Big Blue Sky

by Peter Garrett

  The CFMEU, for their part, predicted ‘a massive backlash’ within the Labor Party if I was ever elected. This was highly unlikely, and there was one thing I could confidently predict even then: if elected, I would show more loyalty to the ALP than had been on display from this angry rabble.

  Ironically, Michael O’Connor, who headed up the forestry branch of the union and had been for many years a trenchant opponent of the ACF, was sitting on the national executive of the ALP when it sanctioned my selection as the ALP candidate for Kingsford Smith.

  Following Latham’s captain’s call, I had to travel to Canberra to meet with this key administrative body so my candidature could be formalised. Sitting around a big table were some familiar and some not-so-familiar faces that I would get to know a lot better in the coming years, including politicians like Victorian left warlord Kim Carr as well as CFMEU boss O’Connor.

  During the course of the interview, O’Connor aggressively questioned whether I would use the party to further an environmental agenda.

  My reply was that I would be a team player, but I’d argue strongly for better environmental policies every step of the way. Labor should be proud of its past record of achievement, but there was much more to do.

  …

  I raced around, trying to get the groundwork done so I could make the transition to a new career as a federal politician, and in a brief window I took the opportunity to visit East Timor. I’d wanted to get there for some time. Since Midnight Oil had done benefit shows for the East Timorese, I’d come to know José Ramos-Horta, the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 after years of trying to draw attention to East Timor’s plight. The Oils ended up doing two songs in support of the cause: one, Jim’s thundering denunciation of Australian complicity in East Timor’s history, ‘Say Your Prayers’, featured on one of the few EPs we released; the other, ‘Kolele Mai’, was an arrangement of a traditional Timorese folk song.

  I had a long-standing invitation to visit from Kirsty Sword Gusmão, an Australian married to Xanana Gusmão, Timor-Leste’s first elected president. Gusmão was a resistance leader who, after years of struggle—including time in Indonesian jails—was now wrestling with the enormous task of getting the country back on its feet. Kirsty asked me to come for a concert they were holding to commemorate East Timor’s independence. The idea was to spend some time with local musicians and politicians, and get a better sense of the issues this tiny new nation was facing.

  I journeyed up to the president’s residence to have lunch and hear from Gusmão about the current situation. The Gusmãos lived just outside the capital, Dili, in a modest bungalow that wouldn’t have looked out of place in any sea-change town along the Australian coast. His was a dire report. The infant nation was struggling; they were in good spirits but lacked the bare essentials: schools and hospitals were rudimentary, in some areas non-existent, and they were facing difficult tasks on every front.

  In 1975 Indonesia had invaded East Timor and a brutal war followed. At the time of the invasion, the population of Indonesia was around 140 million, whereas East Timor had a population of about 700,000. During the course of the conflict and subsequent declaration that East Timor was part of Indonesia—a declaration recognised by Australia alone—it was estimated that nearly 200,000 Timorese had been killed, with many more displaced.

  Violence, beatings and rape were common throughout this period and human rights activists, and some sections of the Catholic Church—notably Carmelite nuns and the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart (the order founded by Mary MacKillop)—had worked hard, and eventually with considerable success, to bring the plight of the East Timorese to the attention of the Australian public.

  At the same time the realpolitik of not upsetting a powerful regional neighbour had been central to the thinking of the Department of Foreign Affairs and successive governments since Whitlam. My predecessor in the seat of Kingsford Smith, Laurie Brereton, as Labor’s shadow foreign minister, had, against this ingrained view, moved to strengthen Labor’s support for the East Timorese. I discovered later that this task was made more difficult by the activities of a newly elected ALP member, Kevin Rudd, who coveted Brereton’s position. Rudd worked in concert with the Howard government’s foreign minister, Alexander Downer, to undermine Brereton, including secretly briefing the US embassy in Canberra against Brereton on the issue of national missile defence. Even by the standard of politics played hard, it was an act of cold betrayal and once exposed should have sent warning signals about Rudd’s character to the Labor Caucus, the collection of members and senators who choose the leader of the party.

  In the end, a decision by Indonesian president B.J. Habibie to allow the Timorese a plebiscite on independence, supervised by Indonesian forces, brought events to a head. The Australian prime minister, John Howard, supported this decision, but in fidelity to the elite view wrote to the Indonesians indicating Australia would accept Indonesia retaining sovereignty.

  The Timorese showed great courage, with nearly 80 per cent voting in favour of nationhood, and Australian forces played a substantial role in the UN-led peacekeeping mission that followed.

  On my final night in town, I joined Paul Kelly, Paul Stewart from Melbourne band Painters and Dockers, and local musician Ego Lemos for a concert held in a ramshackle part of Dili’s downtown.

  If any country deserved to succeed, Timor was surely one. I hoped they’d get there, but Australia wasn’t making it any easier. For a successful fresh start, they required a fair share of royalties from the oil and gas reserves located in offshore waters close by, a substantial portion of which was claimed by Australia. With a reliable source of income, the country’s leaders could invest in health and education and in the infrastructure needed to raise standards of living without having to meet the crippling debt repayments that many less-developed countries had been saddled with in recent decades.

