And yet there were those who did not think McMahon was without credit. Having successfully disassociated the CAA, Coombs nonetheless admitted, later, that he thought the prime minister ‘had done his best’, trying to overcome opposition from within the government to ‘force through a decision which for the first time in Australian history made some acknowledgement of Aboriginal traditional rights in land, and provided a means whereby they could have obtained a limited title to it’ — namely, the leases.43 The Australian correspondent for the London Times, Stewart Harris, who took a strong interest in Aboriginal affairs, judged that McMahon had ‘in fact done more for Aborigines than any other Australian Prime Minister, but in the context of their need nothing like enough.’44 Few in the Aboriginal community would share this opinion. Sammy Watson, who manned the embassy in its early days, met McMahon and was blunt: ‘He talked down to me as though I were some tribal fellow who only understood pidgin English. He was patronising to a sickening extent. I think he completely lacks any understanding of us.’45 Charles Perkins, an officer on the staff of the Council of Aboriginal Affairs, and later the first Aboriginal secretary of a Commonwealth department, thought along the same lines. McMahon’s attitude did not fit with the times, Perkins thought: ‘In this day he has no place … He is out of date and out of touch.’46
Amid press coverage, the embassy turned an initially hazy set of demands into a five-point plan for land rights, and sought to broaden its protest to a campaign. A placard at the embassy on 7 February called out the Labor Party: ‘Whitlam: when you change McMahon’s Govt will it make any change to the suppression of Aboriginal people?’47 Whitlam’s response was quick. The next day, he visited the embassy — now consisting of eleven tents and sixteen activists — and talked. When he emerged, he made an immediate and public promise to grant full freehold title to Aboriginal tribes and clans, should his party win government.48
Much to the chagrin of McMahon, this was a promise that increasingly looked as though it would have to be fulfilled.
AS the one-year anniversary of McMahon’s becoming prime minister approached, gloom within the Liberal and Country parties continued to deepen. McMahon’s reputation was shrinking. The government’s standing in the polls was dismal. Labor had the upper hand in Parliament and in the media. Gorton looked to be more popular than ever. And every new day seemed to bring another unexpected problem to the fore. The government was consistently buffeted, unable to gain any semblance of control. ‘I think it has been the hardest and most unpredictable year I’ve known since I’ve been in politics,’ McMahon lamented. ‘I’ve found it a very difficult year.’ But he would not admit publicly that it was his fault. The poor polls, he insisted, were the result of ‘so many crises of a kind over which we’ve had no control’.49
The government’s lingering embarrassment over recognition of China flared when, amid US president Richard Nixon’s visit to the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese government’s attempt to solicit a visit by Andrew Peacock arose in Parliament. There was also uproar when McMahon’s answers about the matter were contradicted by television appearances by James Kibel. On 29 February, Labor launched a no-confidence motion over the matter. Whitlam was caustic and, in his speech, homed in on McMahon’s relationship with the truth. ‘The truth has caught him up and caught him out,’ Whitlam said. McMahon had presented to the House ‘an utterly false story — a fantasy, a fairy-tale, mischievous in its intention, mendacious in its substance’.
What was most devastating about Whitlam’s argument was that he placed the Kibel matter in a context of other questionable answers and explanations. He cited contradictions between public statements and answers from McMahon and Snedden on the BHP price rises, and McMahon’s shifting answers on whether he had sent a letter to the South African government criticising its apartheid policies. The portrait Whitlam painted was one with which many in McMahon’s own party agreed: that of a dissembler and liar, of a prime minister ill-prepared and unwilling, or unable, to state the truth.
