by Shaun Carney
By the time I finished as a reviewer, the gig didn’t seem to mean much any more. Music reviewers were no longer gatekeepers or tastemakers. There was very little that was special about the job; anyone with an Internet connection could find a way to access newly released music and get a copy of it if they wanted to. And they could write about it, definitely with more passion for the task than I could muster. Writing about music had been such a crucial part of my journalistic mission, a necessary restorative to my political writing. The music I tried to write about was mostly created by people who thought they had something to offer. People could like it or not. It was rarely the product of cynicism or any sort of impulse connected with dishonesty. In fact, much more often, it was, in a naïve way, the result of too much honesty. People with limited musical talent do manage to get their music released with a fair degree of frequency. That can be too much honesty. But at least it’s fair dinkum and less encumbered by the trimming that inhabits so much political verbiage and activity. I was sad to let that part of my professional identity go but if the limb is numb, you can’t pretend that you’re using it.
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I was in survival mode. I had to hold on to my job. I was well placed to do so. I’d been writing the Saturday political column continuously for more than four years; all I had to do was to keep track of what was going on in politics and continue to produce a column each week. If things settled down a bit more and Jane’s extended hospitalisations were rare, I could add a midweek column as well. That way I could manage my schedule around the hospital visits for chemo, which at that point were running at four a week. If I’d surrendered the column and become a feature writer or an editor or some sort of glorified special news reporter, I would have become hostage to news events, which would have been disastrous. You can’t walk out in the middle of a story as a writer, and saying ‘no’ to the news desk or an editor when they pitch an idea because you’ve got commitments is something you can get away with only a few times before they either give up on you or start complaining about you behind your back. Your personal circumstances are taken into consideration but over time they fade. And if I’d opted for some sort of desk job, editing a section, say, it wouldn’t have worked; you’ve got to be around for those jobs, liaising with production staff, waiting for late copy, sitting in meetings—lots of meetings.
So after taking almost two months off, which was spent shuttling between The Royal Children’s Hospital and my home and watching my daughter’s long, golden hair fall out, I started spending my weekdays in the office and resumed my Saturday column. Fortunately, I had one thing going for me: I knew there was a big story afoot. I was not the only journalist around who had concluded that Kim Beazley’s days as Labor leader were numbered and that he would not lead the party at the election due the following year—The Australian was running hot on the story—but I seemed to be one of the few working for Fairfax. That suited me. Beazley had started to lose the numbers back in August when sections of the ALP’s dominant right faction in New South Wales, which had been loyal to him for years, shifted their support to Kevin Rudd, who had been agitating to take over since the beginning of 2006. Rudd’s push to knock off Beazley had become unstoppable as soon as he joined forces with Julia Gillard as his running mate. Gillard brought numbers from the left, especially in her home state of Victoria. But as the end of 2006 loomed, Beazley was proving difficult to budge. He’d concluded that possession was nine-tenths of the law and that he would not surrender, even though he must have known that he was a goner. It could not be a permanent solution because he was bound to fall once those with the numbers applied public pressure and resolved not to let up. And that’s what they ended up doing but not in the way that they intended, thanks, in part, to me.
The aphorism that when confronted with the choice of a conspiracy or a stuff-up to explain something you should go with the stuff-up is a handy rebuttal to the more florid theories about the media’s performance. Journalists use it reflexively because we get so tired of the accusation that we are evil geniuses who have the time, intelligence and foresight to see five steps ahead on any given issue or incident, orchestrating public and political reactions to what we do. Most of us aren’t that smart and even the best-run news operation is generally so chaotic and hostage to thousands of overlapping events that each new edition of a newspaper is akin to a minor miracle. But the stuff-up theory is probably, in many cases, inadequate. In my experience, when things go haywire there’s a lot of stuff-up but often also a bit of conspiracy thrown in. The conspiracy doesn’t necessarily need to have been generated by the media. It can be a half-hearted or ill thought out bit of manoeuvring by the individuals you’re reporting on. Or it can be down to a series of fumbles where no-one and everyone is to blame.
On Tuesday, 21 November, The Age led its front page with a big story on the Labor leadership headed ‘Rebels Plan Beazley Coup “by Christmas”’. I shared the by-line with Michelle Grattan. It began:
Kim Beazley’s ALP critics are ramping up a concerted destabilisation campaign to try to force a change of leadership to a Kevin Rudd–Julia Gillard team, possibly before Christmas. As arguments about Labor’s future direction got more brutal, anti-Beazley sources made it clear they would not back down if a November–December handover did not take place, and were willing to carry their campaign into the New Year.
How did the story come about? On the previous afternoon, I was sitting at my desk, going through some of the newspapers I’d missed while helping Jane through her early chemo treatment, just trying to catch up on the run of events in the past few weeks, when the editor, Andrew Jaspan, turned up with a guest in tow: Julia Gillard. Andrew is energetic and relentless. He is not tall. He is intense. In his clipped, English accent he said: ‘Shaun, Julia’s here. You know Julia, don’t you? Of course you do. Julia’s here and she’s been bringing me up to date with what’s going on in the Labor Party and I thought she should have a brief talk with you too.’ He turned to Gillard. ‘Julia, thanks for coming in. I’ll leave you with Shaun.’
