by Garry Sturgess
A DRAMATICALLY changed world financial outlook and Barack Obama as
US president seemingly divides the Howard Government era from
here-and-now attention. Yet the 11-year plus period is a tale for the
ages and critical to Australia’s national understanding and identity.
SBS picked it as such and commissioned the three-part series Liberal Rule: The Politics that Changed Australia which
is screening in the Tuesday 8.30pm timeslot – it premiered on July 21
and continues on July 28 with the final episode on August 4.
As the senior researcher for the ABC television series Labor In
Power (devised by Philip Chubb) broadcast in 1993, I had been keen to
apply similar tools and techniques to making a television series about
the Howard government but with significant differences.
The Labor In Power template was
broadcast last year in the ABC’s series The Howard Years. Without
detailed comparison, Liberal Rule is a broader and more historically
fashioned account, beginning in fact with the Fraser period as
springboard to Howard’s own career and to the deregulatory ideas that
drove both sides of politics for more than 30 years.
In addition, the director Nick Torrens and I were concerned not just
with the political recounting of events from the mouths of the players,
but with the story of the nation during the period and the extent to
which politics and country were linked.
We too spent many hours on camera with John Howard, Peter Costello,
Alexander Downer, Peter Reith, John Anderson, key staffers and other
insiders gathering insights about what was intended and what was
achieved and dealing too with issues of leadership, motivation and the
ideas that shaped and inspired them.
But we also took an outside-in view, tackling Australia’s leading
political historians, social scientists, economists and authors to help
us examine the Howard philosophy and reform agenda for the economy,
society and Australia’s international relations.
Labor In Power was a benchmark certainly for a current affairs
political documentary series in close with the playmakers. For us,
however, it was also a marker of what we wanted to do differently.
We intended a much more layered film-maker’s appreciation of the
Liberal Rule period, a non-fiction feature presentation of Australia’s
political history.
Of relevance, Liberal Rule was also conceived as an archival
project. All research and on-camera interviews were transcribed and
tapes and transcripts will form a collection preserved for posterity.
Leadership is a key issue in our series: Why Australia chooses the
leaders it does? Why Fraser over Whitlam, Hawke over Fraser, Keating
over Hewson? Why did the country choose Howard when it did, choose,
choose and re-choose him and then reject him for Rudd?
Leadership in the narrower sense, Hawke and Keating in conflict, was
the key dramatic driver to Labor In Power and made that series so
powerful. But it was a potential frightener for Liberal Rule
interviewees and, initially, we were keen to stress that, no, Liberal
Rule was not all about power rivalry between Howard and his Treasurer.
It was, however, often the main focus for our interviewees. When we
began research interviews early in 2006, three former senior ministers
freely discussed the so-called McLachlan note and its record of an
alleged deal between John Howard and Peter Costello in late1994 that
Howard on becoming Prime Minister would only serve one-and-a-half terms.
They had been present when Ian McLachlan, the former Howard
government Defence Minister, had fished the noted from his wallet and
shown it around.
It was a dog we hoped would lie until revealed by us but knew that
something discussed so often and casually would one day awake. When
that day came in July 2006, the disclosure rocked and destabilised the
Government distracting it as it confronted an electorate suddenly
turning.
To Howard and his confidants, the disclosure of the note and
Costello’s implied comments about Howard’s veracity smashed any hope of
a Howard-Costello leadership transition.
“I would have retired at the end of 2006 if it hadn’t been for the
McLachlan memo and what followed it,” he told us on the third day of
our interview with him. “I was contemplating through 2006 that the time
was coming to go.
“But what happened with the McLachlan thing broke was that there was
overwhelming pressure on me not only to stay but also to say then that
I was staying. And the truth is that all of my senior colleagues at
that time said that I had to stay and that was the overwhelming view of
the party and it was the overwhelming view of our supporters in the
community, including in the business community.”
Costello and his confidants, of course, are equally adamant.
“He could have if he’d wanted to, he was in a situation as the
leader of the party, the uncontested leader of the party, where he
could make his own decisions, and he had complete and utter freedom to
make his own decisions and he could have made that decision any day he
chose,” Costello told us during a lengthy interview.
The McLachlan disclosure was potentially disastrous for our project.
Combined with the phony 2007 election campaign of more than a year’s
duration and other disclosures in the Errington and Van Onselen Howard
biography and, then, news of an uncapped Waters Edge Canberra
restaurant dinner in 2005 involving the Treasurer and three
journalists, our patient circling of sitting government hit brick wall
after brick wall.
