And What Do You Do Mr. Gable?

by Richard Flanagan

  In the afternoon I go back out west to Panania to visit a friend who is a carpenter. He is one of those for whom Latham invented the term later used to describe Howard’s constituency: aspirational voter. We have a few beers. He asks me a question that before visiting Latham’s home I would have felt more confident in answering.

  ‘Is that Latham a phony?’ he asks. ‘I’ve worked on those McMansions. Does he think living in them ever made anybody happy?’

  The media bus is a Contiki tour from hell, full of camera crews, photo journalists, print journ- alists, radio journalists, along with some Latham staffers. Inside it sounds like a cicada swarm at dusk with mobiles chirruping, radio journos filing by phone and photographers testing cameras.

  We are notified by SMS messages as to the time of departure of the media bus, but rarely its destination or purpose. One day it’s a 6 am start to head off to a health-care policy in Gosford, another it’s arriving in Surfers Paradise at midnight in preparation for a tour of a pineapple cannery.

  Everything that can be controlled is controlled, and Mark Latham is the on-message messenger. But the hope and the promise of Mark Latham is that he will also be the message.

  A journalist on the bus tells me Australia will be different under Latham, that he will fundamentally change Australia. How? I ask. He can’t say precisely, but then nobody can, least of all, on the evidence of his campaigning, Mark Latham.

  The problem is that Mark isn’t performing. He seems listless, flat. Day after day, Latham is underwhelming in his speech and manner. Rumours abound that his health has still not recovered. Stories are beginning to run about Mogadon Mark.

  But his dullness seems another choice he makes. You sense in his answers at press conferences and in interviews that everything is calculated—his aggression, his occasional colloquialism, his passivity, his studied mundanity. Sometimes when a question is asked it is as if two answers are run by in his mind, and he chooses the one that gives nothing away. When asked about Howard’s suddenly new-found concerns about David Hicks’ trial, Latham merely and meekly says that the story of Hicks is one about ‘bad government decisions’.

  His emotion and vulnerability, his two most attractive features, are transformed by his decisions about how to campaign into a sullen brooding and an aloofness. The problem is that Latham is emotion, and without it he can seem very little.

  You discover some of the truth of a man in the insults he chooses to hurl: Latham is not an arselicker and he doesn’t defer or demean himself by trying to ingratiate himself, or play at false bonhomie with the journalists.

  Still, many of the journalists are fascinated by him. In some ways it is not because of what he is, but because of what he isn’t. The journalists are sick of Howard: some dislike him, some respect him, some are beyond political judgements, but nearly all are bored by him. Latham’s not Howard and he’s not Beazley and he’s not Crean. He’s not old and they tend to be young.

  One morning, waiting for the bus to leave from the Sydney Harbour Marriott, an AAP photographer is sipping at takeaway coffee.

  ‘Hanson was great,’ he says. ‘She said whatever she thought and we did whatever we wanted.’ He takes another sip. ‘Up there in redneck wonderland,’ he adds wistfully. I glimpse the attraction of Hanson: to a media imprisoned in a numbing process she must have seemed the last expression of spontaneity in Australian politics: stupid, bigoted, angry, human.

  I realise that contemporary politics has become a very dull spectator sport, and in it a figure like Latham—erratic, occasionally colourful—looms large. Perhaps it is a measure of the relentless tedium of so much of Australian politics, and the dullness of so many of its actors, that a man characterised by alternating periods of brutish language and numbing insipidity can be the source of such hope. Perhaps too it is the nature of many of the journalists. Often accused of undue cynicism, they can seem oddly naïve. They want to believe that something of what they report on might mean something good.

  I begin to sense how when a bus-load of people are on the trail of one man, they invest themselves in that person until, like or dislike him, he becomes not one man but the sum of all their imaginings and longings and passions. To the extent Latham is seen to be interesting it is because bored journos more interesting than he have created him.

