I knew I would miss the freedom that I’d had up to now, the dressing-room rituals, the suspension of time deep in performance and the core group of people who had been there for the long haul: Gary, Michael Lippold, our street-smart publicist Paula Jones, the Office team, with Arlene Brookes a constant presence. I knew the rest of the Oils would be sad, angry, pissed off, anxious, relieved and any number of other emotions. I had plenty of mixed emotions too, but relief was the strongest; I just had to let it go.
At the same time I suspected it wasn’t completely finished. How could it be? The character of Midnight Oil was bigger than any single member. The band had decided they would continue to play and keep it going in some shape. I later heard they chased around for a female vocalist without unearthing a candidate, eventually re-emerging as a surf instrumental band called the Break—how ironic to have a soundtrack for surfing after all those years.
As a group of people for whom being together on stage made perfect sense, this band could always do it again if the reasons stacked up, as happened when we played benefits at the Sydney Cricket Ground for those affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami on Boxing Day, 2004, and later at the Melbourne Cricket Ground for victims of the 2009 Victorian bushfires.
‘I love ya, big man,’ Bones had said when we parted ways at the airport, and the feeling was mutual. But then, he’d been through a break-up before. For Jim, Martin and Rob, Midnight Oil was just about all they’d known—it had to hurt.
…
The calls started coming almost immediately. The first two were from Phillip Toyne and Bob Carr, wanting to know when I was going to join the Labor Party. Carr had already hinted at a spot as environment minister in New South Wales, and was coming back for a second bite. Phillip, now heading up the Bush Heritage Trust, was, as usual, thinking upstream and keen to see someone with a strong conservation background in mainstream politics. In the days and weeks that followed, there were plenty of other calls, including from Tom Uren, Bob Brown, John Faulkner and a host of mates. There’d be plenty of time to follow them up later on, but for now I just wanted to catch my breath and spend more time on the home front. The girls were growing up in front of my eyes, turning into spirited, sensitive, funny young women, filling up the house as teenagers do. Grace, no longer a baby, was now playing piano, Em and May were out on the sporting field on Saturdays, and I wanted to be there as much as I could.
Besides, my presidency of the ACF still left me with plenty to do for the present, especially with the foundation moving to refurbished offices in an old three-storey building in Carlton in Melbourne that was intended to showcase the best energy- and water-saving technologies and sustainable building methods.
Dubbed ‘the ACF Green Building’, this project got me excited, and was a stellar example of leading thinking from the council and its previous president, Professor David Yencken, who had long argued for the ACF to walk the talk in its own premises. Located at 60 Leicester Street, the renovation project was designed as an affordable fit-out that could be easily replicated. It had been made possible by a generous donation from a charitable foundation called the Poola Foundation, operated by Eve Kantor (Rupert Murdoch’s niece) and her husband, Mark Wootton.
While ACF’s Green Building features a number of sustainable elements, like generous rainwater storage, waterless urinals—always a good talking point—and an ingenious heating and cooling system that relies on an automated system of louvres that track the sun, it was the behavioural elements of the approach that turned out to be most important. The enthusiasm of the people working in the building to extend their tasks to monitoring the temperature, sharing workstations and always turning off the lights when they go home ultimately provided the biggest energy-saving payback. With its six-star energy rating, the Green Building became a showpiece, demonstrating that low energy and water use could be business as usual, but it was the workers’ willingness to change a little that made the biggest difference.
It wasn’t only environmental issues that took my attention. I was appalled by the decision of the Howard government, in early 2003, to commit Australian troops to the war in Iraq, and spoke out against the war, including at a large rally at Federation Square in Melbourne. It was clear that the invasion was illegal, as the relevant Security Council resolution on Iraq did not expressly authorise the use of force, and I was encouraged by Labor’s clear opposition to the war in the parliament. It was a reminder of the power that principled oppositions can have and I took note. It was also a reminder of the need for the parliament, not the executive, to determine whether the nation should go to war.
At ACF we were focused on a redesign of the economic system so it didn’t operate counter to ecological principles and society didn’t have to fight for the natural world at every turn.
In June 2003 I addressed the National Press Club, a venue that provides a unique opportunity to talk directly to the nation’s media. John Connor, the new ACF campaign director, executive director Don Henry and I spent a lot of time preparing a speech that we hoped would reset the compass. It laid out a template for environmental tax reform and a new approach to natural resource management that would help reverse the decline in the health of Australia’s precious ecosystems. But the gallery’s mind was elsewhere and the appeal fell on deaf ears.
I remained in touch with the then Labor Party leader Simon Crean and others in the party as we attempted to green the party’s policies. But the absence of anyone willing to stick their neck out and go to the wall was telling, and I began to think that if the opportunity arose to influence policy from inside the parliament, I would take it.
Simon Balderstone visited me in Mittagong and we scoped out possible scenarios. Discussions intensified when Mark Latham became Labor leader. Doris and I had hosted Latham and his wife Janine and their kids at our place, and I found him serious, interested in policy and forceful to boot. There was something about his showing up at old-style town hall meetings and arguing the toss with all and sundry until everyone went home talked out that appealed to me. That he was a bona fide maddie, and could explode at any moment, I didn’t recognise at the time.
