A Secret Country

by John Pilger

  Abeles, with whom Bob Hawke ‘dreamed dreams’, has become a close Mate of Treasurer Keating. On Keating’s recommendation, Abeles was appointed to the board of the Federal Reserve Bank, a post of great prestige and value. As the National Times pointed out, it is ‘a position that allows an intimate insight into the conduct of the country’s monetary policies, briefings from the Bank’s highly regarded research department and, perhaps most significant of all, ready access to most of the key figures in the financial community’. Soon after Keating saw Abeles on to the board of the Reserve Bank, his closest staff adviser, Barbara Ward, left to join the private sector. She later went to work for Abeles.141

  When ‘Nifty’ Neville Wran retired as Premier of New South Wales his Mateship with Abeles did not end. Nifty went into the cleaning business and his company, Allcorp Cleaning Services, immediately won a million-dollar contract to clean Abeles’s Sydney air terminal. Asked to explain Allcorp’s spectacular success in winning forty contracts so quickly – several of them contracts abruptly cancelled with other cleaning companies – a spokesman for Allcorp said, ‘Mr Wran has an enormous understanding of the cleaning industry. He has occupied offices himself and has seen what good cleaning is and what bad cleaning is.’142 Wran’s wife, Jill, was appointed to the board of Ansett New Zealand, owned by Abeles, and Wran’s former press secretary, David Hurley, advises Abeles on how to deal with the press. When he was Premier, Wran gave Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer the licence to run the State’s ‘Lotto’ lottery. Wran is now on the board of an investment bank which was partly owned by Packer at the time of his appointment, and his Allcorp company won a contract to clean the television studios of Channel 9, then owned by Packer.

  On the other side of the continent, the Mates run ‘the Dallas of Australia’, as Perth was optimistically known in the 1980s. Until recently, Bondy still owned much of the best land, a daily newspaper, a brewery, and most of the State’s gold mines. He was the central figure in ‘WA Inc’, a Mates’ arrangement under which the Western Australian Government entered into ‘partnerships’ with very rich financiers in order to give the taxpayers ‘a slice of the action’. An estimated $A500 million of public money was lost as a result of such liaisons: notably one with Rothwell’s Limited, a bankrupt moneylending organisation owned by Laurie ‘Last Resort’ Connell, the well-known Mate and confidant of Bob Hawke.

  Connell, together with Bond and others, is awaiting trial on charges relating to a network of deals that involved land which was never developed, a petro-chemical plant that was never built, millions of taxpayers’ dollars and the State Labor Government. Giving evidence before yet another Royal Commission enquiry into corruption – this one set up to look into WA Inc and described by Jim McClelland as ‘undoubtedly the most revealing striptease show currently running anywhere in Australia’143 – Connell talked, and talked.

  He recounted a lunch he and Bob Hawke attended during the 1987 election campaign at which, he claimed, Hawke promised not to introduce a gold tax. Connell, who then had majority holdings in gold mines, subsequently gave $A250,000 to Hawke’s election campaign. Hawke’s response to this was to deny making any public commitment on a gold tax. He then had to apologise to Parliament when the record was checked. Connell said his interest in seeing Hawke re-elected had been ‘heightened’ by Hawke’s private assurances to him. Such an ‘imputation’, countered Hawke, was ‘unfounded’.144

  Connell said he is ‘pretty well broke’145. Yet he and his wife, Elizabeth, enjoy beautiful things. Their silver collection alone was valued at $A3 million. The family jewellery collection included one necklace that had 58 carats of diamonds and was valued at $A1.2 million. Connell had no difficulty paying for these; his personal drawings from his business amounted to $A44 million in five years. He also owned more than 400 racehorses and four thoroughbred studs.146 In January, 1992 he was charged with fixing a horse race and conspiring to defeat or pervert the course of justice147.

