Tiberius with a Telephone

by Patrick Mullins

  Thinking it was over, Farmer turned to go. ‘Well, don’t run away in fear,’ McMahon said, scornfully, to his back. Farmer turned around to continue the talk, and Davis had to intervene again.78 A drink between them that afternoon allowed McMahon’s team to say that the matter had been smoothed over, but McMahon was still incensed. ‘He rang Murdoch again to complain,’ Farmer recalled. Murdoch’s response was a shrug. As he relayed to Farmer, Murdoch told McMahon that he was a difficult reporter to control. ‘He didn’t say that he had instructed me [to be difficult],’ Farmer said later. Then, unbelievably, at Murdoch’s suggestion, McMahon invited Farmer to his home for breakfast, as though to get to know him. Said Farmer:

  It was extraordinary. We sat outside. It was a summer’s day. He had no idea what was happening to him. His mind had gone. He didn’t realise that Rupert was against him … I had this lovely breakfast, said, ‘Thank you very much,’ and continued to do the same thing. Everywhere he went, I went. The fact that he could allow himself to get so upset by one journalist was extraordinary.79

  Extraordinary, yes — but also understandable. Farmer had worked with Newton, been an ally with Newton, when McMahon was fighting McEwen over tariff policy. McMahon could not have failed to be aggrieved at this seeming change of sides. Nor could he fail to have been aggrieved by the knowledge that the Telegraph was against him. He could not rely on its support, as all his predecessors had. At the moment when he needed it most, McMahon could not rely on his former constant ally.

  Murdoch was forthright about the change. ‘We did some dreadful things to the other side,’ he said later. ‘A lot more happened than even they managed to find out.’ His long-held dislike and scorn for McMahon had caused him to urge Bob Askin to support a late challenge from Gorton. When Askin declined to support this, Murdoch told Snedden that if he challenged McMahon, he would throw his support behind the government.80 A meeting with McMahon in Sydney — taken in spite of advice from McMahon’s staff that the media baron should come to him, to the prime minister’s office — did not change Murdoch’s mind about the merits of the McMahon government.81 ‘It was an unsuccessful meeting,’ Gaul said later.82

  Murdoch’s involvement with the Labor campaign, and his willingness to offer advice and free advertising in his newspapers, were the logical culmination of his disenchantment with McMahon and the Liberal-Country Party government. Murdoch would admit that he and his papers had been unfair to McMahon. ‘I should have had more reserve, but I got emotionally involved. I allowed, with my eyes open, some of the journalists to go beyond being sort of partisans into almost being principals.’83 The Daily Telegraph was the most strident, he acknowledged. It had gone ‘overboard’ in seeking a change. ‘We all really threw ourselves into the fight, to get a change. It did break twenty years of conservative government.’84 Certainly the Telegraph’s editorial on 2 December, advocating a vote for Labor, was unequivocal: ‘We have no hesitation in recommending a vote for Mr Whitlam and his party.’85

  Other newspapers that withdrew or tempered their support rubbed salt in McMahon’s wounds. Aside from his dalliance with Labor in 1961, the conservative chairman of the Fairfax stable, Sir Warwick Fairfax, had been a steady supporter of the government and had exercised his influence to ensure that his newspapers echoed that support. But this time would be different. The Sydney Morning Herald would offer some support — running a dubious story, wholly on Fairfax’s urging, on Labor’s immoral social policies.86 But The Australian Financial Review leaned so obviously towards Labor that Fairfax made a complaint about its ‘lack of enthusiasm’ for the government. ‘There was not one leader or one sentence that said positively that, summing matters up, the policy of the government was to be preferred to that of Labor,’ he wrote.87 Most egregious, however, was The Age.

  Under editor Graham Perkin, The Age became far more active and incisive on political issues, pursuing an editorial independence that was much to the chagrin of its board. The Liberal Party’s president, Robert Southey, had found the paper difficult all year. ‘The Age is having a very destructive effect in Victoria, and is much more bilious than most of the Australian newspapers which I see,’ he had written to McMahon in March.88 Certainly, Perkin was not enamoured of McMahon. After lunching with him in May, Perkin conceded that the prime minister was ‘really dazzling company’, but thought him disconnected from reality. ‘The funny little man has convinced himself that he is a brilliant success and sees himself winning handsomely in November,’ wrote Perkin to a colleague, ‘and remaking the nation in the following three years; leading them to victory in 1975 and then retiring with honours thick upon him. God save us all!’