People whom I’d confided in about possibly throwing my hat in the ring thought I was tending to mad as well—but it goes with the territory. Doris knew that, having come this far, I would have a go if the chance arose, and she was supportive. Again, I can’t overstate her generosity. If it came to pass, it meant a lot more time apart, a state neither of us liked, even if our relationship was strong enough to withstand the absences.
In the end, nothing would have happened if the member for the Sydney seat of Kingsford Smith, Laurie Brereton, hadn’t resigned very late in the day, leaving open the possibility for the new federal Labor leader to request that a candidate be selected without going through a bitter rank-and-file process, there being no clear-cut contender in the electorate. Accordingly, Latham struck.
Once a Labor leader has made a call like that, the party could be expected to fall into line, but it wasn’t that straightforward. The blur of calls and meetings to prepare the ground was now accompanied by a growing media frenzy over whether or not I was about to make an announcement. And there were plenty of Labor insiders who didn’t like the idea at all.
It was pretty simple when you boiled it down. I wanted to make a difference. After years of heading to Canberra to get some attention and make the case for change, why not go and see if things could be taken further? Until now, I’d always worked as an outsider. I’d written and commentated on issues. I’d done time as the talking head with a quote for the day. I’d been on the front line pushing and shoving to get issues on to the agenda, and I’d campaigned for change. It was time to get into the ring.
I knew my decision to enter formal politics would put me offside with a raft of people: conservative voters generally, the rebels and purists who saw me as selling out, Greens party members who felt I should have joined them, ALP members who thought I was getting a free ride. And for those closest
to my roots, the legion of Oils fans—who yearned for us to keep doing what we had always done—here I was really walking away from the band.
I’d watched politics closely over the years and seen that idealism and pragmatism have to reach a balance in successful policy-making. You want to aim for the best possible result, with the best chance of making it work, and that means bringing dreamers and idealists together with managers and the technically skilled to see if you can get a project up to create change that lasts. I was willing to try to find that sweet spot in the endeavour of government.
At the same time, I was too much of an economic dry and too allergic to utopianism to side with the Australian Greens. When leader Bob Brown had asked me to consider joining, I spent some time in discussions with him and his adviser, Ben Oquist. Oquist, one of the next in line, was willing to make way for me in the queue for a Senate seat. Later on, he was rejected by the New South Wales Greens as a candidate, which was a pity. He is smart and principled and would have made an outstanding representative.
Sanctimony sucks, and while there were a number of people involved with the party whom I liked and had worked with in the past, including Bob, I couldn’t envisage years of playing a dishonest song to the bleachers, promising a nirvana that couldn’t be delivered and castigating everyone else as moral inferiors. There was another factor, too, and that concerned the flirtation of the Wilderness Society with the Liberal/National Coalition when Labor had been in government in the 1980s. From the luxury of opposition, the conservatives had promised greater environmental gains that, sure enough, once Howard came to power, were never realised. It was a characteristic position of the Wilderness Society and, later, the Greens, that they would deal with either of the major parties, having equal contempt for both. In their eyes, Labor and Liberal were indistinguishable from one another, characterised as ‘laborials’, different in name only. As a way of slicing votes, particularly from inner-city electorates, it was effective rhetoric, but a long way from the truth. On environmental issues like climate change, the differences were great, which explained why, in nearly all cases, the Greens would exchange preference votes with Labor, the party they spent most time attacking. They wanted Labor to stay in power but they also wanted to enlist the support of left-oriented Labor supporters—it was a deft double act but not one in which I wanted to participate.
Strange as it may sound, I also respected small business, having spent more than twenty-five years in a partnership generating income, paying taxes and employing people. I knew how hard it was to keep productivity going up, which was the only solution to the inexorable demands on the budget, especially for social services that had to be paid out of the public purse.
When I sat quietly to consider my future, I knew that the Australian Labor Party, despite its flaws, was my natural home. I’d grown up with Labor and many of its values rang true for me. I believed a fair reading of Australia’s modern history showed that our social and economic progress was due in no small measure to the ALP: centralised wage-fixing, saving the Antarctic from mineral exploitation, supporting the formation of the UN, establishing Medicare and compulsory superannuation, legislating for native title, and there was plenty more. And while it was, and still is, in danger of becoming a closed-door club for careerists and union hacks, to date Labor had been a major source of positive reform going back to its formation in the dawning days of our democracy.
I knew a number of senior Labor figures well—John Faulkner, Warren Snowdon, Kim Beazley, Bob Carr, Ros Kelly, Steve Bracks, Susan Ryan—and appreciated the serious intent they applied to the calling. I’d got to know others, too, like Simon Balderstone and Sam Mostyn, both of whom had worked in Keating’s office. They believed the values of Labor best matched the values of young Australians and were supportive of me getting on board.
No matter what lay ahead, I was genuinely animated by the thought of representing an electorate in parliament. This notion was one that some of my peers, and even strangers I ran into in the street, couldn’t get their heads around. Why put yourself through the endless school speech nights and sporting events, accessible to all and sundry day and night, with precious little time for family and the finer things of life, to be Mr Everyman in the suburbs?
