Tiberius with a Telephone

by Patrick Mullins

  Time would force hard choices on the government. Legislation for the Monopolies Commission and restrictive trade practices were introduced with a clear intention that they would not be passed: there was not enough time to force them through. This left the foreign takeovers legislation, introduced on 24 October. It was piecemeal, and meant only as an interim measure. It gave legal backing to proposals McMahon had announced on 26 September, but did not establish the independent authority that McMahon had proposed would vet takeover bids (that, McMahon announced, would occur in the next session). Nor would it have a long life: the operation of the Bill would cease on 31 December 1973, or by proclamation once another Bill had been passed. But the Companies (Foreign Takeovers) Bill would set out a policy, and it enshrined two powers to prevent injurious takeovers. A minister would be able to prohibit takeovers on grounds of the national interest, and the minister could limit the beneficial interests in a specified company for foreign interests. Moreover, there were penalties to ensure it was no figleaf.76

  Labor called it a ‘death-bed repentance’, but was much in agreement with the Bill, a point borne out when it offered only minor amendments before it was passed the next day.77 Given the late timing, it is doubtful that the Bill made much of an impact on the electorate, but for McMahon it was proof that the government was following through, that it was alive to public concerns, and acting in a responsible way. Ominously, however, in the view of a prime minister overworked and tiring, the problems and delays that had surrounded the Bill’s drafting were also proof of lack of co-operation from colleagues and the bureaucracy.78

  FOR every achievement and move towards new policy there was another fight, another muddle, another problem that should never have been cause for concern. Taken individually, each one could appear insignificant; in a series, however, each mishap upended McMahon’s attempts to show that his government was professional, unified, and getting on with its job; each mistake reinforced the sense of chaos, of lack of control, of ineptitude, and even deception. One example had roots that went back to McMahon’s time as minister for foreign affairs — what became known as the Jetair affair.

  In 1969, just as McMahon had taken over as minister for external affairs, his department had decided to make a gift of five DC3s to the Nepalese and Laotian governments as part of its foreign-aid programme. Surplus DC3s were purchased from the RAAF in November 1969 and April 1970 for a total cost of $60,000. The need to convert the aircraft for civilian use, however, meant that the cost of the gift would be much greater and the delivery date of the aircraft much further away. When, on 5 December 1970, the struggling Australian airliner Jetair advertised that it had six DC3s for sale — a prelude to the company’s imminent demise — the Department of Foreign Affairs realised it could purchase, convert, and deliver the Jetair aircraft for $360,000 — some $65,000 less than the total cost of doing the same with the ex-RAAF aircraft. At around the same time, the department learned that it could provide, as part of another aid package, the five already-purchased ex-RAAF DC3s to the Cambodian government, which was seeking military-configured aircraft. After performing inspections on the Jetair aircraft, the department decided to make an offer to purchase them. With McMahon’s approval on 1 January 1971, the department paid Jetair $275,000 for the six DC3s.

  Almost immediately, however, there was concern within the bureaucracy. Normal purchasing procedures — namely, the calling of a tender — had not been followed. As Department of Foreign Affairs secretary Sir Keith Waller was to admit, there had been a ‘technical breach’ of Treasury regulations when the department agreed to purchase the aircraft from Jetair.

  Labor senator George Georges spoke about the deal in the Senate on 12 September 1972. The breach of regulations was not the point of his scorn or enquiry; rather, it was McMahon. Georges wanted to know if there was any patronage involved in the deal. Had McMahon altered or tailored it to help a friend, who was a director? Did the deal represent true value for money? Georges would not allege improper conduct, but his insinuations were too cute by half. Eventually, accepting the challenge of government senators to put his charge explicitly, Georges was straightforward: ‘I am accusing the Prime Minister of patronage.’79 The Senate voted immediately to suspend him, but the damage was done.

