‘She is a grand lady,’ wrote one newspaper, commending Shortland’s candidacy for the Senate ballot.17 When she and the other ‘pioneers’ were shut out of that ballot, she called it a ‘tactical error’ on the party’s part.18 But by early June, she declared it was enough. She resigned from the Liberal Party. Arguing that she wanted to ‘justify the status of women as laid down in the [party] platform’, Shortland announced that she intended to stand for Lowe as an ‘Independent Liberal’:
As an erstwhile leader of the women of the New South Wales Liberal Party, I feel that a stand has to be taken against the unofficial discrimination against women within the party. The New South Wales Liberal Party has never endorsed a woman for the Senate and only once has [it] endorsed a woman for the House of Representatives. In every democratic country in the world the prejudice against women has been entirely removed and the right of women representation has been considered as being coincident with that of the vote.19
McMahon was panicked by her decision. Already, he and the party were unsure about Lowe. Would it vote Labor? Would it go Liberal? The presence of another candidate, well known in the area and possessing the potential to split the non-Labor vote, could derail his candidacy. He tried to persuade Shortland to withdraw from the race. She refused, for what he thought were reasons all to do with her vanity.20
Within the Liberal Party, there was criticism of Shortland. Eileen Furley, a vice-president of the state and federal party, and one of the women who had put themselves forward for Senate preselection, subtly called into question Shortland’s merits as a candidate. ‘The reason why more women were not chosen,’ Furley said later, ‘was because women of high calibre did not stand for selection. The men were outstanding in their field and women would have found it very difficult to compete against the men’s qualifications.’21
Shortland would not have a bar of it. She would not resile from criticisms of her party. Attention needed to be paid to women. Shortland told one journalist that the war had created a ‘politically conscious type of Australian housewife’ who found politicians uninterested in their concerns.22 Her candidacy, she argued, was not just for her own benefit: ‘If I win the seat, it will be easier for other women to follow; if I fail, the women of Australia will go back fifty years.’23
The Labor Party, meanwhile, preselected a forty-year-old schoolteacher named H.L. McDonald as its candidate. As the year progressed, the three campaigns swung into action.
McMahon boarded with a local family for a few weeks, living on Shaftesbury Road, Burwood, doorknocking and distributing a flyer advertising his policy positions.24 They were straightforward, uncontroversial Liberal policies: the elimination of the socialist changes made by the Labor government, a ban on the Communist Party, a restriction of Commonwealth powers to those set out by the constitution, and the breaking up of the Commonwealth Bank.25
He was aided by press coverage that favourably garbled his resumé. McMahon was a ‘business executive’, wrote The Sydney Morning Herald, when he won preselection.26 The Sun described him as a ‘barrister and economist’ who, after leaving the army, had ‘lectured in law by day, [and] studied economics at night’.27 The falsities piled up, and Heinz Arndt, observing the campaign with some amusement, now understood why McMahon had become so angry about being refused entry to the Honours subjects in his Economics degree. ‘His motives became apparent the following year when, in his election literature as a candidate for Lowe, he listed among his qualifications, “B. Ec. with Honours in Economics III and IV”,’ Arndt noted.28
Campaigning allowed people to see McMahon’s quirks and personality. Alan Wright, a member of the Liberal Party, found him busy to the point of hyperactivity. ‘He was a like a fly in a bottle,’ he said. ‘He never stayed long. He’d go from here to there to there again.’29 McMahon was small and lithe, his movements somewhere between a dancer’s graceful step and a mouse’s furtive scurry. His dark hair was rapidly thinning, revealing a high, tanned scalp and emphasising the size of his ears. In spite of his wealth, McMahon rarely carried money or used it freely. Lorna Wright — whose brother, Lerryn Mutton, a New South Wales MLA, had considered McMahon’s nomination — observed McMahon nudging her brother during a church service, just before the collection plate came around, asking if he could borrow a pound. She noticed that McMahon would always kiss the older women of the electorate but, potentially wary of any romantic distractions, never the younger ones. He always looked ‘smart’, was always dressed in expensive clothes, and his hearing difficulties could become apparent in conversation. ‘He always came close when talking to you,’ she said.30 Possibly because of this, he rarely indulged in small talk.
The Chifley government’s lacklustre campaign aided McMahon’s efforts. Despite an accomplished record in office, including presiding over the transition to peace, the maintenance of full employment, and a visionary programme in infrastructure, education, immigration, and social welfare encapsulated in the hopeful and oft-quoted objective of ‘the light on the hill’, the ALP was as complacent as it was exhausted. Calling a seventy-four day campaign that would culminate on 10 December, the worn-out prime minister offered ‘no rosy promises’ or ‘economic bribes’ to voters. He asked them to judge him and his party on its record.31
That was a place that the Menzies-led Coalition was happy to fight on, particularly once the Privy Council decision to strike down bank nationalisation laws was announced on 29 October. Free to raise the spectre of socialisation and nationalisation, the non-Labor parties and the daily presses ran amok, creating what Chifley later called ‘a fear complex in the minds of a percentage of the middle-class vote’.32
Menzies, meanwhile, continued a yearlong effort to cultivate a more homely image. No longer the glittering, lordly prime minister of 1939–41, an advertising campaign by the same people who had composed the John Austral ads sought to portray Menzies as a man of the people. He was depicted in widely distributed photographs chatting to miners and drinking a beer, ironing a shirt, engaging with hecklers. While Menzies would never match Chifley’s gruff ordinariness, these efforts were intended to develop another Menzies — a Bob to go with R.G. Menzies.33
‘The best years of my life have been given to what I deeply believe is a struggle for freedom,’ Menzies declared in his policy speech. ‘That struggle has reached a climax. Victory is in front of us. We can fail to achieve it only by indolence, or indifference, or a failure to realise that on December 10 we will be deciding the future of our country. It is in your hands, Australia.’34
THE same kind of appeal was being made throughout Lowe. McMahon enlisted the son of his official campaign director, A.V.S. Walker, to spruik his candidature all over the electorate. All of nine years old, the boy had to stand on tiptoes to reach the microphone. Reading from a script, Adrian told people that:
December 10 is a very important day for us children too. In twelve years time I should have a vote and I want you to help me so that I can be sure of having that vote. To do that I ask you to vote for Mr William McMahon. My daddy says he is a very good man.35
It was kitsch, but it garnered attention. McMahon was intent on winning, and had no time for half-hearted efforts. He door-knocked until his knuckles were sore. He begged Billy Hughes to visit the seat and speak for his candidacy.36 He persisted with the discipline that had characterised his attempts to get into the Eights in those days back at Sydney Grammar. ‘From the time that I was selected to be the representative for the Liberal Party in the division of Lowe,’ he later said, ‘I devoted all my attention to it. I can’t give you a reason for it, it just happened naturally.’37
The commitment was absolute. Bill Wakeling, a famed Liberal Party organiser with thick cloudy glasses, who boasted of papering the ceilings of Kings Cross brothels with posters for Billy Hughes, was changing a light in the roof of the builder’s hut from which McMahon was running his campaign. It had been raining, and his shoes were slippery. ‘I f
ell down and hit the chair on the way down and laid myself out,’ Wakeling recalled. McMahon looked through the window, and thought the worst. ‘You thought I was a corpse!’ Wakeling said to McMahon later. But McMahon’s immediate reaction was not grief. It was horror — for himself. He called Liberal Party headquarters: ‘Send me another organiser. Wakeling’s dead!’38
Lowe was a key seat, according to some, but, as the campaign neared its end, both parties believed it would go Liberal, just as the country was expected to. A Roy Morgan poll the weekend before had suggested that neither party would receive a substantial majority, but 10 December broke with much of the press predicting a change of government.
The press was correct. Labor lost government in a resounding fashion, but had the consolation of retaining control of the Senate, with thirty-four seats to the Coalition’s twenty-six. Of the 121 seats in the newly enlarged House of Representatives, Menzies’ Liberal Party took fifty-five, including many of the new seats. The Country Party snared nineteen. Labor held forty-seven.
Menzies was vindicated. Chifley was humbled. McMahon was elated.
He had no trouble in Lowe. With more than 20,000 votes — 4,000 ahead of the ALP, and far above the 2,470 that Edith Shortland received — McMahon’s time in Parliament and in government had begun.39
CHAPTER NINE
Gaps
1984
Working through the course of McMahon’s life could prompt cynicism and dislike. Trawling through McMahon’s twenty-seven filing cabinets, reading the innumerable speeches he had made and the countless articles he had appeared in, confronted with inevitable contradictions and gaps between words and actions, Bowman perceived a man difficult to understand.
‘To whom did McMahon appeal as a politician?’ he wondered privately. ‘To the brainless, the scheming, the mean, the petty, the muddled, the get-rich-quick, the I’m-alright-Jack …’1
He wondered how McMahon had succeeded in politics, how he had gotten so far ahead. He agonised over how to confront McMahon’s pervasive reputation as an incompetent, schemer, and inveterate liar. With Whitlam’s famous sobriquet in mind — Tiberius with a telephone — Bowman asked in his notes whether it should be met ‘head-on’ in the book.2
At other points, however, he was less adamant about McMahon and his reputation. ‘In many ways W.M. seems to have been the victim of false rumours and false perceptions,’ Bowman wrote. He had heard the former prime minister yap away about rumours of homosexuality and how he had triumphed over them, how he had been knocked down many times but always gotten back up. There was a lot of commentary around McMahon, and much of it seemed scurrilous.
‘And yet,’ Bowman was moved to write, ‘when that is said, there remains something odd. He appears undeserving. What is it?’3
CHAPTER TEN
Red
1950–1951
The opening of the nineteenth Parliament was an occasion for pomp and circumstance. It was a clear, sunny February day. Well-dressed spectators and finely clad dignitaries attended Parliament House in droves. Menzies and his ministers turned up wearing formal black jackets, grey striped trousers; some MPs went further and arrived in full morning dress. Inside, the chief justice of the High Court, Sir John Latham, deputised for the governor-general and swore in new MPs while clusters of diplomats looked down from the crowded galleries. Likening himself to the bramble that ruled over the trees in the Book of Judges, Archie Cameron took the Speaker’s chair wearing the full rig of British tradition: a horsehair wig, long black robes, lace cravat and cuffs, buckled shoes replacing his usual elastic-sided boots.1 The governor-general, William McKell, arrived wearing a top hat amid the smoke and powder of a twenty-five-gun salute and a guard of honour from Duntroon.
In the Senate chamber, crowded with members of both newly enlarged houses and thronged with members of the public in the galleries, McKell opened the Parliament with a speech that was weighty in its emphasis on national security and the scale of change to come under the Menzies government. He foreshadowed measures to impede government intrusion into industry and to invest in infrastructure. The government would legislate to ‘protect the community against the activities of subversive organisations and individuals’ (that is, the Communist Party), to alter the governance of the Commonwealth Bank, and would bring in policies to improve welfare and child endowments.2
Surveying the faces of all the new members and senators assembled in the crowded chamber, one journalist noted that the ‘predominant impression was that of youth’.3 He was not wrong. The 1949 election had lowered the average age of MPs and senators, raised the average level of education, raised the number of Australian-born representatives, and raised the number of women from four to a still-paltry five. Predominantly ex-servicemen of World War II, those elected in December were ‘ready to remake Australia’, Edgar Holt wrote later.4 They were young, driven, idealistic. Many of them, coming from the Liberal side of politics, were fervent opponents of anything that smacked of government control. Key members included West Australians Paul Hasluck and Gordon Freeth, the Victorian senator John Gorton, Queenslanders Reg Swartz and Alan Hulme, New South Welshmen David Fairbairn and William Wentworth, and the South Australian Alexander ‘Alick’ Downer. As a parliamentary class, ‘the forty-niners’ were notable for the generational shift they heralded.
With so many colleagues around him having similar backgrounds and outlooks, McMahon needed to distinguish himself if he were to have any prospect of advancement. His degrees in Law and Economics were to his credit, but he needed much more than this.
His initial efforts to gain notice were not promising. In his first speech, given on 2 March, McMahon recited the standard objections to Labor Party policies, and invoked the new gospels of the Liberal Party. Exaggerating the former and underlining the virtues of the latter, McMahon cited Keynes, Schumpeter, and academic monographs to support his argument that the Coalition would be better for the country than the ALP. He sprinkled statistics throughout. He professed to be nervous:
I may say that some of my colleagues have told me that they experienced considerable nervousness when making their maiden speeches in this debate. They said their hearts were in their mouths. They fared better than I have done, because I am sure that my heart has been lost somewhere in the corridors. It is not marked, ‘Please return to the owner’ or ‘Reward to finder’, but if any honourable gentleman should find it I should be pleased if he would return it to me.
He boasted about his credentials. To underscore a point about socialism, he told the House that:
I do so as a person who, during the last two or three years, has made a study of scientific socialism. When I say that I have studied socialism, I do not mean that I have merely read a couple of books on the subject. I have spent two years of hard effort and mental sweat in the university.
Concluding that the Menzies government was ‘pro-worker, pro-woman, pro-family’, he predicted prosperity within the decade should the Coalition remain in office. Then, despite the fact that it was just after 2.30pm, McMahon finished with a weak, prepared joke. ‘As this is the first occasion on which I have made a speech before dinner, I trust that it has not proved too indigestible.’5
Listening to the speech on a bench on the government side of the House was John Cramer, member for the neighbouring seat of Bennelong. A real estate agent, former mayor of North Sydney, and a Catholic in the Protestant-dominated Menzies parliamentary forces, Cramer thought little of his colleague’s introduction. McMahon’s was an ‘academic speech’, Cramer sniffed derisively — ‘as one would expect from a lawyer’.6
At other times, McMahon gained attention for less desirable reasons. His tendency to be well dressed was soon noticed by other members, some of whom — particularly on the Labor side, such as Evatt — could be positively dishevelled. In May, in lieu of the grey or blue double-breasted suit that was the invariable attire of a Liberal Party member, McMahon enter
ed the House wearing a rather less-formal navy-blue sports coat and grey trousers. The next day, he received a letter from the Speaker, Archie Cameron. Indignation was apparent in the query as to whether McMahon’s attire was due to ‘ignorance or arrogance’. McMahon replied immediately to assure the Speaker of his regret and to explain that he had somehow lost his regular coat during the journey between Sydney and Canberra.
The letter never reached Cameron. The government whip, Jo Gullett, who took from the incident great amusement, saw to it that his practical joke was leaked to the press but did not reach the ears of the short-tempered Speaker.7
MCMAHON was a quick learner. After Arthur Fadden introduced the Commonwealth Bank Bill on 16 March — which would, among other things, repeal the Chifley government’s Banking Act of 1947 and re-establish the board of the Commonwealth Bank — McMahon spoke seven times on the Bill, drawing upon his knowledge of economics in a manner that was far more direct and effective than his first speech. ‘It is practically impossible for anyone outside to determine whether this organisation [the Commonwealth Bank] is being efficiently managed,’ he said on 28 March. ‘However, there is a strong suspicion that it is inefficient.’ Defending the idea of a governing board, and arguing that the advantage enjoyed by the Commonwealth Bank — working as a central reserve bank and trading bank simultaneously — was unfair, McMahon argued for what he believed was the fundamental point: ‘All we say is that there should be fair competition with the other trading banks … Ultimately, the Parliament itself must have the power to review or to control the financial affairs of Australia.’8
But, for the Labor Party, the scars of the Depression went deeper than those of the 1949 election. It was convinced neither by the government’s arguments nor by political expediency. Blaming the banking system for the upheaval and turmoil of the 1930s, Labor used its majority in the Senate to neuter the Bill of its main provisions.9 The government refused to countenance any changes. A second Bill, exactly the same as the first, was passed by the House and sent to the Senate with the same result. It was a deadlock.
Tiberius with a Telephone Page 9
