‘What if we get the one, but not the other?’ asked Scott.
‘We pray,’ said Mike. ‘And we continue to pray.’
WEDNESDAY, 13 FEBRUARY 2002
Lewis has turned up an hour late to his own press conference. A lot of Liberals are around him, looking apprehensive. We crowd in Mike’s office listening to the radio. Soon his honest, gruff, deep voice is saying:
‘I said I would deliver reforms in the institution of parliament through an inclusive process, and deliver it quickly, and do all these things in keeping with my philosophical values and understanding of society …’
We’re gone, that’s it.
‘… and, most importantly, knowing that I have the responsibility, as well as the power to exercise it, in controlling what will happen in South Australia during the next four years. And against its philosophical beliefs and some of its practices of the last few years, I nonetheless give my support to the Labor Party, because it will have to deliver …’
SUNDAY, 10 MARCH 2002
On the crunching pebble drive that slowly curved into Government House it seemed realer, and a little scarier, and soon, inside, in a high blank handsome room, hand up, Mike was sworn in by Marjorie Jackson; his other hand was on a literal stack of Bibles – Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox – owned by clergymen who had prayed for him, and he signed his commission with the pen given to me by James Mason’s widow, Clarissa, after the fire, and then we went into another room and admired some colonial paintings and had champagne in thin-stemmed glasses and Vini took photos and that was that. There was a rowdy, beery celebration in his office, and he went off to do interviews and Annie and I went to the pictures, and life went on …
Goodbye Babylon
KIM BEAZLEY, 1998
SUNDAY, 20 SEPTEMBER
‘And when they are gone,’ cried Beazley to a hall the size of a stadium, ‘Who will mourn for them?’ And the crowd went wild, as they had to, I suppose, on this, the launch a fortnight out, of his 1998 campaign …
It had been a good campaign, although begun on the day we won Tasmania, thus leaving many celebrating victors headsore the following morning, and marred by a young fool in Beazley’s office who hacked into the Liberals’ computer. I flew home on the day that Kim posed in a shower cap in a milk factory. Asked in its canteen what he wanted, he ordered a short black, and then, after aghast spin-doctoring, a flat white.
I arrived late, just as his car was driving away. He ordered it stopped, got out, embraced me laughing and, while the cameras recorded, said he’d left instructions with the security men that I be shot as my faxed jokes were lowering the tone of his Big Picture, and then drove on.
He grows more homicidally mysterious by the day, I wrote at the time, like all big generous men approaching power, I suppose. The Caligula Syndrome. Where’s my horse? Let’s make him a Senator! There’s Ellis. Shoot him! Ho ho.
We then went to Woy Woy where it was planned to photograph Kim among pelicans; but the big birds boycotted the shoot – and so did the local Labor candidate Belinda Neal. We ate fish together in the famous waterside restaurant, and Bill Leak sketched us conferring. Kim’s cheery availability and relish for campaigning impressed the media mightily. ‘I can do one thing John Howard can’t,’ he explained to me. ‘I can go into crowds and whatever happens I can probably win the encounter. He doesn’t dare.’ On the Woy Woy streets he was hugged and patted and kneaded, if that’s the right word, like a big soft toy. His great gusts of laughter, unnerving on television, in real life bonded crowds, especially old people, to him in a genuine, palpable way.
Scared by all this, Howard straddled the election over the Commonwealth Games, for the duration of which, obediently and connivingly, Packer cancelled the Sunday program and showed instead a lot of fools running and swimming and jumping. These occupied the headlines as well, and so did the various football finals, one on election day, one the day after, while differing school holidays deprived Labor polling booths of the teachers who usually manned them. The best election, Howard’s media cronies knew, was no election. It was a common ploy in police states and, lately, in Kennett’s Victoria and Olsen’s South Australia.
But Kim kept surging through like, as I once put it, a freed Willy. He creamed Howard in the Debate with his combination of aggression and politeness, and the next day’s headlines alleging a draw were deeply unconvincing.
