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

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.