Press criticism ran hot in Australia. ‘What is the real motive behind the government’s inactivity on the French nuclear tests in the Pacific?’ asked one reporter.2 The next day, however, the instructions from Canberra suddenly changed. Howson and his delegation were to vote with New Zealand. The government had decided — embarrassingly, humiliatingly — to do what it had spent the past few days trying to prevent New Zealand from doing.
It was a blunder. The government had positioned itself against the tide of public opinion in Australia, and in moving to reverse course had seemed to be acting only so as to go along with that tide.
McMahon did what he could when he returned to Australia and found sixty protesters demonstrating outside his Bellevue Hill home. He had a letter of protest sent to the president of France, Georges Pompidou; he canvassed sending Doug Anthony to Paris to protest in person; and while appearing at the opening of a critical facility at the nuclear reactor in Lucas Heights, which had been built by French engineers, he told the French ambassador that ‘none of the explanations you have given would in any way, in any shape at all, change my or my government’s attitude, or the Australian people’s attitude, to the atmospheric testing by any country’.3 The government had to be seen to be going into the test matter thoroughly, he told Bunting.4 But he could not dispel the distrust the incident had caused. Duplicitous suggestions that Australia had simply not thought the Stockholm conference the appropriate place for issues of disarmament and world peace would not do it.5 Nor would an admission that ‘we came in a little, a very little, slowly at Stockholm’.6
Problems with the states also claimed a part of McMahon’s attention. Amid continued gloom over the rate of unemployment, the premiers came to Canberra on 22 June for another conference. They arrived, as usual, with complaints about their budget deficits. It was an uneasy meeting for McMahon: he was anxious to avoid the infighting of previous conferences, but also intent on preserving his options and viability at the upcoming election. He wanted no increase in taxes whatsoever, a desire shared by Robert Askin and Henry Bolte.7 By the standards of their past behaviour, the two Liberal premiers were relatively muted in their criticism, but the presence of three Labor premiers in Don Dunstan, John Tonkin, and Eric Reece ensured that the federal government did not emerge unscathed. As Reid wrote of the proceedings, ‘Dunstan took a lump out of McMahon.’8 Again, the federal government opened its chequebook: financial-assistance grants to the states were increased by $112m for 1972–73, and $90m was provided for works and housing grants. Though Askin still made noises about returning income tax powers and the press continued to bemoan the state of Commonwealth–state relations, the outcome of the conference was about as good as McMahon could have hoped for.
But there were clear portents of change and declining confidence in his leadership. One sign of this lay in the retirement speculation that followed Henry Bolte from the moment he arrived at the conference.9 In power since 1955, the irascible Victorian premier wished to depart politics on top — not in the wake of a likely federal election defeat, nor too close to the next Victorian election, due early in 1973. The idea of Bolte’s departure worried McMahon enough that he beseeched Bolte to not retire. He wanted to ensure that he had some of the premier’s earthy charm to use during the federal campaign. ‘But I couldn’t see why I should look a fool after he’d lost the election,’ Bolte said later.10
Bolte’s pending departure at least freed McMahon from a campaign to have the Victorian premier made a life peer. The idea of ‘Baron Bolte’ was clearly out-of-step with public attitudes, and Bolte had been awarded a GCMG only in January that year. Was it not too soon for another honour? When McMahon raised the issue in May, Hasluck asked who was driving the campaign. ‘Bolte himself,’ McMahon answered. ‘He’s pressing for it.’ At the time, McMahon was inclined to give it to the Victorian premier in order to keep him ‘on side’. It was worth doing even if it lost him support in the electorate, McMahon said. ‘I must do something,’ he told Hasluck. ‘I must make some move. He keeps asking me what I have done about it.’11
