They will need to know they have good neighbours, and good policemen, and psychiatric services and victim support groups, good priests and pastors and parishioners who come to visit. They will need to know that at the press of a cell-phone button at any hour of the night, a friendly counselling voice will be there to help. They will need to know where the money is that will rebuild their lives, or, if they are moving on, where else they might go.
They will need to know as a fact, Mr Speaker, what we know as a generality – that Australians care, and rally round in time of fire and storm, not just this month but for seasons and years and decades of rallying round, as we do with war widows, and veterans of naval disaster and radiation poisoning. That we are there for the long haul.
And so on. Nathan went near tears halfway through. Korena Flanagan, his press secretary, said, ‘Ah, the old Alfred Tennyson touch. It gets them every time.’
One Hundred Days of Summer
THE COMING OF TONY ABBOTT
PARLIAMENT HOUSE, TUESDAY, 1 DECEMBER 2009
9.02 A.M.
I arrive in a bland, indifferent area off the corridor with pot-plants and roving, texting reporters … David Marr smiles loftily, and the heavily pregnant, radiant, lovely and amused, always amused, Annabel Crabb winks at me and keeps talking on her phone. To all of them I say, ‘Abbott by two votes, one of them disputed’, and they think me mad. Hockey, the consensus is, it has to be Hockey.
I have been here before, I think, looking round the recurring faces, Michelle Grattan, Lenore Taylor, Misha Schubert, Chris Uhlmann, Kerry O’Brien, faces which last I saw in dreams in Bonaparte’s court, or Queen Elizabeth’s, or Nero’s, or Cleopatra’s, faces hungry for the day of joust, the clamour of the horses and the shouting – never themselves engaged in battle of course but pleasured, aroused, to be in the general area.
9.25 A.M.
Soon, too soon, a phalanx of worried nonentities – or men of destiny if you prefer – comes walking towards us behind the stooped rhinocerine Somlyay. He finds a place and we gather round him. An agonised half-minute passes, and he says:
‘Two ballots were held. Mr Hockey was eliminated on the first ballot, and the final ballot was won by Tony Abbott, forty-two votes to forty-one.’
A great convulsion clutches my chest, and I think I’m having a heart attack. Could I be this right? It seems impossible. How did I know? One of the ballot papers was spoiled, it is soon revealed, by a secret voter who wrote the word ‘No’ on it and one potential voter did not turn up owing to illness.
‘What spectacular … madness!’ David Marr says, beaming.
10.05 A.M.
I head off across the lawn towards Aussie’s craving a coffee and run into Kerry O’Brien, who is being fixed with a lapel mike.
‘The amazing thing,’ I tell him, ‘is Abbott and I are booked to have a public conversation at Gleebooks on Thursday night.’
‘I wouldn’t hold your breath,’ says Kerry, with his principled, serious glance. ‘I’m sure he’ll find he has more pressing engagements that day, and that night.’
‘I’ve heard he always turns up.’
‘Don’t hold your breath.’
10.20 A.M.
I have the coffee, nod at Bob Brown – who shakes his head in grave, unamused disbelief – avoid John Faulkner, who I think dislikes me these days, see on the lawn a horseshoe-shaped gathering of glum-faced media fools, all of whom got it wrong, around an unabashed Turnbull and, in a red dress, his cool but aggravated wife. He looks greyer, but unbroken, chin tilted, smile in reserve, and he says, repeating yesterday’s jest:
‘No, no, here’s how it goes. You ask me the question: am I going to resign from parliament? The answer to that is no. There’ll be no by-election in Wentworth. As far as your next question, which undoubtedly is: will I recontest the next election? Lucy and I are going to have a think about that over the holiday, discuss it with our children, and we’ll let you know in due course.’
‘Will you offer yourself for front-bench service under the Abbott leadership?’
‘No, I won’t. No, I will be on the back bench. Assuming the parliament does come back, I’ll be on the back bench.’
