Groundhog Days - Working with Paul Keating PM March 1993 - March 1996

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 21^st 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.

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.

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.

Paul Keating’s trips abroad always generated rancour and controversy domestically, which was sometimes his fault, and sometimes not. His August 1993 visit was a triumph in some respects, as he clearly identified a shared vision with the newly-elected US President Bill Clinton - both economic reformers from left-of-centre parties who strongly favoured multilateralism and trade liberalisation - but the trip is best remembered for the London tabloids demonizing him as the ‘Lizard of Oz’. After that, it is all downhill.

The November 1993 APEC summit in Seattle sees the Malaysian Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir, makes a major issue out of Paul Keating’s doorstop interview where he described Mahathir as a ‘recalcitrant’ on the APEC issue. His April 1994 visit to South-East Asia is marred by the Australian media corps accusing him of dishonouring Vietnam veterans and, more importantly, Keating’s determination to go to the back of the plane and speak his mind to the assembled media. Most appallingly, the 1995 trip to Germany becomes hijacked by Keating’s preoccupation with the question of whether Kerry Packer has done a deal with John Howard, and whether his old mates from the NSW Right, Peter Barron and Graham Richardson, engineered it as some form of personal revenge.

If Kerry Packer had thrown his lot in with John Howard by 1995, he wasn’t the only one thinking that way. After the Liberals replaced the ineffectual Alexander Downer with Howard in early 1995, and their leadership issues were finally settled, the opposition strategy had been honed down and simplified. The strategy was simple: make as few policy announcements of your own as possible, and fuel the growing dislike of Keating, and the sense that his government was tired and out of touch, wherever possible. The steady stream of departures from the Prime Minister’s Office, the growing disaffection of long time allies such as the ACTU’s Bill Kelty, the rancour in the Labor caucus, and the clearly thinning ranks of talented people on the Labor frontbench, were all working in the Opposition’s favour. Don Watson spends a lot of time blaming the Canberra-based media for the mess that the government was now in, but they were clearly getting the same signals as everyone lese, and as often as not from within the Labor Party itself.

For me, two events crystallized that the end was nigh. The first was an appearance on John Laws’ talkback radio show where, after failing to connect in any way with Laws’ talkback callers myriad complaints, he responded to a caller complaining about young single mothers with the line ‘What are people going on about?’. ‘People’, of course, were the electorate, and the statement confirmed everything that Laws’ listeners had been concluding about Keating. The second was the decision by the ACTU in December 1995, in an industrial dispute with the mining giant CRA in Weipa, to bring in Bob Hawke as a mediator. The fact that Watson and the others in PMO hadn’t seen such a possibility arising, given the view of much of the union movement about Keating, and the fact that they shared Keating’s view that it was done as a personal slight, suggests that political hubris had well and truly set into all parts of the Prim Minister’s Office by 1995.

The view from ‘Santa’s main workshop’ that the PMO ‘had reached or come close to the light on the hill’, as Watson described the period in late 1995 (p. 676), marks out the fact that long period of struggling against adversity, and as much of that coming from their own employer as the wider electorate, had taken its toll on the ability to think clearly. Similarly, the slogan for the March 1996 election, ‘Leadership’, was heaven sent for the Opposition, as it pointed to ‘the weakness, the arrogance and aggression that they [the electorate] perceived and loathed’ in Keating (p. 691). Claims that Paul Keating had the personal imprimatur of Indonesia’s President Suharto, and seeing this as a domestic vote winner, reflected people who had been on the APEC circuit too long, and not in the shopping malls or on the buses.

The description of Paul Keating in his pyjamas at the Lodge at 10am, two weeks out from election day, trying to get on the phone to John Laws’ producer to correct a statement John Howard had made on the program ten minutes earlier, would support the theory coming from ALP Head Office that Keating had become ‘Captain Wacky’, surrounded by people who had become too personally close to him to generate political strategies that could quell the looming electoral landslide.