  Others named in the Perth ‘striptease’ include Hawke’s successor, Paul Keating, whose advice was said to have been sought on the rescue of Connell’s bank, Rothwells. Keating has denied this.148 The former Premier of Western Australia, Brian Burke, one of Hawke’s inner circle, was said to have arranged for his ruling Labor Party to avoid paying tax on millions of dollars which he invested.149 Burke told the Royal Commission he had ‘no idea’ as to the source of $A207,000 cash that went into gold investments he initiated as Premier.150 He also admitted secretly investing $A87,000 of Party funds in ‘about 100’ rare stamps151; and he revealed that money given as Party donations was used to pay for the defence of two senior Party men charged with offences relating to WA Inc.152

  In Queensland, until recently, the local Mates ran a game park of corruption that at times was reminiscent of Nicaragua under General Somoza. The Royal Commission into police corruption in Queensland gave the impression of a police force used as an instrument of the ruling ultra-conservative National Party, which has long been manipulated by international criminals and political thugs. Opponents of Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, State Premier for seventeen years, were constantly harassed by the Queensland Special Branch, which regarded non-National Party members as fair game, together with homosexuals, environmentalists and ‘uppity Christians’. Queensland probably has more tax dodgers and other assorted hucksters than any other State. It certainly has more knighthoods than any other former British colony. Knighthoods are currency in Queensland, where all but the cane toads seem to have them and the term ‘patronage’ had a meaning and dynamism not known elsewhere. During the reign of Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, half the 55 knighthoods recommended to the Queen by Sir Johannes were bestowed upon Mates linked to his Government. The Queensland Police Commissioner was knighted Sir Terence Lewis in 1986, following an astonishing rise from country inspector, jumping ahead of 106 officers of equal rank and 16 superiors. Sir Terence was described in evidence before the Fitzgerald enquiry as ‘Big Daddy’ and a ‘bribes shark’. At his subsequent trial he was found guilty of 15 corruption charges and sentenced to 14 years prison.153

  During his enquiry, the Royal Commissioner, Tony Fitzgerald, said he was ‘appalled’ by the information held by the Commission, ‘which I suspect is merely the tip of an enormous iceberg’.154 The Fitzgerald hearings became a litany of leading names in Queensland politics, business, crime and law enforcement. Sir Johannes himself was a star witness. Knighted on his own recommendation for his ‘mission-like zeal and dedication to his role’, Sir Johannes was questioned about a total of $A560,000 in ‘political donations’, most of them delivered in cash when the Queensland Government was awarding contracts to the donors. In 1986 a total of $A210,000 found its way to the Premier’s office in suitcases and packages of cash. Sir Johannes agreed that $A100,000 of this had come from a Hong Kong businessman wishing to invest in the State’s hotel industry and cocoa plantations. He said he could not recall who had delivered the rest of the money; anyway, he explained, packages of cash normally would have been handed to his secretary.

  Commissioner Fitzgerald asked, ‘Would one of your secretaries come up and say: “We’ve just had someone drop in and leave fifty thousand dollars in cash and we don’t know who he is?”’ To which Sir Johannes replied, ‘People don’t talk like that . . . I didn’t know who did it. I didn’t want to know . . . I always tried to stay as far away from that sort of thing as possible.’155 Sir Johannes eventually stood trial on charges of corruption and perjury relating to the $A100,000 wrapped in brown paper, left at his office. This was reduced to perjury. In October 1991, the trial jury was dismissed after failing to reach a verdict. The Queensland Attorney-General said he had decided not to proceed with a second trial, partly because of Sir Johannes’s age.156 Sir Johannes is 81.

  The former Queensland Minister for Transport named fourteen Cabinet Ministers who, he said, had misused public money for private expenses. The ruddy-necked Buddhashaped figure of Russ Hinze, the former Police Minister, was asked about
a total of $A2.09 million in loans paid into his family companies by property developers and other entrepreneurs. Among those named was one Eddie Kornhauser who, according to evidence before the Commission, paid Hinze $A250,000 in loans within days of the Cabinet approving legislation designed to help his property interests on the Gold Coast. Eddie Kornhauser is an old Mate of Bob Hawke; they like to gamble together. In 1982 Hawke defended Kornhauser against what he described as ‘totally improper attacks’. At that time Kornhauser was an applicant for a casino licence on the Gold Coast.157 In 1988 Hawke said that he was ‘absolutely confident that any connection I have had with Mr Kornhauser over the years has been entirely proper’.158 Hinze was subsequently found guilty of corruption and perjury, and died. Four Cabinet ministers are in prison at the time of writing.

