Only McMahon seemed comfortable and confident.63 His hearing aid disguised by the camera angle, McMahon spoke almost entirely to Calwell and Evatt as though trying to persuade them to his point of view. He tried forever to have the last word in any discussion, and was repeatedly cut off by Maude: ‘No, I’m sorry Mr McMahon, no, I’m sorry, I can’t accept another word on this.’ McMahon constantly talked, protested, even called Maude’s impartiality into question at one point: ‘You said you’d give us a fair go!’ His protests became boasts, of course: ‘Can I speak here? Because if one person has taken a deep interest in financial and economic problems, I have.’ Even Calwell found this humorous: ‘So has Mr Holt.’
The debate was sedate until its end, when Maude brought up communism and its influence on the Labor Party. Evatt and Calwell bristled at suggestions they were soft, and McMahon overreached, declaring that the government would never recognise Communist China, as Evatt had promised.
Maude sensed the opportunity. ‘You’ll never recognise them?’
‘Not until they’ve given up war as an instrument of policy. But if they give up war as an instrument of policy, then it’ll be considered.’
‘And how will you know they’ve done that?’ Maude asked.
‘… Well, I don’t know,’ McMahon bleeted feebly.64
The misstep hardly mattered. The 22 November election saw the government returned with the largest majority commanded by any since Federation; moreover, it had retrieved a majority in the Senate.65
Menzies drew up his new ministry quickly. The attorney-general, senator Neil O’Sullivan, resigned to open up further options. Allen Fairhall was dropped. Garfield Barwick became attorney-general. John Gorton, an obscure senator from Victoria who, until then, had been languishing on the backbenches, became minister for the navy. Men were shuffled along, moved around. The Old Guard that had so attracted the ire of the forty-niners was almost entirely gone.
With Fadden now retired, McEwen was leader of the Country Party. It was time to make his decision: Treasury or Trade? He doubled down and surprised many by taking the latter. ‘This post was the one most central to Country Party interests and policies,’ he wrote later.66
Officials within the Department of Trade were relieved. It was tomato sauce odds that if McEwen had left, McMahon would have replaced him — a prospect about which they were very circumspect. ‘We in the Department had agreed to have a party once the new ministry was announced,’ said Eric McClintock, a senior official within Trade at the time. ‘We struck a deal with the people at Primary Industry. If we kept McEwen, and they [Primary Industry] got McMahon, we in Trade would pay for the drinks.’67
McMahon was angling for something bigger. He knew that Holt, as deputy leader of the Liberal Party, had the pick of portfolios, and he was aware that Holt held no particular interest in economics. In the face of Holt’s vacillation, McMahon staked a claim for Treasury. He had a degree in economics. He had long been lauded as a ‘financial backstop’. He was interested. Why not him?68
Few shared these opinions. Paul Hasluck, the minister for territories, thought the idea a non-starter:
McMahon would certainly have had no hope of being Treasurer under Menzies for the simple reason that Menzies himself did not trust him and doubted whether McMahon had that high standard of incorruptibility that Menzies himself would set for the Treasury. Menzies said something of the sort to several of us at the time. ‘You couldn’t trust McMahon not to give away budget secrets if it suited him.’69
Menzies did not want him in Treasury, and McEwen did not want him in Primary Industry. That job was to go to a Country Party MP, which it duly did.
On 10 December, McMahon was sworn into his new portfolio: minister for labour and national service.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Perception
1984
Verification was a constant problem within the McMahon office. On a copy of an aide-mémoire that he had prepared in 1967, which addressed his difficulties with McEwen, McMahon had scrawled notes and added details, few of which could be substantiated. He claimed that he had been involved — along with McEwen and John Crawford — in the creation of the Department of Trade; and he claimed that his appointment as minister for labour and national service was made over the objections of McEwen and Crawford, who wanted him instead to be minister for supply.
His handwriting spidered across the pages, offering examples and asides to support his arguments and story. There was McEwen telephoning at two o’clock in the morning to complain about a cabinet submission on the stabilisation of the dried vine fruits industry; McEwen leading the charge against McMahon’s attempts to reconstruct the butter industry in Western Australia; McEwen instructing Trade officials to withhold vital information from McMahon; and cabinet decisions made and undone against a background of threats and libellous accusations.1
McEwen was not the only person with whom McMahon recorded disagreements. Recalling the Suez Crisis, McMahon wrote that cabinet ministers had gathered in Sydney to discuss the British and American request for Menzies to lead negotiations with Nasser. Six ministers gathered, with Arthur Fadden supposedly chairing the meeting. Each minister had a telephone, and each minister told Menzies that the task was impossible and that the British and Americans were using him.2
Bowman checked other accounts and found differences. Menzies had said nothing like this in his memoir, Afternoon Light, he noted. According to that book, there were no telephone calls to Australia and no misgivings expressed. ‘My colleagues were, as I now know, delighted,’ Menzies had written. ‘They regarded the appointment as a compliment to Australia, though they (and I) fully understood the immense risks, perhaps the certainty, of failure.’3 Bowman did not point out that McMahon’s account differed in another respect: Fadden had not been at the meeting, on the phone. He was in Brisbane, taking care of his son, who was grievously ill.
