches. Lady ‘Kitty’ Abeles has a private fortune and was featured on the cover of the Bulletin magazine under the headline HOW THE RICH LIVE. She compared the splendid position of her Sydney home with Monte Carlo, which she and Sir Peter visit often. They both like to gamble large sums and when they travel, Lady Abeles prefers to carry ‘a separate safe’ from Sir Peter.36

  Among the Abeles’s frequent guests is Neville Wran, also known as ‘Nifty Neville’.

  Wran played a critical part in the founding of Australia’s new Order of Mates and in the rise and rise of Bob Hawke. It was Wran who brought the Labor Party back to power in Australia’s most populous State less than a year after Whitlam’s dismissal and the crushing of the Federal party. New South Wales is the home of Labor’s right-wing machine and Wran, as Premier, was arguably its most talented product. Like Hawke, Wran saw himself as a ‘realist’, a ‘pragmatist’ and a future Prime Minister of Australia. Like Hawke, he saw as a means to this end the cultivation of the rich and powerful, especially those who controlled the media and were Labor’s traditional enemies.

  Shortly after he was elected Premier, Wran and his wife, Jill, were flown free by Sir Peter Abeles to a holiday in tropical New Caledonia. It was a happy beginning to a long Mateship. One of Wran’s first actions on becoming Premier was to ask Abeles’s advice on who should run an enquiry into the troubled New South Wales docks. Abeles nominated his codirector and Mate, Alex Carmichael, whom Wran appointed deputy chairman of the State dockyard. The first major contracts at the dockyard went to Carmichael’s and Abeles’s company, TNT. When the opposition Liberal Party complained about Carmichael’s conflict of interest, the State Auditor-General made the surprising announcement that only minimal information about the TNT contract had been made available to him.37 Shortly afterwards Carmichael was appointed chairman of the State Rail Authority. In 1983, reported the National Times, ‘the Railways Union asked for an enquiry into why the SRA had paid $4.2 million to buy back a lease of railway land from TNT subsidiary Seatainers Ltd’.38

  Perhaps the most significant bonding of new Mates was Wran’s granting of the lucrative Lotto (lottery) licence to a consortium dominated by the media proprietors Kerry Packer, also known as ‘the Goanna’ (a primeval Australian lizard) and Rupert Murdoch, also known as ‘the Dirty Digger’.

  Murdoch is one of Abeles’s oldest Mates. Between them they have dominated the Australian airline industry. It was Abeles’s TNT trucks which broke the siege of Murdoch’s printing operation at Wapping in London in 1986, allowing Murdoch the profits he needed to extend his television empire in the United States and ensuring that the 5,000 print workers, sacked by Murdoch, would never regain their jobs.

  Wran’s decision to give the Lotto licence to Murdoch and Packer caused a furore among those of his Labor colleagues who recalled the lengths to which the two proprietors had gone to keep Labor from office, especially the orchestrated distortions in the Murdoch press before the 1975 coup. Wran ignored these complaints and appointed the ubiquitous Abeles man, Alex Carmichael, as the chairman of the Lotto Control Board. Carmichael remained in that post in spite of his subsequent appointment to the board of Ansett Airlines, owned by Murdoch and Abeles. (Ansett was already employing Wran’s wife, Jill, as a consultant.)

  Wran’s ‘pragmatism’ did not go unrecognised; during his decade as political boss of New South Wales he was often supported by the Packer and Murdoch media, and this may well have helped to sustain him in office in times of acute political and personal stress. During the Wran years more than a dozen major enquiries, including Royal Commissions, were held into political corruption and organised crime in New South Wales. Several of these involved Wran’s predecessor, Sir Robert Askin, who was in the pay of organised crime, and a previous Labor Justice Minister, N. J. Mannix, who on being informed that his name appeared in the ‘black book’ of Sydney’s most powerful criminal, Richard Reilly, said, ‘I knew he was a criminal, but I saw nothing wrong in having him for a friend while I was Minister of Justice.’39

  During the Wran years corruption seemed at times to be pervasive and to justify the description of Sydney as the most corrupt city in the Western world after Newark, New Jersey and Brisbane, Queensland. Politicians, judges and senior policemen and their various ‘associates’ were, and remain, the subject of official investigation and criminal charges. The New South Wales Minister for Prisons was jailed for seven and a half years for taking bribes to bring about the early release of prisoners. He did this apparently because he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in gambling debts. The State’s former Chief Stipendiary Magistrate was given four years for perverting the course of justice. (He served just ten months.) Neville Wran himself was fined for contempt of court and subjected to relentless questions and allegations about his knowledge of corruption, but was exonerated by a Royal Commission.

  The ‘Botany case’, a relatively small affair, was not untypical of the times. Shortly before the Wran Government was elected in 1976, senior executives at Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited headquarters expressed their concern about News Limited land in the Sydney suburb of Botany, which was due to be re-zoned as residential land and on which the company wanted to build a factory. The local Labor member, Laurie Brereton, was later charged with conspiring to bribe two local aldermen, who gave evidence that Brereton had told them that, if they deferred the zoning, the Labor Party would get $A20,000 and that this would include $A5,000 of ‘personal campaign funds’. Brereton allegedly told the aldermen that the Labor Party owed Murdoch a favour because he had supported Labor in 1974.

  The case was heard by Chief Stipendiary Magistrate Murray Farquhar, who dismissed it on a legal technicality. (Farquhar subsequently received a four-year prison sentence on another matter.) The Solicitor-General decided to indict Brereton; but the election which brought Wran to power in 1976 intervened and the case was dropped. Brereton continued with his political career and became a Cabinet Minister.

  In spite of living in a hot-house atmosphere of innuendo, Neville Wran not only survived, but retired as something of an elder statesman of a ‘new’ Australian Labor Party, now the party of Bob Hawke, based on the ‘Wran model’. However, not even a eulogistic send off by Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers could compensate for the reward he wanted above all others; the Silver Bodgie had beaten him to that. When I met Bob Hawke in Fitzroy Gardens in February 1976 he did not look like a bodgie. He was dishevelled, drawn and wore what seemed to be a permanent scowl. As the novelist Howard Jacobson later wrote of a lost-property clerk he encountered in Darwin, ‘He possessed that twinkling callousness which passes in Australia for calm.’40 He reminded me of Richard Nixon. He had Nixon’s half-smile, with the top lip drawn in, Nixon’s habit of ‘strap-hanging’ on an ear lobe and Nixon’s darting eyes. When passers-by recognised him – ‘Gidday, Bob. Howyergoin?’ – he would reply in what was becoming known then as an ‘ocker accent’: full nasal with vowels spread-eagle. However, this wou
ld change remarkably for other occasions: the vowels would be rounded and some French would be added: on dit was a favourite.

  Three weeks earlier Hawke had held a secret meeting with Rupert Murdoch, who was then well on the way to becoming the most influential press proprietor in the world. Murdoch had demonstrated this influence with his vendetta against Whitlam; and many in the Labor Party felt great bitterness towards him. ‘Is this country’, asked a Labor Senator in Parliament, ‘to continue to be run with Governments being made and broken, and men being made and broken, by snide, slick innuendoes of a lying, perjuring pimp – Rupert Murdoch?’41

  When word of the Hawke/Murdoch meeting slipped out, and Hawke, then Federal President of the Labor Party, was observed slapping Murdoch’s back, many people were angry and felt betrayed. However, others who claimed they knew Hawke well saw no inconsistency; he was ‘building bridges’, or, in Hawke’s words, ‘a consensus for the future’. There were other secret meetings with Murdoch, as the two men constructed a ‘bridge’ that stands today as a monument to their mutual, accrued benefits.

  I was making a documentary film for British television about Australia in the immediate aftermath of the Whitlam coup. With a film cameraman walking ahead of us, Hawke and I strolled the length of Fitzroy Gardens. A ‘new Australia’ was emerging, he said, out of the ‘mistakes’ of the Whitlam period; Whitlam was naïve to expect people to ‘keep up their rage’; Labor had to ‘move forward’. When I asked him what he and Murdoch had talked about at their secret meeting, his face became florid and his eyes rolled back into his head. I had not seen this done before, not even by Nixon; interviewing someone whose eyes disappear is disconcerting.

  ‘You bloody Poms come out here’, he said, still eyeless, ‘and think you know exactly how things are done in Australia . . .’

  ‘I’m an Australian,’ I interjected.