Phillip Adams

by Philip Luker

  He said that at times, and only at times, Adams’ view of the world ‘leads him into a smugness and predictability. I had to tell him that during the backlash against John Howard’s approach to Wik (the High Court’s decision on native title rights), he was broadcasting the same indigenous grievances and gripes night after night — there was no criticism of his own position or openness to fresh ways to deal with indigenous Australians’ condition. That’s one example, and it’s a rare one, but on occasions like that you can — for a moment, and only for a moment — understand the right-wing reaction to left-liberal orthodoxy in Australia. Thank God and the ABC, Phillip is there and he is what he is, one of the jewels of ABC Radio National, a corner of the radio universe free of the cacophony of climate-change denials, rank racism, manufactured grievances and fake indignation that is the currency of commercial radio.’

  At the same time as Adams got his break on Radio National in 1990, Jim Soorley, who was once a Catholic priest but is now a non-believer, won his first election as Lord Mayor of Brisbane, the biggest local government area in Australia, and became one of the few Australian politicians to raise their votes at three elections in a row. He was having dinner in Brisbane with Phillip Adams soon after Adams got involved in the Adelaide Festival of Ideas in the late 1990s. He is always a sucker for a good idea — he tells people to give him an idea and he can always find a million dollars to put it into practice. He told me, ‘I asked Phillip to run a Brisbane Ideas Festival every two years and the city council would fund it. Phillip said, “Done deal.”’

  Adams has been involved in the festival since the first one in 2000, not only chairing sessions but also coming to committee meetings. The state government now provides most of the funds but it was Adams’ ideas and initiative that has made it happen. He has a deep-seated dislike of prejudice and ignorance and an appetite to know and understand issues; he is also an artist with creative energy and insight. You get a feeling when you listen to his program that here is a man who is gentle, searching for the inside of people he is interviewing. He has an incredible ability make them feel at ease.

  Jim Soorley said, ‘Phillip is driven by a search and a thirst for knowledge and by a sense of fairness and social justice, demanding that people throw away their prejudices’ — a sentence that sums up the inner Phillip Adams better than any other spoken to me by his friends.

  Who can tell what effect Phillip Adams’ spoken and written words have had on Australian society? As the American historian Henry Brooks Adams wrote in his book The Education of Henry Adams in 1907, ‘A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.’

  Chapter Eight:

  Keating Pre-cooks Adams

  Paul Keating’s office is in an old, gloomy Georgian terrace in Potts Point on the borders of Kings Cross in Sydney; he and his secretary occupy the first floor. He is one of Adams’ two best friends, the other one being Barry Jones. Adams had told me several times that Keating would not see me, but I persisted, and Keating’s secretary sent me a letter saying when and where he would see me. He is one of the most complex, controversial politicians Australia has ever had. But his elitism upset ordinary Australians.

  I was shown into his large, dark office and sat waiting for the man about whom so much has been written and spoken. I was almost startled when he slid silently into the room and shook my hand. I respectfully regard this accomplished man who left school at the same age as Phillip Adams: fifteen. A lot has happened since then. He served as a backbencher under Gough Whitlam; he was Bob Hawke’s treasurer and then usurper as prime minister. He was the driving force behind the Hawke government’s economic reforms and was invaluable as Hawke’s treasurer because he was happy to be a maverick and to challenge accepted views. But he is probably best known as a witty and often venomous speaker who people either like or decidedly dislike. His arrogance was a large reason why the Labor Party lost in 1996 to the Liberals under John Howard, who is equally despised by Keating and Adams.

  As we sat down in his office, he smiled softly and said, ‘Phillip’s been unwise to co-operate with you. I’m surprised myself that I agreed to see you. I normally send authors packing; you slipped through.’ Keating was well aware of why I’d gone to talk to him and launched into a well-prepared monologue to prove it.