  In 1989, the people of Queensland voted resoundingly against corruption and, in spite of the gerrymandered electoral boundaries, threw out the National Party. But that was not the end of it. In 1992, the new, ‘squeaky clean’ Labor government in Queensland disclosed that 14 serving and former Labor MPs were being investigated by the Criminal Justice Commission. Four Cabinet ministers may also be investigated.159 In the meantime, Sir Johannes has founded a merchant bank, to be based in a Pacific island tax haven. He denies this is to avoid paying taxes. ‘Business is cracking that fast we can’t cope with it all’, he said.160

  During the 1990 election campaign Bob Hawke offered his fellow Australians a vision ‘not of a lucky country but a clever country’. The word ‘clever’ seemed to hang in the air, unexplained and with contradictory implications. ‘Lucky country’, after all, is an ironic term; and ‘clever bastard’ on the streets means sharp operator. For most Australians the Hawke years had brought diminished living standards and for many, once again, the prospect of unemployment. Voters were given the choice of two main parties devoted to an Antipodean version of Thatcherism. On polling day, independents and so-called ‘centre’ parties received unprecedented support; and although Labor received little more than a third of primary votes, under Australia’s preferential system, the Hawke Government was able to hold on to office by eight seats.

  In December 1991, after a failed earlier attempt, Bob Hawke was dumped as party leader and Paul Keating became Prime Minister. Keating’s ‘personal approval rating’ in the polls stood at 25 per cent, the lowest ever recorded for an incoming Prime Minister.161 ‘It’s a very humbling experience’, said Keating. ‘I feel the poignancy of the moment’.162 Said Hawke, ‘I hope they think of me as the Bob Hawke they got to know . . . a dinky-di Australian’.163

  Everyone has their favourite snapshots from an album. Mine are from a gala evening staged by Kerry ‘The Goanna’ Packer in Sydney’s vast Regent Hotel shortly before the 1987 election. This was the ‘Businessman of the Year’ awards ceremony, both a get-together and a celebration of the Mates.

  Bob Hawke was the guest of honour.

  ‘I am pleased as Prime Minister of this country’, said Hawke, ‘to count as a close personal friend and to measure as a very great Australian, Kerry Packer . . . and when you talk of Kerry you almost inevitably lead to Alan Bond . . . to you, Alan, congrats for all your achievements and may I thank you for your generous comments about the Government.’ Hawke embraced Bondy and drew Packer with him in front of the television cameras. A Jaguar car was raffled for a charity that looks after the poor. The irony shouted; here was a Labor Prime Minister, whose predecessors have pioneered some of democracy’s most enduring reforms, massaging the quick-rich at an event ostensibly in aid of the poor.

  Packer remarked that he was proud ‘the Prime Minister refers to me as a friend’. During most of the evening Hawke remained at Packer’s side. Packer at times seemed uneasy, and as he was leaving he whispered to a friend that he wished Hawkie had not been so damned deferential in public; after all, that kind of thing should be done in private.

  This was remedied a few weeks later when Packer threw a twenty-first birthday party for his daughter, Gretel, at the family mansion in Sydney’s Bellevue Hill. Gretel wore her father’s gift, an $A290,000 Cartier diamond choker and earrings, flown in from Hong Kong. Members of the New South Wales police force ensured the privacy of the 350 guests, whose combined wealth, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, was more than four billion dollars. Almost all the Mates were there: the Goanna, the Dirty Digger, Nifty, the Silver Bodgie and even minor mates like David Hill. And when everybody departed they were made just that bit richer, with gold necklaces for the ladies and gold cufflinks for the Mates.

  7

  BATTLERS

  To the operative classes, Australia is a veritable land of promise.

  Victorian Review (1881)

  I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn’t poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as being needy, I was deprived. Then they told me deprived was a bad image. I was underprivileged. Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don’t have a cent. But I have a great vocabulary.

  Jules Feiffer

  WHEN THE AUSTRALIAN journalist Geraldine Brooks returned home in the 1980s after living in the United States, she described a tour of Sydney she liked to give American friends who visited her. She wrote:

  I’d always take them for a ferry ride into the city, because it’s the best way to show off Sydney’s beautiful harbour, its bridge and its Opera House. But there’s another building that gives me even more pride: the funny-looking concrete ziggurat by the bridge with the big picture windows and the balcony gardens. It’s a block of New South Wales Housing Department flats, built in the late 1970s to keep low-income earners from being pushed out of the Rocks [on the harbourside].