My answer, and one that had the cynics gagging, was that I believed in this aspect of democracy—it was real, for a start. I valued the service a diligent local member could bring to their electorate and was proud to do that job regardless of what else might eventuate. I happened to think the grist of politics is better for the fact of physical representation—eye to eye with the decent as well as the deranged—and I liked people, liked to be in the place they lived, bound by the weave of family and community life. I didn’t see it as a chore.
…
I travelled to Sydney at the beginning of June 2004 to sign the ALP membership papers as the factional deliberations were settled by John Faulkner representing the left, and right-wing state MP Eric Roozendaal (who became embroiled in corruption allegations later on) at Faulkner’s home in Sydney.
The right were far from happy, and having examined the electoral roll and discovered I wasn’t registered, someone close to head office chose their moment and, once the announcement was made, leaked it to the media—welcome to the Labor Party.
I’d voted in every election, and assumed, since the stalking incident in Balgowlah years earlier, that I’d been on the silent electors roll. The media firestorm that followed was a taste of things to come. No one really doubted that I was genuinely interested in politics and had always fronted on election day. There was even a photo of me voting at the US consulate in New York, and friends, including Todd Hunter from Dragon and his wife Johanna Pigott, had been with me at the polling booth at the previous election and were willing to testify on my behalf.
The whole incident left a sour aftertaste. I knew that it would require a big dose of stamina and some deep breathing if I was to survive going over the falls in the months ahead. There was choppy water wherever you looked and the rollcall of those who’d dived in late and foundered included: former Australian Democrats leader Cheryl Kernot, a late addition to the Labor Party (beleaguered and abandoned in tears at Hobart airport); rugby league great Mal Meninga (‘I’m buggered’ two minutes into his first radio interview); Australian Olympic hockey coach and medico Ric Charlesworth (stranded on the backbench); and, later on, ABC journalist Maxine McKew, after one all-too-brief term (‘It’s all their fault!’). Their fate was a reminder there were no lifesavers around here.
…
The months preceding my decision to run for federal parliament passed in a flurry of activity as I tried to square off existing commitments.
Don Henry had proved a positive leader, successfully shepherding the ACF through the operational changes and maintaining a close focus on Cape York and national and global climate change developments. Always cheerful, Don was impossible not to like: beneath the smiling exterior he was a determined advocate who never wavered in trying to win the day for conservation.
We’d only just launched an important new paper, ‘Natural Advantage: A blueprint for a sustainable Australia’, with the Governor-General, Sir William Deane. It was a thorough set of policy ideas to try to match environmental protection with economic growth, a reboot of the principles of ecologically sustainable development (ESD). Despite some strong corporate endorsement, however, it failed to excite any interest from the Howard government.
We’d also begun a dialogue with Labor’s shadow cabinet, and new leader Mark Latham’s office, about repositioning the environment around a low-carbon economy and finally cracking the code on the long-running Tasmanian forests dispute. After I departed the ACF, the discussions on Tassie forests continued all the way through to the 2014 election. At the time, Latham was clear that he wanted, as he put it, ‘to be bold’. Don and I kept pushing at the policy, aware that at long last there was a chance to go right over the Maginot Line that had separated the warring parties for so
long.
The result has gone into political folklore, but without much perspective. Labor’s announcement, when it came, of significant increases in areas of protected old-growth forests, was a campaign disaster in 2004. John Howard had sensed the enmity that many in the powerful forestry union, the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), had to an ambitious environmental agenda and he outflanked Latham by appearing at a union rally, promising to save timber workers’ jobs and offering some modest proposals for forest protection. Amazingly, the unionists cheered Howard, their natural enemy, blinded by the hatred that coursed through the veins of most Tassie workers for the ‘greenies’, who in their eyes were blow-ins, nothing more than a rent-a-crowd of ratbags, intent on taking timber jobs away while squatting on the dole. Of course, once re-elected, Howard cynically abandoned his promise to add substantially to the conservation estate and the forestry industry continued to struggle and shed jobs. It wasn’t until much later, in 2013, under the Gillard government, that a proposal to save significant areas of Tasmania’s tall native forests, along with a restructuring package to assist displaced workers, was accepted by both governments, the conservation groups and most of the unions and industry, although subsequently the Abbott government torpedoed the agreement. It was remarkably similar to the policy put up by Labor a decade earlier.
In Tasmania there was an irrational fear of taking a leap and doing something positive for the environment, despite the kudos that had come with the successful Franklin Dam campaign thirty years earlier. Everything was viewed through a prism of fear and loss, in this case shared between the opposing forces of organised labour on the left and industry on the right. It showed up as a footnote as my entry into parliament was mooted.
To Coalition environment minister David Kemp, I was a ‘rogue ideologue’. And to prove the assertion, he pointed out I was even opposing the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement. (On firm grounds, as it turned out, given the lack of real benefits that have flowed since—and the fact that it freezes the quota for Australian music at 25 per cent.)
Big Blue Sky Page 29