  Whatever his regard for McMahon, however, Perkin was intent on giving his readers the knowledge to make an informed decision. He ensured there was considerable space devoted to analysing the politics of both parties, and invited McMahon and Whitlam to lunch with the editorial staff before the election. The successive lunches saw the contrast between prime minister and leader of the opposition exposed. Where Whitlam came looking a winner, confident and tall, McMahon arrived looking lost, hopeless. ‘He looked like a retired jockey who was on his way to the bowls club,’ Les Carlyon recalled. That McMahon later telephoned Perkin to request that a ‘misjudged’ comment be removed from an interview transcript only confirmed the poor impression. Perkin had been amazed at the request: ‘Remove it? My dear Prime Minister, it’s in 72-point headlines on page one.’89 It was no surprise, then, that The Age’s election-day editorial was simple and clear:

  Should we persist with a Government of modest accomplishment, considerable disunity and no clear vision for the future? Or should we decide for change, with the risks that change inevitably involves, and look forward to the stimulation of new ideas and new purposes? This paper believes change, and Labor, ought to be given the opportunity.90

  MCMAHON spent polling day in Lowe, in Sydney’s inner west. He had no fear of losing his seat. There were only nuisances about: an eccentric who had sued to have the election stopped over problems with his filing fee; a local who had changed his name by deed poll to ‘M.D. Aussie-Stone’ in the hope of attracting the donkey vote; and an Australia Party candidate who had suggested people vote for the poof who lived in the seat.91 McMahon’s electorate chairman drove him around. John Howard and Sonia accompanied McMahon for part of the day. McMahon visited polling booths, chatted with workers, and shook hands. He went to booths in the seat of Evans, held by Malcolm Mackay, which he knew the government might lose. In the mid-afternoon, he went home to Bellevue Hill. He went for a swim.

  Inside, showered and dressed, with the curtains tightly closed, McMahon sat down with friends and family. John and Janette Howard went to the house after dinner. At McMahon’s invitation, Bruce MacCarthy left the party faithful who had gathered at the back of the Strathfield L.J. Hooker, by the builder’s shed that had once been McMahon’s own headquarters, to come over. He arrived to see food and wine everywhere, laid out for a party. Davis, meanwhile, holed himself up in the kitchen to draft a concession speech. When someone asked what he was doing, Davis replied, ‘Trying to bury everything.’92

  At eight o’clock, the polls closed. McMahon’s party watched the returns come in on television sets in the lounge room. Bede Hartcher, the Liberal Party director, called repeatedly on one of the two telephones with messages and news of numbers. Settled beside one of the phones, McMahon calmly used it to follow results himself. He scribbled on a notepad to keep track of the seats that were falling, calculating the swing, noting what was certain and what was not. There were bright spots in the evening. The government won the Victorian seat of Bendigo and the South Australian seat of Sturt, and it took the Western Australian seats of Forrest and Stirling, as per McMahon’s prediction. But seats also fell the other way. Evans was gone; Cook slipped away; Lilley was lost by a handful of votes. The bright spots were blacked out, forgotten. It became a steady stream of losses. ‘It was a tough night,’
Gaul would say later.93 The atmosphere, Howard thought, was one of ‘calm acceptance’.94 Denison, Diamond Valley, Holt, La Trobe: they all fell to the Labor Party. Seats that McMahon had thought he might win — St George, Eden-Monaro — did not come his way. More seats fell: Macarthur, McMillan, Mitchell, Phillip. Overnight, it would become clear that Casey, held by Howson, would also crumble.95

  Just after nine o’clock, speaking on Channel 9’s election coverage, Alan Reid confirmed it. ‘If the trend continues,’ he said, ‘I’d say Labor is home and hosed.’96 There was a swing, not as big as that which had swept Chifley away in 1949, not as big even as that which had so damaged Gorton three years before. This was some solace to McMahon: ‘At least we didn’t lose as many seats as in 1969,’ he would say.97 On a two-party-preferred measure, the swing was only 2.5 per cent. But it was enough. The government would take only 41.4 per cent of the nation-wide primary vote; with almost 500,000 more votes, Labor would take 49.6 per cent. By ten o’clock, two hours after the polls had closed, McMahon could tell that the government had lost office. In spite of the caution advised by Hartcher, telling him to wait just in case, McMahon knew that there was no coming back. There were too many seats being lost. ‘Where did we go wrong?’ McMahon wondered, at one point.98 For that night, at least, he would not answer questions like that. ‘That’s something for deep consideration,’ he would soon say.