When he rose to reply, McMahon sought to duck the topic entirely; then he sought to shift the issue; then he all but admitted errors in answers he had given in earlier debates.50 McMahon compounded the awful optics when, as the House divided to vote, he approached Gorton. He had barely spoken to his predecessor since sacking him; now, though, he put his arm around Gorton and said he would like to sit and speak with him during the division. Gorton’s response was blunt: ‘Go to buggery.’51 The motion was defeated, but afterward Reid heard that people were telling McMahon he had dealt with the debate quite well. Reid all but rolled his eyes: ‘God protect me from my friends and keep me aware that reality is not what you want it to be but what it is.’52
Opinion polls recorded the drops in McMahon’s popularity with increasing frequency. By March, he had a 28 per cent approval rating, according to Gallup. The multiplicity of such polls — from Gallup, the Sydney Morning Herald–Age, and ANOP — were by themselves a new phenomenon to grapple with: where Menzies had been the subject of only three opinion polls on his performance in his second prime ministership, McMahon would be the subject of twenty. They were a stark and regular demonstration of the government’s declining standing, and a prompt for questions and whispers about McMahon’s leadership. ‘What the devil do we do next?’ Bert Kelly wondered on 8 March. ‘We’ve got Billy McMahon elected as our leader and obviously he is not doing it at all well and everybody knows this. What we can’t think of is, how do we get rid of him? I suppose the only hope we have is that he suddenly drops dead one day.’53 Word of the despair reached the governor-general’s ears. Meeting with senator Robert Cotton on 9 March, Hasluck was told that the McMahon government’s fall in the polls was prompting some members to consider radical measures:
They were in the mood of thinking that nothing could be worse than what they had and that they should change the leadership of the party once again and try to have a general election deferred until May, 1973, in the hope that they might have time to recover favour … I asked whether this was a move to restore Gorton to the leadership. He [Cotton] said he thought some might think that way but he doubted whether it would work. I expressed the view that the Liberal Party would expose itself as completely confused and silly if it swung back from McMahon to Gorton after so many of its members had declared by a vote only a year ago that Gorton was unfit to be Prime Minister.54
Was the party really considering replacing McMahon? Despite initially dismissing murmurs to this effect on grounds that there was not enough time, Reid thought it plausible enough to be alert, particularly to a Gorton candidacy.55 Press reports noted that the former prime minister was regaining popularity and eclipsing the government. As The Age asked, ‘Who is that man flying around the country, talking to company directors, university graduates, and schoolchildren; opening fetes, libraries, and motel wings? Is it a Prime Minister, or a party leader? No. It is the super-backbencher.’56 Meanwhile, Peter Buff, a Melbourne businessman and self-described chair of the ‘Get Gorton Back Committee’, was agitating for Gorton’s return by stirring up the Victorian division of the Liberal Party. Within the parliamentary Liberal Party, McMahon’s parlous standing gave the idea the whiff of a possibility.
The threat of being deposed did not provoke the best in McMahon. He continued to blunder, sometimes so poorly that his party had cause to call much more than his political judgement into question. That March, while commenting on reports about Chinese overtures to Kibel, West Australian Liberal senator Peter Sim was quoted as saying that Australia’s foreign policy should not be left ‘in the hands of two Manchester Jews’.57 In Parliament on 23 March, West Australian Labor MP Joe Berinson called on McMahon to repudiate Sim, the statement, and its connotations. However, instead of answering with a straightforward repudiation of Sim’s statement, McMahon handed the question to Nigel Bowen, the minister for foreign affairs. Concerned that McMahon had passed on the opportunity to disavow anti-Semitism, the former
attorney-general Tom Hughes rose from the backbench:
Will the Right Honourable gentleman assure the House that neither he nor any member who sits behind him on the Government benches would ever wish it to be thought that he or any of them would endorse, or would wish to be associated with, an expression of anti-Semitic sentiment or any sentiment based on religious or racial grounds made by any member of the Government parties, if it were made?