In the end, nothing would come of it. McMahon would not propose a peerage for Bolte. When the Victorian premier retired in July, McMahon would lose a valuable campaigner in the state — but he would be free of the ‘down-to-earth’ premier and his demands.12
MOVEMENT in Aboriginal affairs was also slow. There was no progress on addressing the concerns of the activists encamped outside Parliament House, and even the government’s own initiatives were gaining little traction. Coombs wrote to McMahon in April to note that the government had not issued any general-purpose leases for Aborigines and that the Northern Territory administration was granting only small, special-purpose leases. What was the government doing, Coombs wanted to know. An offer for the government to lease land from Lord Edmund Vestey, owner of a vast cattle station at Wattle Creek, for use by Aborigines had gone unanswered. ‘Surely this is throwing away the opportunity for a significant initiative!’ Coombs wote.13
The tabling of the report of the Gibb Committee, set up in 1970 to investigate conditions on pastoral properties in the Northern Territory, did not induce the government to act quickly. Its recommendation that the government seek to buy various sections of pastoral lands for use by Aborigines only saw fruit in August, when a cabinet committee, in a deliberately ‘low-key’ announcement, agreed to accept Vestey’s offer for thirty-five square miles of land at Wattle Creek for use by Aborigines. But at the same meeting, the cabinet committee decided not to pursue an acquisition of 1,500 square miles of land at Wave Hill for use by the Gurindji people. It was ‘not practicable and should not be pursued’, cabinet decided.14
What eventually did receive attention and movement was the Aboriginal embassy. An inter-departmental committee set up in February recommended that the government amend the Commonwealth Lands Ordinance to create a legal basis for removing the embassy, but movement to act on that advice was slow. The proposal that McMahon took to cabinet on 2 May was approved with the clear caveat that the removal should occur ‘tactfully and with the least disturbance’.15 The need to create as little disturbance as possible was doubtless the source of the government’s continuing inertia. In June, Ralph Hunt sent McMahon a ‘pros and cons’ list on removing the embassy that nonetheless made a clear case for its removal. The five months that it had gone on for was ‘long enough’. The embassy had had a ‘fair go’. Some of the people in the embassy were potentially targets of police. ‘Proposed action is tactful,’ the briefing went on. ‘Directed at tents not the individuals.’16 The government wanted the embassy gone, and was not about to hold back, but it was now conscious of timing. ‘It has also to be remembered that it is now not long until National Aboriginal Day (14 July) and, after that, to the beginning of Parliament (17 August),’ Peter Bailey wrote to McMahon. ‘… Also to be taken into account is your visit to the Northern Territory.’ Essentially, Bailey continued, ‘the decision is a political one’.17
On 17 July, a copy of the new ordinance that provided for the embassy’s removal was delivered to the embassy. Hunt promised to give two weeks’ grace before enforcing the law, but the activists were suspicious, and established a vigil to protect the embassy. On 20 July, aware that police were massing, the activists sent a message into Parliament House, intended for McMahon, explaining the situation and urging him or another minister to come out and talk. ‘With the Prime Minister [inside] were three other ministers,’ wrote Times correspondent Stewart Harris. ‘Anthony, Snedden, and Sinclair. Not one of them emerged. The budget, a material thing, remained more important than a unique human need which they must have seen from their window.’18 Ten minutes after the message was sent, sixty police officers marched on the embassy and, amid violence that saw eight people arrested and many injured, ripped the tents from the lawns and tore down the Aboriginal flag. It was a debacle conducted within full view of cameras and the Parliament. In the aftermath, Whitlam praised the activists si
