Phillip Adams

by Philip Luker

  Adams also discovered that there are few genuine Australian jokes because almost every one has been recycled from overseas. His favourite joke is, however, genuinely Australian, about a couple of bushies who’d been making fences back o’ Bourke. One asks the other, ‘What are ya gunna do when ya got ya money, mate?’ The other replies, ‘I dunno. I might go down to S’nee.’ The first bushie says, ‘Yeah. S’nee’s a pretty good place. And what route are ya taking?’ The other bushie replies, ‘Ah, I think I might take the wife. She’s stuck with me through the drought!’ The series included The Penguin Book of More Australian Jokes, The Penguin Book of Jokes from Cyberspace, The Penguin Book of Schoolyard Jokes, The Penguin Book of World Jokes, The Penguin Book of All-New Australian Jokes, Pocket Jokes, More Pocket Jokes and What a Gag!More Kids’ Jokes from the Net.

  How does Phillip plan his Weekend Australian Magazine columns? Not much at all, really. Usually he thinks up a topic but doesn’t know where it will go; anything from a dog that has died on his farm to an idea the government should keep alive, like combating climate change. He writes up to four weekly columns in a weekend on the farm and the magazine editor and he decide by email which ones will be run in which weeks. He admits his columns are written quickly and intuitively rather than logically and thoughtfully. Often, this is obvious. Usually, the columns involve no research except through his extraordinary mind and memory.

  Adams’ columns and broadcasts have one thing in common: he tries to introduce people to ideas. In politics and public affairs, he sees his job as putting a counter view to what is being debated because usually the community is ill-informed, either through shortcomings in the media or in people’s minds or because people don’t want to be informed. He told me that in the Pauline Hanson era, when people were being brutal to refugees, they chose not to know that the refugees were completely within their legal rights to ask for asylum. To admit to this would have been too disturbing to Australian’s sense of being tolerant. Many people did not want to know the truth. They’d rather go shopping.

  Adams follows up very few of his Late Night Live conversations with highly intelligent and articulate people around the world by writing about the same people or ideas in The Weekend Australian Magazine. Obviously he couldn’t just repeat his broadcasts, but he could follow-up ideas or concepts in some broadcasts by doing more research and writing about it in his column. Some of his listeners and readers would be the same people. However, my own conversations with 30 of Phillip’s fans and non-fans revealed that almost all either listen often to the broadcasts but rarely read the columns, or the reverse.

  My favourite Adams Late Night Live conversation was with Arthur Miller on February 6, 2001, repeated a few days after Arthur died in February 2005, and followed up in his Weekend Australian Magazine column on June 14, 2008. Adams told how he had asked his producers to assure Miller he would not mention Marilyn Monroe but Miller kept talking about her ‘as if still awestruck by their improbable and ultimately sad relationship’. (I declare a special interest, as when I was a young freelance journalist hitchhiking around the world in 1956, I read in The Los Angeles Examiner that Marilyn was planning that day to fly to New York City to marry Arthur. I got a bus to the airport and tagged along behind a batch of Hollywood reporters. Marilyn sat in the doorway of her limo with her legs well displayed. I asked her as many questions as I could think of while she held my hand.)

  Finally in his conversation with Arthur Miller, Adams got him to talk about Death of a Salesman, which had its opening night in 1949 but is still being played around the world. Adams wrote in The Weekend Australian Magazine, ‘In the final scene, Willy Loman’s old friend Charley gives one of the greatest speeches ever written for American theatre — about the inevitable end of a salesman’s sustaining dream. Willy’s wife kneels by the grave of the man she loved, for all his faults, and says, “I made the last payment on the house, Willy, but there’ll be nobody home.”’ Adams said: ‘Miller remembered standing at the back of the theatre on the opening night as the curtain fell. Total silence. Behind the curtain the actors were frozen with bewilderment. The silence went on for several minutes. Then they started to clap and they’ve been clapping ever since. It’s no exaggeration to say the play changed my life every bit as much as it changed theatre.’

  What interview or column subjects does Adams avoid? He does not talk about business and leaves his partnership in Monahan Dayman Adams out of any CV because ‘I always see it as an accidental detour. But to be honest, it gave me money and with money (lots of it) I could bargain with prospective media employers because I was never desperate. I’m not terribly interested in business or economics. I get my weekly economics lecture from Paul Keating when he rings. I’ve never been numerate so I’m not good at economics.’ Adams has, however, often had Late Night Live conversations with financial people since the world crash and its aftermath made finance a hot topic. Sport? Not a subject. ‘It’s not that I despise it or anything. It’s wonderful for people who are good at it. But I do not like the mass-marketing of sport — or anything.’ One sports interview he had on-air was with Aboriginal Australian Football League hero Kevin Sheedy, about his work with Aboriginal children. Typically, Adams spent the first ten minutes joking with him about their common low-income upbringing in Melbourne suburbs.

