A Secret Country

by John Pilger

  This was all very well, but he had not answered the question, and it was plain he was becoming increasingly agitated as I urged him to answer it. When I asked him why he had not used the law to stop Rupert Murdoch gaining control of most of the Australian press, he replied that the press had never been more diversified. He was now angry, indeed approaching incandescence. Suddenly his eyes rolled upwards into his head and failed to return. I remembered this from our meeting in Fitzroy Gardens. It was a successful tactic, for it rendered me speechless before a surreal visage not unlike a small Grecian statue in a silver wig.

  I asked him about Aboriginal land rights, and there I lost him. He got up and walked off, ‘You’ve had your time!’ he shouted from across the room. ‘You took up a lot of time on an issue on which you were obviously wrong’ – Murdoch’s dominance of the press – ‘You asked the wrong questions on the wrong issues. You should learn!’

  I phoned the ABC and asked the executive producer, John Turner, to transmit all twenty-two minutes of the interview, but Turner insisted that it should have only eight minutes. ‘Hawkie is Valium,’ he said. During the course of editing I negotiated another minute of air time and sought to retain the essence of each of the answers to my questions.

  The interview drew a remarkable public response. A minority complained to the ABC that I had been ‘biased’ and ‘disrespectful’. Others felt that the interview had confronted Hawke with, as Ian Davis wrote in the Canberra Times, ‘that tiny grain of truth, that kernel of self realisation, which threatens a public figure with exposure with something less than he has successfully persuaded others he is’.109 The next day Cassidy issued a statement which described the interview as ‘slanted’ and ‘heavily edited’. The transcript of the interview, he said, ‘does not record the admonishment referred to by Pilger, nor does it record the question concerning Aborigines mentioned by Pilger, nor Mr Hawke replying that he couldn’t answer the question.’ All of this was false.

  On the transcript the beginning of Hawke’s admonishment of me was clear, my question about Aborigines was clear and Hawke’s expressed unwillingness to stay and answer the question was clear. Cassidy also complained about ‘re-filmed questions’. The separate filming of ‘reverse’ or ‘cutaway’ questions is standard television practice when there is only one camera. Otherwise editing is virtually impossible. Each of my ‘cutaways’ as recorded was no different in substance or meaning from the original question.

  The ABC’s Controller of News and Current Affairs, Bob Kearsley, immediately mounted an enquiry. He compared the edited and unedited tapes and interviewed the programme’s executive producer, the camera crew and me. He then phoned me to say that the accusation ‘is plainly ridiculous on the evidence. As far as ABC current affairs is concerned the complaint is rejected and that’s the end of it.’ Kearsley wrote a report for the ABC’s acting managing director, Stuart Revill – David Hill was overseas – in which he left no doubt that the charge of misrepresentation ‘is not justified . . . the Prime Minister appears to have approached the interview in a way which made confrontation inevitable’. He recommended ‘no apology or correction’.110 The response of viewers left little doubt that Hawke had angered many by his hostility to questions about fundamental issues, and that had the ABC shown all twenty-two minutes of the interview, his populist image would have been at some risk. The response of the Mates was prompt.

  Hawke’s confidant, Tony Ferguson, was in touch with Cassidy and with Neville Wran. Wran was incensed by the interview and agreed to handle the matter in Sydney. This led the former Premier of the State to demand time on Sydney radio in which to read an extraordinary prepared statement. Wran attacked the interview as ‘deeply disrespectful’ to Hawke and called on his former aide and protege’, David Hill, to take action. Hill had been informed in New York and on his return to Sydney on March 13 he went straight from the airport to a closed meeting with Ferguson about the episode. On the same day I asked Bob Kearsley for a copy of his report; Kearsley agreed, then changed his mind and wrote me a note saying that the report could not be given out because it was now an ‘internal ABC document’. The next day Hill flew to Canberra, and without consulting his own head of news and current affairs or anyone else associated with the production of the Hawke interview, myself included, made a speech in which he effectively apologised to Hawke for the interview. He also refused to confirm whether or not I would again be allowed to work for the ABC.

