Big Blue Sky

by Peter Garrett

  The enormity of the task we had undertaken was still swirling around in my mind as the Oils headed off to record in Tokyo in the first half of 1984. On 10–1 I’d been asking who was running the world, but more pressing now was the question of what I could actually do about it. My mind wasn’t fixed on songs and recording; in fact, I had little to bring to the table and ended up throwing lyrics at some of the tracks once they were done.

  Nick Launay would be producing again, and we had picked the Victor Studio in the Tokyo suburb of Aoyama, reasoning that the Japanese were bound to have first-class recording equipment. We were aiming for another left turn that would insert unpredictability into the creative process. It was a pricey exercise for those times but typical Midnight Oil. We had a few dollars to play with now, and the opportunity to go left field, so why not?

  After a while we had to let our expensive interpreter go, and so the negotiations with the record company on some finer points around the album took nearly as long as making it. But we became variously proficient in Japanese as a result of living there for months, and the exposure to a totally different culture, where we were complete strangers, was refreshing. I took to fasting at the weekends to clear my head and worked my way through Gideon’s Bible and the sayings of Buddha, the only English-language books in the typically tiny Tokyo hotel room that was my home for the duration. In a touch of synchronicity, Rob introduced the song ‘Kosciusko’ with a phrase from Isaiah 61: 1–4, ‘bind up the broken-hearted’.

  The band played studio gurus with Nick, as bewildered local sound engineers tried to fathom sessions where constant change and daily experiments were the norm. What possible reason was there to record the drums in the toilet, or to have two studios on different floors going at the same time, or to completely change all the settings on the mixing desk after spending a day getting it right? The answer: because we can, and let’s see where the song might end up.

  I worked hard on songs like ‘Who Can Stand in the Way’ and ‘Sleep’, but my mind was on the big screen. After taking some small steps I was ready to do more, in whatever shape or form that turned out to be.

  …

  Between albums I’d got steamed up about the kinds of policies I thought the government should adopt to help the local music industry, and I’d travelled to Canberra armed with a paper setting out the arguments: a stronger quota for Australian music on radio, loans for overseas touring support and so on.

  I presented the proposals to the arts minister, Barry Cohen. He wasn’t in cabinet and didn’t seem to know much about the Australian rock scene, so I wasn’t confident of a positive response—nor did I receive one. The only sound I heard was the report dropping into the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet and the door slamming shut. (Twenty-three years later, when I was arts minister, I went looking for the submission, knowing that bureaucrats don’t throw much away. There was no trace of it.)

  Meanwhile, the mood had been building to mount a more determined opposition to Australia’s role in an increasingly nuclear environment. People who’d previously opposed the war in Vietnam, peace activists, some church groups and a smattering of artists (including the novelist Patrick White, who had publicly opposed Australia’s role in preparations for nuclear war) were coalescing into a broad antinuclear movement.

  I’d already had some interaction with the local peace organisations and found them splintered around ideology and mired in personality conflict. Up to that time, they had been campaigning hard to hold the Labor Party to its controversial no-uranium-mining policy. I had a difference of opinion with some groups, a number of whom were offshoots of the Communist Party of Australia, over the question of what the right response to nuclear overkill should be. I wasn’t a pacifist and so didn’t unreservedly support its policy equivalent, unilateral disarmament. I could not conceive of modern nations with opposing ideologies trying to maximise their sphere of influence while one decided unilaterally to lay down its weapons. Nor that the only country laying down arms would have to be America. Martin Luther King Jr was right to say that true pacifism is not ‘unrealistic submission to evil power’. I knew that, if faced with the prospect of submitting to an aggressor or defending my family or my country, I’d stand my ground. Sometimes turning the other cheek was the right thing to do, if it was an act of defiant, deliberate non-violence, but that didn’t mean lying down and letting someone walk over you.