  Two weeks later, in the face of continued questioning, the government tabled a selection of papers related to the deal, only for Whitlam to raise further questions and call for more documents to be tabled.80 Evasive answers from McMahon, and attempts by him to pass the matter to Nigel Bowen, in his capacity as the minister for foreign affairs, did little to deflect Labor. On 12 October, Whitlam sought to suspend standing orders to have all of the documents relating to the deal tabled.81 The motion was handily defeated, but the issue refused to go away. Five days later, McMahon tabled a copy of the minute that Waller had sent recommending the purchase and a letter from Sir Kenneth Bailey, the former head of the attorney-general’s department, who had advised McMahon on the legality of the deal at the time.82

  The tabling of these papers, and others, disproved the charge that McMahon had exercised patronage in the deal, but left him exposed in other ways. Why had he not ensured the deal followed proper procedure? And why had he not immediately moved to dispel the issue by tabling the papers a month earlier? Whitlam cited these very points on 19 October, when he moved an unsuccessful motion of censure against McMahon ‘for his incompetence and concealment in relation to Jetair Australia Limited’. Once again, Whitlam homed in on McMahon’s suitability for his office and his truthfulness in the Parliament. ‘Can this nation afford a Prime Minister who is pathologically incapable of admitting that he erred?’ Whitlam asked. More critically, too, he noted that McMahon was shifting the blame for the matter to others. ‘He has passed the buck to public servants who cannot defend themselves.’83

  This was the most conspicuous outcome of the affair. McMahon’s willingness to use the public service and individual public servants as means to deflect criticism was an embarrassing abnegation of ministerial responsibility, a reversal of the convention that a minister takes responsibility for the actions of his department. Certainly, Waller felt this way, particularly after he was named in the ALP censure motion: ‘All this is wildly in breach of what [Erskine] May lays down [in Parliamentary Practice] and I felt pretty savage about it,’ he wrote privately.84 Journalists were scathing about McMahon’s conduct, but with an additional note to their criticism. ‘From now on,’ wondered David Solomon, ‘what senior public servant will not take account of the possibility that the advice which he gives, in writing, to a minister, might not be tabled in the House or the Senate, shortly afterwards, with his name attached?’85

  Other problems of administration and division surfaced when cabinet decided against adopting the recommendations of a joint committee on retirement benefits for the armed forces. Despite agreeing that the retirement schemes for Australian military personnel were a mess, defence minister David Fairbairn believed that the committee had been set up to make trouble and that its proposed scheme was ‘excessively generous’.86 Labor and dissident members of the government backbench, especially the committee’s chair and loud critic, John Jess, wanted the matter dealt with before Parliament rose for the election, and they had assurances from McMahon and Fairbairn that it would be. On 25 October, believing that McMahon had evaded questions about the matter and hoping to entice government dissidents to cross the floor, the ALP deputy leader and member for Bass, Lance Barnard, moved to suspend standing orders so as to adopt the recommendations in full. The motion was averted when Fairbairn undertook to provide a statement before the House rose.87 Half an hour later, a hurriedly organised meeting in McMahon’s office between McMahon, Fairbairn, Snedden, officials from the public service, and the dissident Liberal MPs, including Jess, negotiated a way out.

  McMahon presented the results the next day. Seven of the committee’s recommendations were accepted, he said. Six were adopted in part,
two were referred for independent investigation, and two more were rejected. Labor, as was its wont, attacked the government, and Jess all but begged for the government to introduce legislation that day to get the changes through before Parliament adjourned. But the most ignominious part of the matter was Jess’s subsequent attack, not withstanding its support for his scheme, on the Department of Defence. ‘I am not impressed one iota with the support that this scheme has been given by the Department of Defence, whose job it is to stand and speak on behalf of the defence forces,’ he said.88 Fairbairn, unable to reply during the debate that followed, thought it singularly ungracious and politically self-defeating. ‘From the point of view of the government,’ Fairbairn said later, ‘nothing could have done more to undermine its support amongst the services for the coming election.’89

  UNDENIABLE throughout the year was the existence of a vigorous public-relations contest between McMahon and Whitlam. That contest focused as much on their personalities and appearances as it did on their respective policies. In appearance and manner, McMahon was always playing a catch-up game. After Whitlam returned from China, fluffy-haired without his Brylcreem, McMahon also began to eschew hair oil. He allowed his sideburns to grow almost to his jawline, and the koala-like tufts of hair around his head to grow long and curl on the nape of his neck.