  Timor’s fair share was never entirely realised, although some royalties now flow into Dili. The original agreement Australia signed with Indonesia, which effectively denies Timor access to a large part of its oil and gas reserves, is under challenge. Even though a subsequent agreement saw the East Timorese parliament approve that arrangement, recent events, including instances of Australian government espionage in East Timor, have reopened the issue.

  …

  I was struck early by the fervour of audiences when we first ventured south of the New South Wales border. Melburnians are among the most loyal supporters around. I don’t know if it’s because of the weather, or it’s a facet of their culture, but they stick with their favourite footy teams and their causes through thick and thin.

  It was in the Melbourne suburb of Essendon that I saw my first, unforgettable, AFL game. There I stood shoulder to shoulder at the club’s old ground, the aptly named Windy Hill, on a freezing, wet afternoon, with the full sweep of Melbourne society: well-dressed matrons, mongrel sons and daughters, toffs and working people of all ages, shapes and sizes, many togged up in scarves and beanies in the Dons’ colours, red and black.

  The crowd was screaming at the top of their lungs as the ball was punted up and down the ground and players lunged into the air for a catch or threw themselves into melees to retrieve the precious pill. The shouting extended to the umpire when he made a questionable call—‘Ya mug, ump!’—and across the ground to tease rival supporters for good measure. The smell of pies and beery breath and sweat seeped through the crowd. And it was like that week in and week out. I’ve followed the Bombers ever since.

  There was good reason to be a Bombers fan during the period when Kevin Sheedy was coaching. He was a social pioneer and encouraged Aboriginal players in the sport. The ‘Dreamtime at the G’ fixture between Essendon and Richmond, which celebrates the contribution Indigenous AFL players have made to the sport, was a stand-out initiative.

  When it was first mooted I got behind the event—at last, a focus on the big picture; black players had made a huge contribution to AFL—and always
tried to get down for the game. When I got back from Timor, it was to join Shane Howard, Paul Kelly (again), Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter at the G for a sober version of Goanna’s ‘Solid Rock’.

  On another occasion we marched to the ground with Michael Long, the former Essendon great, who had walked from Melbourne to Canberra—a real long march—to put pressure on the ‘gutless’ (his word) Howard government for not making Indigenous issues a priority.

  I’d called him up on the way in to see how he was going after walking 500 kilometres. He was characteristically low key. ‘It’s been all right,’ he said. ‘But I need a new pair of shoes.’

  Wearing out shoe leather was about to become a fact of life for me as well, although not quite on the scale of Long’s arduous trek.

  A decade of tramping around the streets and through the corridors of power was just around the corner, and I had little idea what lay ahead. The only thing I knew for sure was that when it came to the governance of my country, the time to stand up and be counted had well and truly come.

  24

  NO TIME TO WASTE

  IN LATE JUNE 2004, I took the train from Mittagong to Sydney to move a few essentials into the small flat I’d rented until we had a chance to get something bigger for the family in the electorate. The margin in favour of Labor was running around 8 per cent, so I could expect to win the seat if a strong campaign was waged. The country was still in the grip of a big dry. As the train emerged from the last of the rock cuttings that accommodate the railway line before Camden, the miserably thin soil line stuck out like a sliver of gold in a rubbish tip. Rattling into full sunlight, there in sharp relief, was empty dam upon empty dam, squatting at the bottom of bleached grey paddocks. This drought was at last concentrating people’s minds on water, or the lack thereof, with rivers slowing to a trickle and the threat of bushfires building. And hopefully it was making us rethink climate change too. For we couldn’t keep stumbling along this barren path to another blazing inferno, could we? It was a good time to be going to the nation’s capital; there was serious work to be done.

  A short-term lease on a shopfront—formerly a Thai restaurant—along one of the shopping strips in Maroubra, in the centre of the electorate, provided premises for the campaign team. Kate Pasterfield, a former staffer from Laurie Brereton’s office who’d left university early and worked with various Labor MPs while still a teenager, had been employed by head office to help coordinate. We were joined by a slew of fresh faces—local party members tired of the rote politics of the machine, keen to shake things up—and a few media tagging along to file celebrity politician pieces, or better still to catch a stumble (though none were forthcoming just then).

  The vexed issue of celebrity meant that I was still considered a rock star of sorts, even if I didn’t see myself that way, and sitting astride the fame-o-meter with a suit and tie on would make me fair game. Sure enough, an early report referred scathingly to the ‘well-cut suit’ I was wearing, as if the normal mode of dress for a politician was somehow confirmation of my lack of integrity in exiting the stage to make a run for parliament. Scurrilous snippets appeared suggesting all wasn’t well in my marriage—a descent into the dirtiest gutter that made me feel sick. I’d never paraded my family around; it was enough that we had to manage long separations without dropping them in it head first. Anyone with a smidgen of decency, and a background check under their belt, would have known that reports of marital strife simply weren’t true.

