Tiberius with a Telephone

by Patrick Mullins

  The prizes he had received and the marks he had been given were the credentials that McMahon would refer to when demonstrating his expertise. He repeated the claim over and over again. ‘Then back home I did the four-year Economics course in two years,’ he told one journalist.92 To another, he claimed, ‘I wanted to go back to the university to attempt to get a degree in economics, which I did, graduating with distinction after a two-year course which normally takes four years.’93

  The claim was false. McMahon had started the degree in 1944; had claimed credit for courses he had finished in 1928; and had used the exemptions afforded to students who had war service. It had not taken him two years. He did not receive honours.

  But, veracity aside, the claim was important to McMahon for it was the culminating moment of his narrative of transformation. The story he told and came to believe split his life into two phases. The first contained the errant years of his childhood and his wild days at St Paul’s, the boredom of the law, and the modesty of his time with the army. ‘I didn’t have any precise goals and I moved from one field to another because the mood caught me,’ he said of it. ‘As I was able to do it, I took advantage of what I thought would be the most entertaining and enjoyable thing to do.’94 In his telling, this first phase of his life was without a mission: his abilities and education were lying idle, going to waste.

  The second phase began after 1945. ‘It was then, immediately after the war years, that I changed,’ he said.95 By his trip abroad, McMahon would say that he became awake to the threat of communism and the need for individual liberty. By his studies, he would say, he became convinced of the importance and enthused by the possibilities of economics in the post-war world. With all this — plus his familial background, his social circumstances, and his networks of supportive friends and family — he had become disciplined and dedicated, prepared for a new life.

  It was a transformation. In his own eyes, by his own lights, McMahon was now ready. He would put to use the education he had gained, the abilities he had honed in law and in economics. He would live a life of service, one that William Temple might be proud of. He would do so in a noble profession, where it was possible to find recognition and status. He would live up to the idealised image he had of himself and his talents. Never acknowledged, but perhaps crucial, he would succeed in a field where his father had failed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Rumours

  1984

  On 23 February 1984 — his seventy-sixth birthday — McMahon surprised his staff by being in a good mood. Two days before, he had lunched with some oyster farmers, and the meal had left him ill and bad-tempered. He was in a ‘shocking mood’, Bowman wrote the next day. He, Campbell, and Cawthorn were not the only ones to bear the brunt of it.

  ‘Don’t Sir William me!’ they had heard McMahon bellow from his office. Whoever was on the phone had the call and the relationship abruptly terminated: ‘I never liked you anyway!’1

  By his birthday, however, McMahon was better, and he was apologetic. The oysters had affected him badly, he told Bowman. He was glad when the day had ended. ‘We all were,’ his ghostwriter muttered, sotto voce.2

  The good mood and the consequent energy lasted. Recovering from McMahon’s earlier about-face, Bowman was rewriting the draft again, and the whole office was swinging in to help him. Campbell wrote to Sydney Grammar School for McMahon’s school records.3 McMahon sought information about the movements of the Second Australian Army after his fitness had been downgraded. If his hearing difficulties had been properly handled, he told the Central Army Records Office, he was sure that he would have gone to New Guinea.4

  Abundant energy spurred McMahon to work on other things. On 27 February, he told Bowman he wanted to write about the constitutional aspects of the Hawke government’s dispute with the AMA. The clash had been making headlines for weeks. Bowman was cautious about the diversion, but interested. He told McMahon he had not seen anyone mention a constitutional question. ‘Ah,’ McMahon replied, ‘that’s because they haven’t got my memory.’5

  The article he gave Bowman for editing was verbose and overlong, with extensive quotes from Menzies and Evatt and their debate in 1946 over section 51 of the constitution. It required a harsh edit. But it was better than he had expected, Bowman allowed. ‘And he seems to be making a good point.’6

  Bowman cleaned it up and sent it on to The Sydney Morning Herald, which published it with some indifference on the following Monday. McMahon did not mind. He liked being in the public eye again. When The Age published transcripts of conversations suggesting that an unidentified justice of the High Court had been involved in improper behaviour, McMahon did the media rounds to offer his opinions. ‘He said the PM, the A-G, and Solicitor-General had all pronounced on the tapes and it was proper not to name names,’ Bowman recorded, after McMahon arrived late into the office and happily recapitulated everything.7

  His good mood allowed McMahon to relax. Between appointments and work, he continued to talk to Bowman about his youth, and about his life. He gabbed about old friends and enemies. He yakked about Clyde Packer, about the Lloyd family, about the woes of Fairfax. Peculiarly, for a man who had spoken of the hurt that rumours had caused him, McMahon seemed to have no compunction about trafficking in gossip and half-truths. He did it often, almost compulsively. Snippets were tantalising, but much of it was grubby. On other occasions, McMahon’s talk seemed simply hare-brained. ‘You’ll have to excuse me if I say this,’ he said to Bowman on 9 March, ‘but Dame Pattie [Menzies] always thought I should marry her daughter.’8

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Lowe

  1948–1949

  By 1948, the number of seats in the House of Representatives had not been increased since Federation in 1901. In that time, Australia’s population had grown from 3.5 million to 7.5 million. The average number of voters in each electorate was more than 60,000. MPs complained that their local-member work had become too onerous, too difficult — particularly in rural areas, where electorates were large and sparsely populated. In response, and with some self-interest, the Chifley government passed legislation to enlarge the House from seventy-four seats to 121. At the same time, the Senate was expanded from thirty-six to sixty, in accordance with the constitution, and proportional voting was introduced.

  No electorate was left unchanged once the country was carved up. Old electorates were broken up, and the pieces cobbled together to form new ones. The names of explorers and Labor heroes were given out, with the slightest of nods to Australia’s Indigenous people in the naming of the Sydney electorate of Bennelong.

  Lowe was one of the new electorates. Proclaimed on 11 May 1949, it was located in Sydney’s inner west, and centred on Strathfield, Concord, and Burwood. Neighbouring the newly created Blaxland and Evans, its creation reflected Sydney’s continued growth after World War II. Assembled from pieces of old Labor-leaning seats, it was unclear which way the electorate would go in an election.

  McMahon would not have been ignorant of the seat. Since 1943, at least, he had been angling for a political career. His studies in economics had been a part of the plan to build his credentials and reputation. He would have been aware of the opportunity that the forty-seven extra seats offered ever since the measure was mooted. And even before Lowe was proclaimed, McMahon was politicking.

  When Heinz Arndt wrote a critical appraisal of an article by prominent Liberal William Spooner on production and taxation early in 1949, McMahon picked up the pen to respond. Writing that his old lecturer had the views of a ‘doctrinaire armchair socialist’, McMahon said that Arndt’s critique was deceitful and riddled with errors. ‘We have heard this before,’ he wrote, ‘but not in Australia. It is the technique of the Communist.’1

  Use of the term was deliberate. The non-Labor parties had been invoking the spectre of communism everywhere they could, stoking fear and raising alarm. International news reinforced the urgency and
gravity of their message. The Iron Curtain had been drawn. Democracy in the Eastern European states was being stamped out. In western Europe it was under threat. Communist-driven insurrections had flared throughout Asia. As the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek fled across the Taiwan Strait to set up a government in exile, Mao Tse-Tung was soon to declare the end of a costly civil war and proclaim the creation of the communist-governed People’s Republic of China. The suggestion that communist revolutions would continue was virulent, effective, and, for many, terrifying — so much so that Arthur Fadden declared that the Country Party regarded the Australian communist as ‘a venomous snake’ that had ‘to be killed before it kills’.2

  The Liberal Party was less savage, but no less critical. It worked to link the Chifley government to the communists. It paid for a series of propaganda broadcasts that were thinly disguised as discussions of current affairs, and used them to lacquer the ALP until it was dripping in red. The fictional ‘John Henry Austral’ told listeners:

  The Communist Party in Australia has fastened itself on the Labor Party as a tick fastens itself to the skin of a dog. Its propaganda is to urge the support of Labor. But remember this. Lenin himself said, ‘Whoever we support in this way is supported in the same way as the rope supports one who is hanged.’ Whoever communism supports is supported in the same way as the rope supports one who is hanged. Therefore, whoever supports communism plays the hangman; assists in the annihilation of freedom [and] the destruction of liberty.3

  Despite attempts to prove that it, too, was opposed to communism, most notably expressed in the establishment of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the Chifley government’s measures to smooth Australia’s path through peacetime were too easily tarred. Its reintroduction of petrol rationing, and its proposals to nationalise the banking system, smacked of the state ownership and control that were the hallmarks of communist-governed countries.

  The Liberal Party’s message was harsh. Its members thought the country was in danger. And notwithstanding that the Chifley government broke a Communist Party–driven strike on the coalfields of New South Wales in August 1949, the Liberal Party feared that the ALP was susceptible to communist influences. It approached the imminent election with the zealous belief that it had to be won in order to protect Australia.4

  To that end, preselection committees began work early. They looked for new blood and for candidates who were well prepared. Party nominees, wrote the general secretary of the New South Wales division, John Carrick, should have the ability to legislate ‘with courage and conviction along the progressive lines of a Liberalism which is completely independent of either conservative or socialistic pressure groups’.5 The party and its committees had a checklist of the perfect candidate: ‘A Protestant male in his thirties or forties, who had a war record, professional qualifications, a commitment to the public good, and a loathing of socialism,’ as Ian Hancock summarised it.6 McMahon could not have been unaware that he ticked all these boxes; nor could he have been unaware of the markers of acceptability that he carried with him: his schooling, memberships of reputable clubs and societies, networks of friends and politicians, and connections in the business and law communities. All of these were valuable, and would become more so when he bumped into an old friend while walking along Phillip Street some time in 1947.

  Jack Cassidy, a leading Sydney barrister, had taken silk ten years before, and had since been kept on retainer for The Daily Telegraph, Truth, and Daily Mirror. An energetic man with impeccable connections, Cassidy had taught at Abbotsholme College while working his way through degrees in Arts and Law at the University of Sydney. While his time at Abbotsholme had not overlapped with McMahon’s, the connection between the two was strong enough to make them friendly.7

  According to McMahon, Cassidy begged a favour.8 There was a function out in the west of Sydney for women and younger members of the Liberal Party. He was supposed to be speaking — part of his pitch to be the candidate for the seat that was likely to encompass the area. But suddenly, Cassidy said, he had been called to court. Could Bill do him a favour and speak in his stead? Could he speak on Cassidy’s behalf?

  With nothing to do and nowhere to be, McMahon readily agreed. Taking a cab to the hall in Strathfield, he spoke to an audience composed largely of women about his studies in the law and his time working for Allen Allen & Hemsley. He spoke about economics and politics, what he had observed of communism and democracy in North America and Europe, and what he was seeing in Australia.

  Once his talk had finished and the audience broke for afternoon tea, McMahon was asked to stay for a few minutes. He sat outside. Shortly afterwards, the tall woman who had chaired the meeting, Mrs Beale, came out to speak with him.

  She asked if he was a tyke. He had not heard the word before. He asked her what in the hell it meant.

  She told him.

  The question became clear. Was he, as his surname suggested, a Roman Catholic?

  Redeemed at last was Samuel and Elsie Walder’s guidance, and McMahon’s allegiance to the Church of England. For, to his reply that he was not a tyke, Mrs Beale was pleased. ‘Yes, well, we are very interested in you, and the women of Strathfield would like to promote you as candidate for Lowe.’