ncerely and the government sarcastically:
The men and women who established the embassy should be congratulated on their initiative and self-discipline … I suppose the government must be congratulated upon the dispatch it showed against these Aborigines in contrast to its impotence in the face of travel swindlers, international gangsters, and fascist bombers, and tax racketeers.19
There was criticism from McMahon’s own side. After initially saying that he had been ‘far too busy’ inside Parliament House to watch the removal of the embassy, Hunt backtracked and said he had only seen it for a moment. Labor MPs present at the time ‘should have used their influence to make the protesters conform to the law,’ he argued.20 It was a pathetic argument, and Queensland senator Neville Bonner, who was both the first and sole Aborigine elected to the Parliament, was scathing about how the whole matter had been handled. McMahon and Hunt knew his feelings on the matter, he said. He had wanted to have the ordinance debated in Parliament. ‘In this instance the Executive Council should not have exercised that authority. I categorically state that I am disappointed with the government to the point of being disgusted by its action on this issue.’21 There was widespread disillusionment over the government’s handling of it. Letters flowed into McMahon’s office decrying the move. ‘I wish to register my strong protest concerning the treatment of the Aboriginal Embassy affair yesterday in Canberra,’ ran one such letter:
Although I have voted Liberal in the past, my frustration with the cumbersome progress toward continued development for Aboriginals [means] that I can no longer vote, nor encourage others to vote, for your party. Australia surely has the resource[s] and determination to involve Aboriginal people in political action. Provoking violence by industrial or political self-interest must lead to chaos, and further de-humanisation.22
Undaunted by removal of the embassy, the activists launched court action calling into question the gazetting of the new ordinances. Three days after it had been torn down, the activists re-erected the embassy amid another police move to intimidate and disperse them. ‘Girls were knocked to the ground and kicked, and men were smashed in the face and groin,’ recalled Bobbi Sykes, one of those in the melee that followed. ‘I was hurled to the ground on several occasions, and walked over by heavy cop boots. “The whole world’s watching, the whole world’s watching,” we chanted. Police dragged people along the ground by their hair. We lost … but we won.’23
McMahon would seem, in the days that followed, to grow concerned by the violence, but there were no regrets within the government more generally.24 Believing the activists to be militant and radical, Howson scotched suggestions that the government offer the embassy’s personnel a club or meeting place in exchange for complete removal of the embassy, and attended a meeting with them on 29 July with little interest in dealing with the issues they were raising. ‘It was mainly a public relations exercise to show that we are prepared to talk to them,’ Howson wrote later. ‘We were patient and got rid of them after about two hours.’25 It was a phrase that summed up the government’s approach to Aboriginal affairs.
But there would be controversy over the government’s handling of the removal of the embassy. In the House of Representatives on 15 August, the opposition moved a motion of no confidence in Ralph Hunt, the minister for the interior. Hunt would make no apologies for his actions: ‘I held firmly to the view that the continued presence of scruffy tents outside Parliament House was not serving either the interests of the Aboriginal people or the Parliament in a dignified way.’26 The motion failed, but just under a month later, on 12 September, the ACT Supreme Court ruled that the ordinances providing for the July removal of the embassy had not been appropriately gazetted, and were therefore inoperative. The embassy was re-erected outside Parliament House, but now the government gazetted the ordinance again — this time, at around midnight, after Parliament had adjourned. The embassy was removed less than an hour later.