  Hill’s remarks were widely reported. They could not be justified in any way by the results of the ABC’s own enquiry, nor did he attempt to justify them. I called on him to show the unedited interview and allow people to judge for themselves. He refused. Two newspapers, the Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald, planned to publish my response on March 16. As both papers were about to publish their first edition, they received calls at the behest of the ABC’s Controller of Corporate Affairs, Keith Jackson, himself a member of the Labor Party’s right wing and a Mate of Hawke. Under New South Wales libel laws, claimed Jackson, my reply was ‘potentially defamatory’. Both papers heeded the warning and dropped the story.

  On the same night Jackson and an ABC legal officer were busy warning ABC journalists that if they interviewed me, or even got in touch with me, they could be sued by their own managing director. The acting Chief of Staff of ABC radio phoned me to read me the bulletin she proposed to put on the air. She said she had been instructed to delete all mention of my reply. Two ABC current affairs producers phoned me with similar stories and to say there was nothing they could do about it. The presenter of the ABC’s AM programme, John Highfield, a respected broadcaster, phoned to apologise for the ‘embarrassment’ he felt about having to take me off his programme. ‘It’s come from above’, he said, ‘and no one is prepared to put their job on the line. The pressure has been crude; I feel very bad about it and I’m very sorry.’ Highfield, however, felt deeply about the matter and talked to the Sydney Morning Herald. When a report appeared quoting him, he was phoned by a superior at six in the morning and told, ‘You’re in deep shit, son.’ In this way David Hill gagged Australia’s public broadcasting body for almost two days.

  High farce now ensued. Hill and I were invited to appear on the Midday Show, a popular ‘chat show’ broadcast live on the commercial Channel 9 network. But when Hill arrived at the studios with Ferguson, he refused to debate with me face to face; and when told that I would have the last word, they began to walk out, bellowing expletives at the presenter, Ray Martin. This took place during a commercial break and behind a precariously mounted screen which separated Hill and Ferguson, Martin and his producers from a studio audience of mostly suburban matrons. As the refrain of ‘What a load of bullshit!’ and ‘You unethical bastards!’ drifted over them, the ladies appeared at once perplexed and entertained in a manner they had not anticipated. And when the man who did the ‘warming up’ came and told them a joke, hoping to deflect their interest, he was told by a formidable woman to ‘piss off’. After spirited negotiations, Hill agreed to say his say separately from mine, but refused to allow a clip of the Hawke interview to be shown.

  On March 28 a letter appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald signed by sixteen distinguished Australians, including the historian Manning Clark, the writers Dorothy Hewett, John Hepworth, Faith Bandler and the former Labor Minister and judge James McClelland. ‘The recent controversy over John Pilger’s interview with the Prime Minister’, it read:

  raises serious questions about the independence of the ABC . . . The heart of the matter is that this was an important interview, in which Pilger raised issues of a nature and in a way not usually seen on TV. The Prime Minister’s office promptly complained to the ABC about alleged misrepresentation and distortion on Pilger’s part. Those charges were explicitly rejected by the ABC’s controller of news and current affairs . . . Doubts that ABC employees were subject to political pressure could be resolved by the publication of the relevant documents.

  Two months passed,
during which I made several applications under Australia’s Freedom of Information Act for the ‘relevant documents’ to be released. The report of Bob Kearsley’s enquiry was not included in the first batch. However, other documents were revealing. On March 9, five days after the interview with Hawke, the ABC’s acting Director of Television, Grahame Reynolds, wrote a confidential memo to Kearsley, in which he instructed that any future ‘major political interview’ should be referred to David Hill before being broadcast. This, he wrote, ‘used to be the practice’. In his reply, Kearsley wrote that such a ‘practice’ had never existed and added that he would have ‘some difficulty with such a system, both philosophical and practical’. Kearsley was writing as a journalist who understood that such a system equalled the most insidious form of censorship and control. It is a pity the Australian people, who own the ABC, were not made aware of this important development; but by the time ABC management had complied with the law and released more papers it was too late; the story was ‘dead’. No newspaper would publish the documented evidence, which appeared finally in The Journalist, the union paper. ‘Intimidation, black bans and other forms of pressure’, Mike Steketee, a leading political journalist, once wrote, ‘have all been part of the attempts to coerce unco-operative journalists. After all, politics is a tough game and, in New South Wales, they play it for keeps.’111

