Phillip Adams

by Philip Luker

  But he was elected party leader on January 9, 1968 and prime minister the next day. He invited Barry Jones to a sleepover at The Lodge to thank him and to talk about Jones and Adams’ plans to revive the Australian film industry.

  Adams told me, ‘Barry told me that he was sitting with John by the fire at The Lodge and John said, “I don’t know what to do about the Canadians. I’ve never liked Canadians.”

  ‘Barry said, “It’s different there now because of Pierre Trudeau.”

  ‘Silence. “What’s Trudeau?”

  ‘“The new prime minister of Canada.”

  ‘“What happened to Lester Pearson?”

  ‘“He lost his job.”

  ‘“Hang on,” said John. “I had to sign a letter to this Trudeau bloke.”’

  Adams laughed at the memory, as I did. Pierre Trudeau was prime minister of Canada from 1968 to ’79 and again from 1980 to ’84, outlasting Gorton by many years. But Adams wasn’t finished with the Gorton anecdotes yet.

  ‘Another time, John was holding a press conference on an Asian tour when someone asked him what he would do about the general SEATO situation and John was heard to ask an aide, “Who the fuck is General Seato?’” Adams roared with laughter. SEATO was the South East Asia Treaty Organisation.

  ‘Then there was the time when Barry and I visited John at his office in Parliament House. On his desk were signed photos of the Pope, Harold Wilson and another man with epaulets. I asked him who he was and he said, “Fucked if I know.” It turned out to be Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.

  ‘Gough Whitlam looked as if he should have been a Liberal prime minister and John a Labor one. That minced-up face of his was a good face.’ Gorton’s face had been mutilated when he served in the Royal Australian Air Force during World War II. ‘I liked him all the more because he backed our film project. Barry and I would write speeches for him and I remained quite good friends because he was a strong nationalist and he hated the fact that we had sold the farm to foreigners. Also, he was a republican. He said the British wanted Australians to roll over on their backs so the Poms could trickle their tummies like a dog. His nationalism did him no good in his own party. The Liberals used his strong flirtations with Liza Minnelli and Ainslie Gotto against him, but their main aim was to get rid of him.’

  At John Gorton’s ninetieth birthday celebration in 2001, Adams was the only one there from the left. The Liberals despised Gorton but pretended they cared. Gorton told Adams he was quite enjoying the bizarre event, where people who loathed him were pretending to love him. John Howard spotted Adams and told the function how Gorton had associated with people who were not the Liberals’ usual friends and one of those associations had led to the film industry.

  ‘It was Howard’s olive branch to me,’ Adams told me. ‘He kept offering them and I kept rejecting them. Soon after his birthday, John Gorton died.’ The date was May 19, 2002.

  ‘The Liberals don’t have genuine affection for their ex-leaders, like the Labor Party has,’ said Adams. ‘Even when they’re disasters, Labor loves them. You couldn’t not like John Gorton. He was as rough as bags, immensely vague and didn’t know what was going on, but totally genuine. He just didn’t have any skill at spin. He wasn’t a thoroughbred Liberal out of The Melbourne Club. It was the first time the club had lost control of who would be prime minister. In some areas, he was very progressive. In others, he was hopeless.

  ‘The myth is that he used a casting vote to vote himself out of the prime ministership when he called a party meeting in March 1971 and a motion of confidence in his leadership was tied. The myth is just a myth. Under the party’s rules, a tied motion is automatically defeated. Gorton said, ‘That is not a vote of confidence, so the party will have to elect a new leader.’

  ***

  After John McEwan retired as Country Party leader, his successor Doug Anthony told the Liberal Party that the veto against Billy McMahon no longer applied. So the Liberals elected McMahon to succeed John Gorton. McMahon, his wife, Sonia, and little ‘Nugget’ Coombs, the Reserve Bank Governor, mounted the stairs in Washington with Sonia’s thigh flashing in the picture that went around the world. Adams wrote that it looked as if Snow White was down to her last two dwarfs. Soon afterwards, Tony Staley, a Liberal MP, came to Adams with a job offer from McMahon and Adams said, ‘But I’ve just described your boss’s wife as being Snow White down to her last two dwarfs.’ Staley said, ‘The PM thinks that’s funny.’