  ‘Phillip has a compellingly progressive mind,’ he said in the famous voice that once wielded words like a rapier during Question Time. Aged 66 in 2010, his voice is now more subdued. He continued about Adams, ‘There is no element of reaction. The whole framework is one of enlargement, starting, of course, with the human spirit. Everything flows from that. No matter how the decades go on or what the issues are, Phillip always approaches an issue from the framework in his head. And the framework is progressive, so even as time progresses and changes, he progresses further. Even Phillip’s prejudices — and we all have them — spring from that same approach.

  ‘He is also a very attractive writer,’ Keating continued in soft tones. ‘He has a great facility with words and this is part of his power. Great writers are also great thinkers. No-one can write well if they don’t also think well, because that would be immediately apparent in their writing. What happens with Phillip is that he has a great penchant for synonyms. He tries to paint in synonyms, finding similar things to contrast with, to tell a story. He has the ability to use vivid colours and thoughts in his writing. This comes, I think, from the fact that he has thought about most arguments beforehand. It means that his phrases and synonyms come pre-cooked. It’s like turning out a high cuisine meal. A lot of the ingredients have been cooked over time and they are brought together with great facility.’

  Paul Keating continued: ‘Phillip’s mind organises ideas and arguments and then intersperses them with colours. His mind can put charcoal on a canvas but also use pre-mixed colours and add them to the picture. This was why his columns read so clearly and visibly.

  ‘Of course, many people would disagree with me. Conservatives disagree with Phillip vehemently but they would all give him — perhaps through gritted teeth — marks for consistency. The consistency is not rooted in prejudice; it’s rather rooted in position. The position gets back to that progressing framework.’

  Keating barely drew breath as he continued talking about Adams: ‘He’s had a substantial effect on the Australian community. The media tends to attract people from the right and not many people write from the moderate left. Throughout the barren Howard years, Phillip marked out a position every week. You can’t do that by episodic flurries. You have to have a wider position. If you look through the barren years of the Howard orthodoxy, Phillip was perhaps the most obvious writer commenting from the centre and centre left. So his influence has been quite large. He has his ABC program and his Australian readership and he’s been blessed with a very attractive, intimate voice. There is a relationship between him and his listeners. He also has the ability to stand back somewhat from the discussion yet the same ability to pull the threads out and follow — as any important interviewer does — the myriad of issues and to know a fair bit about them. He lets people talk. He doesn’t dominate the conversation.’

  I asked, ‘Can you evaluate his influence on the Australian Labor Party?’

  Keating answered, ‘He gave the party a litmus background. It wouldn’t take Labor people long to know if he believed they were on the wrong track. In countries like France and Britain there are colour standards and Phillip represents a standard — it’s a standard in the colour way of the Labor Party, not the exact colour but the colour way, the general colour tone of the broad Labor Party. The Labor movement does not hang on Phillip’s every word, but the political colour way he works in is broadly sympathetic to Labor. So although Labor people might not read what he writes every week, they would notice if he wrote things at odds with them and might ask themselves, “Is Phillip right? Is what he says worth considering?” So he is a litmus provider to the debate, particularly in the centre left.’

  I
knew, coming here, that I would be talking to one of the sharpest wits of the Australian landscape, a man capable of many interesting turns of phrase. I tried another question: ‘How did Phillip stand in relationship to the party as it moved more to the centre?’

  Keating replied, ‘The party moved to the centre under me and also under Bob Hawke, but especially under me, well before Kevin Rudd, and Phillip was dubious of the rational agenda. He had to be intellectually charmed into the rationalist position. It’s a measure of his mental dexterity that he understood how, for example, an open, competitive economy was better grafted to a traditional social wage and how an open, wealthier economy was better able to fulfil the obligations of that social wage. In other times, he might not have thought so and other, more rigid people of the left will never think so. He’s burned them off because, simply, his mind is better.’

  I asked, ‘Did Phillip see how far-left policies would never appeal to Australians?’

  ‘It’s a matter of delivery. The first structurally important graft of elements of policy, which came to be known as the Third Way, started in Australia. I used to call it the Only Way. The First Way was trickle-down capitalism where private ownership is everything; the Second Way is state socialism, where there was no private ownership; but there had to be a better way. The Australian Labor Party in the 1980s and ’90s broke the mould, and Phillip had the intellectual gymnastics to understand that. We had copycats. Tony Blair started talking about the Third Way, not knowing what it was; and the same with the Clinton Administration in the United States. But no-one did it as successfully as the Labor Government in Australia in the 1980s and ’90s.