  In April 1987, the ABC appointed a new chairman, Rob Somervaille who, with David Hill, was to run public broadcasting in Australia. Somervaille is a Mate of Bob Hawke and Rupert Murdoch. As a director of a Murdoch ‘shelf company’, Somervaille played a principal role in Murdoch’s takeover of the Herald and Weekly Times group and he did this while a member of the ABC board. Once confirmed as chairman, Somervaille announced his intention to prevent ‘unfortunate incidents’ at the ABC. He nominated my interview with Hawke as one such ‘incident’. During the Bicentenary year political control was further secured at the ABC. Wendy Bacon, one of Australia’s leading investigative reporters, was hired by the producer of a new ABC current affairs show, The World Tonight, only to be told subsequently that the Director of Television, Grahame Reynolds, considered her ‘unsuitable’ and had withdrawn her appointment. Wendy Bacon’s numerous investigations for the National Times had revealed deep corruption in the Labor Party machine. David Hill refused to say in what way she was ‘unsuitable’, only that he would not have her ‘at any price’.112

  Indeed, under Hill some of the best people in Australian broadcasting have been refused entry, or have got out or have been forced out. One of the finest journalists in Australia was warned off because his politics were ‘wrong’ and he was ‘too good’ at his job. Among others, a subtle McCarthyism ensures silence, only occasionally broken. When John Beeston, a radio current affairs producer, complained about crude political interference by management, he spoke for many of his colleagues who fear losing their livelihood. Beeston’s programme had lodged a Freedom of Information request for the tape of a talk given by Paul Keating, who did not want it made public. The request was being considered, said Beeston, when David Hill inexplicably told the ABC’s legal department to drop the request. Beeston has now left the ABC.113

  The precariousness of the ABC’s independence was vividly demonstrated during the 1991 Gulf War. Bob Hawke had dispatched two warships to the Gulf long before the ‘coalition’ attacked Iraq. Hawke’s unquestioning support for Israel ensured that this was ‘Bob’s war’ almost as much as it was ‘George’s war’.

  The ABC reported the war little differently from most western media organisations. Saddam Hussein was identified as a universal enemy and the United Nations the defender of the rights of small nations. However, the ABC did allow several dissenting voices to be heard, notably that of Dr Robert Springborg of Macquarie University, Sydney, whose work on the Middle East is standard text in many countries. Springborg suggested the war was wrong and cynically motivated: that the United Nations was not experiencing its finest hour and Australia had no reason to be involved. Hawke exploded. ‘I find it difficult to summon the language’, he said ‘to describe my contempt for the analysis by so-called experts. They are loaded . . . and disgraceful’.114

  A familiar process of intimidation began. Hawke was fed by two minor Mates on the far right: Michael Danby, who runs Australia Israel Publications and Gerard Henderson, of the Sydney Institute, who writes a column in the Sydney Morning Herald. Danby sent Hawke a ‘dossier’ which purported to show Springborg’s sympathy for the Iraqi regime; it failed to mention that he was banned from Iraq. For his part, Henderson wrote preposterous articles that relied on sophistry in an apparent attempt to prove that the ABC was an Israel-hating, subversive organisation. Here is an example:

  Yesterday, on ABC 3LO in Melbourne Ramona Koval interviewed Manning Clark, a Ranbow Alliance activist, Belinda Probert and the expatriate journalist John Pilger (who related how he ‘laughed’ at the ‘farce’ of Israeli residents putting on gas masks). Some joke . . .115

  In fact, I had merely referred to the famous black comedy staged by journalists in the CNN office in Jerusalem which was carried ‘live’ around the world and exemplified so much of the instant media coverage of the war. There was no suggestion of laughing at the plight of Israelis.

