A Secret Country

by John Pilger

  I met Bond in his Sydney headquarters, in offices trimmed with fake walnut and ebony. The oppressiveness of the surroundings seemed at odds with Bond’s ebullience. In one corner was a model of his proposed Sydney Bond Tower. ‘Ugly isn’t it?’ he said. That afternoon he had bought Sydney’s Hilton Hotel. ‘I only got the building,’ he said with a laugh, ‘not the people in it.’

  The Hilton did not long remain Bond property. It was sold shortly afterwards for a clear profit of $A480 million – all of it untaxed. The Hilton deal, according to Four Corners, had been done through a web of companies, ending up with one based in the Cook Islands, a volcanic pile in the middle of the Pacific. Bond executives described the sale as an ‘international transaction’ and claimed that no Australian tax was payable. But, whatever the subterfuge, here was a major Australian corporation selling an Australian asset to an undisclosed buyer and, on the face of it, owing the Australian people around $A40 million in tax, of which not a cent had been paid.94

  The Hilton deal was not unusual. In 1988 the Bond Corporation made 90 per cent of its profits – or $A250 million – in the Cook Islands, where it does not sell a single can of XXXX. ‘This Government’, Treasurer Keating said, ‘will not tolerate any action by companies which rips off the rest of the community.’95

  According to a report by the Australian Tax Office, Bond Corporation and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation made their profits for 1987–8, a total of $A673 million, in tax havens like the Cook Islands. The report said that they and thousands of other Australian companies had cost ordinary tax payers $A1.2 billion in lost revenue in just one year.96

  I asked Alan Bond how, with so many potentially conflicting commercial interests, he could run an honest media. ‘How would you respond’, I said, ‘if one of your TV journalists found out something untoward in a corner of your empire and exposed it?’

  ‘The instructions to our journalistic staff’, said Bond, ‘is that if you find something you release it first and be seen to release it first.’97

  This was interesting in the light of a finding by the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal that Bond had made an ‘unprecedented’ payment of $A400,000 to the Premier of Queensland, Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, ‘in order to maintain good relations between the Premier and the Bond group of companies’. The payment, said the Tribunal, ‘could have compromised the independence’ of one of Bond’s Queensland TV stations and ‘led the beneficiary to believe that the station will bow to pressure in future’. Bjelke-Petersen had brought a libel action against the Brisbane station, QTQ, after a current affairs programme had alleged that he had used his official position for private advantage on a trip to Japan. When Bond bought the station he was told by its insurance advisers that the Premier’s claim was unlikely to succeed, that although the station had technically libelled the Premier, its defence was ‘strongly arguable’. Still, Bond rejected this and paid up.98 Bond has mining, brewing and hotel interests in Queensland, all of them highly dependent for their profitability on Government decisions.

  In 1989, the Broadcasting Tribunal decided that Alan Bond was not a ‘fit and proper’ person to run a television service: a decision which is still being contested in the courts. Prior to this judgment, the Minister for Communications announced that the Hawke Government might change the Broadcasting Act to ensure that the Australian public was not deprived of Bond’s broadcasting services. Such has been the essence of the Order of Mates.

  By 1990, however, Bondy’s empire was crumbling under the weight of its lOUs. Banks and investors sought the immediate repayment of $A1.4 billion and his beer interests were threatened with the receiver. Edifices were sold. His television network was put on the market, prompting Kerry Packer, who sold it to him, to reach for his chequebook: mateship, after all, has its limits. And yet for all the disclosures of practices more akin to an unlicensed gambling den than a great international corporation, Bondy did not sink. Indeed, in full-page newspaper advertisements he pleaded his case direct to ‘my dear fellow Australians’; and as if to underline ‘my patriotism above all’ he pledged Bond Corporation to build a $A12 million replica of Captain Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, as a gift to ‘this greatest of nations’.

  However, by 1992 the saga of Australia’s most glamorous Mate had become a farce. Owing billions, Bond stood before bankers at his Tricontinental Corporation and said that he had only one asset to his name: a gold Rolex watch. ‘So the bankers asked for it’, reported the Asian Wall Street Journal. ‘Broke but not beaten, Mr. Bond refused to turn over the timepiece . . .

