Keating: The PM who should have got out more

By 1992, however, the political landscape had changed for Keating, and those in his office, for two reasons. First, with unemployment over 10 per cent, interest rates at record levels, and Paul Keating so personally identified with Australia’s economic restructuring, claims that things will get better if only policy stays with the ‘economic fundamentals’ were wearing very thin. Moreover, the landslide loss of Labor in Victoria in October 1992 clearly pointed to the need for a change in tack, even if Paul Keating and Jeff Kennett probably had a lot in common in their assessment of the Cain-Kirner governments in that state.

Second, with John Hewson, the new Federal Opposition leader, being so focused upon deregulatory economics with his Fightback! policy manifesto, Keating needed to stake out alternate territory. This partly drove him towards more interventionist economics with the One Nation economic policy package, and certainly hardened rhetoric that was skeptical of free market economics.

Perhaps more importantly, it encouraged a shift in the terms of debate. Keating’s raising the issue of Australia becoming a Republic, and the associated rhetoric of national independence, was demonstrably going well with a large section of the electorate. Polling was indicating that a lot of voters were getting sick of endless lectures on the economy, and enjoyed Keating’s change of tack to questions of national identity, as long as he didn’t talk about changing the flag. Similarly, speaking positively about the arts and national culture, and passionately about Indigenous deprivation, was not necessarily winning swinging voters to Labor - fear of the GST was the primary factor there - but, for almost the first time since 1983, bringing disaffected Labor supporters back into the fold.

On the 1993 Federal election victory, Watson recognises the extent to which it was not simply won by Paul Keating, but lost by John Hewson. This is acknowledged in his comments about the period when the campaign began:

For eighteen months John Hewson had every right to believe that the prime ministership was in the bag. But Keating did to Hewson what he and his colleagues had done to the Liberals for a decade- he drove him further and further to the right. It wasn’t hard: in the course of the year Hewson’s enthusiasm and self-belief took a near-fanatical turn which the public found disquieting. At times he seemed interested only in doing the impossible. If he won it would be despite himself; above all, it would be despite a 15 per cent GST on everything except food. The election was not quite a referendum on the new tax, but it was the dominant issue … It sustained us through the darkest times, all year long (p. 317).

Paul Keating won the 1993 election, defying not only the expectations of the Coalition parties and the media, but much of the ALP National Secretariat. Watson reports a phone conversation with Peter Barron saying that Keating would lose, and Labor Head Office would ‘rip the arm off’ of those involved in deposing Hawke for Keating, and those who had worked in Keating’s office (pp. 61, 346).

When decisions are being made about Paul Keating’s victory speech at the Bankstown Sports Club, Watson is on the side of expansiveness, and Russell on the side of caution. The result is the famous ‘True Believers’ speech, that simultaneously galvanized his supporters and drew his critics’ attention to qualities of hubris, arrogance and divisiveness. Watson observes that, with the ‘True Believers’ speech, ‘he might have still been campaigning’ (p. 354), and his retrospective reading of that speech is interesting:

For now and for some time afterwards the victory speech would be the guiding light, the inspiration, the high tide of our ambitions. When we were in doubt, we thought, we will have the victory speech to turn to. But Don Russell had been right. He [Keating] should have been more modest. The sound bite should have been more humble. Instead, only the opening line was remembered, and for much of the next three years we would battle the perception that the words meant his victory had only been for the faithful and the rest of the country can go hang (p. 354).

The 1993 election victory speech neatly captures the paradox of what Watson terms Keating’s ‘Horatius complex’ in leadership. His style was not to deal in shades of grey, but in a more ‘tribal’ style, where he needed to approach politics as a ‘constant state of war’, and to present his positions in ways that meant ‘the people were never in much doubt about where he stood’ (p. 225). It also meant that ‘Years of death-defying struggle had given him the metabolism of a cornered rat - he could not get excited until the stakes were very high, preferably a matter of life and death’ (p. 225). The problem was that people sensed his moods, ‘reckoned he stood against them, and that he cared little about their lives’ (p. 225). This problem became more apparent after he was elected Prime Minister in March 1993.