  These were petty examples of journalistic practices that weren’t exceptional. There were a few good journalists who stuck to the facts, didn’t take sides and delivered credible media. But it looked like the bar would be set high for me and I’d be granted a slimmer margin of forgiveness for the inevitable mistakes to come. In time, I just had to accept there would be judgement by prejudice, not fact, and often from the projections of a cohort who got their steer on events from anonymous whisperers and talk-show blowhards. I wouldn’t be the only politician who was set up and then assaulted in the docks. It happened on a greater and more damaging scale to Julia Gillard when she was prime minister: she had to wear a relentless negative media campaign. It says a lot about her fortitude that she persevered without displaying any bitterness at the treatment she received.

  Our political system might still be a method of finding proximate solutions for intractable problems (as American commentator Reinhold Niebuhr has observed), but it’s usually a messy business of incremental change, often with two steps forward and one back. Only rarely is there the big flash of light and a great leap ahead. Yet it seemed as if some expected a hero who would suddenly ride into the middle of a pitched battle they had been waging forever and carry their flag to victory—if only. I never bought in to the hero myth tied to success or notoriety. Real-life heroes are those who risk their lives in war, natural disasters and emergencies when no one else will step up to help. The sense of disappointment that some felt at my joining Labor was a projection of people’s assumptions about me rather than a reflection on what I actually said or did; in these instances, it wasn’t about me at all.

  In the meantime, in comparison to any number of ego-driven airheads that infect our culture, the politician has become the modern-day bogeyman, infinitely attackable, a locus point of envy, animosity, cynicism, disdain and world-weariness. While there is no shortage of politicians who are deserving targets, tarring every politician with the same brush is inaccurate and lazy. Still, when New South Wales Labor turned toxic, having shown bad faith with the public and genuine party members by allowing crooks and thugs to inhabit the party, people understandably treated any politician they came across as a punching bag. It was a strange sensation to be warding off these attacks while at the same time being told not to take it personally.

  Some have it that voters are hypocrites, who complain that there are too many laws, then immediately want another one to fix something that’s wrong in their lives. But this is too harsh. Voters act both rationally and emotionally, and the picture of people’s responses to politics as a consequence can be confusing. It is rational to expect governments to enforce laws that protect children or to object to a politician breaking a promise. It is not rational to expect that governments can legislate for better behaviour, or that politicians will keep every promise they make if conditions change markedly in the interim. People’s view of my role wasn’t always rational, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t genuinely felt, and I still encounter the conflicting responses to my decision to step into politics to this day.

  …

  The slogan I chose was ‘Energy—Action—Commitment’, having discarded the predictables: ‘Our Area, Our Voice’ and ‘Working with You’. It was as good a summary of the approach I wanted to take as we could find.

  Initially, our modest campaign headquarters were a magnet for anyone with a barrow to push. At the start of the campaign, to the surprise of Kate Pasterfield and the team, much time had to be spent handling these incursions, aimed at elevating a personal grudge or pet issue into the spotlight.

  One memorable media stunt, and a sign of things to come, saw the Wilderness Society hire a front-end loader and dump several tonnes of woodchips on the footpath in front of the office, preventing anyone from getting in or out, accompanied by signs saying: ‘Garrett has to save the forests now!’ This was well before the election. After the camera crews had taken their shots and left, one of the activists returned and sheepishly asked if he could borrow a broom to sweep up the mess—a request that was politely denied through gritted teeth.

  During the campaign I travelled a little with Latham and tried to satisfy the entreaties from other Labor candidates for photo-op visits, but mainly I stayed on home turf as much as possible. I was pretty sure electors didn’t want to see their putative local member on TV; they wanted to see him in the flesh, and I was determined to stay put.

  Election day 2004 came upon us in what seemed like minutes, not months. The day itself was one rush of continual movemen
t—visiting each polling booth, as was the practice, to thank party members who’d turned up, while the team made sure everyone had a coffee and a feed at some point. No one had time to sit and catch their breath until all the votes were in. Then the business of getting out early to catch the commuters, walking the streets, visiting clubs, schools, Saturday-morning sport, anywhere there were people, all the while responding to scuttlebutt and incoming attacks from the other parties, abruptly stopped dead.

  On the morning before the big day, I’d stood with a team of volunteers at Maroubra Junction, handing out leaflets to passers-by. Some were forthcoming about our prospects. It was clear we weren’t going to win: they didn’t like Howard, but they didn’t trust Latham. In Kingsford Smith, though, the party had rallied; the angst about the method of my entry had vanished in the heat of the campaign. The tribe was out in force, and in greater numbers than our opponents: there was a seat to win.

  Two days later I was the new member of parliament for Kingsford Smith. I stood in an empty office on the top floor of a six-storey medical centre, watching a line of international flights descending into Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport, as flickering TVs blinked back at me from the rows of houses and flats in the streets below, catching my breath after a contest that was already sliding off the radar and marvelling at the bizarreness of it all. And then it was time to get to work as we started to draw up a list of actions for the coming year.

  The idea was simple. I wanted us to operate like I felt the church up on the hill should: open to help all comers, regardless of rank or affiliation. I’d come into the party without any faction behind me and I wasn’t intending to join one now. The existing system of favours, the counterbalancing of various personal debts and credits that was part and parcel of political office, and essential to the upward climb of most members of parliament, wouldn’t have purchase here—much to the chagrin of the local heavies.