Bowman stapled his notes to the relevant page and delivered it to McMahon. ‘Can these versions be reconciled?’ he asked. ‘Has Menzies got it wrong? Is he hiding something? I am looking for other sources, but perhaps you can settle the question immediately.’4
McMahon called him in to talk. After some discussion, the former prime minister told his ghost that it was a long time ago and perhaps did not matter much now.5
But other claims had been long repeated and did matter. One was McMahon’s claim that Menzies had demanded he stand for the deputy leadership of the Liberal Party when Eric Harrison resigned.6
In the middle of the night, the story went, sometime after Menzies’ return to Australia in September 1956, McMahon received a summons to the prime minister’s office. He ran from his room at the Hotel Canberra with a raincoat thrown over his pyjamas, and arrived to find Menzies offering him a drink and the deputy leadership. Menzies intimated an opportunity to succeed him as prime minister, but McMahon refused the offer, concerned about his hearing problems.
‘Well, that didn’t stop Billy Hughes from becoming the leader of the party!’ Menzies scoffed. The prime minister assured McMahon that he could do the job; moreover, Harrison would be able to get the New South Wales members on side and vote him in. He did not want Harold Holt to become deputy leader, Menzies continued, because he had not supported him in 1941, when Menzies had been forced to resign.
McMahon refused to go along with it. He cited his long friendship with Holt, with whom he frequently breakfasted at the Hotel Canberra and in whose company he regularly walked to and from Parliament House. He stressed the gravity of his hearing problems. To Menzies’ consternation, McMahon said that it was neither practical for him nor loyal to Holt.
They argued, went back and forth, supposedly for two hours, until at last Menzies relented and McMahon departed.7
That, McMahon believed, was among the origins of his stormy relationship with Menzies. It was proof of his unwillingness to obey Menzies unquestioningly, to sta
y firm in what he believed and wanted, and it affected his standing in the party for years.
How to evaluate that story? How to verify it? How to write it, even?
All stories have dual landscapes. In one, there are the events of the real world; in the other, there is the perception of those events by the storyteller, the construction of their telling, the interpretation and meaning that is drawn from them. McMahon’s work on his autobiography, and his work with his writers and researchers, made his perceptions clear. He was important from the beginning — why else would Menzies want him to be deputy? His judgement, plainly, was impressive from the beginning — there was proof of that in Suez. His ability was so great, too, that it demanded immediate recognition — why else the early promotions, the rapid rise, the attention of enemies? McMahon thought the setbacks and the antipathy of colleagues were the result of pettiness, malevolence, jealousy, and conspiracy. In his telling, he was the victim, the righteous one, throughout it all.
For McMahon, ensuring that people came to see him and the whole period of Liberal government as he did remained the constant goal; for Bowman, it was reconciling that goal with the events as they had occurred and how others saw them. Was it possible? Was there some middle ground?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
War and Strife
1958–1964
McMahon had never forged particularly close relationships with the public service heads of his departments. He simply was not in his portfolios long enough to do so. But as minister for labour and national service between 1958 and 1966, McMahon’s relationship with his permanent head would prove crucial to his biggest success and advancement in the Liberal Party.
Henry (‘Harry’) Bland had dominated the Department of Labour and National Service even before his appointment as its permanent head in 1952. Sydney-born but Melbourne-based, the tough former solicitor prized efficiency and possessed a marked intolerance for grandstanding. He could bash heads as readily as break bread; he had no compunctions about intervening in industrial disputes; he understood the labour scene, and was zealous about defending his department’s role in it. Working with Harold Holt, McMahon’s predecessor, had been productive and enjoyable for Bland; he later remarked that theirs was the ‘apogee’ of a relationship between a permanent head and a minister.