On 13 September, the government moved to retrospectively restore the ordinance allowing for the embassy’s removal. Labor castigated the government for the ‘sloppy drafting’, and called its tactics those of the ‘Tcheka and Gestapo’, but the most damaging interventions came when Jim Killen spoke on the motion. Believing that the embassy should be removed, Killen was nevertheless disgusted by the way the government had handled the matter, and its determination to charge the protesters who had been arrested. The prospect of Killen voting against the motion caused consternation. Fears that other members could join Killen and cross the floor prompted Sinclair and Chipp to canvass ‘capitulation’ on the question of prosecutions. That would not happen — Anthony would counsel against it, and McMahon, in Melbourne but in touch via the telephone, would agree — but the division was again in the headlines.27
Killen was unrepentant. The government had had six months to deal with the embassy, and in a mixture of ‘dither and irresolution’ had failed to do so properly. It had then resorted to an inappropriate gazetting, which Killen likened to Caligula’s practice of depositing criminal edicts atop monuments, so they would not be seen and could not be known. ‘What is the difference between what Caligula did and what happened last night?’ he asked.28 The motion would pass, and the collection of tents that constituted the embassy would, for a short time, be gone. What would remain, however, was the moral victory that the embassy represented for the rights and dignity of Australian Aborigines.29
A potential strategy for regaining the government’s standing was considered, and indeed pursued, all year. There were many within the government who hoped that highlighting industrial relations, and the dangers of electing a union-influenced ALP, could provide a path to victory. The year had opened with a strike by the Australian Postal Workers Union and concern that union demands for excessive wage rises were a threat to the economy. Intent on showing that the government was concerned about this, McMahon canvassed inviting ACTU president Bob Hawke in for a meeting, then scotched the idea, saying that Hawke would ‘use it politically’. Nonetheless, he added, ‘We must be taking leadership somewhere.’30 Over a dinner on 1 February, Bolte suggested that McMahon emphasise industrial trouble, and blame Labor and Hawke. But, as Reid judged it:
I for one simply don’t believe Hawke is such an ogre in the public mind as McM[ahon] makes out. Hawke too Australian in his manner and speech and approach to be such an orgre [sic]. And he achieves results and takes action which is more than government does.31
Legislation announced in December 1971 by the minister for labour and national service, Phillip Lynch, would ostensibly have aided the government. The package would have outlawed political strikes, done away with compulsory unionism, encouraged secret ballots before strikes, and altered the way that the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission dealt with cases — most particularly by compelling it to ‘have regard to the likely national economic consequences’ of its decisions.32 The political intent was naked, and, in a lengthy and virulent speech immediately afterward, Labor’s spokesman on industrial relations and former union official, Clyde Cameron, called the proposals ‘notice of an early election next year’, and accused the government of deliberately creating industrial unrest.33
The government would have expected nothing else from Labor, but the opposition of the DLP was surprising. On grounds that the proposals endangered ‘moderate’ unions while doing nothing to prevent supposedly communist-dominated unions to amalgamate, a process then underway within the metal trades, the DLP threatened to withhold its support.34 This argument was felt most keenly among backbench government members, such as Dudley Erwin and senator Ian Wood, who believed the government should intervene to prevent the amalgamations.35
Amid widespread discontent with his leadership in the early months of 1972, McMahon had to tread warily: as Howson was to write, it was a ‘test of firmness’ for McMahon.36 But McMahon would not necessarily hold out. Snedden and Chipp both recalled that McMahon used to meet regularly with the
DLP senators, and would even try to second-guess the party’s attitude on matters. It became a source of angst. ‘Oh, I feel between a shit and a shiver,’ McMahon would say of the tension between the DLP and the government.37
After two nights of party-room meetings on the amalgamations legislation, during which ministers pointed out the lawfulness of the union amalgamations and the need to resist the DLP’s demands, the prospect of a revolt was headed off. But the DLP continued to withhold its support, and, while the government refused to consider retrospective changes to the laws relating to amalgamation, it was, by the end of March, making conciliatory noises about future amalgamations. Then came a victory for the DLP: the government decided to offer financial aid to two unionists opposing the amalgamation of the AMWU.38 A few days after this came a headline victory: the government agreed to remove the proposed abolition of compulsory unionism, as the DLP had demanded, and agreed that future amalgamations could only go ahead so long as 51 per cent of the union membership agreed to it in a court-controlled ballot.39
McMahon was unrepentant about the concessions. As he said privately, there was no point in bringing a Bill into Parliament that could not be passed. ‘To that extent we’ve had, therefore, to submit to pressure from the DLP,’ Howson explained.40 But McMahon was certainly frustrated by the process. When Lynch received the congratulations of colleagues for getting the Bill through, McMahon could not help but spread word that Lynch had initially refused to take the Bill to the party room and had asked for his help to do so.41 Notwithstanding a largely positive reception from the press, what became clear afterward was the diminished attraction of an industrial-relations campaign. One newspaper editorialised that it did ‘not look so certain an election-winner’ as it had in December 1971.42
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