Review of Don Watson, Reflections of a Bleeding
Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM, Knopf/Random House Australia,
Sydney, 2002, 756pp. Part 2.
When Labor was elected to its fifth term of government in 1993, there
were two possibilities. The one that Don Watson and the Prime Minister’s
staff hoped for was that the surprise election victory had given Paul
Keating and the Federal Labor government a clean slate, and the capacity
to pursue new initiatives confident that he had the authority of popular
election and a renewed mandate from the electorate.
For much of 1993 and some of 1994 this appeared possible, partly
because of continuing leadership instability among the Liberals, but also
because of the impact of the major issues that Keating had chosen to run
on after the election: a legislative response to the High Court’s Mabo
judgement, that found that indigenous Native Title claims to traditional
lands were not annulled by European settlement; establishment of the
Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum, that would include
Australia, New Zealand and the United States; and options for Australia to
become a republic. In all of these cases, Keating could lay claim to
personal moral authority, the symbolism could galvanise the Labor
rank-and-file, it created the concept of a ‘big picture’ for 21st
century Australia that both complemented and moved beyond the economic
reform agenda of the 1980s, and often provoked reactions on the
conservative side that were so extreme that moderate liberals baulked at
an association with such reactionary perspectives.
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But the problems were apparent on Sunday 14 March, the day after the
election victory, when Mike Keating and others from the Prime Minister’s
Department arrived to disrupt the partying and let the Prime Minister know
that the government could not afford the tax cuts it had promised during
the election campaign. Watson observes that ‘Every winter of the Keating
Government seemed to be worse than the one before’ (p. 395), and with
the first winter being that which put forward the politically disastrous
August Budget, where the government reneged on the promised tax cuts that
Keating had said would be ‘L-A-W—law’ two weeks earlier, it sets the
scene for a bad three years. Watson notes that ‘At the heart of the
protest against the Budget of 1993 was the feeling that Paul Keating had
made bunnies of the people’ (p. 403). Such sentiment would get harder,
and uglier, over the term of the Keating Government.
For Keating’s defenders, the passage of the Native Title Act
exemplified both the qualities of Keating’s leadership, and the
political impossibility of the tasks that he had set himself. Watson
describes developing a legislative response to the Mabo judgement as both
a moral imperative and a political death trap:
There were three options: hedge, backslide, prevaricate - and live
with the ignominy; go the long way round - and perhaps get lost and never
reach the other side; or wade straight in - and risk disaster. Keating
waded in. From that moment we could never be sure that he would not sink
irredeemably in quicksand or reach the other side in triumph, but alone
and stranded (p. 405).
For Keating, the moral imperative to pursue Mabo arose not only from
concerns about historic injustice. They were also shaped by his view that
Bob Hawke had failed as a national leader when he backed away from
national land rights legislation in 1985, unable to get consensus on the
issue, and not wanting to endanger Brian Burke’s Labor government in
Western Australia.
Keating surmised, rightly, that it was impossible for a Federal Labor
government to get consensus on indigenous issues, particularly those
involving land and Native Title. There would always be opposition in the
conservative ranks, and from the mining and pastoral industries; there
would always be State premiers, both Liberal and Labor, who would oppose
you (most likely to come from WA or Queensland); there would always be
polling that said that most Australian voters were not very interested in
Aboriginal issues; there would always be those who argued, perhaps
correctly, that the practical problems facing many indigenous communities
can’t be solved through largely symbolic statements about reconciliation
or land rights; there would always be some straight out racist sentiment
expressed very forcefully; and there would always be those Aboriginal
leaders and non-indigenous supporters who said that such policies did not
go far enough.
For Keating’s supporters, the fact that he was willing to wear nine
months of this to get a legislative package together that could satisfy
enough interests, and get enough votes in the Senate to pass in the face
of blanket Coalition opposition, would be perhaps the high point of Paul
Keating’s Prime Ministership.
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The second half of Reflections of a Bleeding Heart is
considerably more tetchy than the first, as Watson and others are
increasingly worn out by their inability to correct Paul Keating’s
reckless behaviour and excessive response to perceived slights. As Watson
puts it, in one of several statements on their inability to deal with
Keating’s moods, or his political contrariness and unwillingness to
listen to criticism:
I felt half unhinged. I had his ear, his confidence and trust, but I
could not make a difference to the political chaos that surrounded him
(p. 610).
At times, working in the Prime Minister’s Office seems akin to being
Bill Murray’s weatherman in the film Groundhog Day. Times start
hopefully, with a fall in interest rates, a new policy, or the signing of
a treaty, then turn bad as it either becomes apparent that the good news
has had no impact on the opinion polls, or Keating is too despondent to
respond to the possibilities presented, or Keating blows it through an
excessive response to his political opponents, or to the media. This
clearly takes a toll on Watson’s health, and indeed on his mood: the
list of groups who are obstructing the ‘big picture’ grows from
expected conservative opponents and the economic hard heads in PMO and
Treasury, to include the arts community (pp. 518-519), ACOSS (p. 636), the
ACTU (pp. 661-662), environmentalists (p. 539), and, of course, the Labor
Party Head Office, who were suspected of secretly maneuvering to replace
Keating with Kim Beazley.