11.32 A.M.
I arrive early in the Liberal Party room whose grey walls, wooden venetian blinds and big bland photographs of Gorton, McMahon, Snedden, Fraser, Peacock, Hewson, Downer, Howard and Nelson have a stern, superannuated look, and sit on a chair in the back row near the door. I am immediately texted by Walt Secord, Rudd’s big, ebullient, Canadian former minder, working now for Roozendaal, saying Timmy and I are watching you. Wave at the camera. I do this and he texts me again. Excellent. Very funny. How did you get in? I text back I have friends you do not know about and smile at the sixtyish grey-bearded cameraman whose name I always forget, and he nods back at me.
12.15 A.M.
Soon all the press are there, and Tony comes in, a few minutes late, looking like an athlete back from a run emerging from the shower in a state of heightened refreshment. His amused, abashed and boyish smile is hard to resist, as was the hint of a tear when he said:
‘I have said to my colleagues that I will do my best to be a consultative and collegial leader. Political parties don’t work when people just announce what they’re doing and expect everyone else to follow. I will not be that kind of leader.
‘I want to pay tribute to all of my predecessors, but I particularly want to pay tribute to Malcolm Turnbull. I’ve known Malcolm for a long time. We have sometimes been sparring partners, but we’ve mostly been friends. I really meant it when I said in recent days that my respect and admiration for Malcolm has grown enormously over the last few months. Malcolm has shone in adversity. When he elected to join the parliamentary Liberal Party he did us great credit, great honour, and I want him to have a long and successful future in public life.’
Though his words were punctuated with ums and ahs, the sentences were graceful, deft and brisk, and followed, as we scriptwriters say, the emotional line. And he believed pretty much, by the look of it, by the sound of it, what he was saying. He had, as I had said before, a working substitute for integrity. This was shown when he said in an ordinary Australian voice and what sounded pretty much like the common tongue:
‘I accept that at times I have stuffed up, obviously. I also believe that when you become leader, you make a new start. I probably should apologise now for all my errors of the past and make a clean breast of them, if you like, and ask the public to judge me from this point.’
WEDNESDAY, 1 DECEMBER
… Only David Marr has said I got it right. ‘Bronwyn Bishop arrived ready, as always, for her close-up,’ he wrote. ‘Bob Ellis arrived predicting an Abbott victory. He was scoffed at.’
WEDNESDAY, 2 DECEMBER 2009, 8.05 A.M.
Tony Abbott rings and says, ‘Mate, I’ll be there, but I might be an hour late.’ I say that’s fine, we’ll wait for him.
I then ring Morgan Smith of Gleebooks and she says, ‘Oh, that’s dreadful! That’s hopeless!’
‘It’s okay,’ I say, ‘I’ll read from my book and take questions for the first hour …’
‘That’s no good, Bob, they won’t wait that long.’
‘Won’t wait that long for the next alternative prime minister two days after his … ?’
‘It’s so hot in there, they won’t wait.’
‘So we … cancel?’
‘It’s too late to cancel, they’re coming, it’s booked out!’
‘What if I get … Annabel Crabb … to fill in, till …?’
‘Oh, that might work. That’s good. Get her.’
I text Rhys Muldoon and he texts Annabel and she says yes. She may give birth at seven-thirty but she’ll be there. I text thanking Rhys and drive in through the forest, pulling over to sleep, can’t sleep, and hear on the radio Nathan’s voice saying:
The old regime will never again dictate the fortunes of our party, nor will they regain the levers of control. I will lead one sort of gove
rnment and one sort of government only. A government that is modern, ethical and progressive. A government in which the people of New South Wales can have confidence, trust and respect. Those are my standards. And those are my beliefs. They are my standards. They are my beliefs. I will settle for nothing else.
Should I not be premier by the end of this day, let there be no doubt in the community’s mind, no doubt, that any challenger will be a puppet of Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi. That is the reality. That is the choice at stake today. The decision now lies in the hands of my caucus colleagues.