  But there was no way to disguise the larger differences. He was short where Whitlam was tall; thin where Whitlam was broad-chested. He was faint-voiced where Whitlam’s was sure; bald where Whitlam sported a full head of hair. Abuzz and flighty where Whitlam was deliberate, McMahon simply could not help but appear a pitiably small figure by comparison. His image was not aided by his name: in spite of his preference to be called Bill, McMahon was popularly known by the diminutive Billy. In sum, McMahon always appeared the smaller, less impressive figure.

  ‘Whitlam was the better speaker, had the better voice, and had a dominant physical presence,’ recalled the journalist David Solomon.90 Alan Ramsey agreed. ‘Gough was in command of the way he spoke. McMahon was never in command of the way he spoke.’91

  McMahon was always conscious of how he sounded and looked, but he could rarely appreciate how he was perceived. At an annual meeting of regional daily newspapers in March 1971, McMahon had shown up wearing an urbane dinner suit, a velvet bowtie, and patent-leather shoes with bows on them. He was thoroughly outperformed by Doug Anthony, whose bucolic presence and appearance was much preferred by the audience. McMahon’s attentiveness to his appearance — always ducking into bathrooms to check his reflection, applying ointments, colognes, and lotions — was excessive. He was so fond of rubbing Nivea cream into his skin that Sonia had to tell him to stop: ‘You’re slipping away from me, Bill.’

  McMahon could be acutely sensitive when informed of the problems of his appearance and manner: ‘Why don’t you stop criticising me?’ he would usually say to staff who ventured suggestions. ‘You’re always nitpicking!’ He wanted praise, not advice. He resiled from admissions of weakness. During a period where his deafness made it hard for him to hear his own voice, his press secretary, Reg MacDonald, suggested letting a few journalists know, in order to garner sympathy. McMahon would not consider it.

  At other times, attempts to solve his problems went awry. After his staff noticed that he sweated profusely under the heat of studio lights, McMahon accepted their suggestion that he use amputee stump powder on his face. The powder worked — but it gave him a pale, sickly pallor that looked almost as bad as the sweating.

  At a time when journalists such as Mungo MacCallum and Bob Ellis were exposing the follies of politics, all this made McMahon an easy target of ridicule. Cartoonists, too, delighted in McMahon: they found a fitting, comic essence in depicting him as a gnome-like figure, short and weedy, a big-eared, ageing dwarf. Folk singer Eric Bogle lampooned him in the same vein:

  Ah, poor wee Billy McMahon, he’s certainly no Superman,

  He tries to be with it, and he dresses quite moddy,

  But with his big ears, and his skinny wee body,

  He looks like a cross between Big Ears and Noddy,

  Poor wee Billy McMahon.92

  Quips and jokes about McMahon — that he looked like a Volkswagen with both doors open, that his accent was ‘Bhowani chi chi’, that he was literal old age creeping up on Sonia — were rife, an influence on day-to-day reportage. The birth of McMahon’s third child, Deborah, on 28 September, for example, was greeted with both congratulations and suggestions that her birth had been orchestrated as an electoral ploy designed to attract support and aid McMahon’s image. Sonia McMahon would deplore this: ‘It was just the luck of the gods.’93

  But coverage of the image was not just superficial: it spoke to deeper issues, ones that could not sometimes be stated explicitly. Few journalists in the Press Gallery judged that McMahon could lead the government to victory at an election, and fewer still thought he was in any way up to the job of being prime minister. But they never stated so. Why not? Mungo MacCallum reasoned that there were three principal reasons. ‘Anybody who tried to even hint at the fact that he [McMahon] was incompetent was greeted with howls of “Bias,” and “You’re prejudiced,” and “We can’t believe anything you write because you take sides,” and “You’re a Labor Party stooge,” and so on and on.’ And yet, when MacCallum would reply to these critics that McMahon was incompetent and the critic knew it, suddenly a sense of decorum would take over. ‘Yes, of course he’s incompetent,’ MacCallum recalled critics admitting, ‘but, you know, he’s the prime minister. You’re not meant to say that.’ Then there was the threat of legal action: ‘The laws of libel at the time prevented one telling anything like the whole truth about McMahon.’94