  With thousands of weapons armed and dangerous, we urgently needed measures that reduced the threat of nuclear war. The do-nothing proposition was morally objectionable, and the argument that you had to destroy the world in order to save a part of it (in God knows what shape) was nonsense.

  When we finished recording Red Sails in June, Doris and I took the bullet train down to Hiroshima for the annual commemoration ceremony marking the use of the first nuclear weapon when ‘Little Boy’ was dropped on the city on 6 August 1945. What we witnessed there provided the final push for me to do something concrete.

  At Hiroshima, everything other than the steel skeletons of some buildings at ground zero had been reduced to ash. Nearly all the doctors and nurses in the city had been killed by the blast, leaving the hideously injured survivors to fend for themselves. When multiplied hundreds of times, in even a limited nuclear exchange, this first horror-filled experience showed there was simply no way the arms race and the strategies that attempted to justify it could be tolerated any longer.

  With a federal election in the wind, the single-issue Nuclear Disarmament Party (NDP) had been formed by a Canberra doctor, Michael Denborough, and anti-war groups around the country were standing candidates for the Senate as a way of giving the issue greater prominence. I heard about a meeting of the Sydney groups, and spent some time talking with Victorian candidate Jean Melzer, who’d already been chosen to run, about the possibility of standing as a candidate myself. She was an experienced Labor Party activist and I valued her counsel. She was positive about the idea, as were a number of local contacts, including Sean Flood, a well-known public defender. I touched base with the Oils, who said I should go for it and, finally, talked it through with Doris and got the same response. On the basis that I could head the ticket and so maximise the vote, I decided to throw my hat in the ring.

  There was one complicating factor that was to bedevil the campaign and which still exerts undue influence on left politics in Australia, and that was the presence of members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), or ‘Trots’ as they were then known. These were mainly young activists attracted to a virulent form of anti-capitalism, who’d been specifically trained by older members with a hard left background, some with ties to communist countries. Many in number and skilled in organising, they knew how to mount a public campaign, how to get a street demonstration going, how to disrupt a meeting and, crucially, they could infiltrate other organisations if it suited them.

  It sounds far-fetched, but at that time they were a destabilising fact of political life. They saw the rise of the antinuclear movement as an ideal opportunity to further their specific aims, which I, and many others, did not share. We simply wanted to remove 50,000 weapons of mass destruction from the face of the earth, however impossible a task that might appear to be.

  I enlisted Doddo’s help as campaign manager. I needed someone I could trust if we were going to take this unexpected step. Michael Denborough was also intending to stand, but it was hard to see how that could work as he was based in Canberra and unknown. A call was made over radio station Double J inviting potential members to join the party.

  The meeting to select a candidate was fractious as a consequence. Denborough had flown supporters up from Canberra and Patrick White was miffed at the sudden appearance of new members, but we prevailed by a narrow majority, and set about establishing an office underneath the YWCA just off Whitlam Square—the kind of address I could live with—calling on volunteers and friends from the music and arts community to lend a hand.

  The stopper was out of the bottle and people
flocked to the cause. A small committee was established to coordinate the start-up effort, including the maverick Liberal MP Ted St John QC and the number-two candidate, Gillian Fisher. John Ward, a doctor who took a broad view of the Hippocratic oath, served as chair. The distinguished historian Russel Ward, the deputy chancellor of the University of New England, joined the ticket and lent an air of authority to the growing swirl of activity that surrounded this new political party.

  Peter Carey, just branching out as an author, offered to help. He and his advertising agency partner Bani McSpedden came up with the slogan ‘The future is ours’, and, not surprisingly, much of the subsequent written material read pretty well. Other early helpers included the opera singer Janet Kenny, writer and psychologist Alex Carey, and Judy Richter, who’d worked on the Franklin Dam campaign in Tasmania with Bob Brown. Split Enz frontman Tim Finn phoned in his support, and film director John Duigan came and went depending on his work schedule. Strangers would just turn up at the campaign office and pitch in, like the softly spoken nurse Diana Lindsay, who walked in one day and without a word started efficiently sorting leaflets and answering phones. She stayed to the end and then came across to work for me and the Oils in our office in Glebe.