10.40 A.M.
In the office of Parliament House, the same dour, stoic tension that I remember in the staff of Mike Rann as they waited to hear from a cross-bench fanatic in 2002 if he would come to our side and Mike would be premier or not. A lot of denial, head-shaking and punching of computers. Graeme Wedderburn, Nathan’s chief of staff, walking, phone in ear, papers in hand. I start to note down the things I hear said around me, by people pacing, seated, bemused.
‘They can’t call a spill. It’s against the caucus rules.’
‘This is against the rules. Only the ALP Conference can do that.’
‘And the ALP Conference voted him, not them, total power twenty days ago.’
‘This is fuckin’ treasonous.’
‘At long last, the New South Wales DLP split,’ I grumble crankily …
What happened, it seems, is Matt Thistlewaite, the New South Wales general secretary, took fright at Tuesday’s Newspoll showing Labor at forty-five two-party-preferred, and Nathan preferred as premier by only thirty-five to thirty-six for O’Farrell, not enough improvement, it seemed, in the sixteen days since the previous poll (Newspoll: ‘the Bill O’Reilly of statistics’) and this for Matt meant Nathan had to go urgently. One man, one idiot, takes fright at one set of dodgy figures, and now this …
6.20 P.M.
It’s not yet resolved and I have to leave to confront Abbott. Frantic phone calls follow me through the peak-hour traffic, from Morgan and Annie and Jack, and I swear I’ll be ten minutes late. I park illegally and stumble upstairs into Gleebooks. Annabel Crabb arrives two minutes after me.
Stephen Ramsey, there as a documentarist this time, puts a mic on me for the camera, but the main mics in the room are dodgy. ‘You have to speak right into them,’ says Morgan, helpfully. This is turning into the book launch from hell.
My family are there, and many an old acquaintance. I begin my dialogue with Annabel. I use up most of the material I planned to use with Abbott: the unbroken nose, the sado-masochism of all athletes, the charm that gets through the cellophane. It is a pleasing conversation. Twenty minutes in we heard word that Keneally is premier by forty-seven votes to twenty-one. The entire Right votes, in a bloc, for a first-term American female premier; astonishing.
8.10 P.M.
Abbott arrives with a goofy smile and a light sweat, nervous in a big room full of Trots and Greens, and sits and looks at me gamely. Annabel gets up and sits to one side, yielding her interrogator’s role to me, though I invite her to stay and participate.
And so it begins.
‘Comrade … may I call you comrade?’
Laughter.
‘Well, I think the right wing calls people brother, doesn’t it? So I’ll call you Brother Bob.’
‘Comrade …’
More laughter …
WEDNESDAY, 19 FEBRUARY 2010
I wake at precisely three a.m., as always, make tea and transcribe the rest of my recorded talk with Nathan Rees. It’s all very good, and the best was towards the end, when I asked him, carefully:
‘Do you feel you are an old-fashioned man or not?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Tell me about that.’
‘Why don’t you get another beer and I’ll think about it. Because it’s a good question and an important one.’
I did this and I came back and he said, ‘If you go out in the street here and give people a question to answer that has a moral or an ethical dimension – if you say, “Is this the right thing to do or is that the right thing to do?” – nine out of ten people will come down on what you and I in the normal course of events would consider is the right thing to do.
‘How do they arrive at that? What goes on in their mind to arrive at that? Well, that’s your upbringing. Most people get their ethical compass or framework from religion, their moral compass. Others draw their views of rights and wrongs from people they’ve known and circumstances they encompass.
‘Even before I left school I spent some time with people, mostly blokes, who were older than me. I left school, did an apprenticeship with lots of older blokes. And it’s an age-old saying: don’t learn from your own mistakes, learn from the mistakes of others. So I’m always drawn to learn the lessons that other blokes have learnt before me. In different jobs I’ve worked with blokes who’ve done time for murder, I’ve worked with blokes who were lawyers who are now bankrupt, people who couldn’t read and write and add up but have reared five kids to perfection. And so I always went out of my way to get the advice of those who were older and wiser than me. If I’ve grown a bit old-school, I guess I am.’
‘In a few sentences, what are the bottom lines?’