  When I ask Adams about it all now, he says, ‘Billy as prime minister was a joke from start to finish, probably our most underwhelming PM, a non-event, but a cunning little bugger. Afterwards, he disappeared into the mists of time. Once when I was staying in the Sebel Town House in Sydney, all I needed was a nap.

  ‘I told the switch, as a joke, “No calls, unless it’s a prime minister.” I literally collapsed on the bed and the phone rang.

  ‘The reception asked, “What about an ex-prime minister?”

  ‘I said, “Which one?”

  ‘They said, “Sir William McMahon.”

  ‘I said, “Put him through.”

  ‘Bill said in his squeaky little voice, “Hello.”

  ‘I said, “Hello, Bill.”

  ‘Bill said, “Who’s that?”

  ‘I said, “It’s Phillip.”

  ‘He said, “What can I do for you, Phillip?”

  ‘I said, “No, Bill, you’re ringing me.”

  ‘He said, “Oh, yes. I’ve written my autobiography, Phil, and I’d like you to read it.”

  ‘I said, “I’d be happy to do that, Bill, if you courier it to me.”

  ‘It arrived; I ran through it and saw how bad it was. Every prime minister’s autobiography is self-serving, but Bill’s was preposterously so. I rang him and diplomatically said, “Bill, it needs a really good edit before you submit it to a publisher.” He didn’t take any notice and submitted it to several publishers, all of whom knocked it back. I sent the one copy I had to Barry Jones and told him, “You’ll love this.” Barry agreed with me and then lost the copy. For years I asked him whether he’d found it, because I wanted to send it to the National Library, but he never did find it.’

  McMahon stayed in Parliament until he was seventy-four and died of cancer, aged eighty, in 1988, twenty-two years before Sonia died, also of cancer, in 2010.

  ***

  Gough Whitlam walked all over Billy McMahon in the December 1972 election and became prime minister in the first Labor government for twenty-three years. Adams had been one of his young supporters in the 1960s, when Whitlam was the Labor Party deputy leader under Arthur Calwell. Calwell was the end of an era and had to go. Even then, television was becoming a major factor in politics and Calwell was a bad joke on television, physically and vocally, whereas Whitlam was a gift from heaven.

  When I asked Adams about this time he said, ‘We all knew Calwell wouldn’t win the 1966 election against the prime minister, Harold Holt. It was not ideology; it was presentation.’

  Adams wrote a secret report to a Victorian Labor Party committee saying the party had to get Calwell out of the picture and suggested he be persuaded to ask Holt for an aircraft to fly him around the world seeing world leaders who supported Labor’s anti-Vietnam War policy. While he was away, Gough Whitlam and Jim Cairns would put on a double act and run the election campaign. Calwell went along with it and teed-up the plane from Holt. Then one Saturday morning The Australian had a page one story, ‘Secret committee says dump Calwell’ and all the committee members were named, which was embarrassing as the atmosphere was still pretty McCarthyite. Calwell cancelled the trip and we were well and truly done over in the election. Adams thought Whitlam was pretty special, and of course he’s not alone in that opinion: many Australians still feel the same way. Jim Cairns, the hero of the left, led the anti-Vietnam marches and decided he would have a crack at the Labor leadership, but only to give Whitlam a kick in the backside. He didn’t want to win. He and the party knew he wouldn’t win a f
ederal election because he was too left-wing.

  Adams told me, ‘Cairns wrote a very feeble, incredibly polite letter to all Caucus members. Jim was, in fact, a very polite, decent human being. He was ill — and holding press conferences in his pyjamas was not a good look. I sat on his bed and rewrote the letter, making it angry. I took out every “Mr” before Whitlam, put in some really ugly, aggressive prose about Whitlam being pompous and arrogant, who the hell did he think he was and finished by asking, “Whose party is it anyhow? His or ours?” To everyone’s astonishment, Gough won the leadership ballot by only three votes. He never forgave me and whenever they met, he would call me “Jim Cairns’ campaign manager”. He was so petulant, he never really spoke to Cairns again, even when Jim was deputy prime minister and treasurer. So when I think of Gough, I think how close Australia was to Whitlam not becoming prime minister — because of a letter I helped write. The greatest triumph with Gough was the arts.’