  ‘But Mr Cassidy is the potential candidate,’ McMahon said.

  Beale was nonplussed. ‘We’ve decided to ask you.’

  MCMAHON’S objections faded quickly, likely the result both of Cassidy’s decision to let bygones be bygones and his own, innate sense that Beale’s approach to him was correct — that he was the better candidate. Beale became his quasi-official campaign manager. She prompted him to come along to branch meetings. She pointed out potential rivals. She ensured that he joined the Liberal Party and became well known around the traps. He did not know the area. Strathfield, Burwood, and Concord were not home: he was living in a red-brick, art-deco apartment in Elizabeth Bay. Inner western Sydney was a whole new area for him.

  He was lucky to have Beale and contacts within the party he could draw upon. Billy Hughes advised McMahon to make an impression on those who would form the electoral conference for Lowe. When he was told a reference from Hughes would be invaluable, McMahon wrote to ask for one. Hughes asked him to send a draft. A week later, McMahon sent him a short passage that emphasised his studies and his family’s involvement in politics. After Hughes’ amendments came through, McMahon was ready to float the nomination.9

  McMahon’s platform was straightforward, but tinged with ideas drawn from his studies and his background. According to drafts of his autobiography, he wished to break up the Commonwealth Bank; roll back changes made by the Chifley government and reserve the use of tariff protection for infant industries; ensure that the Commonwealth did not usurp the states in areas such as health care and education; spread a gospel of efficiency, innovation, and entrepeneurship; offer government support to private schools; and means-test pensions and welfare payments. Unusually, too, McMahon stated that he was in favour of abortion when recommended by medical advice, and that he believed in equal pay for equal work.10

  His nomination succeeded. Despite the presence of sixteen other candidates, McMahon won preselection on the first ballot. But almost immediately there was an outcry. When the Liberal Party had been formed there had been considerable attention paid to ensuring it would attract and promote women. Elizabeth ‘May’ Couchman had exacted a commitment to equal representation within the Victorian division when she led the Australian Women’s National League to merge with the Liberals in 1945. Committees had been set up in the four years since to address ‘women’s issues’, most notably in equality of opportunity, equal pay, and ending discrimination for appointments to the public service.11

  But by 1949 the party’s commitment had not been turned into action. It was simply not choosing women for preselection. Roberta Galagher, who had worked and pushed fruitlessly, had considered resigning from the par
ty because ‘women are not allowed to work’.12 The Liberal Party seemed happy to have women organise meetings, raise funds, staff polling places, canvass for votes, and cater for events — yet there was little evidence it was willing to preselect them. Parliament, it seemed, was a place for the men.

  There were some gestures made to address the disparity. War hero Nancy Wake won preselection for a seat in the House of Representatives in the lead-up to the 1949 election — but it was for Barton, held by the deputy prime minister, Dr Evatt, on an insurmountably high margin. In Western Australia and Victoria, two women were preselected in winnable spots in the Senate, and Dame Enid Lyons was still serving in the House of Representatives. But in New South Wales, the efforts of three self-styled female ‘pioneers’ to force the issue were defeated when none was selected for a position on the party’s Senate ticket at the end of March 1949. When the state council subsequently agreed to a motion that at least one woman should be selected for the Senate ticket in third place or higher, William Spooner — who headed the ticket — rubbished it, ruling that the 1949 preselections had already been conducted and that retrospective measures were inappropriate.

  Edith Shortland, chair of the Women’s Central Movement and a former vice-president of the New South Wales Liberals, was incensed by the party’s continued indifference. A university graduate and school teacher who had become well known for her involvement in the Strathfield community while her husband served as mayor, Shortland was loud with her opinions and an outspoken critic of the Labor Party.13 Its efforts to nationalise the banks were ‘a flagrant injustice’, she believed.14 Its encroachment on civil liberties followed the ‘example of Russia and its subservient states’.15 Under the Chifley government, she argued, ‘home life is crumbling’.16