  My diary entry—one of the few I have for that time—for 7 October 1984 reads: ‘No more dope, this is really it.’ That really was it, and that’s the way it stayed. We’d been playing on the North Coast, and the night before the announcement of my candidacy had shredded the tiny stage at Forster RSL. I drove to Sydney late, still steaming after the show, and early next morning headed in to start work. All of a sudden I was a Senate candidate.

  Initially, the NDP was seen as purely a novelty: a rock singer from a single-issue party that had sprung up overnight trying to get into the Senate in an election where bread-and-butter issues were expected to dominate. We almost didn’t get off the starting blocks when there was an amateurish attempt to derail the dawn launch of the campaign at Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, overlooking Sydney Harbour. Just as we arrived, a woman suddenly lurched out of a taxi swigging from a bottle, lipstick smeared all over her face. Falling out of her blouse and visibly staggering, she made a beeline for me, calling out, ‘Pete! Pete!’ Luckily Doris sniffed the set-up. There were photographers lurking behind trees ready for the compromising moment but I managed to steer clear as the dishevelled saboteur was hustled away. To this day I’ve no idea who was behind that piece of nastiness, but I suspect right-wing Labor Party heavies might have had something to do with it. That and a break-in at the NDP offices following the election were the only dirty tricks we experienced.

  The NDP was constantly dismissed as a joke by the major parties and written off by most of the media before we’d even produced any policies. This worked to our advantage. By night the Oils were touring big shows in the capital cities, with a specially designed backdrop illustrating the futility of war, featuring songs like ‘Read About It’ and ‘Minutes to Midnight’. By day I campaigned like a dervish, trying to get in front of as many voters as possible, reaching out to disillusioned parts of the electorate: the young, those from the left, disenchanted Labor supporters and a growing body of Australians wanting independence of mind in our foreign policy and apprehensive about the massive build-up of nukes.

  The Democrats, a small party established by former Liberal minister Don Chipp that sat to the left of the Coalition, went feral as their vote drifted. They received extensive coverage from The Australian during the campaign. A typical headline on 20 November 1984 read: CHIPP LAUNCHES BARRAGE AT NDP. There were plenty more in that vein.

  When I joined the Labor Party in 2004, some questioned how I could take that step, having campaigned against Labor twenty years earlier. It was Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner who made the observation that back then he’d never once heard me attack the Labor Party as a whole. That was true, but I certainly was highly critical of some of their policies at the time, especially in the area of nuclear issues.

  The fact is we’d caught the political establishment napping. One of the assumptions that underpinned our reliance on America’s protection in the event of a conflict was that we would acquiesce to the use of nuclear weapons. It was a fatal concession that had to be challenged and, if possible, changed. It’s never easy to judge how well a campaign is going when you’re in the thick of it, but at one point support for the NDP reached 17 per cent. In Western Australia, stalwart anti-nuke activist Jo Vallentine was running a cheeky, media-savvy campaign, and she eventually won a spot in the Senate.

  We knew we were making an impact when, at the last minute, Foreign Minister Bill Hayden finally agreed to a live television debate with me. The Hawke government was now under significant political pressure, with votes leaking to the left. Under the direction of right-faction chief senator Graham Richardson, Labor exchanged preferences with the Liberal Party, and the remaining parties adopted the same tactic, which ensured I received very few flow-through preference votes. My primary vote ended up at 9.7 per cent, short of a full quota but historically high in relation to any single-issue candidate. The party bosses’ action meant I just missed out on taking a seat and at least six years of concerted political activity.

