Gordon Freeth — a West Australian, a ‘forty-niner’, an open admirer of Hasluck and a critic of McMahon, whose opinion of him was not improved by close contact, a rower and medallist at the British Empire Games in his youth who maintained his vigour with regular games of squash and golf, and otherwise boxed, ran, and swam — had been an unusual replacement for Hasluck.127 Possessing little background in foreign relations, Freeth had queried the wisdom of it when he was appointed. The prime minister told him that he would hold the portfolio for only a year — just until after the election, at which point Gorton could shift Freeth back to a more fitting role in economics.128 Accepting this, Freeth had worked quietly and without much visibility in the intervening months. Yet while the statement he proceeded to give displayed little of the hesitancy that might be expected of a novice, it would cause a political uproar.
After noting new US president Richard Nixon’s statements on the need for Pacific countries to assert their security, Freeth emphasised that the way to prevent further Vietnams was to ensure that countries had ‘sufficient strength’ to protect themselves. But, Freeth went on, ‘I do not only mean military strength. I mean decent standards of living, efficient and honest administration, harmonious relations with neighbours, and the easing of communal tensions within a country.’ This was new, if unoriginal — yet when Freeth then discussed the Soviet Union, he seemed to display political naivety as much as naivety in foreign affairs:
Australia has to be watchful, but need not panic whenever a Russian appears … In principle, it is natural that a world power such as the Soviet Union should seek to promote a presence and a national influence in important regions of the world such as the Indian Ocean area.129
The apparent suggestion that there could be any kind of a rapprochement with the Soviet Union — which only a year before had invaded Czechoslovakia and reasserted its harsh line on dissent, and whose support for the North Vietnamese had ensured that military efforts there were continuing long after they might otherwise have — was met with some disbelief from Labor and outright anger from the DLP. Whitlam called it ‘a striking and significant departure’ from previous policy, and applauded the hope that Australia might engage with Russia.130 His applause was a sure sign that the DLP would be absolutely opposed, which it duly was. The DLP thought the speech augured a decisive and radical shift, and, in his anger, Vince Gair repeated his threat to withhold the DLP’s second-preference votes at the election. Within the government, the initial appreciation of Freeth’s ‘good speech’ gave way to muted disavowals as it overshadowed the budget.131 McEwen made his disdain well known, and McMahon put the word about, accurately, that Gorton and Freeth were the only cabinet ministers involved in the speech’s preparation. Neither cabinet nor its foreign affairs and defence committee were consulted, he told Peter Howson.132
The damage was compounded when, five days after Freeth’s speech, the minister for defence, Allen Fairhall, announced his decision to retire at the forthcoming election. Publicly, Fairhall attributed his decision to health reasons; privately, he believed that the government would win the election, but would lose the one that followed, in 1972. He wanted to go out on top — ‘decently’, as he put it.133
Whatever the veracity of his reasons, Fairhall’s retirement became another subject of rumour, discontent, and complaint. Concern at the rapid turnover of ministers deepened. Rumours of the prime minister’s overt disdain of ministers and their departments rippled through the government. Whispers that Fairhall, like Hasluck, had been forced out, wound their way through Parliament House. Unrest over the prime minister’s political wisdom and methods of work — exemplified in his tendency towards unilateralism, his unwillingness to observe the old faith of federalism, his emphasis on social welfare, and his happy antagonism of the DLP — fermented and grew within the party.134
The next day, Gorton informed the Coalition parties that the election would be held on 25 October. Whether he had picked up on the discontent or not, Gorton was aware that his party’s belief in the potency of national-security issues needed to be addressed, just as the DLP needed to be assuaged. To this end, Gorton assured restless backbenchers that defence would be a major issue during the campaign. And while hardly disavowing Freeth or his speech, Gorton added forceful denunciations of Russian actions to his speeches. On 12 September, speaking to a Liberal Party rally in South Australia, the prime minister said that the establishment of any Russian naval or military base in Australia’s region would be a threat, and that there was neither any ‘intention’ nor the ‘remotest possibility’ of a military understanding being reached between Australia and the Soviets. It was notable that Gorton allowed no time to speak on the ‘other issues of significance and importance’ in the campaign. Plainly, he was going to concentrate on what was most important.135
Yet the prime minister’s lack of consistency was plain, and the pressure he was under evident. Four days after Gough Whitlam launched the Labor campaign with promises to introduce a universal health-care scheme, remove the means test, raise pensions, abolish national service, and withdraw troops from Vietnam, Gorton recorded a policy speech that sought to reassure the DLP and resurrect the worth of his incursions into health, education, and social welfare.
It made for a curiously extravagant and disparate pitch. Beginning with a warning that the public should not discard the progress of the previous twenty years, Gorton promised that if the government was returned it would not sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, and would retain national service, improve the air force, strengthen the navy, keep up the army, and maintain a presence in Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore. He suggested the government would reduce income tax, spend money on water, rail, and nuclear power, and invest in education at all levels. There would be assistance for parents of children with disabilities, a subsidy for Meals on Wheels, improvements to health care, and the scope of the Home Savings Grant Scheme would be increased. Immigration, trade, industry — all received a run in the speech. Perhaps most enduringly, Gorton promised to establish a film and television school and to provide a $1m grant to the Australian Film and Television Development Corporation to invest in Australian film production. While this grab bag was attractive, its effectiveness was undercut by the stilted, formal delivery. Gorton gave his speech in front of a lectern that inhibited any semblance of charm, familiarity, or engagement. The audience to which the camera occasionally panned was composed of decidedly underwhelmed Liberal Party figures, including McMahon, who watched without joy.136
The sections on defence were barely enough for the DLP. It had held off announcing a policy on preferences until it had heard Gorton’s speech; now, once the speech was broadcast on 8 October, it decided to make good on the threat made by Gair the year before. The party’s resolve had been fortified by an early intervention from Bob Santamaria, chairman of the National Civic Council, who called for someone to ‘act effectively to bring the Government to a sense of reality’.137 The threat did not extend to electing the ALP, but the DLP did give its preferences to candidates from other parties.
The campaign did not go well for the government. Three weeks out, a poll showed Labor leading the Coalition 45 to 42 per cent. Overcoming that disadvantage was hard fought, done in increments, bit by bit. Gorton spoke relentlessly on defence, trying to turn back the DLP’s criticism and expose the gap between the government and Labor; McMahon attacked the opposition on its economic credentials.
In public, they were working towards the same end: victory. In private, they were backgrounding one another and manoeuvring to be best placed once the election was over.138 Even those observing from some remove could see it. ‘That untrustworthy little scamp McMahon is already, I think, on the warpath,’ Menzies informed his daughter.139
The façade could not last. The divergence between public unity and private disharmony was too great, and the division between Gorton and McMahon broke through to the public. At first it was low-key: th
ey could not agree on how much Labor’s policies would cost.140 Soon it was more serious. Barely days after appearing to gain ground on Labor, Gorton allowed his personal hostility towards McMahon to edge into public view. On 19 October, in a televised interview, he was asked to confirm that McMahon would remain treasurer if the government were re-elected. The most Gorton could bring himself to say was that McMahon would be a ‘member’ of the government.141 It was an indulgent statement made worse by repetition: the journalists pressed him twice more for an answer, but Gorton would go no further than this.
It was a signal of the licence that Gorton allowed himself. He was going to do things his way, critics and enemies be damned. ‘Gorton’s handling of the question asked him about Bill McMahon,’ Arthur Fadden wrote privately, ‘was to say the least stupid and cruel. I have never experienced such a hopeless Liberal-Country composite government campaign.’142 The opposition seized the opportunity to raise questions of division, to suggest disunity: ‘The Prime Minister is openly humiliating and repudiating Mr McMahon,’ Whitlam gloated.143
With only four days to go, McMahon publicly maintained his composure. In private, he was vituperative: ‘Do you think the bastard would dare?’ he hissed at one journalist, when asked about reports he would be shifted.144 But publicly he was calm. His response was a measure of so much: his self-discipline, his calculation and self-control, his awareness of his strengths and those of his prime minister, his knowledge that this was a battle not to be fought right now. When the press asked him whether he would still be treasurer, McMahon did not lash out. He did not fight back. He deflected. Only a very close listener would have understood the message. ‘It is up to Mr Gorton,’ he said. ‘I think you had better get an answer from him.’145
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Fragments and Credit
1984
‘There is no complete life,’ wrote the American novelist James Salter. ‘There are only fragments.’1 To judge from the drafts that covered his time as treasurer, McMahon seemed to follow that pronouncement to the letter: his was a mess of short, fragmentary chapters, overlapping and disjointed, that prised apart all the interlocking circumstances, each setting out an event or person, a policy or development, as though they were all discrete entitities. There was a chapter on Lord Casey and his interference in 1967; two chapters on Harold Holt and McMahon’s friendship with him; a chapter on the 1967 visit to Australia by American officials General Maxwell Taylor and Clark Clifford to discuss Vietnam; a chapter on the Resources Development Bank; a chapter on McEwen’s Australian Industry Development Corporation; and more.
For Bowman’s predecessor, Mark Hayne, this scattershot approach had been the cause of immense frustration and the result of McMahon’s ‘total lack of historical understanding and sense of chronology’:
Rather than working systematically through periods of his life, and placing them in ordered, coherent chapters, he [McMahon] would take ideas randomly. He would write two or three pages and then expect that they would be ‘pasted’ in an ad hoc fashion without any proper linkage with other sections.2
Repetition, as Bowman had observed when he first read the manuscript, was the most immediate consequence of this method of work. This could be addressed through careful editing — but a deficiency that could not be so easily repaired was the absence of context from all of the events, people, and policies that McMahon sought to discuss.
This was crucial. For the man who proclaimed himself to have been the country’s best treasurer, the chapters covering 1966–69 were going to be at the heart of the autobiography. They would need to set out a credible and convincing argument that McMahon was as good as his boasts — that he really had been the country’s best treasurer. An explanation of the circumstances, conditions, and his actions had to be detailed, logical, and credible if it was to convince.
He could not merely cite his credentials as the first treasurer with an economics degree — there were more than a few who knew of the circumstances in which he had obtained his economics degree in 1948, and knowledge of those circumstances would spread further when Heinz Arndt published his memoirs in 1985. He could not simply list his role as a governor of the International Monetary Fund (1966–69) and chairman of the board of governors of the Asian Development Bank (1968–69) — his critics would observe that these were hardly endorsements of him personally. Nor could he point to the buoyant economic conditions, the strong growth and prosperity, that Australia had enjoyed while he was treasurer. There were so many who dismissed his work, saying either that he simply did what he was told or that a drover’s dog could have done the job.3 Gallingly, many of those critics were on his side of politics. Dudley Erwin, admittedly a Gorton supporter, was derisory of McMahon: ‘Whilst it went down that he was a great treasurer, I think anyone could have been a great treasurer in the days that he was treasurer.’4 Billy Snedden ascribed McMahon’s success to the ‘fortunate era’ in which he was treasurer,5 and John Stone dismissed McMahon’s claims as an economic sure-touch: ‘Like many other claims by McMahon, his expertise in this area was considerably overstated.’6
Numbers would not be enough. If McMahon were to rebut his critics convincingly, he would need to cite specific measures he had initiated, and explain how they had contributed to Australia’s wellbeing. Yet even this would be insufficient. For while such examples might prove McMahon’s claims, they would not explain how and why he had aroused so much ire and controversy while he was treasurer. He would need to explain the regular bouts of disunity and anger that had plagued the governments in which he had been treasurer — most sensationally, how and why McEwen had vetoed his candidacy for the leadership in the days following Holt’s death; how and why he had become so mixed up with Maxwell Newton, Alan Reid, and the Packer press; and how and why Gorton had seen fit to eject him from his favourite portfolio.
McMahon was certainly aware of this, yet he was unable to work with the discipline needed to achieve the emphatic and convincing argument required. A draft that attempted to integrate the events, people, and policies of his time in Treasury was flat, lacking detail, and strewn with vast slabs of old speeches. Hayne had observed that these speeches were integral to McMahon’s process: what the former prime minister called ‘writing’, Hayne wrote later, was to take those speeches and scrawl little notes and comments where there was space on the page.7 He had refused to countenance removing or editing those speeches. To Hayne’s suggestion that the general reader might find them boring, McMahon was adamant that they go in, word for word. By the time Bowman came to work on the chapters, McMahon was just as implacable: there was to be no change in the chapters he had drafted.8
That he had not actually written the majority of these speeches was of no concern to McMahon. The logical flaw in citing his own speeches as proof of his own brilliance failed to bother him. He wanted the speeches in; he wanted the chapters left untouched. They were good enough.
It was unfortunate. McMahon’s time and significance as treasurer was already coloured by assessments of his character — the work of Alan Reid aside, always to McMahon’s detriment — and not by his willingness to argue a perspective that was contrary to McEwen’s. As John Stone later observed:
His [McMahon’s] time in Treasury was principally consumed by his long-running battle with McEwen — a battle in which he was fully supported by the Treasury on the policy issues concerned, and which was very much to his credit (whatever his personal motives).9
McMahon’s questioning of protection; his willingness to take on McEwen over the Australian Industry Development Corporation; his advocacy and victory in the decision not to devalue following the UK’s devaluation of sterling; his reduction of the deficit, from $644m in 1966–67 to $30m by 1969–70; and his efforts, with Gorton, to set out the relationship between the Commonwealth and the states — all of these were significant, more than creditable to him.
Moreover, the repeated humiliations, the criticis
ms, and the hostility he engendered were, at least in part, caused by his willingness to force a debate on tenets of policy that had long been taken for granted. As one observer later suggested, for all of McMahon’s many faults, he could be called a ‘martyr’ for the free-trade movement: ‘Few (if any) suffered more, personally and politically, for their beliefs.’10
That was the story to tell. That was the story that might convince. But McMahon seemed unable to tell it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Subsequent Plots
1969
‘He says I can run!’
It was the afternoon of Monday 3 November. In the ten days since voters had delivered their verdict, government MPs had been scrambling — scrambling to understand, to contain, to address, to vent, to discuss, to simply deal with the fallout of the election. For although the government had been returned, a swing against it of 6.6 per cent and the loss of sixteen seats had dampened the joy of victory and quashed any suggestion that Gorton’s approach had been vindicated.1 The DLP’s threats had paid off. Gordon Freeth, the target of their ire, was a conspicuous casualty: his West Australian seat of Forrest had been claimed by the ALP, thanks to discontent among farmers, the efforts of the far-right group the League of Rights, and the DLP’s decision to withhold preferences.
Gorton had been unapologetic. Happy at least to see Edward St John bundled out of Parliament after running as an ‘Independent Liberal’, Gorton pointed out that the government had won. He argued that there was always going to be a swing towards Labor — a consequence of its new leader, its promises on pensions and allowances for families, and the reversion to normalcy after the 1966 election. Since that election, moreover, there had been a redistribution. That explained some of the losses, he argued. He therefore saw little rebuke in the election: when asked if he would do anything differently, Gorton demurred. He would not alter much of his campaign, he said.2
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