Tiberius with a Telephone

by Patrick Mullins

  Another element in McMahon’s frustrations were problems with the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Its expanded list of functions, as well as restoration of its secretariat functions for the cabinet, was an enormous tax on the department’s resources. Lenox Hewitt, who had carried a heavy load while he was secretary, believed the added work would be too much, especially alongside a prime minister so temperamental, self-interested, and exhausting. ‘I would have thought it an absolute nightmare,’ he said later. ‘Bunting must have had a hell of a time with McMahon.’80

  The secretary had foreseen the mounting work toll early. He edged away from participation on inter-departmental committees of cabinet, and he pressed for more resources from the Public Service Board.81 The weight of work done by his department, Bunting wrote in June 1971, ‘is not merely a five day a week weight, but a day and night weight, often of seven days.’82 But the problems persisted, to the point that the department’s failings became, in McMahon’s eyes, Bunting’s failings. That same month, McMahon told the secretary that the draft record of a cabinet decision was ‘bad’, that Bunting was not carrying out ‘team work’ with him, and not consulting properly.83 He was still critical six months later. He lectured Bunting and Sir Frederick Wheeler for what he saw as their failures in co-ordination and staff work. He wanted better briefings and he wanted for them to be ahead of matters, so that he in turn could be as well.84 He was still aggrieved in March. ‘He said he should be getting more lead and more discussion of current matters,’ Bunting recorded. The secretary had a different idea. He did not think it should be his department’s mission to offer competing advice to that of other departments. As he said to McMahon, there were ‘limits of time to what the Department can do’.

  But to McMahon’s offer to call the chairman of the Public Service Board and demand better resources, Bunting demurred. He did not want to use McMahon ‘as a lever’, he said. McMahon agreed to let the matter go, but added a condition. Bunting had to get results.85 ‘Bunting was at his wit’s end with Billy,’ Jonathan Gaul recalled, ‘because he was always on his hammer. John Bunting was a gentleman. He didn’t know how to cope with this sort of treatment.’86

  McMahon’s criticism of Bunting and the department was not unfair: McMahon was prime minister at a time when the demands upon him and his office were outstripping resources. McMahon himself was wilting under the pressure of work. He frequently complained to Bunting about the amount of paper crossing his desk and the problems of consultation.87 He wanted the department to step up, possibly by emulating the British cabinet system, and he wanted there to be fewer matters on his plate.88 ‘He wanted to make progress in this direction so as to achieve a new basis in the new year, so that he would have more time available for forward thinking,’ recorded Peter Lawler in late 1971.89

  ‘Last week was chaotic,’ Bunting recorded McMahon telling him, in a late-night call in May 1972. ‘Papers kept rolling in.’90 The problems were not solved by September. Whatever PM&C were doing to reduce his workload, they had to do more. ‘He said that if we did not conform, he would simply send the papers back un-dealt with,’ Bunting wrote, after a telephone call from McMahon.91 But when Bunting sought clarification on the cause of the problem, McMahon’s own staff told him that sometimes it was just a matter of accumulation.92 McMahon did not believe it. He thought that it was ‘laziness’ on the part of the department.93 Trying to explain and understand, Bunting sent McMahon figures the next day. The department received some 3,000 papers per month. Roughly 400 of those went to McMahon, he said. Half of those were letters to ministers, members, senators, premiers, and constituents, or matters relating to parliamentary questions. Of the remaining 200 papers, 150 were unavoidable: they were cabinet documents, Foreign Affairs cables, Treasury papers. The remaining fifty papers — two per day, Bunting pointed out — ‘are sent only after judgment in the Department that you would want to see them.’94 Did McMahon really not wish to see them? The complaints subsided, but a month later, McMahon was ringing again:

  He said he would just have to ask me once more about the amount of work. He would just have to plead with me. Had he got an election or hadn’t he? He would crack up if he went on with the work at the present rate … Take yesterday — he had all that work. It took all that time.95

  The work was immense. But McMahon’s problems were, in no small part, of his own making. As McMahon’s principal private secretary, Ian Grigg, recalled, McMahon’s demand for material meant that there was a large amount of paper coming into the office. ‘He complained about it, but if he did not get a paper on something that he wanted, or thought he should see, then he would complain about that, too. He was demanding paper, he was getting paper, but then he didn’t like the amount of paper that was coming through. It was Catch-22.’96 Moreover, McMahon hoarded papers. Using a peephole in Grigg’s office, staff would watch him hide files in his drawers. Between this and his unwillingness to delegate, McMahon’s office was a bottleneck. The problem was exacerbated by his fervent belief that his personal involvement equated with success. All this ensured that McMahon took on far more work than he needed.97 Suggestions that he delegate more, and allow his ministers to do more, would be accepted, then forgotten. It was McMahon’s nature to try to control things himself.