  Most in the room believed that McMahon knew what the election result would be. ‘I think by then he had realised the most likely result was a loss,’ said Gaul, later.99 Howard agreed, though he did not think Sonia was quite prepared. But she was dignified, just as her husband was, he recalled.100 Certainly, McMahon was composed throughout the evening. He did not tear up. When he spoke, his voice did not tremor. Sonia admired it. ‘He was marvellous,’ she said of her husband.101

  Gorton appeared on television to confirm the defeat. Chipp followed. Snedden added his concession. Whitlam’s Labor had won office with a nine-seat majority. The loss was not huge. It could have been worse. An additional 1,917 votes, spread over five seats, would have seen the government retain office. There was no landslide. ‘It’s not that bad,’ McMahon told MacCarthy. ‘We’re only going to lose by eight or nine seats.’102

  Knowing that he would need to say something, McMahon took the statement that Davis had drafted. He had a cup of tea and, with Gaul, retired to the family room to look it over. McMahon tweaked the draft, then had a stenographer type the new version so that he could read it without his glasses.

  Whitlam came on the television at just after 11.30pm to announce that Labor had won. Speaking from the sunroom of his home in Cabramatta, sitting on a white piano stool in a crush of press, Whitlam claimed a ‘very good mandate’ for his party’s policies and said he would await a call from the governor-general. McMahon watched the impromptu press conference in silence. He re-read his own statement, and made a final note on the back. ‘Let’s get it over with,’ he said. He went outside, plunging through a tunnel of press, down the gravel driveway to the front lawn. Sonia accompanied him. ‘Nothing would stop me going out with him,’ she told Davis. A crowd of neighbours and friends watched from McMahon’s right as the television crews and reporters clustered around him. Wearing a blue suit, a white shirt, and a crimson tie, McMahon became the first prime minister to concede on television. ‘Mr Whitlam has obviously won, and he’s won a handsome victory,’ he said.

  McMahon thanked those who had voted for the government. Glancing at the paper in his hands, he promised that the Liberal Party would stick to ‘our Liberal principles’ and give Whitlam ‘vigorous opposition whenever we feel that he is taking action which is contrary to the interests of the Australian people’.

  Then he departed from the statement. The hand that held the paper fell to his side. ‘Above all,’ McMahon said, ‘I want to thank my own staff who have been driven relentlessly over the last few months and have stuck with me, they’ve helped me, and they’ve never wilted under the most heavy and severe oppression.’

  The remarks surprised his staff. They were generous and unprompted, and, coming from a man who had read from an autocue throughout the campaign, were surprisingly eloquent. His speech would provide a lingering memory of considerable dignity and grace. ‘He showed real true grit,’ Davis would say.103 The sword had fallen, Ian Grigg would later recall, and despite the hurt, what was clear was McMahon’s professionalism. ‘I was stunned at his calmness and the way that he handled the whole thing,’ Grigg said later. ‘… He stood and said that this is how it would happen; this is how the change of government would take place. I think that was really where all his ministerial background came to the fore. He knew that government had to go on … He was a real professional.’104 Whitlam would echo the sentiment. McMahon’s concession was ‘a brief, brave television appearance of memorable charm and grace’.105

  McMahon made his way through the well-wishers and press to return to the house. After sitting alone, sombre and quiet, McMahon brightened up. His staff had brought champagne in case of a miracle. ‘Let’s open it,’ he said.106

  It was finished. The election had been lost. McMahon’s time in government was over.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  As Matters Stand

  1984

  On 19 June, McMahon called Bowman into his office. Sonia had received a letter from an editor at Macmillan, he said, suggesting that she should write her autobiography. The letter also, McMahon said, inquired how matters stood with her husband’s book. Did he have anything? How was it all going?