  That I would have leapt into the job boots and all had I got over the line was never in question, and that was my intention at the time. But once the count was finally concluded there was a tinge of relief from all quarters that things could return to normal, or at least to our definition of normal. Throughout, the Oils had backed me without qualification, and I was grateful for their solidarity. It would soon be time to grab the microphone and guitars and get out to play again. My close encounter with a dose of party politics would surely add to the store of experiences we were accumulating; we’d broken new ground for a rock band—and the band was still intact.

  As it turned out the NDP was not so solid, however. The election was held on 1 December but, because of the vagaries of the Senate voting system, the result wouldn’t be known until weeks later. At one point Channel 10 mistakenly announced that I’d won the seat, not the last time that the media would get something so basic completely wrong. I was conscious that, whatever the result, following through on the momentum we’d built up would require a lot of effort on everyone’s part, so I scheduled a meeting for early January, before the final count was in, to make preparations for the next phase of work. However, on the appointed day very few members showed up. Sure it was the holiday season, and it did happen to be a gorgeous summer’s day, but I was deflated by the low turnout, other than a few close allies and the usual SWP supporters. If we couldn’t muster decent numbers so soon after a tumultuous campaign that had succeeded in shaking up the political status quo, and with the possibility that I might still win the seat, then it seemed to me we stood little chance of keeping this ship afloat.

  Even though the party could not hold together over the long term, a moral victory belongs to the NDP and its many initial supporters, as that period saw some discernible changes made in Australian politics and policies.

  The 1984 election was the first to see a haemorrhaging of two-party support, a trend that has continued to the present day, with the emergence of the Greens party, occasional independents and other minor parties that have altered the composition of the Senate. The major parties could no longer take their traditional base for granted.

  It should be noted that during the campaign Bill Hayden tried to distance Australia from American efforts to develop first-strike capability. Displaying commendable independence of mind, he held out the possibility of a reassessment of the relationship between our two countries if the Americans didn’t up the ante on arms-control negotiations. Within a week of the election, The Sydney Morning Herald was reporting that the US had protested about Australia’s policies because of our support in international forums for a nuclear test ban.

  Barely two months later, Prime Minister Hawke was forced into a humiliating backdown following the government’s decision to assist the US in test
ing long-range MX missiles in the South Pacific. The public uproar that followed, due in part to the coverage nuclear issues had received courtesy of the NDP campaign, saw the initiative founder only four days after it was announced.

  A stronger degree of partnership was initiated in relation to the operation of US communications bases on our soil, with America nominally sharing ‘all’ information and Australian security agencies more fully informed about US operations. From that point on, according to defence ministers up to the present day, Pine Gap—one of the largest satellite ground stations in the world—‘operates with the full knowledge and concurrence of the Australian government’.

  But the activities of the bases, especially Pine Gap, have expanded over time, and the chief of the facility is an American officer, with the deputy chief an Australian. While Pine Gap plays an important role in arms-control monitoring, it also scoops up information that is used for intelligence and military purposes by the US, an issue that accompanied my entry into parliament.

  I had qualified my earlier view by saying that the bases could play a constructive role in anti-terrorism efforts, and this was Labor’s position at the time, but my wording was imprecise and gave the impression that I’d completely reversed my position. I should have simply reiterated my reservations on the question of Australian control at the facilities and their potential role in any nuclear exchange, while noting that since the 1980s the bases could play an important role in anti-terrorism and arms-control verification. In fact, my thinking on the bases had changed since the NDP campaign. The NDP was right to question the extent to which Australian sovereignty was compromised by US bases, and to oppose their existence as key parts of a nuclear war-fighting strategy; the arrangements governing their operation are too opaque, and require greater clarification and a higher level of oversight by parliament. But because of its unique location the base can, and in the future should, play a greater role in current disarmament efforts. We are now reaching the stage where the verification capacity of Pine Gap and its many satellite antennas should be utilised and shared more widely. If the world is finally going to get serious about ridding itself of these weapons, then Pine Gap could service a multinational verification project aimed at speeding nuclear disarmament as the push continues towards a nuclear weapons treaty.