  At first the ABC’s managing Director, David Hill, defended the ABC, then in a repeat of events already described in this chapter, he flew to Canberra and effectively apologised to Hawke. Having listened to a reportedly ‘two-hour rant’ by Hawke, he returned to Sydney and attacked the ABC’s Head of TV News and Current Affairs, Peter Manning, along the same lines. Manning, a former editor of the excellent Four Corners investigative series and one of the ABC’s independent spirits, rejected Hill’s pressure.116

  When the Silver Bodgie opened his third election campaign, he chose the splendour of the Sydney Opera House. Striking a commanding stance, he was ferried across the world’s finest natural harbour on a naval barge. It was pure Hollywood-in-Oz, staged by none other than the director of Crocodile Dundee. When the queen of croneyism, Imelda Marcos, paid a visit to Sydney, she demanded a similar nautical display of her worth. The comparison is not remote.

  One of Hawke’s principal image-makers in the late 1980s was the Sydney advertising ‘tycoon’ John Singleton. To some in the Labor Party, this was a curious choice. During Whitlam’s second election campaign in 1974, Singleton had made a television commercial for the conservative coalition which showed a frightened Estonian woman warning that Labor ‘is disguised communism’. In the same year he founded the extreme right-wing Workers Party, later renamed the Progress Party, with a platform calling for a 20 per cent flat rate tax and the virtual destruction of trade unionism. He was also an associate of Frank Nugan, co-founder of the Nugan Hand bank. Before he took on Hawke, Singleton was advertising agent for the Pope on his tour of Australia. He was clearly proud of this campaign, as he told Woman’s Day magazine, ‘If Jesus Christ was around, he’d have commissioned something like that for Himself. Now that’s a product I’d like to handle. The consumer would never know for sure whether you’d misrepresented the product until he died!’117

  In the week he called the election, Hawke rushed a Media Bill through Parliament. This confirmed the ‘re-structuring’ of Australian commercial television, which had reduced the ownership of most of the industry to a few very rich Mates and given Murdoch and Packer a billion dollars in tax-free profit. When a leading commentator, Max Walsh, suggested to Hawke on television that on the one hand he was exhorting ordinary Australians to make sacrifices while, on the other, helping Kerry Packer pay off his million-dollar losses at the races, Hawke became florid with rage and, once again, his eyes rolled upwards in his head. He is seldom challenged in this way. On another programme the level of political discourse was undisturbed. ‘I love the Australian people’, said Hawke, ‘because I think they are, in the end, dinkum.’ And to his quiescent interviewers: ‘Laurie and George, it’s been a pleasure.’118

  At that time – 1987 – A
lan Bond had bought up so many gold mines that he became one of the biggest owners of gold on the planet. During the election campaign Hawke made a special point of pledging that gold would not be taxed. No reporter asked or dared to ask why; Hawke had demonstrated his power of humiliation and his Mates now employed most of those who might ask such questions. Moreover, here was the phenomenon of the world’s first Thatcherite Labor Party and there was no one to write the story. Instead, readers were expected to ‘wade through thickets of monetarist mystification’, to quote the former ABC journalist Allan Ashbolt. ‘Where’, lamented Ashbolt, ‘are the commentators and analysts with a sense of history, a vision of the future, with even a vocabulary of social progress, justice and enlightenment?’119

  They exist, of course, however few in number; and their names have distinguished these pages. And of course the same question could be asked in other countries: Britain, certainly, also the United States. The critical difference remains the unique concentration of ownership which both underpins and depends upon the new political order. ‘The world is divided into two types of journalist,’ said Barry Porter, Federal President of the Australian Journalists’ Association, ‘those who have worked for Rupert Murdoch and those who are about to.’120 But Murdoch’s dominance is not the only obstacle to free journalism. As many of the best and most troublesome Australian journalists have been forced into the margins, muted by under-employment or, in some cases, by commercial success, a group of commentators has assumed a dominant place. In tombstones of column inches they echo the invocations of a pseudo-economic and political deity, imported whole from New York and the City of London by so-called Labor politicians and business economists. Together they have succeeded in dressing up stale conservative ideology as economic necessity and, as a consequence, are accessories to the present recession. They have – rather, had – a confident style, inclining to start their tracts whimsically, perhaps with reference to a jolly meeting they once had with a ‘financially literate’ politician (i.e. a believer). This expression is much used by Ross Gittins, economics editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. In one memorable report, Gittins told of a visit to Britain, which was paid for by the Thatcher Government: or as he put it, ‘flying business class all the way courtesy of the long-suffering Pommy taxpayer’: