by Philip Luker
Adams remembers Keating making an impression on him as far back as the early 1970s, when he heard him in a parliamentary broadcast as the MP for Blaxland in Sydney’s western suburbs; Keating was still in his late twenties.
‘He was good!’ said Adams, reminiscing about the man I interviewed only days ago. ‘I became intrigued by him, although I didn’t entirely approve of his views because he came from the New South Wales hard right faction. As the years passed, he became more interesting. After he became prime minister, every year when I was chairman of the Australia Day Council, I’d go to Kirribilli House in Sydney, collect Paul and Annita and we’d go to Admiralty House next door for the Australian of the Year ceremony. Telstra, the sponsors, pitched a tent for the guests. Most years, we used to upset Alan Jones with our choice.
‘One year, when I was writing The Penguin Book of Australian Jokes, I told the audience it contained quite a few jokes about Paul and we had gone into history and found they were originally anti-Hitler jokes, invented by a couple of Munich comedians who finished up in Dachau. That’s the way jokes work — the costumes change but the joke continues.
‘Paul smiled but Annita was livid. Later that day, we wandered down the Admiralty House lawns towards the harbour. Paul Kelly, of The Australian, was with us. The rest of the media were up on the hill with long-distance microphones and could pick up our conversation. As a joke I said loudly, “Rupert Murdoch is gay.” Kelly nearly passed out. Paul Keating quite liked what he called my “fucking irreverence”. So we had a rapport.
‘I love the British MP Tony Benn’s argument that politicians are either straight men, fixers or maddies, and I wrote a column allocating Australian politicians, such as John Cain and Nick Greiner as straight men, Neville Wran and Bob Hawke as fixers and Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Jeff Kennett and Paul Keating as maddies — ones who really do things, whether you like what they do or not.
‘The phone rang at the farm and Paul’s voice said, “It’s your mad mate here.” He was delighted because that was the way he saw power — if you have it, you use it, which is why he thought Kennett was the only state premier worth feeding, because he used power.’
In 2007, ABC Radio National ran a poll to find out what listeners thought were the world’s greatest speeches. Keating’s 1992 reconciliation speech at Redfern Park in Sydney came third after Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ and the Sermon on the Mount.
‘I rang Paul to tell him,’ said Adams, ‘and he thought it was okay to come third after those speeches.
‘He was in great pain after he lost, badly, in 1996 to John Howard, the person in Australia he most despised. He immediately resigned as Labor leader and from Parliament a month later (on April 23, 1996). After that he lost Annita, a calamity for him because he will go to his grave adoring her. They’re not divorced, but she’d had enough of it. The Labor Party dumped him and tried to write him out of history as much as possible. People crossed the street if they saw him coming.
‘His last disaster was Don Watson’s biography on him, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart’ (Random House), said Phillip. ‘Paul regarded it as a personal betrayal and a gross misrepresentation of what was really going on. Paul’s argument is that it makes him look like Hamlet on the battlements of Elsinore, a pale figure full of indecision. His version was, “Don wasn’t at the meetings. I’d be there fighting all day and go home dead tired and listen to some music, and that was when Don would come in.”
‘Paul and I propped up each other for John Howard’s twelve years in power. He’d come around and we’d talk and he’d tell his wonderful anecdotes. I have a huge affection for him and think the world of him. I asked him once, “What does it feel like to be the last Labor prime minister?”, and I meant “last” because I couldn’t see the Labor Party climbing out of the Howard years, which had so completely reshaped Australia. ‘In Kevin Rudd’s 2007 election campaign, Paul got more and more angry because Kevin was not taking his calls. I knew Paul would blow his stack in the middle of the campaign. So I rang Kevin and asked him to ring Paul. Then I rang Paul and said, “I think you might get a call from Kevin.” But he didn’t, and he went on Lateline on ABC TV and did them all over because he was angry about being marginalised. Then Kevin redeemed everything by making a fuss of Paul at his policy launch in Brisbane Town Hall.
‘Paul was always annoyed that, after Bob Hawke left office, he made piles of money from racing and international gambling connections, Burma, China and so on. I was sitting in the Chairman’s Lounge at Sydney Airport with a friend from Melbourne, and we compared notes about the states of mind of Paul and Bob, and my friend said, “Hawke’s got no money. He does things on success fees but he’s not having much success.”
‘I said, “Hasn’t he got a building in the CBD?”
‘“Yes,” said my friend, “but it’s mortgaged to the hilt.”
‘I thought, Paul would like to know this. So he rang him and asked if he would like some good news.
‘Paul said, “Yes, I’d like some good news.”
‘I sang a little song: “Hawkie’s got no money, Hawkie’s got no money” and asked him where he was.
‘He said, “I’m in Beijing and he’s sitting opposite me.” They were there representing different interests.’
I laughed, imagining Paul Keating looking like the Cheshire cat as he faced his old adversary.
Adams went on: ‘I see Paul as the great brain, the most extraordinarily gifted prime minister we’ve ever had … Any Canberra bureaucrat you ask who’s observed prime ministers up close says Hawke was a dazzling PM at running meetings, getting across the briefs and understanding the politics, but Paul was the most exciting. He is the most complex and charismatic character of them all. He was a maddie and Hawke was a fixer. To me, Paul in those short years was astonishing.’
***
Phillip Adams was born fourteen days before John Howard, but they are separated by vastly different ideologies and agendas. Hearing Adams say a kind word about Howard is like hearing the English praise the French, or the reverse. But he surprised me.
‘I saw John in the VIP Lounge at Sydney Airport one Monday morning after he’d lost the Liberal leadership in 1989 over his appalling interview with John Laws on 2UE, when he bucketed Asian immigration,’ Adams said. ‘The Labor Party was greatly relieved that he had lost the leadership, because it feared him. The whole Liberal Party was up one end of the lounge and Howard was at the other end because no-one was talking to him. People forget how out of it he was at that stage.
‘We each made ourselves a cup of tea and I said to John, “Our blokes are terrified you’ll get the leadership back.”
‘He asked, “Why?”
‘I said, “They know how smart you are politically. They know you’re not afraid of Keating and that’s pretty rare because almost everyone else is terrified of Paul, much more than they are of Hawkie. They know you understand the Labor Party as an organism. If you ever get the Liberal leadership back, the ALP will be concerned.’”
Just to balance the unexpected rosy hue, Adams then told me, ‘When Howard won, and won big, I knew the first thing he would do would be to attack everything Paul had done, he detested Paul so much. Howard came into power not with an agenda but with a hit list. My first reaction was to resign from everything to do with the government because I knew anything I was connected with would get no funds or support. Paul had given me the wonderful job of building a national museum as chairman of the board, to be announced after the 1996 election, which Paul lost. I resigned soon after the election.’
Keating had also asked former Victorian Premier Joan Kirner and Adams to write a report for COAG (the Council of Australian Governments) on preparations for the 2001 Centenary of Federation celebrations. Committees from all the states signed it but Adams knew that the actions suggested in the report, which included reconciliation and the republic, wouldn’t happen. Janet Holmes à Court chaired the national committee and ‘Howard sacked her,
’ said Adams.
‘If you didn’t resign, you were sacked. I predicted that the new chairman Howard would appoint would be Dick Smith, who at the time was a mate of his, and I was correct. I thought it was outrageous. It was typical of the way Howard operated.’
The Great Purge went on. The whole Howard issue boiled down to the refugees, which he made into a crisis, because Australia had more illegal refugees coming in through Mascot and Tullamarine, dressed in suits, than it ever had arriving in boats. They’d come in on tourist visas and disappear. Howard whipped Australia into a frenzy over boat people, aided by his appalling surrogate Pauline Hanson. The Labor Party collapsed ethically and morally and Kim Beazley, the leader, fell over: that was when Adams knew he could never support him.
‘My horror of Howard focused on his shameful manipulation of bigotry,’ Adams said. ‘When he ran for a second time in 1998, he was asked why and he said something quite extraordinary. He said, in effect, “To prove my legitimacy to Robert Manne”’ (Professor of Politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne) ‘“and Phillip Adams.” I was curious why he kept singling me out, most famously when he said the ABC should have a right-wing Phillip Adams, which helped because the ABC couldn’t get rid of me then. It spent years trying to fill the slot with Imre Salusinszky and Tim Blair and, more recently, Michael Duffy. So I have to thank John, with his inept statements, for the ABC keeping me on.’
The greatest evidence of Howard’s strange attitude to Adams was when his Arts minister, Peter McGauran, came to see him, ostensibly to talk about the film industry. They talked about it for hours but Adams was sure there was another reason why he had come.
‘At the time my main problem was a very painful arm,’ Adams told me. ‘I couldn’t even stir a cup of tea without it hurting. As the minister was leaving, he grabbed my bad arm. I nearly passed out with the pain.
‘McGauran said, “You’ve got to stop doing it. You’ve got to stop saying these things.”
‘“What are you talking about?” I asked.
‘He said, “You’ve got to stop saying these awful things about the prime minister. You’ve no idea how much you’re upsetting him.”’
‘I didn’t feel the pain in my arm as much after that.’
Adams kept smiling at the memory as he told me, ‘John Howard and I have a strange relationship. Perhaps one of these days, when we’re much older, we might sit down and talk about it, as I did with BA Santamaria (the Catholic activist) near the end of his life. We had always detested each other. But at the end of things, you sit down and talk things out.’
***
Just as with Paul Keating, Adams’ first contact with Kevin Rudd was by ear, when he interviewed Rudd, who was in Queensland, for Late Night Live. Phillip had never even heard of him at that time but found him fantastic, forensic, intelligent and articulate — ‘all the things most Labor Party people are not’.
‘I said to the producers, “Let’s get him on again.”’
Rudd started calling on Adams regularly for a cup of tea and a talk. He was the longest of prime ministerial long-shots for millions of reasons: his physicality, religion, conservatism and bureaucratic background — everything was against Kevin ever becoming a Labor Party leader.
‘I tried to talk him into running against Kim Beazley. He didn’t have anything like the numbers but he was very bitter that Beazley didn’t step aside. His next chance was when Beazley floundered and Mark Latham became parliamentary leader from December 2003 to January 2005.
‘Latham said in his Sydney Daily Telegraph column there was no place for me in his Labor Party, largely because he wanted a tougher illegal-migrant policy than the Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock’s. So for that reason, apart from anything else, I crusaded for Rudd against Latham as Labor leader. I used to say it was a choice between “The Bomber”’ (Beazley’s nickname) ‘and “The Bomb”.’ This was the nickname Adams had given Latham. ‘But Labor caucus leaders became desperate and Latham won the leadership — he was in the earthy, vigorous bullyboy Labor tradition and people thought they saw glimpses of Keating in him. They still couldn’t see Rudd, a strange, pristine, nerdy person.’
Adams suggested to Sally Warhaft, then editor of The Monthly, that she ask Rudd to write an essay, and talked to Rudd about it. ‘He rewrote a speech he’d given about his hero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi resistance fighter) and Warhaft put it on the cover. It caused a storm in the party and confirmed the worst suspicions of some but neutralised Kevin’s religion by putting it on the table, like Blanche d’Alpuget did when her biography of Bob Hawke revealed some of his amorous behaviour, but not all of it.
Adams continued, ‘Rudd won the leadership, and bloody hell, to everyone’s astonishment (including his own), he won the 2007 election because he ran a Howard Lite campaign. He didn’t frighten the Liberal voters, it looked like a painless transition and he wasn’t a sort of Hillsong God-botherer but was identified with a martyred Protestant theologian who stood up against Hitler, which I’d argued would kick in over any ethical crisis like refugees.
‘Just after the election, Kevin rang me up and asked Patrice and me to dinner at Kirribilli House. It was a nice way to say thank you. We got out of the car at the front door, the door opened and there was Kevin. We laughed and laughed. We laughed in disbelief.’
Chapter Ten:
Hilarious Tales of Politicians and Others
I decided to tackle Phillip Adams for anecdotes about politicians and phoned him at the usual time, 9 a.m. on a Monday, to arrange a meeting. He answered, ‘Yup?’
‘Hello, it’s Philip Luker. How are you?’
‘Okay.’
‘Can we have another meeting this week?’
‘Okay. Will you come here tomorrow at nine-thirty?’
‘See you then.’
That was always the extent of the call. The next day, as arranged, I pressed the security intercom on the front door of his office in Paddington, Sydney.
‘Yes?’ said a voice.
‘It’s Philip Luker.’
‘Come in, Philip.’
He welcomed me warmly and remarked that, as we were both wearing black shirts, ‘People won’t be able to tell us apart at the book launch.’ Adams went into the small, dark kitchen next to his large office and living room. He made each of us a cup of tea, two teabags each. The phone rang. It was his executive producer at Late Night Live. They discussed the interviews Adams would conduct that night. I set up my tape recorder on his desk and prepared to ask him for anecdotes about the dozens of politicians and other personalities he has known.
***
‘Bob Hawke is Australia’s Bill Clinton,’ Adams told me. ‘He’s enormously affable, feeling the electors’ pain and shedding the occasional ritualistic tear, but without much substance. Bob relishes the idea of becoming a welcome conciliator in a devastating dispute and used this tactic many times to settle strikes when he was ACTU president. It created a rush of affection for him.
‘But it’s amazing how little Bob is considered these days. He’s almost written out of the narrative.’ For such a popular prime minister, Hawke does not have the gravitas within the party or the public of another former PM, Gough Whitlam.
‘I much preferred Bob’s former wife, Hazel,’ said Adams. ‘We set up the Children’s Television Foundation to make children’s TV. Hazel loved that kind of thing. We all expected she would have a long twilight with or without Bob, but it was not to be. It’s immensely sad.’ He was referring not only to Hazel’s divorce from Bob, who had for many years conducted an affair with the writer Blanche d’Alpuget, but also to the fact that that in 2003 Hazel made public the fact that she has Alzheimer’s Disease.
***
I asked Adams what his anecdotes were about other federal and state politicians. ‘The thing about Nick Greiner (premier of New South Wales from 1988 to 1992) ‘is that he set up ICAC’ (the Independent Commission Against Corruption) ‘and if the same principles were a
pplied nationally, it would be hard to find an Australian political figure who would not be removed from office.’
ICAC returned to haunt Greiner when it ruled that his executive job offer to Independent MP Terry Metherell was corrupt. Four independent MPs decided not to support the government and Greiner resigned, although he was later cleared of corruption.
Adams continued, warming to the theme of political anecdotes: ‘You know, on the day Nick lost office, no-one came to see him or shake his hand, which shows what a dreadfully tough business politics is — other people can fail quietly, but not politicians.’
‘What about Joh Bjelke-Petersen?’ (the notorious National Party premier of Queensland from 1968 to 1987).
Adams said that after most premiers decided to have a film corporation like South Australia’s, Bjelke-Petersen gave the job of running his to his aide-de-camp and heavy hitter.
‘I’d never met the man,’ Adams said, ‘but one day two federal police called to see me and ask me questions about gifts they said I’d received from this head of the Queensland film body. So I said, “What gifts?” and they read out a list of gifts like gold watches. I said I’d never seen these gifts and that I wouldn’t have accepted them anyway. Turns out the film boss had been buying the gifts for himself and recording them as gifts for me.’ Adams said with a laugh. ‘He was relieved of his gold timekeeper before doing time himself.’
Adams met Joh several times and although he loathed everything the premier did in Queensland, Phillip nevertheless found him delightful, charming and amusing. ‘It’s annoying meeting people you want to hate and not being able to hate them,’ Phillip said. He told me the story of a film producer who went to see Joh to ask whether the Queensland Government would help him make a film in that state. “What’s in it for me?” Joh asked him. The producer went through his sales pitch again while he pondered the question and Joh again asked, “What’s in it for me?” The producer left without offering the premier the bribe he sought. Joh’s government started to fall apart after ABC Television exposed rampant police corruption in Queensland in a Four Corners program. Joh died in 2005.