Howard had trouble with the Nationals, whose preference-swaps with One Nation were, in those days – and it was a long time ago – embarrassing. He talked of Kim’s lack of ‘ticker’, a restored piece of slang which emphasised Howard’s cold stillness and Beazley’s rhubarbing warmth. Kim never mastered the one-liner however many he was given, but he hit the public consciousness like a big affable comet, and his popularity surged, eventually passing Howard’s, a startling happenstance in those days …
Goodbye Babylon
ABBOTT AND COSTELLO
NOVEMBER 1998
A year before, in March 1997, Tony Abbott had been forcefully sat down beside me by Paul Whelan, the New South Wales police minister – who said, ‘Now you two sort this out’, or words to that effect – at the St Patrick’s Day outdoor breakfast in George Street. Abbott engaged me in earnest, nervous, reluctant conversation and, to the best of my memory, it went like this:
ABBOTT: Mate, I’m really sorry about this, but look, your lawyers stuffed up. They should’ve been onto this, and they weren’t.
ELLIS: (with menace) I have to warn you that you are now obliged to swear in court that the idea, the very idea, of sexual congress with Tanya Costello is physically repulsive to you, or you do not have a case.
ABBOTT: Look, that’s wrong, she wasn’t repulsive, she was very, very attractive but she … wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing. She was religious and she wouldn’t stand for … (Abbott then realises who he’s talking to) Beazley’s doing very well, you know, very well indeed, I mean I keep saying to these drongos in the Liberal Party …
Abbott then realises again who he’s talking to. He gets up quickly, leaves the table and strides off, deftly avoiding the rising knees of the Irish Riverdancers.
*
I was told by the lawyers I might be required on the third day, Wednesday, to take the witness stand. I slept very badly on a moth-eaten couch in a young friend’s lodging in Queanbeyan and turned up unshaven, wild-eyed and thick-voiced with flu …
I’ve lately seen how I looked to the media that day – ‘like a possum erupting from a Glad Bag,’ Bob Carr happily described it – when, hair disordered, shabby, glutinous with flu, I approached their startled and wobbling line of vision. Seeing the cameras and feeling a surge of mischief, I tried to walk towards them in slow motion, in the way that men accused of major crimes always do on television, ‘thus saving them’, I later explained to Bert Newton, ‘the cost of needless processing’. But this was reported as a ‘weird dance’ by the hacks …
Inside the building, suddenly, boomingly, there was Gough Whitlam. ‘Just dropping by for the circus,’ he said, ‘and the clowns’, or words to that effect … And then there were the plaintiffs’ witnesses: David Spicer, who told me of the excellence of his choir, and Laurie Oakes, who seemed amused and called me ‘Mr Ellis’ – as he always has since we first co-edited honi soit in 1962 …
Tiring of Tanya’s prim evidence – ‘harlot-like’ she said she was not, and this was clearly very true – I went out onto the courthouse steps and, with my single one-liner prepared – I would say this, I determined, and nothing else – I stood and waited till a flurry of cameras and microphones gathered, and then began.
‘This is a book of two hundred thousand words,’ I said with slow and surly precision, ‘and these were thirty-three of them. If harm had been meant, there would have been more. If malice had been intended, they would, believe me, have been better … phrased.’ I meant to say ‘expressed’. ‘Phrased’ would do.
I turned to go, but quickly they were circling me and jost
ling me and gabbling at me and, fatally, foolishly, trustingly somehow – what a dill I was – I turned.
‘Do you regret this?’ one had asked.
Being very tired and grimy and Ellis, I then blew up. ‘A great deal,’ I snarled. ‘I would rather have had my book, which was a number-one bestseller when it was withdrawn, continue to be sold, and my bills to have been paid that year, and my children to have grown up in a house that was completed. Of course I regret it.’
‘Do you offer any apologies to the Costellos and Abbotts for the words that were published? Are you sorry in any way?’
On screen the Ellis face winced, went through a hundred contorted, exasperated indecisions. ‘I suppose so,’ it growled finally. ‘I will think on these things.’ He began to leave. ‘I’m tired, don’t talk to me.’
‘Is Mrs Costello fair game?’
‘Fair game for what?’
‘For what you published about her.’
I turned away, muttering. ‘God, you’re horrible.’ Then I turned back and said, with considerable fury, ‘Am I fair game? Are you fair game?’