  This was evident in the way that he continued to meddle in Howson’s portfolio. Already hampered by crossed lines of authority within the bureaucracies of his unwieldy ministry (nicknamed by some the Ministry for Bits and Pieces), Howson’s work was incremental and frustrating, even without McMahon’s involvement. ‘I think that Bill McMahon didn’t realise when he handed me all those things on my plate how big a job it was,’ he would say later.98 On the environment, for example, Howson was trying to develop an office that, as one writer put it, was little more than a ‘postbox for communications between the state and Commonwealth governments’.99 Whether the Commonwealth’s role could be developed, and what part it would play amid the work of the state governments and Commonwealth departments, was a long-running problem. Howson’s permanent head understood this. ‘I always felt, for my minister, that he was at a disadvantage,’ Lenox Hewitt said later, ‘in that there was already people responsible for the matters in hand.’100

  Matters were hardly going to be made easier by a prime minister who felt that taking action on the environment could offer some political traction. Throughout Howson’s tenure, McMahon continually sought to involve himself, often frustratingly, in developing the government’s environmental policies. Late in November 1971, cabinet decided against establishing a committee that could advise on a national approach for the environment, on the grounds that there were too many such committees and councils already.101 ‘Must say advisory councils haven’t helped us — they create problems,’ McMahon said, during the debate.102

  Just after Christmas, however, McMahon telephoned Howson to say that he had changed his mind. The government ‘needed’ an advisory committee at Commonwealth level. Could Howson prepare another cabinet submission accordingly?103 When Howson brought that proposal to cabinet late in January, there was another change. ‘Half-way through the discussion it was obvious that most of the cabinet were against the proposal,’ Howson recalled, ‘and the PM proceeded to dump me, saying that the proposals I’d put up were nothing like what he had envisaged.’104 Cabinet ordered instead that an inter-departmental committee be established to advise it on alternatives.105

  By March, the work of that inter-departmental committee had wrapped up, with the same result that Howson had originally sought: an advisory committee on the environment. When that recommendation came to McMahon, he could not make up his mind whether to return to cabinet or make the decision himself. Then he argued with Howson over who should make the announcement. A week later, McMahon had decided that he would announce the committee, but that Howson could deliver a ministerial statement on the environment in the House.106

  Drafting of the statement was ju
st as difficult. An initial draft prepared by Keith Sinclair was reworked so as to be less ‘negative’, but then McMahon got involved, seeking to make it less ‘low key’ and more positive about the environment and what the government was doing. When Howson explained that the draft followed the line of cabinet discussions and thinking, McMahon said he would overrule the cabinet. Wary that changes of the sort McMahon wanted would involve significant expenditure, Howson made some changes only to be told again that it was still not positive enough: ‘I had not seized enough of the glamour of this subject.’ Conscious already of McMahon’s tendency to take decisions without consulting cabinet, Howson saw similarities to Gorton, and he worried about the effect of cutting out vital input from other departments. ‘He still doesn’t realise that if he is going to make this a glamorous statement, he’s also got to be prepared to pay for some of the promises that he’s bound to make, and I don’t think this has been accepted by the Treasury.’107

  Four days later, to the horror of staff surrounding the prime minister, McMahon was taking over both the drafting and the announcement.108 That decision would be reversed and the low-key approach would be restored, but McMahon continued to hound Howson for better news. When an article in The Sydney Morning Herald featured Howson’s descriptions of the highly circumscribed role that the Commonwealth could play in environment policy, McMahon telephoned his minister to complain that he had not mentioned the possibility that the Commonwealth could give grants to the states for environmental purposes under section 96 of the constitution.109 ‘If the cabinet had ever told me that Section 96 grants were feasible I would have mentioned it,’ an astonished Howson wrote in his diary, ‘but I would have been in much more trouble if I had been too imaginative.’110 Then McMahon and Howson were at loggerheads over who should head the advisory committee that McMahon had announced.111

  At least Howson was able to make his statement, on 24 May. Stating that his purpose was to ‘emphasise’ the government’s interest in the problems of the environment and its determination to do what it could to solve those problems, Howson stressed the need for co-operation and co-ordination with the states. The still-developing role of the Commonwealth was evident in what he proceeded to outline as the achievements and progress of the McMahon government’s environment policy. Administrative machinery to deal with environmental matters had been set up, Howson said, and state ministers were meeting regularly, via the Australian Environment Council, to consult. There were also innovations: from now on, Howson announced, government proposals with any relevance to the environment would have to carry an explanation of their impact on the environment. That would prove contentious and difficult, but eventually would become a valuable and standard practice. The government had also adopted the OECD principle of ‘the polluter pays’, where the costs of pollution control were recognised as a part of the cost of production. There were initiatives underway to address water, air, and carbon monoxide pollution, and the government would continue to participate in international efforts to address pollution.112

  Howson was pleased by the press reception the statement received, and by the apparent paucity of Labor’s response, announced immediately by Tom Uren, the member for Reid. But it was always necessary to consider McMahon. The next day, amid the favourable reports in the morning’s newspapers, the prime minister telephoned Howson to say that he was worried he had not made the statement himself.113

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  On Edge

  1984

  ‘WM under strain today,’ Bowman wrote in his diary, on Monday 10 March. Due to go into hospital on the Thursday for tests and treatment for a patch of skin cancer on his left ear, McMahon had been ‘on edge, urgent, incoherent, memory gone, rambling’, wrote Bowman. Though exasperated, Bowman had now had enough experience of McMahon to realise that it was not entirely normal behaviour for the former prime minister: ‘For the first time I understand that this must be a manifestation of pressure.’1

  But the behaviour tested McMahon’s staff nonetheless. Three days later, Bowman was withering, calling McMahon ‘jumpy and silly this afternoon’. He had especially upset Joyce Cawthorn. She had made out three cheques to meet McMahon’s doctors’ bills, but when she presented them to McMahon for his signature, he decided to up-end that approach. He came up with a complicated plan that saw him spend an hour on the phone with Medicare, the AMA, and his health insurer, getting advice about sending bills one way and cheques another. His purpose, Cawthorn vented to Bowman later, was to avoid paying the bills until the last possible moment. ‘He never tears up a cheque, because of the 10 cents [cost],’ she said, ‘but now he’s going to tear up three and ruin my accounting system!’2

  By the Thursday, McMahon’s staff was happy to see him go. McMahon had been petulant, brusque, rude for too long. ‘Stop talking when there’s so much to do!’ he was saying, barging into conversations. He was annoyed that there was not a suite available at the hospital, he was annoyed about money, and he was annoyed about the prologue yet again. He had called Bowman to his office to discuss it, but had been too fluttery to talk properly. ‘Quite unintelligible,’ Bowman wrote after this latest waste of time.3

  McMahon’s presence in hospital prompted calls from the media. Sonia had told Bowman that the office was not authorised to say anything, but when the ABC telephoned the next week, Bowman decided to ignore her. He told George Campbell, who had answered the call, to say that he could not comment but to add that, to the best of knowledge, McMahon was fine and that if they called St Vincent’s they might even be able to speak to him.4

  Bowman kept working on the prologue — ‘or trying to’, as he wrote. His opinion of it slipped the more he worked on it, and McMahon’s interference, from his hospital bed, did not improve Bowman’s mood or appreciation of it:

  It is abysmal; actually, far worse than that. I expected to finish it today. Then George came in to say WM had called and wanted him at the hospital at 2pm. He wanted the start of the prologue rewritten; he had some very good stuff from The Economist…

  Bowman was profoundly unimpressed with this new development. Angered, he delivered a detailed opinion of it and of McMahon himself. ‘How much longer did we have to suffer this childish nonsense?’

  Campbell’s response was dark: ‘There’s a chance the test will prove malignant.’

  Time did not improve Bowman’s mood. By the end of the day, he had decided on a course of action, McMahon be damned: ‘I shall proceed with the editing and decline to look at the new material until the next round of editing, if there is a next round.’5

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Constant Threats

  1972

  A repeated theme of the McMahon government was the tension and division it found when moving to address new issues on the political agenda. Loosening censorship in Australia was a complete example of how conservative members of the government resisted attempts to have social changes reflected in public policy. To Don Chipp, the minister for customs, the need for change was obvious from the moment he took office. ‘I inherited a censorship system which was secretive, archaic, and illogical,’ he recalled.1 Taking the view that censorship was thoroughly undesirable — even evil — if nonetheless necessary, Chipp had tried for the previous three years to liberalise the system gradually, arguing that ‘a plurality of community standards’ should prevail over those of one minister in one government. Ostensibly, Chipp had support for this from McMahon; after all, the prime minister would soon say that ‘there has to be an overriding national interest’ before censorship should be imposed.2 Where the national interest figured in the case of The Little Red Schoolbook would soon take up considerable time — and provoke schisms within the government.

  Written by Danish schoolteachers Søren Hansen and Jesper Jensen, and intended for young people, The Little Red Schoolbook had been controversial the world over for its frank treatment of sex, drugs, and alcohol. Notwithstanding that these were
clearly discussed in an unenticing way, the book had been the cause of considerable angst among conservative members of the Parliament and government when its importation had been announced. Chipp had decided against prohibiting the import of the book on grounds that its section on drugs was anti-drugs, that its discussion of sex could be easily obtained elsewhere, and that its anti-authoritarian bent — summed up in a suggestion that adults were untrustworthy — was disagreeable but not objectionable.

  Within the government, Chipp’s action was cause for anger, and not only from members of the backbench. On 11 April, the assistant minister assisting the minister for civil aviation, John McLeay, criticised Chipp for allowing the book on grounds that it could undermine the morals of schoolchildren; on 17 April, government backbencher Les Irwin called for the book to be banned, saying that it would lead young people into ‘misbehaviour’.3 The continued controversy led to a summons from the prime minister, who told Chipp to change the decision. When Chipp refused, McMahon declared that it would go to cabinet. In the days that followed, McMahon worked through the press to try to have his way. Cabinet would force Chipp to back down, stories suggested, and The Little Red Schoolbook would be prohibited. Chipp retaliated in kind. He would resign, he intimated, if his decision were overturned.4 Chipp was betting everything on his belief that McMahon could not afford a ministerial resignation that year, and would himself back down. He was gratified to find that when the matter came up in cabinet on 18 April, McMahon’s first words were, ‘We must support the Minister on this question.’5 Cabinet thus agreed with Chipp’s decision not to prohibit the book on legal and regulatory grounds.