On this show we had a clutch of IVF doctors (the technique was controversial in 1985), psychologists, priests and prelates, Ian Temby QC (alive and well), Senator Brian Harradine (until he became confused and tried to walk away, only to be tripped by a cable, fusing the lights) and two extremely brilliant Australians of whom much more would be heard. One was Alan Trounson, the true founding father of IVF, a reproductive scientist who realised that anything he could do to an Australian sheep he could do to an Australian woman (although on this show, he pioneered male pregnancy). The other was a young Melbourne-born ethicist named Peter Singer. It was obvious he would go far after his first exchange with the Anglican dean of Sydney, Lance Shilton:
Shilton: The Bible says there is a certain role for men and a certain role for women. Its teaching is very clear about that. There is no biblical evidence for confusing the roles.
Singer: So far as what’s not in the Bible, you could point out that the pop-up toaster is also not mentioned, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have them.
And so we debated those unthinkable ideas that bioethics was beginning to throw up: the pregnant male has not quite eventuated, but most of the others have, protected by the impeccable logic of Peter Singer and those who think like him.
By this time, ABC Hypotheticals was rating well, and inspiring some emulation. The Department of Foreign Affairs thought it would do one to showcase its minister, Bill Hayden, and the minister for defence, Kim Beazley, as well as to celebrate Australia’s contribution to the International Year of Peace. The department wrote a script, in which Bill saved the world. It was risible, as they must have realised, because they asked me to take over the project. I agreed, but on condition that I could tear up their script, and choose the participants and the storyline without interference. They then not only tried to withdraw when they heard I had asked John Pilger to participate, they went on to express opposition (which I ignored) to the nuclear physicist Sir Ernest Titterton (a father of the nuclear bomb), the head of the RSL, a Liberal shadow minister, and Pat O’Shane, the truculent magistrate. The department groaned, but they had to understand that it was my show, and that opposition to the government’s policies from left and from right had a place around the table.
The eventual program, ‘Should You Tell the President?’, asked ‘What happens when a Duntroon-trained military dictator emerges in a country to our near north, diverts Australian uranium to make an Islamic bomb, and engages in international terrorism to a degree that provokes American reprisals?’ Bud Weiser, a prototype of Edward Snowden, defected from the CIA to offer the National Times the secrets of Pine Gap. Hayden handled the international crises quite well, and lied to the US president to stop him invading an Asian neighbour. It was good fun, and critics said it was good television.
But it did not end there. Some malign official in the department got hold of the script they had written before coming to me and assumed (obviously not having seen the program) that I had used it. It was sent to opposition MP Alexander Downer, who rushed to accuse the ABC of staging a rigged Hypothetical. Foolishly, he said this not in Parliament (where the coward’s cloak of parliamentary privilege would have protected him from any action for defamation) but to the Australian, which published his comments. It was a blatant libel, so off I went to my old firm, Allen Allen & Hemsley, to sue the bastard. I did not bother with the Australian – it was merely the messenger. It was Alex who had opened his mouth without checking his facts. As soon as he realised, he threw up his hands, paid my costs and wrote the most grovelling apology ever, lauding my absolute integrity and covering his own head in sackcloth and ashes. (I know it was the most grovelling apology ever, because I drafted it.) The Australian published his retraction and I did not insist on damages, despite his ability to pay them. I have never, other than on this occasion, brought an action for libel: I do not mind being criticised (as Oscar Wilde pointed out, it shows that at least you are being talked about) but object when ‘facts’ stated clearly and publicly are false and reflect on your integrity.