  Sometimes Latham comes a little alive in response to a question, and the pack bristle with excitement, like dogs that have been dropping sticks at their master’s feet for days in the hope he might play. He’s got his mojo back, they declare optimistically after one press conference. Sometimes he can be funny, generally when he’s being dismissive of the Liberals. But it’s rare.

  Latham seems like an instrument never quite in tune; he has an idea of himself he wishes us to share and take back to the nation, but is he the equal of the idea? There is a melody of yearning rewarded and striving vindicated, the notes are all there, but something seems out of key. And, in any case, just what is the idea? Can he be the creation he dreams ought to lead us? You know he wishes us to believe he is Mark the suburban boy, but is the real truth similar to Balzac’s observation of Victor Hugo—is Mark Latham a madman who thinks he is Mark Latham?

  Typical is his performance launching his tax package on Tuesday. The room is packed with over a hundred people: the seated senior journos, the row of cameras and their cameramen arrayed like mediaeval archers behind them; and behind them the milling minders, politicians and other hacks.

  All the names of Australian political journalism are assembled, from the spreading figure of Laurie Oakes, sleek and assured as a Tongan king waiting to pass judgement, to Glenn Milne, an inquisitive pygmy possum intent on minor mischief. Many of the men of the gallery are suited; they look like the people they describe, indistinguishable in both attire and their assumptions.

  It’s a key moment for Latham, his biggest setpiece announcement on a day when the polling has got worse. Latham looks waxen, listless and unwell. His manner is edgy and abrasive, and if it is not aggressive nor is it endearing. The conference goes badly. Latham struggles to express anything simply.

  Under questioning it becomes apparent that the package details do not seem to bear the grandiose ambition of Latham’s claims. At such times his nervous tics become more pronounced: his tongue darting out blue-tongue-like to lick his lips; the slight raising of the head and closing of his eyes as he says no; along with the habit that has become standard with many Australian politicians of repeating a pointless phrase—A POINTLESS PHRASE—with pointed emphasis.

  Latham grows dismissive, talking about how it is in the real Australia and the real world, as though all those in front of him have never had to pay a bill or worry about money, and live in some happy otherworld, unlike the real world about which Mark and only Mark knows so much and no one else knows anything. This isn’t an abstract sociology tutorial, he says at one point, but it is beginning to sound like it is, and Mark our tutor on all that is real—kitchen tables, public housing estates, bills, fortnightly trauma—and all that isn’t, which is John Howard’s $600 family payment.

  But in spite of his performance, Latham’s tax package carries the papers the following morning when we visit the Golden Circle pineapple cannery canteen in Brisbane. Like a hive of maddened insects compelled by strange lunar movements to swarm, there suddenly appears the media scrum of booms and cameras and lights and stills cameras held aloft like holy relics. And at its centre Latham. A single, strange beast, the scrum moves toward the centre of the canteen.

  Then something unexpected happens: from a table at the far left a Filipino woman called Percy begins clapping and cheering, and her claps and cheering are taken up by her table of four. In the remote heart of the scrum, Latham hears them and turns. His face lights up. He starts walking toward them.

  They cheer and clap and giggle more, and the other tables of Filipino and Vietnamese women around them begin cla
pping and cheering too, until the canteen is joined in uproar. Latham sits down at Percy’s table and then moves to the other tables, talking, smiling, clearly lifted, the heaviness of the previous days gone.

  After Latham has moved on, I go and talk with the women who began the cheering. Elvie, Percy, Divina and Carmelita are from the Philippines and voted for John Howard last election. Why? I ask. Because Kim Beazley was too soft, they say. This time they say they will vote for Mark Latham. They like his tax policy.

  ‘And change,’ says Percy, who began the clapping. ‘I think maybe now change is good.’