  ‘Phillip barracked for it.’ I am heartened to see that Keating still has the same brio that brought him to national prominence.

  Did he support your policies?

  ‘It’s true he was pro my prime ministership but not at the start. As we went on a bit, I don’t think Phillip expected me to legislate native title. Rather, like other people, they expected economic things from me, not the romantic end of the agenda. When he started to see bits of that, I think he realised there’s something going on here.’

  He’s very keen on you now.

  ‘We’ve got time now.’

  Did he attack Howard too much?

  ‘No. Howard was in many respects left alone. Not many people called the Howard template into question. Most journalists were in his favour, including, until the latter years, the Canberra Press Gallery.’ Paul Keating and Phillip Adams cannot accept that many Australians are happy with mediocrity. John Howard knew it and it kept him in power for twelve years, although everything about Paul’s prime ministership was directed at revolution and reinvention. Many weeks in The Australian from 2000 to 2007, Adams attacked Howard, who also aroused Keating to some of his most delicious quotes in Parliament, such as calling Howard ‘a dead carcass swinging in the breeze … a mangy maggot … brain damaged … a desiccated coconut … araldited to his seat.’

  How often do you listen to or read Phillip?

  ‘I’m not a radio listener, not even AM or PM on the ABC. I find they interrupt my thought processes. I read Phillip’s column in The Weekend Australian Magazine. Not every weekend does it bounce off the page, but it has a lot of bounces. The storyline, the colour of the words, the beauty of the words, the analogies and synonyms are there. He’s an attractive writer, and also a sought-after speaker. I’ve never seen him disappoint an audience. It’s never ordinary. The facility is there, the wordsmithing, the pre-cooked phrases, the pre-cooked thoughts, the compositional quality, and the showmanship it takes to put it across. He is also a charming person. “Charming” is not a word you throw around much, but you can with Phillip. He makes the person he’s speaking to feel important. The subject he’s got might not enthuse his imagination, but he makes a fist of it.’

  How has Phillip’s advertising and marketing experience helped the Labor Party?

  ‘Some of the world’s sharpest minds are in advertising — you’ve got to be smart to see the standouts, to pull the issues out and put them into a campaign. It never surprised me that he was a powerful force in advertising; also in films. He was very influential, when I was treasurer, in setting up the Australian Film Commission and in general support for the film industry. That’s part of the Australian story. People who have a position, like him, influence you and ones who have thought-out positions tested over time are always valuable to speak to because they have a framework.

  ‘Phillip’s influence in the Labor Party has probably declined a little, but that happens to us all. You can’t be a topical, fresh-faced person forever. The years wear you down and your complexion has a less rosy hue. You become more pasty. That’s happened to him and to me. We see each other regularly and talk about local and world politics.’

  Do any sections of the Labor movement criticise Phillip?

  ‘Occasionally, if he offends someone. Most Labor people know he’s a kindred spirit. He doesn’t agree with everything Labor does or says and he has sympathies for the big mass party of the moderate left. But he’s never toed the party line.’

  Did he have any influence with Kevin Rudd as prime minister?

  ‘I think he did. He has some contact with Kevin. I’m pretty certain Kevin would regard him as a sane character with a balanced view and would regard his counsel pretty well.’

  What drives Phillip?

  ‘A determination not to fall by the wayside, the compulsion to keep fresh and to keep his older mind current. And that means climbing over the issues and the facts and synthesising and distilling them as always. When you’ve been doing that for decades, it doesn’t necessarily get harder but it’s still laborious. Phillip suffers the labour for the benefit of remaining current.’

  Why does he have so many listeners and readers, do you think?