Hypotheticals continued its merry way on the ABC. Perhaps the most significant episode was ‘Does Dracula Have AIDS?’, filmed shortly after the epidemic hit and popular paranoia thought the disease might be caught from swimming pools, communion cups or toilet seats. Fred Nile was on hand to voice such fears, which were duly debunked by a panel of experts, including the French doctor who had discovered and isolated the human immunodeficiency virus, Luc Montagnier. This episode saw the debut of one of my favourite discoveries, an alderman from Hurstville named Dick Swanton. His views were Neanderthal to begin with, but changed in the course of the program. He was my ‘everyman’ – full of popular prejudice but open to education, so that he ending up employing a panellist who had AIDS. The doctors wrestled with confidentiality problems while the logic of the storyline drove Neal Blewett, the minister for Health, to issue free needles to drug users (a step he had been unable even to canvass politically, but afterwards felt able to institute), as well as undertake other measures to combat the disease, while the editor of the Women’s Weekly accepted condom advertisements. It was a truly revelatory program, to its moderator as well as to its audience, and I hope it did something to counter the stigmatisation that the gay community was suffering at the time.
‘The Battle of Blind Man’s Bluff’ recorded the conflict between those who insist on extracting mineral wealth at any price – Sir Charles Court (former premier of Western Australia) and some CEOs of mining companies – and those concerned with protecting the environment – Bob Brown (then a Tasmanian state MP), Don Dunstan (former premier of South Australia) and actress Robyn Archer. Union leaders were caught in the middle. Gareth Evans was tempted to send F-111s to frighten Vandemonia, the breakaway state led by Sir Charles, a long-time believer that nothing succeeds like secession. This show saw the emergence of two other Hypothetical discoveries: Barry Coulter (then Northern Territory minister for Mines and Energy), a right-wing scrapper with a deadpan delivery and quick-witted put-downs, and Michael Mansell, a Tasmanian Aboriginal activist with powerful delivery and unerring logic. The program saw roads being built (‘sensitively’) through rainforests to mine kryptonite, and the rediscovery of a Tasmanian tiger along with other obscure creatures (Hodgman’s death adder and the red-faced Memphis trouser snake). In the end, dust from the kryptonite mine settled near the state’s famous apple trees and produced a testicular atrophy that lowered the birth-rate. My mother’s old friend Francis James had a cameo role as a Murdoch editor who had to decide whether his boss would want him to publish the truth.
‘What’s Your Poison?’ was about drugs, with politicians, customs officers, federal police, psychologists and Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum. It attracted the attention of educators, and was the first Hypothetical to become part of a kit distributed to schools and universities. The storyline was yet again prophetic, in that it envisaged almost exactly what was to happen, years later, to Myuran Sukumaran, Andrew Chan and others when information which could have them executed was passed by the federal police to their opposite numbers in countries with the death penalty. At the time, there were still calls for the reintroduction of capital punishment in Australia, most loudly from Gerry Peacocke, the state MP for Dubbo:
Moderator: Xanadu, ladies and gentlemen, is a land of tinkling temple bells and genuflecting elephants, a romantic Qantas stopover where the heroin is pure and the massages are not. In Xanadu at midday today, President Kubla Khan has decreed that three drug traffickers will be tied to lampposts in the city square and shot. Gerry Peacocke, you’re in Xanadu on a parliamentary study tour. Here’s a chance to see something they don’t do down in Dubbo. Perhaps they should. Are you in favour of executing drug pedlars?
Gerry Peacocke: Indeed I am.
Moderator: So you approve of the execution. Will you go and see it?
Peacocke: Absolutely. If you believe in the death penalty, I don’t think you ought to be afraid to see it.
Moderator: It will be a
fairly harrowing occasion. You might need a stiff drink or two before you go.
Peacocke: Before and after, probably.
Moderator: That’s a pity. Xanadu is a Muslim country. The penalty for drinking is being stoned to death.
‘What’s Your Poison?’ was conducted in a brick hall in Sutherland, in Sydney’s south, before an audience of a thousand people who turned up on a weekday afternoon in response to a small announcement in the local paper, to sit through a long and circuitous interplay between the panellists on the problem of drug addiction. The ABC’s response was to suggest that henceforth we should charge for admission! I thought the turn-out showed that ‘people out there’ wanted television to extend their knowledge, to educate and inform as well as to entertain – which is the ABC’s charter purpose, after all.