  Adams tells how once he saved Keating from public embarrassment when Keating’s clash with Bob Hawke was hot news. Keating bowled unannounced into Adams’ office while a Sydney Morning Herald journalist was interviewing him about the arts, and started mouthing obscenities about Hawke. The Herald reporter thought Christmas had arrived. Adams said, “Paul, Paul, this is a journalist from The Sydney Morning Herald”. But he wouldn’t stop. After Keating left, Phillip appealed to the reporter not to report the outburst because she had been his guest at the time. She did not report it.

  Chapter Eighteen:

  Outspoken Views — He Stirs the Possum

  In conversations with me and in his Weekend Australian Magazine columns, Phillip Adams tells how to elect an Australian president; why voters have become more conservative; why they join community groups and not political parties; why solar power is an answer to the biggest community concern of climate change; why the world has so much information but little wisdom; why there are some reasons to be happy; what John and Heather did to save families; how drugs killed a politician’s son; how the real pornography is violence not sex; how companies indulge in paedophilia; where Melbourne is different from Sydney; how high executive salaries are obscene; how radio talkback taught him a lesson; how he has searched for a solution to Aboriginal problems; and how Western society censors death.

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  How to elect a president: If the Australian Government asked the people whether they wanted the government or the people to choose a president, they would want to do it themselves, but Adams has no confidence in that model. The 1999 republic referendum failed because the question was poorly phrased. Asked whether voters wanted to alter the constitution to replace the Queen and the governor-general with a president chosen by a two-thirds majority of federal MPs, only 45.13 per cent of voters (and a minority in all states) said yes. Adams told me: ‘People don’t realise that they don’t elect the prime minister. The Labor Party or Liberal MPs do. And if the voters elected a president, this figure would have a bigger mandate that the prime minister, which would put a big strain on the system. The kind of people I would like to see as president would never put up their hands for a popular vote. You would never get someone like Sir William Deane (governor-general from 1996 to 2001) to run for president although he would have been terrific in the job. Perhaps the best way would be a halfway house: Parliament prepares a short list and the voters choose the person they want from that.’

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  Why electorate is conservative: Adams pointed out to me that, as the pace of change accelerates, people become frightened and discomforted. So they turn back and look for simpler answers or they become angry and
can then be attracted to groups such as One Nation.

  Some become Islamic fundamentalists. In a world where everything changes by the hour, they look for people with simple answers. And because they become angry about the pace of change, they listen to shock jocks who yell, and they buy strident tabloids.

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  Community groups grow: Many pent-up progressive attitudes are being expressed not by political parties but by community groups. Australians act together and decisively in a crisis such as the 2004 Asian tsunami or the 2009 Victorian bushfires. (Also the floods in January 2011 — author.) Adams said in The Weekend Australian Magazine on February 28, 2009: ‘The worst brings out the best. The bushfires were beyond belief, beyond description, beyond bearing. Yet a sense of community was created even as communities were being destroyed. That’s the great paradox of such havoc. Suddenly, sometimes too late, people know and care about their neighbours. The Victorian fires were Australia’s 9/11.

  ‘Australians have always worried about national identity. We quarrel over it, we fret about it. The bushfires ended the argument. But will it last? When the smoke has cleared, when the ashes are cold, will the sense of identity, of community, endure? The communal energies released by the fires, and the sense of mutual responsibility they intensified, came at a time when we need to rethink just about everything — from capitalism to the climate.’

  Adams has his doubts about a rising tide of community spirit although the social researcher Hugh Mackay says there has been a profound change. Adams told me, ‘Hugh talks about a future when forty per cent of Australians live alone because they choose not to get married or not to have children, causing a new real-estate phenomenon. They live in alienating cities but they join up and form alliances. They don’t join political parties because they are bitter about party politics but they throng to non-government organisations and community and pressure groups. More people are engaged in politics outside the parties than probably ever before.’

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  The biggest concern: ‘The ongoing crisis of climate change is the biggest community concern,’ Adams told me. ‘Everything is over-heated — the planet, the economy, the population and industry. The world has to turn temperatures down, to stop over-using resources and having so many babies, and the only hope that this will happen is through community pressure.’ In The Weekend Australian Magazine on March 24, 2007, Adams wrote: ‘While we squander trillions in wars — wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars on drugs and terror — the most important war, on carbon dioxide, gets small change, tokenism and political grandstanding. Yet this is our first truly world war. The last time I counted the dead from decades of terrorism, it was about thirty thousand and most were victims of internal conflict in places like Sri Lanka, not of the transnational bin Laden brand. Yet climate change is affecting all of us and it won’t stop after a few years. Already it is too late to stop it; the best we can hope is to take the foot off the accelerator and it will linger. Or failing an effective response, it will intensify for centuries.