  McMahon and his office were certainly aware that there were image problems. They accepted offers of help from everyone they could. In December 1971, the newsreader for Frank Packer’s GTV-9 Melbourne, Eric Pearce, offered advice on McMahon’s ‘television technique[s]’, and an American management consultancy, McKinsey and Co., was called in to offer advice.95 The following June, the chairman of Channel 10, Ken Humphreys, was offering suggestions and facilities so McMahon could practise his television appearances. ‘This is a very important issue and will become more so,’ Humphreys said of the new medium.96 Humphreys would renew the offer again in August, just as another Frank Packer employee, TCN-9 producer and director Brian Morelli, was engaged by McMahon’s office to provide advice.97 Observing that McMahon performed better when he was relaxed, Morelli sought ways to ensure the prime minister could be comfortable. Some of his solutions were simple: when McMahon was interviewed by British talk-show host David Frost a few days after the budget, Morelli insisted on McMahon sitting to Frost’s right, where his hearing was better.98 In response, McMahon turned in a performance that was both amusing and revealing. To Frost’s question of whether he prayed for things, McMahon cautiously admitted yes. ‘Would you pray for something like victory at an election?’ Frost followed up.

  McMahon shrugged, grinned, and sheepishly said, to considerable laughter, yes.99

  It was a ‘magnificently direct answer’, Frost told him, but there were others who thought it a wretched thing to say. ‘Personally I thought it was in deplorable taste,’ Reid wrote. ‘I don’t believe in bringing either God or wives into political wrangles.’100

  Whitlam, for his part, knew that there was more to McMahon than the comic image; indeed, Whitlam offered one of the most pointed and accurate assessments of McMahon’s character. When his turn came to speak with Frost, Whitlam precisely identified one of McMahon’s defining qualities and admitted it was one he admired: McMahon’s persistence. ‘His persistence …’ Frost repeated. ‘In the face of …?’

  ‘He stuck to his guns when he was very badly treated by Mr McEwen and he won, he broke through,’ Whitlam elaborated. ‘Some other people who would have had it like Barwick, if he’d stayed, or Hasluck, if he’d stayed — they missed out, they didn’t
have the persistence. McMahon did.’101

  Whitlam’s ability to recognise this quality also allowed him to perceive how McMahon was positioning the government, to see through the noise and chaos to the strategy McMahon was pursuing. The Labor leader understood that McMahon’s persistence had ensured the coming election would not be a landslide for the ALP. Whatever the optimism of those who surrounded him, nothing could be taken for granted. ‘McMahon was an extraordinarily skillful, resourceful, and tenacious politician,’ Whitlam would write, later. ‘McMahon tried, not altogether without success, to bestride two horses. He claimed to be the real heir to Menzies, yet he claimed to recognise and accept the need for change in a changing world. This balancing act,’ Whitlam thought, ‘he did with some skill.’102

  And yet there was no doubt that McMahon was straining, almost desperately, to keep himself and the government afloat. ‘In his little lonely office the once dapper, fighting-fit McMahon began to look pale and harassed,’ recalled Edgar Holt, a Liberal Party public-relations officer with experience going back to Menzies. ‘The effort of making decisions, the big ones, making or breaking his future, seemed to draw hugely on his physical and mental reserves. Often, members of his staff would look anxiously through the peep-hole that overlooked the prime minister’s room and see him sitting at his desk, pale, head back, knuckles white as he gripped the arms of the chair.’103

  AROUND 9 October, McMahon began writing to his ministers to say that the government should now avoid new major policy measures. It was time for the election. He sought from Bunting clarification over possible election dates, when the governor-general would be available, and a memo on how supply would be ensured through an election period.