I beckoned her into my little partitioned working space, motioned towards my guest’s chair and asked her to sit down. It’s unlikely that when she came in to see Andrew that she expected she would be briefing the paper’s weekly political columnist as well. She explained that she’d thought it would be a good idea for the editor to know what plans she and Rudd had to unseat Beazley: they were going to tell Beazley and his supporters that he should go voluntarily before Christmas or they would pull on a ballot when the political year resumed in early February. By nominating a deadline, they were formally launching their challenge. But this was not a public announcement, more an attempt to lay the groundwork by cluing in a still-influential Melbourne newspaper. She outlined Beazley’s fading standing and his public slips, including his mistake the previous week in which he mixed up the name of the entertainer Rove McManus, whose young wife had just died, with the American political operative Karl Rove.
After she filled me in, I thanked her, wished her well and saw her out of the building. As I returned to my desk, Andrew came over in an excited state. He said we needed to write this story, explaining that we were in the news business, not the secrets business. If politicians approached editors to tell them something, they had to expect that the information would find its way into that editor’s publication. I said he was right but I wasn’t clear that the basis on which our encounters with Gillard had taken place allowed for the paper to decant the contents straight into its pages. He agreed. Then he suggested that he would instruct Michelle Grattan in Canberra to call Gillard and ask if the Rudd forces had set a February deadline for Beazley to jump or be pushed. Michelle duly obliged and called Gillard, who acknowledged that there was a February deadline. Michelle then called me to tell me that we could go ahead with the story. She was unimpressed by what she regarded as Gillard’s disloyalty. I had a different view. This was politics, in which personal loyalties are a highly fungible commodity. Sure
ly the real loyalty of any politician is to the people they claim to represent. In national politics, that means the millions of women and men who vote for that politician’s party come hell or high water. Gillard wasn’t doing anything wrong, either in trying to knock off Beazley or by backgrounding the editor of The Age (and me). Beazley had led the ALP to two election defeats, had handed on the leadership to Simon Crean and then tried unsuccessfully to wrest it back from Crean two years later, and had then found himself as Johnny-on-the-spot after Mark Latham imploded in early 2005. He’d had a good run. I’d always thought he looked too comfortable as Opposition leader. I covered his 1998 election night concession speech in a school gymnasium on the southern outskirts of Perth. Labor had secured 51 per cent of the vote but a minority of seats. If ever there was a time for a leader to do a ‘we-wuz-robbed’ routine, calling into question the legitimacy of the Howard Government through its second term, this was it. The moment called for pained indignation. Instead, Beazley emerged triumphal, full of cheer and began with: ‘Well, how did we do it?’ He seemed relieved to have done well but lost. However, regardless of my assessment of Kim Beazley or Julia Gillard’s justification for briefing against him, I felt awkward about the way in which our story came about.
I called her a day or so later and told her so. She laughed and out of politeness more than anything, thanked me for calling. The piece certainly powered up the Rudd–Gillard push; thirteen days after it was published they defeated Beazley in a caucus ballot. Six months later, author and former Age journalist Robert Macklin produced a biography of Rudd in which he stated baldly that the story’s source was Kim Carr, who’d supposedly called me from China to fill me in. How wrong he was. One of the old saws about journalists is that they can’t expect stories to come to them if they just sit at their desks. Obviously, that’s not always the case. I have to say that I found it difficult not to raise an eyebrow a few years later when Gillard, as a beleaguered prime minister being hunted down by a vengeful Rudd, invited all journalists to reveal any backgrounding she might have done with them against Rudd when he had been leader, apparently safe in the knowledge that she hadn’t done any. But she certainly did engage in it under Rudd’s predecessor—justifiably so, I thought.
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This experience echoed another, more celebrated, occasion in which I found myself caught up, in April 2005. Three of my Age colleagues—Misha Schubert, Michael Gordon and Jason Koutsoukis—and I had a Friday night dinner with Peter Costello at a restaurant in Melbourne’s Docklands precinct. It was a typical journalist–politician dinner in which everything was presumed off the record, although bits of it could be expected to leach into analysis and columns in coming weeks and months. Everyone got on well. The Howard Government was early in its fourth term and this would be the period in which Costello could be expected to press his case once and for all to replace John Howard. We skirted around the leadership issue in our conversation in the early part of the night. What we didn’t know was that before the dinner, Peter had taken a call from The Australian’s Dennis Shanahan informing him that Howard had told two other News Limited journalists, from The Daily Telegraph, that he believed he could defeat Beazley a third time at the next election, which at that point was two and a half years away. The Australian was planning to go big with the story for its Saturday edition. With us, Costello held his tongue until Howard phoned him around 8.30 p.m. Costello excused himself to take the call. He returned five minutes later and didn’t seem especially agitated. About a quarter of an hour later, he said something along the lines of ‘You’re always saying I don’t give you any stories; well, here’s a story for you: tomorrow morning the Tele is going to run comment from John Howard saying that he plans to go to the next election. The Australian’s going with it too’. Under a few more questions, he fleshed out the background and shared his unhappiness about Howard’s comment. He explained that Howard had called him because he wanted to say that the stories would exaggerate and overstate what he’d said. I thanked Peter for letting us know what the other papers had but suggested that the only way we could weigh in on the story would be to get words from him: did he want to say anything on the record? He was adamant that he didn’t want to. I said that in that case, I couldn’t see what we could do. The other papers had the story. We didn’t. We weren’t in the business of reporting that other newspapers had a good story—not at that point, anyway. He said we shouldn’t complain in the future that he didn’t give us any stories because he’d just given us one. We finished up our dinner soon after.