  ‘This is the biggest war in human history,’ Adams continued, warming to one of his favourite campaigns. ‘The weather threatens to impact on health, security and food, with even the optimists agreeing that millions will be fighting for food and water — or for land to stand on. Those disposed from Bangladesh to the Pacific islands will create wave after wave of boat people, many of whom will head our way. Yet it seems that the greatest concern of NSW and federal politicians is voter volatility in mining areas.’ There are 1,600 applications to open or extend coal mines in NSW and no coal application in the state has ever been rejected. The Commission for the Future began agitating about climate change from its formation in 1985. (Adams was its foundation chairman; its aim was social and economic research but its federal government budget was progressively reduced and it was closed in 1998.) It had the climate-change data, the information and the knowledge but the wisdom to deal with it was in short supply.

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  The climate change fiasco: After Adams was made the first chairman of the Commission for the Future in 1985, it met with Australia’s top scientists and decided to make climate change (then called the less-palatable global warming) its top priority. Barry Jones, as Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s minister for science, had come up with the idea of the commission so the government could look beyond the election cycle to see what long-term problems should be tackled. He particularly wanted to get a dialogue going between the public and scientists who talked in their own language. The commission, with Adams as chairman, arranged for climate-change scientists to address public meetings in town halls all over Australia by satellite, the first time this had been done.

  Adams told me that the more the scientists predicted a catastrophe, the more the audiences seemed to like it. ‘It was a religious event,’ he said. ‘People were not concerned about greenhouse gases coming from rice paddies or cattle; they wanted to hear about the evil automobile and the evil power factory. It was the start of a new religion. The scientific basis of climate change is rock solid. Idiots still deny it. It is a scientific fact but has been made a political issue. The world has to act on it or the world will be uninhabitable and we will die.’

  So it is now 25 years since the commission and a whole range of scientists started agitating for action on climate-change — and successive Australian governments have done little about it except talk and worry about losing votes in industrial and mining seats.

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  The answer is solar: John Gorton had just retired as prime minister in 1971 when Adams sat at a dinner next to the scientist Sir Macfarlane Burnet and his wife, who was dying of leukemia. The scientist attacked Gorton’s idea of a nuclear Australia not just because of the threat of leukemia but also because nuclear power stations are an invitation to terrorists. And you can’t get rid of the n-waste. Adams told me the simple answer was solar power. Australia should make solar energy its next Snowy Mountains Scheme. He claimed that if Australia built a solar reflector 165km by 160km in the middle of the Nullabor Plain, it could create enough power for the whole world. That was in the 1970s. Nothing much has happened with solar power in Australia since then. And the coal industry had continued to make fortunes by digging more coal, exporting it and using it to fire power stations that fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases.

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  The system is broken: Phillip Adams told me: ‘My concern is that the last time we had a severe recession, it led to Hitler, World War 11 and 55 million people being killed. So if you add climate change and population pressure, no-one — least of all me — can predict what will happen. The system is broken. You can’t fiddle with bits of it. The whole situation has to be dealt with, because as the Indians and Chinese buy cars and live like us, the planet will boil. You and I are sitting here today,’ Adams told me. ‘It looks like an ordinary day. The sun is shining; there is milk in the fridge and petrol in the car. But we don’t know what will happen. All we know is that the world is a total mess. Everything needs to change, personal behaviour, communal behaviour and all tiers of government have to be brought into play if we are to get through this crisis. We have the data, the information and the knowledge, but where is the wisdom? We have taken centuries to get where we are and we’ve mucked it up. And we didn’t have the brains to head-off AIDS, which is caused by poverty intensified by over-population.’

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  Rome and the condom: On no subject is Adams more aggressive than Rome’s prohibition of artificial contraception. In The Australian on July 15, 2008, he wrote: ‘Vast numbers of people have died, are dying and will die because of this insane and utterly reprehensible prohibition. The Vatican’s prohibition of the condom is on the short list of the cruellest, most appalling pieces of public policy in human history. It is a death sentence passed on to millions, including millions as yet unborn. The two greatest crises on earth are both condom-related: AIDS and over-population. Climate change will continue to accelerate while we continue to crowd the planet
with ever-more climate-changers, seven billion and counting. With Catholicism fast losing ground to the fast-faith franchises, the future of the Catholic religion lies in Africa. There, at least, its market share is booming. The condemnation of the condom guarantees life to millions of surplus human beings while condemning millions to death. The fact that this cheap, simple and ancient device can prevent HIV as well as pregnancy will not be admitted by Rome.’

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  Cheer yourself up again: Never in human history, wrote Adams in The Weekend Australian Magazine on June 20, 2009, have so many people lived in what might be described as freedom, actual or comparative. The religious and political monoliths have been crumbling. If you’re not in a war zone or dying from malnutrition or a pandemic, there’s a good chance that your life expectancy has vastly increased. Previously fatal diseases can be cured and it doesn’t hurt so much to go to the dentist. Education and literacy, once the province of the aristocracy and their priesthoods, are now, like travel, democratised. And we know thousands of times more than our ancestors did.’