THURSDAY, 26 NOVEMBER 1998
The amount awarded shocked a good few people, and so did Abbott’s refusal to say what he would do with it.
ABBOTT: This has been a terrible ordeal for everyone, and I hope it’s over, and I hope we can get on with our lives.
INTERVIEWER: Is this a fair settlement?
ABBOTT: Look, it’s been an ordeal. It’s over. Thank God it’ll all be over, okay?
INTERVIEWER: And what plans for the money? Which charity will you be giving it to?
ABBOTT: It’s been a terrible ordeal and, ah, it’s over. Thanks.
*
Wonderfully, the 7.30 Report made a masterly little film about me coming by train by night under a full moon to Canberra, copping the verdict, and going by night train back home again. In it I said on the grassy knoll, ‘If personal affront uncoupled with loss of income is now a source of money through action in the courts, then American levels of litigation are now likely in Australia, and any pupil can sue his teacher for calling him a fool in front of the class, and any thin-skinned politician can sue Bill Leak on any morning. And at that point our agreeable cheeky Australian democracy ends.’
Then Jack, my son and minder, cut me off, but before we got on the train, I said, ‘It’s a rite of passage.’
Costello rang Barrie Cassidy to say he would not, because of the ‘Ellis item’, go on the 7.30 Report again, and did not for a good few months.
A week later, to show how in touch with community standards Higgins was, a jury in Melbourne threw out of court a libel case brought on by Jeff Kennett, of whom the Age wrongly, almost certainly wrongly, said he had had affairs with two attractive women during the year he spent apart from his wife, and made him, Kennett, pay court costs of two hundred and fifty thousand. The jury’s view was he had said worse things of other people – asking John Brumby in parliament, for instance, if he ‘slept with boys’ – and if he could dish it out, he should also, fuck him, take it. Higgins’ contrary view – that politicians were delicate flowers the price of whose bruised feelings was above rubies – was put back in its box. And democracy, perhaps, was saved; no thanks to me.
Goodbye Babylon
JOHN HOWARD’S HAWKS NEST DIARY, A FICTION
FRIDAY, 18 DECEMBER 1998
Midnight. Sandflies again, and another bad loss at Scrabble to Herb Harris, an arrogant former acquaintance of mine from the caravan park, and the usual Vegemite sandwich dinner.
Noel Pearson in the paper has revealed his true colours, those of a whining Marxist ingrate wanting only to fatten his wallet by entering parliament. Clearly he has invented the entire false notion of past Aboriginal grievance to do this. How dare he allege they had a worthwhile civilisation when in a hundred thousand years of continuous occupation they signally failed to even split the atom? I ask you.
SATURDAY, 19 DECEMBER
Morning. I’ve never attempted to hide the fact that I spend a large proportion of each festive interim looking out the same high window at the same stained concrete wall next door as I have here these twenty-five years. And I can perfectly understand why some people might find it strange or smug or unduly parsimonious or politically ominous in one whose annual income could otherwise take his clean-cut young family to Disneyland or Tanganyika or Venice or other money-wasting venues to upgrade their cultural sensitivity and the Qantas frequent-flyer points, and their names are being taken down and their tax records looked into.
Criticism is always a healthy feature of any successful working democracy and I’m planning to stamp it out. You have my word on that, my core undertaking. Because you can learn a lot from the stains on a concrete wall, and an annual rereading of The Boy Scout’s Book of Knots. The stains vary in shape down the years and this demonstrates, I think, the turbulent instability of life, an instability my policies have sought to correct, while the knots, whose shape never changes, demonstrate in turn man’s power to meet life’s challenges creatively. The double slip-knot is one of my favourites; they used it on South African dissidents in the early ’50s when I was an eager little kid.
Took my usual walk in my sandshoes down to the old familiar newsagency this morning. Only a few spitting and shouting pensioners. I was shocked to find, however, that David Barnett’s fine book John Howard: Earlwood Messiah has been remaindered at five dollars forty, owing, Wal Buckley the newsagent explained, to an overwhelming lack of interest in its narrative thrust.