  Later Latham seems energised. Perhaps he needs people, needs their love or their hate. And perhaps he does care. Latham looks like a Labor politician of another era, and it does seem that if he will just allow himself to behave more like one, to break with the sterility of modern campaigning and reach out to people more, a different man might emerge. Yet now he is carrying something far worse than his own ambition, and that is the burden of hope of so many, and who can say how best to bear the load?

  The irony is that Percy and her tablemates are not Latham’s people, not the happy, hardworking westies of Glen Alpine, with their median income, where your postcode is your destiny—his middle Australia writ in the image of his own romance.

  They earn too little, most being seasonal workers picking up $10,000 for their time in the cannery, and you won’t hear much out of Latham’s Labor on the vexed issues of race and migration.

  Still, at that moment I wonder if Mark Latham succeeds in taking government, it may just be that the point he wins is when in a Queensland pineapple cannery a Filipino migrant woman begins cheering for change.

  But as I fly home that evening, the television news flickering above on the plane’s monitors is filled not with images of Percy cheering in Brisbane, but of terrorist horror in Beslan. The plane has gone into a holding pattern. And like everyone else within it, I feel suddenly fearful.

  The Age

  11 September 2004

  ‘IT’S LIKE THIS,’ said one journo as we sat around the Brisbane Sheraton hotel foyer midday Monday, after being SMSed that the prime minister would not now be doing any afternoon engagements.

  ‘A short man lies in Brisbane, and we report that, and a beefy man lies in Perth, and we report that, and that’s journalism. Everyone knows there’s more, but how do you reach it?’

  No one could say. The journos told stories to each other that were true but which they would never write. Instead they wrote what they had to. The best did what they could, the worst had given up and just filed a gloss of the release for the day. There was a sense something had gone wrong and we were all part of it.

  There was nothing left to do for the rest of the day. The journos took to gossiping on mobiles and the Sunday program took to filming the journos gossiping on mobiles, and when the TV crew had enough footage of that, they went upstairs to the hotel pool and filmed their journo sitting at the hotel pool toasting with a cocktail the top storeys of the hotel where Howard and his party were encamped, thanking Mr Howard for such a gruelling schedule.

  None of it went unnoticed. Howard’s staffers, ever friendly and efficient, helping you get the story they wanted, were soon on to it. Later in the afternoon, Tony O’Leary, Howard’s chief media advisor, was asking the show’s reporter why he had been filmed drinking by the pool.

  In the end all that remained was Howard and our short, occasional encounters with him, the gallery journos invariably horseshoed in the press conferences around him like the rising keyboards of a great wurlitzer organ that was his alone to play. And play us he did, magnificently.

  There was no doubt he was dull, sometimes spectacularly so, but he had transformed his dullness into a political virtue. He evaded questions that led to issues he didn’t wish to discuss with an agility and a speed that surprised; once, when he was asked about Iraq, I opened my notebook, got my pen to the paper, only to realise he had already made some answer I had not heard and was now into a new question on the happier ground of his childcare rebate scheme.

  He shrugged off insults and taunts, and had an ability almost uncanny on the days I saw him to calmly shut down debates he didn’t wish to engage in, and return journalists to his campaigning messages. It was as if so much of the preceding eight-and-a-half years had somehow gone missing in action and, try as some did, they were never going to be found again.

  ‘Prime Minister,’ a journalist asked at a press conference at the Brisbane Sheraton on Tuesday, ‘Tony Blair has told a meeting of the Labour Party in Britain that politicians aren’t always able to tell the truth. Do you agree with this statement?’

  In a sublime moment the great organist pulled his head up and replied authoritatively:

  ‘I always tell the truth.’

  And as he said it he slowly scanned the journalists around him, as if daring someone to take issue with him. No one did. For a moment there was a hint of something at the edges of his mouth—was it a smirk, a smile?—but Howard is too disciplined to allow himself any public displays of smugness, and within a question he had the conference on to Medicare and from there, in half a sentence, to interest rates.