  That, I’d tell my American friends, is where poor people live. Of course, I know that particular apartment building isn’t typical – that most low-income earners are braving punishing waiting lists to get into far less salubrious accommodations with views of the Great Western Highway rather than the harbour.

  But to me those flats are a symbol of the best of Australia: a generosity of spirit that has never equated people’s worth with their wealth. So far, Australia has always managed to afford a share of society’s good things for those who couldn’t possibly purchase them.1

  I have shown those same flats to visitors from other countries and have also felt pride. I remember reading as a youngster Mark Twain’s description of Australia as ‘an entire continent peopled by the lower orders’, and I was proud of that, too; I quite liked the notion that we were the poor who got away; that ours was the People’s Country ‘that has never equated people’s worth with their wealth’.

  The truth, as Geraldine Brooks went on to say, is sadly different. A great many of the poor did not escape poverty, which sank its roots deep into a society begun as a ‘living hell’, then maintained as a fragile economic colony: a status unchanged today. The poor were known by a variety of euphemisms, of which ‘battlers’ was the most popular. ‘Battlers’ could expect the nation’s sympathy, if not its support. In Australian literature the poets Henry Lawson and ‘Banjo’ Patterson romanticised battlers as brash, rugged, sardonic combatants against nature in a harsh land. Women did not exist; or they coped stoically. It is a perfect irony in a society renowned for its cult of the male that those who have so often told the truth about a nation built on the blood, sweat and tears of ordinary men and women, are women.

  Writers like Miles Franklin, Dymphna Cusack, Kylie Tennant, Jean Devanney and Marjorie Barnard not only wrote about people enduring drought, flood, fire, loneliness and fear; they also described active, energetic women in revolt against the poverty and privations imposed on them by the arbiters of class and gender. A few were forced to assume men’s names so that their work might be published. As recently as the 1970s students reading English at Australian universities were told little about these secret chroniclers of Australia.

  In 1959 the Australasian Book Society boldly published Dorothy Hewett�
��s Bobbin Up, an unsentimental account of Australian working-class life in a Sydney I knew well:

  Riley’s Lane . . . a running sore, littered with orange peel, empty milk bottles and old papers. A damp dead-end lined with two-storey weatherboards, built straight onto the road, hump-backed, sagging with time and rot and cynical neglect. The crazy, toppling balconies hung over the lane, defying the laws of gravity. The incredible patched fences of corrugated iron were kept partially upright with paling cross pieces. A puff of wind in the night sent the loose, rusty iron flapping and scraping in a mournful music. On washing day each back yard accommodated one double sheet at a time. And over it all swung the limpid Australian sky, cotton-woolled with cloud. It was hard to raise your eyes above the level of the toppling balconies of Riley’s Lane, better to mix a bottle of pinkie and drown your sorrows in the dry, yellow grass behind the bottle factory.2

  The inheritors of the ‘living hell’, the children of the Chartists and Fenians and those who simply survived, wanted no Riley’s Lanes. They wanted ‘Utopia under the Southern Cross’; and their achievements were considerable. Long before Europe and North America, Australia had a legal basic wage, an eight-hour working day, pensions, maternity allowance, child benefits and the vote for women. The secret ballot was invented in the State of Victoria in 1856 and became known as ‘the Australian ballot’. The world’s first labour government was formed in Queensland; and the Australian Labor Party formed governments twenty years before any comparable socialist or social democratic party took office in Europe.3 ‘To Europeans’, wrote the historian Jill Roe, ‘the state in Australia appeared to be a boldly experimental agent.’4

  In Britain Australia became known as the ‘Workers’ Paradise’, although this was also patronising. In France, extensive literature credited Australia with being a ‘social laboratory’ where ‘socialism without doctrines’ was practised.5 Among German social scientists and trade-union leaders the Australian labour movement was considered ‘the most advanced in the world’.6 Indeed, to many in Europe, Australia was proof that Karl Marx’s prediction of bloody revolution was wrong; and in 1913 Lenin was moved to refute such heresy and to ask, ‘What sort of peculiar capitalist country is this, in which the workers’ representatives predominate in the Upper House?’7