  It is a long way from the hero’s welcome Mr Bond received from the nation when he won the coveted America’s Cup away from the Americans in 1983. On the eighth anniversary of his famous yachting victory, Mr Bond woke to an ignominious day that began with a high-speed car chase witnessed by his neighbours in Perth’s swank Dalkeith suburb.

  With television crews in hot pursuit filming the chase for the nation’s nightly news, a harried Mr Bond sought refuge at a local police station where he told reporters that a stranger in a big red truck with big bumper bars on it tail-gated him and tried to run him off the road . . . The stranger turned out to be an agent hired by the banks to track down Mr Bond. One witness reported a skirmish in the police parking lot during which Mr Bond was served with the papers.99

  A judge ruled that the bankruptcy order served on Bond was deficient on technical grounds. He was served with another at Sydney Airport; at the time of writing, he is fighting this in the courts. Indeed, courts are where Bondy spends much of his time these days. He has been given bail of $A100,000 on charges related to his part in the collapse of the Perth merchant bank, Rothwells Limited. If convicted, he may face a prison term. When the ‘sirens began to wail’ in 1989, Bondy explained it all like this: ‘Maybe it’s because I’m out there like any entrepreneur should be, breaking new ground, taking risks, doing things that other, more conservative people only dream about’.100

  Christopher Skase embodied the Hawke/Keating years. Skase was the bankers’ and journalists’ Mate. He would fly them almost anywhere and pay their bills for almost anything. He was, after all, once a journalist himself; he understood the value placed on patronage and comfort by certain of his former colleagues. The very best mates would find themselves on Mirage III, which Skase bought for $A6 million and which featured baby blue carpets and Chinese antiques. These mates would be flown to its Brisbane mooring in Skase’s jet, with its big leather seats and a bed. Even a visit to Skase’s office was an occasion high above a reception of marble and Egyptian antiques. ‘Skase was probably Australia’s greatest salesman’, said a bankers mate. ‘Better than Bondy. Very smooth . . . yeah, we liked him’.101 Skase and his wife Pixie were almost always photographed smiling, often wearing their twin T-shirts which declared, TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE.102

  It was Skase’s Quintex company, which owned Channel 7 and resorts, that could not bear the fees Skase and his directors paid themselves; in one year Skase took $A12.6 million from his management company. When two independent directors resigned in 1989, after refusing to approve the company’s accounts, yet another siren wailed. Among the disclosures was the fact that $A44.7 million had been paid by Quintex for ‘management services and expenses’ to a company controlled by a number of Quintex directors. When Quintex finally collapsed, Skase was trying to take over the Hollywood studios of MGM in a deal involving more than $A2 billion – which was the sum of the company’s debts and for which ‘prospects for recovery are slim’, according to the receiver.103

  Skase was declared bankrupt in June, 1991 and three days later he and Pixie left Australia to continue their good life in La Noria, a luxurious estate on the Spanish island of Majorca. At the time of writing he has been summonsed to appear before a Federal Court to answer questions about his financial affairs, but has yet to turn up. The Justice Minister, Michael Tate, says he believes Australians ‘are sick to death and quite angry at the spectacle of high-living bankrupts . . .’104 ‘Stil
l, you have to admire Skase’s gall’, mused an investigative team in the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘After Quintex went into receivership, Skase claimed $A634,000 in holiday pay and long-service leave’105

  For many Australians the ABC is the last redoubt of honest news and current affairs, ‘an oasis of public service broadcasting in a desert of commercialism’, according to a friend of mine who once took elocution lessons before applying for a job in what used to be the ABC Talks Department. Unfortunately, vowel transplants did him no good; he was ‘too Australian’. ‘You really should go to London for a year or two,’ he was advised at the ABC, which had digested the shibboleths of Lord Reith’s BBC, including a view of itself as a temple of impartiality. Like the BBC at its best, the ABC has been run with high professionalism and flair. Like the BBC at its worst, the ABC has looked upon impartiality as a principle to be suspended when the established order is threatened. Unlike the BBC, the ABC is dependent upon direct Government funding. This has meant that Governments in Canberra have been able to ‘reward’ and ‘punish’ the public broadcasting service.

  The real importance of the ABC is its national character. In a continent as vast as the United States and with a fraction of the population, the ABC alone broadcasts almost everywhere: from Tasmania in the far Antipodes to Pilbara in the north-west and to the islands that brush Asia.

  In the 1980s the ABC began to discard its BBC ‘blanket’. The automatic purchase of BBC television programmes ceased, and a variety of other sources were sought at home and overseas. Under a new Director of Television, Richard Thomas, ironically a former BBC man, the nature of much of ABC television began to change. Unlike many of his colleagues, Thomas believed that the sacred lore of ‘balance’ in practice too often served to disguise a system biased in favour of the prevailing establishment wisdom and against a genuine diversity of viewpoint. The latter is known in much of the Australian media as ‘controversy’. In 1985, on Thomas’s initiative, the ABC broadcast a documentary film I made with Alan Lowery which examined distortions in white Australia’s history of the Aborigines. I was subsequently contracted to make a series of short reports for the current affairs programme, The 7.30 Report. I proposed an interview with the Silver Bodgie.

  In 1986 Richard Thomas suffered a heart attack and was forced into a long convalescence. It was during this time that David Hill, a Mate of the New South Wales Labor Party machine, became the Chairman of the ABC, after being interviewed for the job by Bob Hawke. Shortly afterwards he took over the chief executive’s job, even though he has no background in broadcasting. He was briefly a financial journalist on Rupert Murdoch’s Australian, then a lecturer in economics, then an assistant to Premier Neville Wran. Wran sent him to the United States to negotiate the Lotto licence with Murdoch, then gave him the State railways to run.

  At the State Rail Authority, Hill’s own runner was Tony Ferguson, a former ABC producer and Labor Party fixer who had been a prominent member of the Hawke Government’s ‘liaison service’, or propaganda unit. He is a confidant of Hawke and a guest at the Prime Minister’s home in Canberra. It was Ferguson who had offered valuable support to Hill’s prospects at the ABC and it was Ferguson who, as Hill’s political sherpa, joined him as ‘executive assistant’ at the ABC.

  On the day Richard Thomas returned to his office, he was summoned to see Hill, told he had been removed from his job, offered a ‘consultancy’ and, when he refused this, was sacked. This was the way the Labor machine had run New South Wales, and it was to be David Hill’s way at the ABC. Hill was a ‘ratings man’. Thomas had tried to change the format of the nightly news programme and had failed to increase the viewing audience; he was not a ratings man. Hill would do almost anything for ratings. He dressed up as a chauffeur and drove a veteran entertainer called Mike Walsh to a press conference where he announced Walsh’s acquisition by the ABC; to Hill, Walsh was a ‘ratings asset’. EastEnders became the ABC’s first foreign soap opera to be shown in prime time. It failed. Hill commissioned a thirty-episode soap opera set in a Bondi hotel and aptly called The Last Resort. It achieved unusually low ratings. When new programmes were presented to him, Hill enquired, ‘Listen mate, is there any rootin’ or shootin’ in it?’106 Rootin’, in Australia, is fucking.

  My ABC interview with Bob Hawke for The 7.30 Report was set for March 4, 1987, the eve of his fourth year as Prime Minister. My request had gone originally to Paul Ellercamp, who subsequently resigned as Hawke’s press secretary. This was not surprising, as Hawke reportedly had a habit of clicking his fingers at Ellercamp and yelling ‘Cigars!’107 His replacement was Barrie Cassidy, who a few weeks earlier had been the ABC’s chief political correspondent in Canberra. This sudden shift from journalism to parliamentary ‘public relations’ is common practice in Australia; journalists slip in and out of political service with such ease that an inner circle of politicians and members of the Canberra Press Gallery are often indistinguishable in their machinations. The level of this incest is such that a vice president of the Australian Journalists’ Association, Gary Scully, can claim to be defending his members’ professional independence while he is part of the Prime Minister’s propaganda unit. The language of Mates is used by all: Hawke is ‘Hawkie’, Murdoch is ‘Rupert’, Packer is ‘Kerry’.

  Cassidy appeared deeply anxious about the interview, if not terrified. ‘It’s important the PM is relaxed,’ he said. ‘I want to see you both really relaxed. I want it to be a conversation.’ He and I had several phone conversations about the art of relaxation during a political interview. He called me once to say he was re-arranging the furniture in the Prime Minister’s outer office so that we would have the most comfortable chairs and be ‘really relaxed’.

  Early on the day of the interview I went for a run around Lake Burley Griffin, the artificial lake in the centre of Canberra named after the American architect who designed the city. To its admirers, Canberra is one of the most perfectly planned cities of the twentieth century; to its detractors, it is the Ulan Bator of the southern hemisphere. With the lake as its focus, the streets radiate out in ever-increasing circles: a design said to reflect the indecisiveness and bloody mindedness of politicians in Melbourne and Sydney, who could not agree which city would host the Federal Parliament. The compromise was a cow pasture between the two State capitals, a site of inconvenience and isolation, broiling in summer and freezing in winter.

  For years the airport building at Canberra, the gateway to the capital of Australia, had the architectural charm of a shearers’ shed; and foreign diplomats returning to their Australian posts could be observed thumbing forlornly through the coy Australian version of Playboy while waiting for their luggage to arrive on a conveyance resembling a small stagecoach. Foreign Governments built odd buildings in Canberra, apparently in defiance of the locale. The Thais erected what appears to be a huge, ornate massage parlour; the Americans put up a pile of mock Georgian Disneyland. Only the squat, banal shape of the Australian Parliament House seemed to fit the landscape; in the Bicentenary year this was replaced by a structure resembling a shopping mall with a rocket launch pad.

  All this belied the fact that 10 per cent of Canberra’s inhabitants lived in poverty, and more than a quarter of Canberra’s young people were unemployed.108 You seldom saw these rejected people from your car. Running back to my hotel, I passed three dishevelled teenagers asleep under a bridge, where they had spent the night. ‘Gidday,’ said the one awake, ‘gissadollar.’

  When I arrived at Parliament House there were numerous Russians and police in the forecourt and on the steps. I bumped into Bill Hayden, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, who was showing his Soviet opposite number around King’s Hall, which is lined with gilt-framed oils of Australia’s past leaders and assorted colonial worthies. ‘Gidday,’ said Bill, ‘Howyergoin?’ At the reception counter I joined the Chinese Ambassador, who was waiting for an appointment. ‘Russians are coming! Russians are coming!’ he said, apparently as a joke. This was accompanied by maniacal c
ackle. All of us at the reception desk, an Indian, a Yugoslav and a refrigeration engineer, were infected by the Ambassador’s cackle. ‘How can I help you, Mr Ambassador?’ said the man behind the desk, now pink from trying not to laugh. ‘Gidday,’ said the Ambassador, who began to laugh at himself. I had not seen a Chinese Ambassador behave that way before, nor had I heard one say, ‘Gidday.’ A friend in the parliamentary press gallery describes the condition as ‘Canberra release’.

  Barrie Cassidy looked hunted. He said the Prime Minister was running late and I would have to settle for an abbreviated interview. Yes, but what about the ‘relaxed conversation’? ‘Sorry, not on,’ said Cassidy.

  Bob Hawke arrived at ten past eleven and Cassidy said I had exactly twenty minutes. Hawke seemed to have shrunk in the eleven years since our last meeting, the result perhaps of the Pritikin diet to which he had devoted himself since giving up the booze. Indeed, his face appeared to be so small that his hair, which had swollen to a silver Thatcher-like bloom, appeared precariously balanced. Flanked by aides, he was no longer reminiscent of Nixon, but of Jimmy Cagney in one of his affected tough guy roles. I held out my hand. ‘Get on with it,’ he said.

  I began by asking him why the rich had grown richer and the poor poorer under his Government and why he did not tax the interest on overseas borrowings which had helped to make those like Rupert Murdoch and Alan Bond extremely rich. He replied that this was a view of ‘Johnnie-come-latelys’ like myself; that he had incurred the wrath of the wealthy Queensland ‘white shoe brigade’ by bringing in a capital gains tax; and that when he came to office he had been confronted with an economy that had been brought to its knees and since then he had de-regulated the financial sector and brought in the foreign banks and, as a result, Australia was off its knees. ‘There is no virtue’, he said, ‘in saying that existing enterprises are sacrosanct; that is the essence of conservatism. The essence of change is that you allow the processes to take place which allows takeovers, which allows existing management to be bought out and taken over.’