  Adams once more told me about Nugget Coombs and his influence in having Whitlam, as prime minister, keep the arts portfolio and Doug McClelland look after media, thus allowing them to achieve all of the plans, such as the film school, once discussed with John Gorton (see Chapter Four).

  He continued: ‘Gough was magnificent in his first hundred days. There was always a quality of self-ridicule and self-mockery about him. When he says, “I’m the greatest”, it sounds okay but not when it appears in print. Gough really believes he is the greatest. But he ran a shambles of a government, a lot of it because he was a great inspiration but not a great prime minister. He’s spent the rest of his life trying to convince us that he was. I revealed in an Australian column that he planned the world’s biggest state funeral for himself, down to the last item, like the mounted police having polished black boots. He had committees working on it, such as a music committee. He chose Centennial Park in Sydney for it, to accommodate the thousands of people who would come. In some ways he is preposterously over the top, in other ways he has a quality of amusement. He’s hard not to like.

  ‘He loves food and uses it as fuel — it doesn’t matter what the food is — and when I did the breakfast program on 2UE, he’d come in if I provided breakfast for him. He eats massively. I also wanted to interview him for Late Night Live and I rang his assistant, who said, “Okay.” So on the way I did a detour and bought a box of disgusting cakes and custard tarts. Gough was thrilled with them. His assistant went and got a towel and put it around Gough’s neck. While he was doing the interview, he was scoffing the cakes. He looked like Mount Vesuvius erupting. It’s amazing that Gough ever made it past eighty, because he does everything wrong. The wrong food, too much of it, and no exercise.’ Whitlam was 94 on July 11, 2010.

  It is well known that on November 11, 1975, John Kerr, who Whitlam had appointed governor-general, created Australia’s biggest constitutional crisis by sacking Gough’s government and appointing the Liberal leader Malcolm Fraser as caretaker prime minister.

  ***

  ‘Malcolm believed, like Whitlam, Hawke and Keating, that he was born to rule,’ Adams said. ‘People say he’s shy and that’s probably right. He has no social graces and no small talk. To have dinner with him is agonising.’

  Adams was invited to The Lodge, the prime minister’s Canberra residence, while Malcolm was living there.

  ‘He always took pills for back pain,’ Adams continued, ‘and I think they added to his grumpiness. And he liked to have a drink.’ During the Fraser government Phillip was on the Advance Australia committee; the chairman was Jim Leslie, the boss of Mobil and later chairman of Qantas. The committee’s job was to make Australians more patriotic and to make them buy more Australian goods. A survey commissioned by the committee found that people ran a mile from anything with ‘Made in Australia’ on it.

  ‘I thought Malcolm should know this,’ said Adams. ‘But first we had to run it past Phil Lynch, the treasurer, who paled visibly when we told him, and said, “I’m not telling him. You tell him.” So we went into a room and everyone from Jim Leslie to Phil Lynch was scared stiff at having to deal with Malcolm on the issue. In he came from lunch, grumpy. All the others looked as if they were hiding.

  ‘So I said, “You’re not going to like this, Prime Minister, and it’s pretty grim.” I read him some bits from the research.

  ‘Fraser shouted, “You tell them that the Holden is as good as the Mercedes and the Ford Falcon is as good as the fucking BMW.”

  ‘I said, “No, you tell them. They won’t believe it because they know it’s not true.”

  ‘Everyone was terrified of this towering man. He was pretty hard to handle.

  ‘The good thing about him is that he’s always been terrific on race,’ Adams said. ‘That’s why the Africans love him. The Centre for the Mind held a function in the Great Hall at Sydney University to coincide with the 2008 Beijing Olympics because Professor Allan Snyder, the centre’s director, believes the same attributes as that make sporting champions make champions in any area. Only Allan could get Nelson Mandela there as the centre’s Millennium Fellow. The protocol required me to introduce John Howard, the centre’s patron, and Howard to introduce Mandela.

  ‘An hour before the event, I got a phone call from Howard’s office.