  Watching him, I was reminded of the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who in 1990 ran for the presidency of his country on a Thatcherite platform and always felt the need to say something different and new each time he spoke. His campaign was a disaster.

  His English campaign manager, Mark Malloch Brown, later wrote of how ‘political communication is two things: definition and repetition. Mrs Thatcher never tired of saying the same thing . . . this aspect of Mrs Thatcher above all others required emulating. It was the one that least interested Vargas Llosa.’

  It is, however, the aspect in which Howard may even outdo one of his great models. That morning I had joined John Howard and a small harlequinade largely composed of porky middle-aged men sweating heavily—journos, minders, bodyguards, TV crews—on his famed morning walk. John Howard sets a pace that can fairly be described as cracking.

  I put it to Howard that if Mark Latham gets asked about his child’s schooling he wants a journalist censured, but that I had the impression that if he, Howard, got hit over the back of the head with an iron bar he would simply crawl back up and say that under him interest rates will stay lower.

  ‘Bingo!’ said Howard, raising a finger in cricket umpire fashion, laughing and adding, ‘And there will be no deficit.’ It was a joke, and it’s a joke being played out daily across the nation as a way of ensuring the Liberal Party is returned to power.

  It’s hard to see Howard separate from the caricatures, the lampoons, the impersonations, the ridicule, the commentaries, the praise as the man of iron, the hate as the suckhole who sold the nation out.

  But all these ideas—particularly the hate—are the least helpful ways to try to understand the riddle of John Howard: a man seemingly so ordinary and unremarkable in the flesh, whose record in government has been one of the most extraordinary and controversial in the history of the Commonwealth.

  Even those close to Howard describe him in unexpected ways. Senator Robert Hill, speaking after John Howard at a Liberal Party luncheon at the Adelaide Hilton, told his audience what a good investment they had made in John Howard. It was a curious description, as if Howard were not a man but an ’80s junk bond that had unexpectedly transformed into a profitable blue chip.

  I asked a senior gallery journalist what Howard was like, and they replied:

  ‘What you see is what you get.’

  But what is it that they were seeing?

  All I could see was a mundanity so honed it was like staring at polished concrete.

  In person Howard is pleasant and inoffensive, and he works at not creating reasons to dislike him. Once a byword for bad dressing, Howard is now a dapper little man, immaculately turned out. If there seemed a
slight brittleness—manifest in a limb occasionally jerking slightly like a Thunderbird puppet, and a constant rolling onto the balls of his feet, back and forth, up and down, as if ever restless to get back to the real business—this too seemed unremarkable. When walking he carries a slight limp in one leg, as if carrying some hip injury. Typically, he acknowledges none of it.

  As the most well-known politician in the country he has about him a lack of charisma so complete that it is almost baffling and can at times appear to amount to a near anonymity. In an era when Kylie’s arse means more than Kylie’s voice, John Howard is an odd triumph of substance over style. His oratory is dismal, his interviews tend to be soporific, his presence unremarkable.

  Yet how little any of this matters. Because when he makes a point it is for a point. Everything he does is, you feel, calculated for an exact political effect. And in the new world of controlled grabs and staged events, he is a master of the times.

  Contemporary campaigning in its sterility and its control is heaven-sent for a man so singularly lacking in charisma, but so focused and skilful on getting electorally significant messages out to voters via the media while revealing nothing.

  It is then of no consequence that in the Brisbane City Hall I dozed off during Howard’s interminably long campaign launch speech—a state in which I felt myself envied by many around me—to wake to the discovery that six billion dollars had been spent in the space of a catnap. Because boring it may have been, short on rhetoric as it certainly was, but in its spending he revealed himself as a man of power brutally calculating what it costs to retain that power.

  A speech, or for that matter any public occasion, seems for Howard not about the egotistic assertion of self, but about getting out certain messages—in this case to those whose votes he wishes to buy—and carefully avoiding mentioning the far-reaching consequences of what his proposals often entail.