After Peter departed, Misha, Jason and I (Michael, a dedicated Hawthorn supporter, had peeled off earlier in the night to see the Hawks at the nearby Docklands stadium) conferred on what we could do with what he’d told us. I was a little tired of all of the shadow-boxing over the Liberal leadership. I thought the time had come for Peter to say something. If he didn’t want to, that was okay, but our exchange had been off the record and he didn’t want to go on the record. We had to respect that. I thought that was where we left it and I went home. But Jason, for whom I’ve always had great professional and personal regard, couldn’t let it go. He took a cab to the other end of the city, had a drink and rang the Age news desk, sharing the evening’s events with the night editor, Peter Krien. Peter apparently did his best impersonation of the Daily Planet’s irascible editor Perry White—‘What are you doing talking to me about it? Get down here and write it!’—which Jason did, rushing down to Spencer Street and punching it all out stream-of-consciousness style, even including on-the-record comments from Costello and the detail of where Costello was when he took Howard’s call. The story led the second edition, which is what I found myself looking at a few hours later when I picked up the paper from my front doorstep. I wondered if perhaps I’d drunk a lot more than I thought and this was one of the vivid grog dreams I’d experienced as a teenager when I consumed too much Abbots Lager. But no, this was real. I’d never seen anything like it. Neither had Costello. After breakfast, he phoned me and embarked on one of the great sprays. This was outrageous, his relationship with The Age was over, he’d never trust us again et cetera. I agreed that the situation was unusual but I hadn’t written the offending story, so why was he balling me out? ‘You’re the associate editor, you’re supposed to be someone down there and by calling you I’m communicating this to the paper, not just to you,’ he said. I said he couldn’t really mean it when he said he wouldn’t have anything to do with us. We were his hometown paper and while Jason had made a different judgement to me, nothing in the story was actually wrong. He paused for a second and said with a lot of conviction: ‘Well, there’ll be no more dinners, I’ll tell you that. No more dinners!’ And to the best of my knowledge, there weren’t. For the next week, the fallout was portrayed in the media as the first big public showdown between Costello and Howard over the leadership. Nothing was resolved. Costello expected Howard to hand over the leadership during that term but there’s no evidence that Howard was ever going to do that. The reason that I feel free to write about this is that the details of the dinner seem to have been shared with any journalist who wanted to find them out in the days after the initial stories appeared.
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I always regarded Peter as a highly talented and fundamentally decent person. I wouldn’t have spent five years writing a book about him if I hadn’t. He was hard working, a diligent administrator, guided by a firm set of beliefs, and was by all accounts a good person to work for. At university it was clear that he had a special ability to influence people and to gather supporters. He was not easily intimidated. I was not necessarily a devotee of his view of the world but I could see what he had to offer. I never subscribed to his HR Nicholls Society prescriptions for the industrial relations system, for example, but his ideas and his worldview warranted respect and close examination. I was intrigued by the idea of someone my age, and with whom I’d shared a tutorial room when we were eighteen, getting to the very top of the poli
tical tree.
It’s fair to say our relationship was stronger before my biography of him was published in 2001. I’d aimed to produce a balanced portrait but he was uncomfortable with it. He told me I shouldn’t fear falling out with my leftie, Liberal-hating colleagues at The Age—he was fully signed up to the comfortable assumption that the paper’s staff were bourgeois crypto-communists to a man and woman—for writing some sort of encomium to him. His view was that what I’d written about him was right up their alley. I understood his discomfort. Having someone trawl through your past, making assessments of your personality and character, determining the important facts of your life, is not something many of us would welcome. He especially disliked my focus on personality—what he called, not without justification, the armchair psychology stuff. I was not offended or hurt. The thing is, if you go into political journalism, you can’t afford to take any of these things to heart. Journalists live in fear of getting something wrong, or they should. Politicians live in fear of losing control of how they’re seen by the public. They’re nervous, we’re nervous. We both let the nervousness affect our behaviour. And you’re not there to make friends; the best you can hope for is to build mutual respect.