McMahon’s answer was perhaps worse than his handing it to Bowen. After a laudable declaration that the government believed in religious freedom, he told the House that ‘a question of the kind asked by the honourable member for Perth [Joe Berinson] raising a sectarian issue of this kind is to be deplored …’58
The House went into uproar. As Labor MPs were quick to point out, Berinson was a practising Jew with quite reasonable grounds for seeking a repudiation of anti-Semitism from the prime minister. McMahon refused to recognise this. He refused to rephrase or withdraw his answer. When Whitlam moved for the House to repudiate Sim’s statements, McMahon tried to amend the motion so that it repudiated and condemned ‘any anti-Semitic attitudes wherever expressed or implied’. This was, as Whitlam said immediately, ‘too clever by half’, and again there was great furore. Government members were visibly angry, and four appeared ready to cross the floor to vote for Whitlam’s motion. McMahon was forced to back down. He removed his amendment.59
What was he doing? What had he hoped to gain by his actions? According to Reid, McMahon knew the question was coming, but had gone ‘off the rails’. Bill Aston, whose electorate had a sizeable Jewish population, was scathing about McMahon’s behaviour. ‘What is wrong with him?’ he asked. ‘What has happened?’ The Liberal member for the Queensland seat of Griffith, Don Cameron, was similarly disbelieving. ‘I’ll be loyal to him because he is the leader,’ he told people. ‘But, Christ, he must be mad.’60 Howson was astonished, too, and lamented what it had done: ‘It has had the effect of setting back all the good work that we’ve been doing in the last three weeks, it’s depressed morale among the whole of the backbench, and altogether the press are going to have a field day.’61
McMahon was certainly aware that things were not going well. There had been more problems with Snedden, over the workings of a family unit tax and the appointment of Vic Garland as assistant treasurer; Gorton was continuing to draw headlines and attention; and good economic news was thin on the ground. Dining with McMahon two days before the brouhaha over his response to Berinson’s questions, Howson found the prime minister ‘tense’. He thought McMahon was ‘finding the strain of office bearing heavily on his shoulders’. McMahon was hearing of moves against him and worried about unrest in the DLP, whose preferences he would need at the election.62 Problems with the Liberal Party organisation were also causing McMahon concern. Already of the opinion that electoral defeat was inevitable, organisation members were making no effort to disguise their derision of their leader. As one told Reid:
McM[ahon] talks all the time, makes extravagant claims about his ability and what he intends to do, and it has reached the stage that [no]body in the organisation believes either him or his claims. Their cry is, ‘If he would only listen.’ [Federal Liberal Party director Bede] Hartcher has complained bitterly about the cavalier way he treats the organisation, and the manner in which he won’t listen to the state presidents and secretaries but ‘just rambles on’.
McMahon was just as frustrated. ‘What do they know?’ he would say, when speaking about the organisation. His scorn and aversion to hearing criticism made him reluctant to attend meetings with the organisation, further reinforcing the problems and potential of a breakdown.63
Disquiet within the party over McMahon’s leadership grew. A few days after his statements on the ‘sectarian issue’, McMahon’s critics put pressure on him to call a party-room meeting to ‘deal with the question of leadership’.64 Killen, whose call for McMahon to restore Gorton and Bury to cabinet positions as ‘a gesture of goodwill’ had been rejected, was among those critics. ‘Having regard to the extreme political crisis and its far reaching implications for the country and the party,’ he wrote to the whip, ‘I request a Liberal Party meeting of all senators and members to be called for next Wednesday.’65 McMahon, realising that the moves were serious, reached for the telephone to firm up his support. ‘It is touch and go,’ Reid wrote at the time.66 Others looked for more creative decisions. Bert Kelly, despairing of McMahon’s performances and aware that he was manifestly distrusted by his ministers, rang the president of the Liberal Party, Robert Southey:
[I] suggested that perhaps he ought to consider coming in and taking a strong stand, advising McMahon that he ought to leave the position and see if we couldn’t arrange some kind of a take-over by a person selected by a small number of the party organisation and a number of senior ministers.67
And yet, even then, Kelly was not certain of the solution. The problem was not that critics of McMahon were rare: the party, almost as a whole, was ‘disenchanted’ with him.68 The problem was that no one could agree on a replacement. Despite his popularity with the public, Gorton was still anathema to the conservative wing of the party; Fraser was still the object of antipathy from Gorton’s supporters; and Snedden refused to allow himself to be considered. (According to Snedden, he also resisted pressure from Anthony to support Bowen in a bid.)69