‘For who?’
‘For you.’
‘As a politician?’
‘As a man, as a being of our time. What are your bottom lines?’
‘You’ve got to be prepared, you’ve got to make an effort to understand the issues of your time. That’s the first one. Secondly, you’ve got to have courage. And thirdly, you’ve got to be brutally honest with yourself. Do I have the courage to do something about it? Well, I do have the courage to do something about it. And recognise that those things change over time. So they’re the three. And fourth – now you’ve got me going – if you step into the space, avoid vacillation. If there’s a blue to be had, go to the death.’
‘There was … a bead curtain you went through to the new reality of leadership. How startling was that, and how scary?’
‘I refused to let it be scary. It was certainly stark, and it certainly required energy.’
‘And was there time for that energy? Was there sleep and so on? Was there trouble in conserving energy?’
‘No, at the end of the day you were responsible for the apportioning of your energy. But if you ask a hundred people in the street what their biggest fear is, 85 per cent of them will say it’s public speaking. And that’s what your overpaid, bludging politicians do all day every day. Someone has to do the public speaking.’
One Hundred Days of Summer
RUDD AND GILLARD
A subtitle reads: Wednesday June 23rd, 2010. Julia Gillard (48) and Amanda Lampe (42) are walking briskly down a corridor at night in Parliament House. Lampe is round, short-haired, spectacled, concerned. Gillard is cool, decisive, inwardly ardent, power-dressed, steeling herself. A little behind them are three men we do not recognise: two youngish, one large and fiftyish, David Feeney, the numbers man.
GILLARD: (to Amanda Lampe, slowing down) I dunno …
LAMPE: Come on. Just do it.
GILLARD: It’s too soon.
LAMPE: You don’t choose the moment. It chooses you.
GILLARD: John!
Up ahead is John Faulkner: lean, bespectacled, fiftyish, scholarly, standing outside an office. His intensity resembles that of a doomed Dostoevskian character awaiting execution.
FAULKNER: (mild, brisk) Julia.
They shake hands, her spare hand to his elbow.
GILLARD: Good you’re here.
FAULKNER: I have to tell you, you don’t have my support.
GILLARD: (false smile) Look, I don’t have my support. This is a … bolt from the blue.
Faulkner doesn’t believe this. He looks at Lampe, and the others, then he and Gillard go on their own into the prime minister’s outer office.
GILLARD: (quietly) Does he have your support?
FAULKNER: (grim) He’s the leader. I’m famo
usly loyal … to the leader of the day.
GILLARD: (looks at him, appreciative and suspicious) Yes, you are. Always.
They go past the reception desk towards the prime minister’s inner office. Outside it is Alister Jordan (30), handsome, solid, reliable.
JORDAN: John.
FAULKNER: Alister.
JORDAN: Go right in.
He opens the door, and they enter. Rudd, behind his desk, rises. Jordan closes the door.
GILLARD: Hi.
RUDD: So: the moment.
GILLARD: It need not be.
RUDD: (going towards the couch) It need not have been. Sit …
GILLARD: Thank you.
All three sit. Rudd looks at her with a mild, confrontational smile.
RUDD: All my life they have been coming, these feet.’
GILLARD: Pardon?
RUDD: T.S. Eliot. Murder in the Cathedral. A sinful saint is cornered by four of the king’s knights in Canterbury …
He indicates the bone china teapot and teacups between them. They nod. He pours tea for them.
GILLARD: I’ve got more than four.
RUDD: You had more than four.
FAULKNER: But they’re not firm.
GILLARD: There’s enough.
Rudd sips his tea, then says:
RUDD: Look, I’m asking …
GILLARD: (interrupting, raised voice) You questioned my loyalty.
RUDD: (mild, cold) Prematurely, you say?
She is stung by this.
GILLARD: I was loyal! Until …
RUDD: Until there were more numbers in disloyalty.
FAULKNER: I can vouch for her loyalty … Up till three p.m.…Today.
GILLARD: And John does not lie.
Bob Ellis Page 13