  ‘“Do you really want to introduce Mr Howard?”

  ‘“Of course I don’t.”

  ‘“Yes, it would be a bit hypocritical, wouldn’t it?”

  ‘“Not as hypocritical as him introducing Mandela.”

  ‘So the line-up was rejigged, and I did a vote of thanks to Mandela. Lovely guy. At the drinks, Malcolm Fraser, at the top of his voice, told me Howard’s record on race, abandoning all rules of Cabinet confidentiality and directing the remarks at Howard, who became increasingly uncomfortable. Fraser said Whitlam had rung him when Fraser was prime minister and asked him to let in a pile of Vietnamese who had helped the Australian troops in Vietnam. Fraser said no-one opposed it except Howard, who protested against letting them in. It was perfectly consistent with his racial attitudes.

  ‘In the ceremony at the university, the Vice-Chancellor asked me to get Fraser out, so I took him into the anteroom and we had a cup of tea. Malcolm became, next to John Hewson, the greatest Howard hater of all. He always supported my refugee campaigns. After Kim Beazley capitulated over refugees, Fraser effectively became the opposition leader on the issue.’

  ***

  The man who succeeded Malcolm Fraser as prime minister was Bob Hawke, who led the Labor Party to victory in 1983. Adams knew Hawke much earlier.

  ‘He was as drunk as a skunk when he rolled into the Don’s Party film opening night,’ said Adams about his first meeting with Hawke in 1976. ‘He had to be virtually carried to his seat. By the time the film was over, he was back in command and took us to a party. He had so much physical resilience that he could drink enough to kill anyone else and still operate. I saw this same resilience at the Tax Summit, when, after Bob had stopped drinking and become prime minister, he invited people to Parliament House to discuss the future of taxation in Australia.

  ‘It was where Paul Keating lost his GST — Paul was advocating it but by the end of the conference Bob, who always saw the writing on the wall, had dumped it. Paul was enraged. I was there to represent the arts but couldn’t stay awake and was shown asleep on television. But dazzling Bob sat there chairing the summit for days because he’s so physically disciplined. I’ve always been impressed by that ability. But he’s always been a very naughty boy and that’s legend.

  ‘He has a genius for seducing even men — not physically, but constantly. He doesn’t have blood, only testosterone. He invades your personal space. I’ve seen him work a room and have been on the receiving end of his sexual radiance plenty of times. He’s just as skilled at seducing men as women and I’ve seen many high achievers with that ability.

  ‘I’ve never been close to Bob,’ Adams continued, ‘but I thought he was pretty good at his job. Bureaucrats and members of his cabinet
tell me he was the best prime minister at chairing meetings. He was the first among equals, he got things going and everyone got to talk — that’s very rare. On the ethical level, he was mediocre. He threw a dinner party for Paul Keating, a French count and his girlfriend, and the actress Miriam Margolyes. It was one of those parties where everyone has to sing a song or tell a story and when it was the French count’s turn he decided he would propose marriage to his girlfriend. So in front of everyone he proposed marriage and she’s thrilled to bits. Next it’s Miriam’s turn and she said she’d do one of her acts of a Charles Dickens character. She said, “How could I refuse this invitation? I was told the other guests would be two ex-prime ministers and a French cunt!”’

  Hawke and Adams nearly had a fist fight in a VIP lounge at Sydney Airport after Hawke lost his job as prime minister. The story was that Hawke was involved in horse racing in Hong Kong. All Adams said in a column was that Bob Hawke always sticks up for the little man — in this case, the jockey. Hawke went ballistic when he saw Phillip at the airport, screaming obscenities and threatening violence. It must have been Phillip’s final insult to him — Adams had been very pro-Keating and had said it was time for Hawke to go. Now, Adams told me, he and Hawke bump into each other occasionally when it’s unavoidable, and they’re pleasant.

  ***

  It took two challenges by Paul Keating, private and public sniping and a recession to unseat Hawke and install Paul Keating as prime minister. Keating finally won in a party-room ballot on December 20, 1991. Hawke alone could not have reformed the Australian economy, but Keating alone could not have sold the reforms to the people.