  ‘The two Fs: framework and facility. All facility and no framework, not worth listening to or reading. All framework and no facility, the same. You need both and he has both. He has the framework and he has the colour, the adjectives and synonyms, the story-telling, the pre-cooked thoughts, the high cuisine. All good restaurants have the marinations going and the other ingredients going, and they bring them all into the grand presentation at the end. That’s what Phillip does.’

  An image of Phillip at a stove flashed into my mind. Given that I’ve never seen him make anything more complicated than a cup of tea, it was amusing.

  How would you describe Phillip as a man?

  ‘He’s a softie to a fault. He should have said no to you and he didn’t. He’s a softie and, frankly, anyone with any brains is soft. What’s the point of being hard? We’re only here for a certain time. His neurons are running around at a great pace.’

  Does he have any good or bad habits?

  ‘He likes cars. His silhouette is a bit like the comic character The Little King.’ Otto Soglow drew The Little King in 1931 in The New Yorker and from 1934 worldwide, until both Otto and the fat Little King died in 1975.

  ‘Phillip’s overweight,’ Keating explains, in case I didn’t understand the reference. ‘But you can’t exercise your way into immortality, and I think Phillip understands that. You can’t exercise your way into not ageing. So he’s not going to even try.’

  What are his demons, then?

  ‘You never quite know what people’s demons are. I don’t know what Phillip’s are. I think if I had to say what his principal demon is, I’d say it’s the threat of loneliness.’

  I said, ‘He likes being alone for some of each week.’ I’ve both observed this and been told this by Adams himself.

  ‘But he’s not alone. He’s got many friends. He’s a person who would suffer greatly from loneliness.’

  How do Patrice and Phillip seem as a couple?

  ‘It’s a partnership that has gone on for a very long time. And always well, in my observation.’

  Phillip has had many successes. Has he had any failures?

  ‘Phillip might like to hav
e been elected to Federal Parliament, and he would have been good enough to have been. Given his attachment to the public realm, it’s hard to think he might not have liked to be elected. He is a commentator more than a proselytiser. It’s very hard to be a commentator. You’re asked to comment on a whole lot of things because of the complexities of modern life, the flow of information, the frequency and velocity of events. To be a commentator of note today and to be able to stand your ground for decades is very difficult to do, and Phillip does it with élan. He is a great listener to audio books in his car. It’s a lazy way of reading books, but as he drives for three hours each way between his nirvana in the Hunter Valley to his office in Paddington every week, it is far more absorbing than listening to the squalor of talkback radio. Phillip is an unusual person to be a rural burgher on a farm in the Hunter Valley. You’d expect him to be an urbane urbanite.’

  Paul Keating extended his hand. As I shook it, I felt a sense of opportunity lost, not for my conversation with him, but for his role in public life. However you regard his politics, Australian public life has been more boring without him. He is currently a Visiting Professor of Public Policy at the University of New South Wales and he emerges from time to time to call politicians nasty things, making headlines. But I wonder if he’ll ever take a bigger role again, or if he would even want one.

  Chapter Nine:

  Eight Prime Ministers Adams Has Known

  When next I see Phillip Adams, I decide to continue the prime ministerial theme. My conversation with Paul Keating has inspired me to find out what other prime ministers Adams has known and to dig around in that brain of his for some insights into the people who have shaped Australian history the most. ‘So,’ I begin once we’re sitting down with cups of tea, ‘prime ministers’.

  Adams begins talking about John Gorton, who he said was clueless and incapable of spin but totally genuine. The day after Prime Minister Harold Holt disappeared while swimming at Cheviot Beach in Victoria on December 17, 1967, John McEwen, the deputy prime minister, said his Country Party would not remain in the Coalition if deputy Liberal leader Billy McMahon, Holt’s logical successor, was made prime minister, because he didn’t trust him. This put John Gorton, minister for education and science, into contention as Liberal leader against his main rival, external affairs minister Paul Hasluck. Adams’ friend Barry Jones had already raised Gorton’s credibility by interviewing him on his Victorian radio and national television show. Gorton was a larrikin and fond of a drink. He was also fond of attractive young women, which made him popular with the voters but not with the Liberal Party.