‘How can you work up any enthusiasm,’ I overheard him telling a customer as I came through the plastic strips, ‘for a man who lives with his mother, doing the washing up, until he’s thirty-two, and then locks her out of the nursing home when he’s fifty-eight?’
I mildly interjected that you can learn a lot from a strong decisive Christian woman howling in a straitjacket and begging for euthanasia in her ninetieth year in vain, and the shapes on the washing-up water bubbles can be quite beguiling, but I don’t think he knew who I was, because he started quoting from the Sydney Morning Herald – whose evil Leninist tentacles I’m sorry to say are now reaching this far north so Comrade Gerard Henderson’s rabid Wednesday ravings can unnerve and ruffle even the placid readership of the Hawks Nest Fortnightly Examiner and Bait Guide – and when I quite civilly, I thought, riposted by asking if he and Vladimir Petrov shared the same Soviet spymaster in the ’50s and who was paying him now, he inexplicably ordered me out of the shop and started yelling, loudly alleging that I was an international embarrassment and Andrew Peacock had better ways of sending Shirley MacLaine to sleep. So I can only assume he must have gotten me mixed up with somebody else, Alexander perhaps. He’s not as young as he once was, old Wal, or as relaxed and pleasant in his manner. The Keating years have taken their toll, I guess, and a lot of decent hardworking small-business folk are hurting badly. I arrived at the Lodge, I reckon, just in time.
SUNDAY, 20 DECEMBER
Strange to be not going to church anymore. But, well, it hasn’t really come up to scratch, has it. Christianity, in the past few testing decades? It’s all very well to say joy to the world and do unto others and sorry you’re all black scum if you haven’t crunched the figures and therefore lined up society’s less fortunate in your periscope and pressed the button of economic reform. We can all prate and whimper about what Santa ought to bring. But I live in the real world.
For a Labor fundraiser, 1998
KIM BEAZLEY: 2001–2002
TUESDAY, 6 NOVEMBER 2001
I worked for Beazley for eight months and saw a bit of him, and his performance in the Debate – the best such performance in television history – didn’t surprise me. I had always known him to be alert, wide-ranging, stupendously informed and mentally well-organised, radiant with conviction, politically hard-nosed and scrupulously polite. But this amazed a lot of journalists who had been printing the Billy-Bunter-plus-Bill-Collins caricature for so long they had come to believe
it.
What annoys most journalists about Beazley is that he is smarter than they are. What pleases them about Howard is that he is stupider. Dealing with Howard is like playing Chinese checkers with a nine-year-old. Dealing with Beazley is like playing three-dimensional chess with Douglas MacArthur.
For Beazley is both very unpredictable and very simple, and they can’t hack that. He’s a very good man and a very ambitious man and the combination baffles them …
WEDNESDAY, 10 APRIL 2002
I watch tonight for the first time what happens then, in replay. Kim comes through balloons and cheering supporters with his hitched-up, left-mouth smile and Susie behind him with a broader, fuller one. His daughters are by the microphone and they smile too. He begins to speak, and says he’s proud, and what a great campaign, and soon he says:
‘Five weeks ago it looked as though we in the Labor Party faced one of the most devastating defeats in our history. It is an extraordinarily difficult thing to conduct an election campaign against the background of an ongoing war, and in circumstances where people feel a great sense of insecurity. Governments all around the globe have been the beneficiaries of massive public support as the people of each nation turn to the leadership of the government of the day in order to get themselves a sense of comfort and security. To conduct an election campaign against this background from Opposition is the most difficult task that any Opposition can undertake. And I am so proud of the way we’ve fought it.
‘We have stood four-square for the security of the Australian people, but we have also offered more. We have looked down through the fog of war to the kitchen table of the average Australian family, and we’ve listened to those who sit around it. We’ve listened to their hopes and their dreams, the aspirations that they have for their young folk that they get a decent education, the aspirations and concerns that they have to ensure that they have access to affordable health care, their love of the future of this nation, the determination they have to see it is a constructive and creative nation, a nation where people don’t leave when they have bright ideas, but come here when they have bright ideas. We alone in the Labor Party brought these issues to the campaign table. And let me let you in on a secret: they’re not going to go away.’
Bob Ellis Page 11