Hypotheticals made its way across the Tasman, with a co-production between the ABC and Television New Zealand, in a show which featured Sir John Kerr and Sir Robert ‘Piggy’ Muldoon. I cast them away in a bumboat without food and only a small cabin boy to eat – or not. They had been aboard one of the tall ships in town for the Bicentennial, and were hijacked by Michael Mansell’s Aboriginal activists. It was a show about the dilemmas of dealing with terrorism – an ASIO chief, his New Zealand equivalent and a CIA officer interacting with Australian and New Zealand politicians. I took the opportunity to make Sir John governor-general once again, in Amnesia (a Commonwealth country not unlike Fiji), confronted by a democratically elected Marxist government, CIA plotters and the inevitable army strongman, General Bazooka. We replayed the Whitlam dismissal, although this time the endangered prime minister got to telephone Buckingham Palace to request that Kerr be sacked. Unfortunately, the Queen was at the races and Charles was meditating and could not be disturbed.
The day after the recording, Sir John agreed to a one-on-one interview with me about his decision in November 1975 to dismiss the Whitlam government: I disagreed with it and pressed him politely on his reasoning, and he was quite forthcoming. It was the only in-depth interview he ever gave on the subject, and although I did not think his arguments persuasive, they should be considered (the documentary is in ABC archives and online) by historians writing about Australia’s worst political trauma.3
In 1988 came the Bicentennial Hypothetical, filmed at Sydney Town Hall. An audience of two thousand turned up – how the ABC would have wished to charge them for entrance. It was a difficult show to dream up – I took myself off to Noosa for a few days to work out how to open ‘Blood on the Wattle’, which focused on the riveting subject of the Australian constitution. I came up with the idea of acting as a film director – Bert O’Lucci – remaking The Birth of a Nation with a motley crew of convicts (Derryn Hinch, Peter Garrett and writer Jessica Mitford) who, sick of being flogged by soldier Bruce Ruxton, try to escape from the penal settlement run by Captain Phillip (played by Nick Greiner) in order to sail with La Perouse (Gough Whitlam) to a new life in a republic.
When the actors in Bert O’Lucci’s remake reassume their ‘real-life’ roles, the Whitlam government discovers that the Australian constitution cannot stop the Northern Territory, once it becomes a state – the state of Uforia – enacting punishment more barbaric than at Botany Bay, such as feeding paedophiles to crocodiles. It cannot stop the premier, Barry Coulter, from going nuclear. The actual Australian constitution is still in the Public Records Office in London, and Jim McClelland, as high commissioner, organises a heist to get it back. (This did have one concrete result, when a few years later the Australian government prevailed on Tony Blair to return the document.)
If we could make the Australian constitution entertaining, the ABC view was that we could do anything. But when my producer, Giampaolo Pertosi, called me to say ‘There’s money to do a show on multiculturalism’, my reaction was ‘Stop. Enough!’ How could multiculturalism ever be made entertaining? Somehow we managed, with a colourful cast ranging from Sir Peter Abeles to New Zealand prime minister David Lange. John Howard – then leader of the opposition – was on the program, set in the Melbourne suburb of Minestrone. I sat him on one of its public toilets, facing racist graffiti (as well as ‘Sack Howard’) on the back of the toilet door. His dilemma was whether to rub it out, or add to it, or to complain to the toilet cleaner – my old friend Charlie Perkins.
This show, ‘All in the Same Boat’, rated above all other ABC shows in the prime-time slot, so the corporation executives expressed the view that the format was ‘a bit dated’ and invited me to do a quiz show instead. I declined the opportunity to reinvent Celebrity Squares, and went back to London to practise law. Channel 7 tempted me back to Australian television in 2000 for another series, working with terrific producers Todd Abbott and an old mate from Sydney University, David Salter. The show was revved up for commercial television and I had to think about the advertising breaks, but it was a joy to perform in the Epping studio where as a small boy I had watched John Dease, Jack Davey and Bob Dyer. The shows are now a bit of a blur, but I do recall getting George Pell – wearing his cross and vestments – to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a gay man, and having Lisa McCune (the cop from Blue Heelers) partner Roger Rogerson (the cop from hell). I recall Andrew Denton’s plaintive cry, ‘Geoffrey, stop messing with my mind!’