No such relationship formed with McMahon. Well-acquainted with the member for Lowe even before his appointment — the McMahon family stables were not far from where Bland lived in South Randwick as a boy; the two men had brushed in Sydney’s legal scene in the 1930s; and Bland’s father, Professor F.A. Bland, had lectured McMahon at university and, since 1951, as member for Warringah, was a colleague in the House — Bland knew enough to be wary from the outset. Time did not change his mind. Their relationship, he said, ‘approached the nadir’ of that between a permanent head and minister.1
Bland found his new minister difficult in almost every respect. He thought McMahon had ‘absolutely no feel for industrial relations and he never understood them’. Moreover, McMahon told Bland’s wife, Rosamund, that he was uninterested in industrial relations and did not intend to become interested. Why should he, McMahon said, when he had Bland?2
McMahon could always be counted on to read his papers: ‘Probably no minister ever read cabinet papers so assiduously as he,’ Bland conceded.3 But he rarely seemed to evince a thorough understanding of them. They came back heavily underlined in all colours, like rainbows. Everything was critical, but nothing was absorbed. ‘He used to be terrified of going to a meeting,’ Bland said later. ‘I’d spend a great deal of time briefing him, and no matter how far I went, he’d get his facts mixed up.’4
What most frustrated Bland, however, was McMahon’s propensity for talking. The secretary preferred his minister to rely on him for information; McMahon favoured a wider harvest of knowledge. He was frequently in contact, via the phone, with business people and departmental officers, drawing on an array of views that could be at odds with his permanent head’s. These contacts were not entirely new. Reginald Reed, the chairman of shipping company James Patrick & Co., recalled that he had first met McMahon a decade before:
It was 1949 and I was picking up for a shift, and there were about 500 wharf labourers standing there, waiting for a job. And there was a young, good-looking fellow, well-dressed, standing in the middle. I thought, God, he can’t want a job down here. When it was all over I introduced myself to him, and I found out that he was down there, making a study of industrial relations.5
By Reed’s lights, this willingness to engage ensured that McMahon was well prepared for the position: ‘When he became minister for labour, no one knew more about the waterfront than Bill.’ One observer noticed at the time how this played out:
McMahon is not disposed to accept Bland’s advice as readily as Holt did. Furthermore, as McMahon resides in Sydney, Bland [based, as the Department then was, in Melbourne] does not keep in such close contact with him except through McMahon’s private secretary who is very close to Bland … If McMahon wants to know anything about shipping he is disposed to ring [Joseph] Hewitt [chairman of the Australian Stevedoring Industry Authority] rather than Bland and this is causing some friction.6
His propensity for talking perhaps explains why McMahon seemed pathologically unable to keep a secret. ‘There was probably never a more assiduous leaker of cabinet documents than Bill,’ Bland commented.7 He found it infuriating: loose talk impeded the work of the department and undermined relationships. Moreover, McMahon’s stories were rarely accurate. ‘He told you what he would have wished he’d said and done, and that varied even in the course of a day,’ Bland said.
Bland’s concern at these brazen, barely disguised indiscretions was hardly confined to him alone. In September 1959, Menzies caught McMahon leaking red-handed — and promptly put him over a barrel for it.
On 22 September, the South Australian Liberal Party MP Keith Wilson gave a speech on a government Bill that provided for a 7s. 6d. increase in the pension. A member of the social service committee, Wilson had a sustained interest in housing and pensions and, in the course of his speech, had referred to ‘proposals recently placed before the government’ to revise the means test. He referred to those proposals again and again, expressing a wish that they be considered closely.8
McMahon met Wilson the next afternoon. He had with him a copy of the cabinet submission prepared by the social services minister, Hugh Roberton, for the 1959–60 budget. That submission — which, among other measures, recommended a revised means test — had been only partly successful when it had been considered in July. The proposed revision of the means test had been deferred so that a report by government members of the social service committee could be considered.9
Word of McMahon’s meeting with Wilson reached Menzies. He summoned McMahon to his office. What ensued was an interrogation, one that resulted in Menzies ordering a stenographer into his office. The prime minister recapped the conversation aloud, and the stenographer took it down and then typed it. Menzies handed the piece of paper to McMahon and told him to check it. McMahon corrected the document in pencil. His changes related only to his intentions when meeting with Wilson. He left the rest of the document untouched:
I [Menzies] said, ‘Did you tell Mr Wilson the substance of the proposal made by Mr Roberton to Cabinet?’
He [McMahon] said, ‘Yes, because I thought it important to show Mr Wilson that such proposals were not new.’
I said, ‘That means that in substance you have conveyed to a private member the nature of a proposal made in Cabinet Room by a Minister, and have indicated that it was rejected by Cabinet.’
He said, ‘Yes.’
I said, ‘How long have you been a Minister?’
He said, ‘Eight years.’
I said, ‘This is an outrage. I will consider the position.’10
‘I showed this note to W. McMahon who altered it as above!’
Menzies scrawled on the bottom. The prime minister initialled the page, placed it in an envelope, sealed it, and dated it. ‘Note of private conversation between P.M. & W. McMahon’, he wrote on the front.
According to many, that note was Menzies’ insurance: should he ever catch McMahon leaking again, the confession could be used to dismiss him from office. It was kept in a safe throughout the remainder of Menzies’ time as prime minister, always available for use, its existence widely known.11
The question inevitably arose, however, why Menzies never used the letter. He certainly had no love or liking for McMahon, who regularly sat opposite him in cabinet.12 In private, Menzies referred to McMahon as ‘that little bastard’ or ‘Little Willie’, and would mutter that he did not trust the little man.13 But none of McMahon’s failings, personal or political, was enough to warrant his dismissal. ‘Perhaps I should have done something,’ Menzies lamented later — but he never did.14 Was he, as some suggested, susceptible to flattery? According to Dudley Erwin, McMahon would approach Menzies and praise his speeches: ‘And you would hear this great man [Menzies] purring like a pussycat.’15 Whatever the veracity of this explanation, it is undeniable that Menzies’ failure to remove McMahon would forever perplex his colleagues.
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