With the prime minister’s loyal media man Tony O’Leary ever vigilant
and suspicious at the gate, access to Howard and his government was
near impossible, even through the impeccable approaches of Howard’s
friends and former chiefs of staff, Grahame Morris and Arthur Sinodinos.
To Tony we were trying to film the entrails of a dying government
(we certainly hadn’t written Howard off and that was not our
intention). But winning or trying to win an election, not history, was
his only concern and, in its context, fair enough too.
We did witness, though, the extraordinary, unrelenting pressures
bearing down on a sitting prime minister and the near superhuman
efforts made to stave off defeat. In the Parliamentary sitting in the
week following the September 2007 APEC gathering in Sydney, we filmed
Howard’s joint press conference with the visiting Canadian Prime
Minister Stephen Harper.
It was a moment of stubborn pride when Howard stared down his
challengers and declared he’d never turned his back on a fight. To us,
it looked excruciating. Talking to Howard after the event, it was all
in a day’s work, almost relaxing.
“Part of dealing with the domestic political pressure is to deal
with the international guest and visitor affectionately, because you
owe it to him,” Howard said.
“The international people I was receiving and dealing with at that
time were people I knew very well and … there’s an interesting
camaraderie between heads of government of democracies because at
various stages you’ve all been through the same experiences.”
As noted, leadership in its broader sense is a main theme of our
series. There’s no doubting that Howard led his Government, and all
roads led to him. Going back to his days as Liberal leader in the
1980s, when he famously said he won and lost leadership by accident and
ambush, he didn’t come to leadership as a natural. He learnt it through
the disciplined grind of politics along the way.
Without making value judgments on the courses he took as Prime
Minister, he was never more in control and stronger than when seizing
the initiative. In his first months as Prime Minister in 1996, he
seized the nettle on gun control and led. Even Paul Keating gave him
that.
In 1997, he took control of a drifting government and led
unilaterally with his GST initiative. In 2001 he grabbed hold of the
Tampa issue and made it a signature of his leadership. Shortly after,
he invoked ANZUS when September 11 found him on US soil, a witness to
the al Qaeda strike on the Pentagon after it too was in hit in the
terror of that day. Disaster relief for Indonesia after the Boxing Day
2004 tsunami trailed death and destruction through Asia was another
bold move of which there were surprisingly many during his years in
office.
Similarly, Howard was arguably never weaker as a leader than when he
failed to act or acted too late – on Wik, on Hanson, on climate change,
on indigenous reconciliation and the apology.
One of our observers, Professor Judith Brett, calls Howard the most
creative conservative politician since Robert Menzies. Howard was
surprisingly creative for a politician who was often maligned as dull.
He learnt how to fashion, coordinate, manipulate, position and connect
the tools of policy to create rapid and powerful electorally appealing
responses to circumstances. He maintained these abilities to the last —
the Northern Territory intervention, the Murray Darling Basin
agreement, the big-bang tax cuts of the 2007 budget and election
campaign.
But there came a point when voters could see the shifting and
placement of policy furniture behind the curtain, could hear and spot
the whirring of mental gears and electoral calculation and stopped
coming to the show, as it inevitably happens. On other matters, he
lacked creativity and stuck doggedly to the script that was edged into
his character and approach from early years and this, ironically,
prevented him coming through with a modified performance that might
have held people for longer.
It was Peter Costello’s view that nothing could have saved the
Government but a transition to him and Howard missed these
opportunities to pass on the baton. Maybe?
Surprisingly for a government led by a supposedly dull man, these
were power-packed years. And they teemed with characters not popularly
associated with the coalition breed, characters often encouraged and
championed by John Howard: Alexander Downer, Peter Reith, Tony Abbot
and Peter Costello, too, in earlier times.
The big question explored by our series was the impact of Liberal
Rule upon the country it governed. How did Australia change? How is it
different? And did it change and is it different in response to what:
Liberal Rule or other causes? We found these questions teasingly
difficult to compact into three episodes, let alone trying to footnote
here.
In conclusion, Liberal Rule is political documentary with a
difference. It’s a positive development in Australia’s national life
that we are writing more and paying more filmic and artistic attention
to Liberal politics than has previously been the case.
Garry Sturgess is the originator and co-creator of Liberal Rule.
A former barrister and specialist legal journalist and author, he is
currently studying for his political science doctorate at ANU. This opinion piece was also published in Australian Jewish News, 23 July, 2009