Later, I returned to the Sunday program, twenty years after the banned media Hypothetical, to do some more: one guest, by video link, was the Malaysian leader Dr Mahathir, who gave Australia’s aspirant prime ministers (Tony Abbott and Kim Beazley) a ferocious dressing-down. I still keep my hand in (or my handwringing – the Uriah Heep-ish gesture when performing of which I am totally oblivious) by doing shows at private conferences. The last was in Sydney in October 2016 – I made Gladys Berejiklian premier of New South Wales, an office which she was actually to occupy only a few months later. I have done many more overseas, and despite my invariable nervousness before I walk onto the stage, the format has never failed – with the possible exception of a show I did for the New York Times in Athens in 2016 to mark the ‘International Day of Democracy’. It was recorded in a venue as old as Socrates where the acoustics were impossible, two key participants had to cancel at the last moment, the president of Italy tried to make a thirty-minute speech and a refugee panellist turned out to be unable to speak English. I came smiling through – through gritted teeth.
I make no great claims for Hypotheticals – I wonder if in some ways I did the show as a reason to come back and see Mum and Dad as they were growing older, to show them that the child they had nurtured at Eastwood had grown up to play God for a few hours in a spot-lit semicircle. I was the small boy who couldn’t ride a bike, and this was my way of saying, ‘Look, Mum, no hands.’
12
Spy-catching
Like all good spy stories, this one begins with a beautiful woman. MI5 attempted to recruit Jane Turnbull at Oxford, with the fabled ‘tap on the shoulder’. No doubt they had satisfied themselves of her loyalty – her father was a bank executive, the family lived in a solidly conservative borough outside London, and she had been recommended by one of her history tutors. However, they were evidently unaware that she was my girlfriend, was attending all the Oz acquittal parties in London basements, and had a very fine sense of mischief. She declined the proffered career as a spy because she wanted to be a literary agent (which she still is). We occupied our own basement in Notting Hill for a while, until she sensibly left me for a poet (a published poet, I might add), but she followed my career and remembered my interest in using the law to challenge the power of the state. In 1985, by which time she was working for Heinemann, the publishing house, she contacted me and invited me to Sunday lunch with her partner, Brian Perman, Heinemann’s CEO. We met on 17 February at a pleasant restaurant overlooking Camden Lock. Jane was excited, Brian a bit apprehensive. He had bought the rights to a book called Spycatcher and wanted my advice. He had just been telephoned by John Bailey, the Treasury Solicitor (responsible for legal advice to government departments), and war
ned against publishing it – or else. ‘We have a bottomless purse,’ he told me Bailey had said: a threat to take injunctions and other actions which could bankrupt the company if it dared to publish.
I knew a little about the author, Peter Wright, a former assistant director of MI5, who had broken cover a year before with an interview for Granada Television’s World in Action from his home in Tasmania, making allegations of treachery in the British secret service. I had been retained as an adviser to the Granada team to make a program about the Australian Freedom of Information Act – an anodyne subject but one for which I arranged interviews with Gareth Evans (the attorney-general) and my barrister brother, Tim, who was filmed using the Act to get information from the army, which in turn he used to stop a shooting range being built on public parkland. All very worthy, no doubt, but hardly the cutting-edge material for which World in Action was famed. I discovered later that I had been used as cover – when I went back to London the team slipped down to Tasmania, in great secrecy, to interview Wright. Its brilliant director, Paul Greengrass (who went on to direct the Bourne movies), stayed on with Wright to gather the information with which to ghost-write Spycatcher. I did not mind being used as a decoy – our documentary had given a fillip to the campaign for a Freedom of Information Act in Britain – but it meant that I watched the program about Wright with some interest. He seemed a genuine whistleblower, even if he was partly motivated by anger at what he saw as a betrayal in being denied some pension rights. As a former senior member of MI5, his allegations had to be taken seriously.
Rather His Own Man Page 28