  The letter was but a way for McMahon to complain about his own publisher. He was annoyed at the work that was going into the book, annoyed that Bowman was leaving, and believed that Richard Smart and Collins were not doing enough to help. Bowman told him that he believed Smart was only interested in getting a manuscript: ‘He didn’t want to be otherwise involved.’ Bowman told McMahon that he should commit himself to the material that had been given to him: no more changes, no more rethinking the structure and theme.

  The advice fell on deaf ears. ‘WM said for the umpteenth time that Smart had said it [the manuscript] needed to be more readable — “easier to read”,’ Bowman recorded. McMahon could not be dissuaded from his belief that Smart and Collins were at fault, that they were the problem. He told Bowman he would get the editor from Macmillan to come to Sydney for a discussion about his own book.1

  But the reference to McMahon’s book was an invention of McMahon’s mind. When Bowman remarked about the letter from Macmillan the next day, Joyce Cawthorn scoffed: ‘Oh, the old liar!’ She ran from the room and retrieved the letter for Bowman to see. ‘There was no final sentence about WM’s work – no mention whatsoever!’2

  It was hard to deny that the work was going poorly. No matter how hard he tried to stick to his plan, and the structure that had been agreed upon before, Bowman was always battling to keep McMahon on track. ‘WM does indulge in some extraordinary monologues at times,’ he wrote, on 20 June. ‘Rambles from one topic to another, misunderstands one’s comments — quite mad.’

  He was complaining ‘bitterly’ about the early chapters of the book — again. George Campbell had supposedly done terrible things to the first chapter, but Bowman saw through it: ‘Clearly WM is restoring my cuts, and new material …’ McMahon had not hidden his tracks well: only that morning he had given Bowman old material on Billy Hughes, and asked if it should be used. ‘I explained that we had retained several Billy Hughes stories, and that readers didn’t want to hear all about Hughes but wanted to hear about McMahon.’ That convinced McMahon, but Bowman was sure that it would be only momentary: ‘No doubt he’ll consider it tomorrow as an entirely new problem, and make the opposite decision.’

  Then McMahon told Bowman that he had decided he had had enough of his publisher, Richard Smart, and Collins:

  He said he thought it best to get rid of Collins. They had done nothing for him. I s
aid that, like any publisher, they wanted a usable manuscript. However, they could, I felt, have been more helpful with their advice (if they had been frank, he would probably have discarded them anyway!). He proposed to sack them today. He did not see any legal problems.

  Bowman did not bother to argue. There was no point. At McMahon’s mention of potential legal problems, Bowman went along with him: ‘I said that on my knowledge of the dealings with Collins, I didn’t either.’3

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  In the Wilderness

  1972–1975

  Losing the election did not mean that the phone calls stopped. McMahon was up long into the night, telephoning colleagues and officials. When the sun rose on Sunday morning, McMahon was back on the phone. He called Sir John Bunting and Clarence Harders (of the attorney-general’s department) to consult about procedures for the change of government.1 He telephoned the governor-general, Paul Hasluck, to propose a meeting at 11.30am on Tuesday, at which he would tender his resignation and advise that Whitlam be commissioned as prime minister, ostensibly on the Thursday. He was following the precedent set by Chifley in 1949, he said. Hasluck thought the suggestion reasonable, and, with McMahon’s agreement, said he would consult Bunting and Harders for further advice.2 Then McMahon returned to his calls to colleagues within the party.

  By the time Phil Davis arrived at the house that morning, McMahon had made enough of these calls to persuade himself of the belief that he still had a future. Told by Davis that he had to quit as leader of the Liberal Party, McMahon surprised him. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’ve been ringing around and I’ve still got the numbers.’

  Davis was astonished. He and McMahon had discussed the leadership the night before. They had agreed that McMahon would not quit explicitly — he would just not stand when the position was inevitably declared open at the next party meeting. ‘It’s nicer,’ Davis thought. Apparently, however, morning had brought a new idea. Pity prompted Davis to be honest and blunt. ‘They’re just being nice to you, Mr Mac. Don’t do it.’ He told McMahon that he had conceded defeat with dignity and grace. But if he stood for the leadership, the end was certain. He would be humiliated.