By the time of the party-room meeting on 29 March, Reid believed that a spill was in the offing. ‘McM[ahon] still unsure of his numbers … Position dangerous even though the rebels cannot be sure of the numbers.’70 But the meeting came and went without a sound. The critics stayed silent. McMahon’s position never came up. ‘For the time being,’ wrote a satisfied Howson afterward, ‘it has headed off any threat to his [McMahon’s] leadership.’71
TWO weeks later, on 12 April, Snedden announced that the government would introduce measures to improve public confidence and support consumer spending. The ‘mini-budget’, as it came to be known, had been developed only during the previous ten days as a response to ‘changing social and economic circumstances’. Amid what Snedden deemed improving economic conditions that were nonetheless short of their potential, the treasurer announced that he and McMahon had agreed to reduce the levy on personal income tax from 5 per cent to 2.5 per cent (wholly reversing the rise they had instituted in the 1971–72 budget), increase the standard rate of the pension by $1 per week and the married rate by 75c per week, ease the means test on pensions, and allow small investors to treat profits on shares held for more than eighteen months as a capital gain. Snedden also announced that the government would move to set up an inquiry into the taxation system.72
The move was unusual, as Snedden himself admitted that night, but McMahon regarded it as absolutely necessary. As Bunting recorded of their conversation on 20 March, ‘No matter where you looked, industries were depressed … People who spoke to him frankly were pessimistic. Gloom was still there.’73 McMahon was concerned to act. He wanted the economy on a sound footing. ‘The economy was his agenda,’ Jonathan Gaul recalled. ‘He paid more attention to that than anything else. Every day.’74 Not everyone was convinced that action was necessary, though. The Australian wondered if the government would have anything left when the time came for the budget. ‘With tax cuts, a tax review, and a pension increase now, what will Mr Snedden do for an encore in August?’ Most believed it was a politicking move from a government keen to ensure the economy was growing by election time. Labor frontbencher and future treasurer Frank Crean called it a ‘sordid political gesture’, and even Anthony appeared to concede that it was thus: ‘I wouldn’t be honest if I said that this isn’t in the back of our minds … We’re very conscious that at the end of this year the economy has to be buoyant and moving along.’75
What no one could deny was that it was confirmation of a major change to the economic strategy announced in the 1971–72 budget. The rigour of that budget, and its attempts at deflation
, were to be abandoned. Instead, the government would spend money to ensure that totemic issues such as employment, the cost of living, and pensions would play well for it in an election campaign.
But the spending would not solve the government’s problems, largely because McMahon seemed unwilling to assess those problems realistically. When he met with Hasluck on 2 May, McMahon blamed his colleagues for the government’s poor standing in the polls and its economic problems. ‘He said that the main causes of their fall in popularity had been the mistake in the 1971–72 budget, the arguments over rural relief, the delay in making a decision on revaluation, and the handling of the postal strike last Christmas.’ Whether this was wrong had not appeared to concern McMahon. ‘In discussing each,’ Hasluck recorded, ‘he [McMahon] represents himself as having been right and the faults as being due to his colleagues or to the supplying of false information to him. He spoke very critically of the Treasury.’76
This was true. In what had become a fixture of inter-office memos and telephone calls, McMahon railed against the Treasury’s estimates, forecasts, work, and ideas. He was scathing of its co-ordination of other departments and what he believed was its unwillingness to share information properly. In March, he was sceptical of Treasury advice on unemployment. He could not go on accepting suggestions that ‘everything will come right’.77 Treasury, he said a few days later to Bunting, ‘have been consistently wrong’.78 In June, he was saying that the stimulus had gone out of the economy: ‘The mini-budget had not had the effect intended.’ The Treasury needed to examine the situation and do so immediately. ‘September would be too late for action.’ There was more than a hint of his frustration evident in his request that Bunting tell Snedden to take it up with Treasury. ‘Unless the treasurer himself did so, and with emphasis, Treasury would not take it seriously.’ When he spoke to Sir Frederick Wheeler, the Treasury secretary, that day, McMahon was blunt in his opinion: ‘He said that Treasury had been testing the situation at regular intervals since the last budget and had always been wrong so far.’79
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