Tiberius with a Telephone

by Patrick Mullins

  Speculation about the election date had been lively for a considerable time. As Whitlam was to joke, there had even been speculation about the date that the election date would be announced. The dwindling number of possible dates narrowed the possibilities, but there were still difficulties and pettiness involved. Seeking to get his party ready, Anthony went to see McMahon to ask him when the election would be held. McMahon refused to tell him. ‘There were only three people who would know, and I wasn’t one of them,’ Anthony said later, of the conversation the two had. It was a sign of how much McMahon distrusted Anthony and how zealous he was of his prerogative to call an election when he saw fit.

  Exasperated, Anthony saw that it was no use arguing. He decided that the electoral officer would have to be aware of the date. So, too, would Sonia McMahon. Neither of them was likely to tell him, so Anthony gave thought to the third person. Eventually, he decided that it must be Jack Marshall, the relatively recently installed prime minister of New Zealand. ‘I had a very good relationship with Jack, and the two countries had been having elections on the same day for a few years,’ Anthony said. ‘So I rang him and asked about his election date.’ Marshall told Anthony that his election would be held on the same day as Australia’s. Anthony thanked him and began to organise his party.104

  Anthony made no secret of his belief that the election would be called for the same day as New Zealand’s — 25 November — so he could not have been happy when McMahon rose in the House on 10 October to announce the election date as 2 December. Whitlam, when he replied, mocked them both: ‘Certainly one now has a magnificent example of the trust, the confidence, the comradeship between the two leaders of the coalition.’ Declaiming that he was assuming the mantle of Napoleon, Whitlam could not help but note that the election date would be the anniversary of the Battle of Austerlitz: ‘A date on which a crushing defeat was administered to a coalition — a ramshackle, reactionary coalition.’105

  The next two weeks of Parliament ran with the spectre of the imminent campaign hanging over all parties. Howson was optimistic, reasonably confident, even. ‘It’s been a good session,’ he wrote. ‘We’ve certainly come out of it with a much higher morale than we started, and all of us feel that we’re ahead of the opposition. If we can maintain this momentum, we should have no difficulty in winning the election.’106 Bert Kelly had completely the opposite view. ‘It hasn’t been a great session … I would think, for the good of the country, Labor ought to have a turn.’107 Most within the party, the opposition, and the media concurred. Published polls agreed that the government would lose, though a poll commissioned in Melbourne suggested that it might be otherwise with Gorton as leader. But there was not enough time to act. McMahon would take the party to the election.

  On 1 November, McMahon came to Government House to advise Paul Hasluck to dissolve the House of Representatives. The two talked for about forty-five minutes. According to Hasluck, the prime minister believed that the Coalition would pick up two seats in Western Australia — Forrest and Stirling — and two further seats, those of St George and Eden-Monaro, in New South Wales. ‘Some people had told him that he would also win three seats in Victoria, including Bendigo,’ Hasluck recorded, ‘but he “did not know about that”.’ The Coalition would not lose any seats except, potentially, that of Evans, held by Malcolm Mackay. If McMahon was simply putting on a brave face, Hasluck could not tell. The prime minister was making plans for the future, patting himself on the back. He talked of the good reception he was getting, and expressed confidence in the strength of the economy. He gave himself ‘personal credit’ for the recent good economic news. He told the governor-general that party meetings would be held on 14 December and that a new ministry would be sworn in on 18 December. Parliament would resume in February the next year. ‘He expressed complete confidence in victory,’ Hasluck recorded.108

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Finishing

  1984

  McMahon’s moods grew worse. He was increasingly irascible, petty, and mean. He was horrible to his staff and visitors. A casual typist who arrived in the office to type Bowman’s drafts was quickly sent on her way. Bowman was disgusted. When the typist had arrived, McMahon had murmured to Bowman that she was not the one he had wanted. And when the typist off-handedly mentioned that the work was going slowly, the former prime minister had all the reasons he needed. ‘He was dissatisfied with her output in the morning and fired her,’ Bowman wrote in his diary. Bowman thought the typist’s work was perfectly fine, and to make amends he tried to have Campbell ring the typing firm to explain. In the meantime, Bowman fumed. ‘He [McMahon] really is a dreadful old turd.’

  That same day, McMahon called Bowman into his office to talk about an invoice that Campbell had handed him the day before. It was for three months’ work, and was accompanied by a request for an advance on any future work. Bowman backed Campbell. His understanding and observation over these past months, he told McMahon, had been that Campbell was working full-time. He reminded McMahon that the job he had originally been hired to do was nothing like the job he was doing — and that it would take longer than the six months he had been hired for. Campbell was integral to getting the job done. It was imperative that Campbell be kept on so that Bowman could use him. McMahon seemed to accept this. But then, as always, came a quibble: ‘I’m not paying him $4,000 and more.’1

  The office was filled with tension again — over how long the next typist would last, whether Campbell would get paid, on the progress that Bowman was making. It took over a week for it to begin to dissipate. McMahon got the next arriving typist to accept a payment of $8 per hour, instead of her agency’s $15, and Campbell gave McMahon a note stating that his bill was ‘not a gun’ at McMahon’s head.2 But the third cause of the tension could only be delayed, not resolved. On 18 May, McMahon went to the Gold Coast with new, Bowman-authored drafts of the first four chapters, the last chapter not so secretly copied by the new typist on McMahon’s orders. ‘It’s another of his monkey tricks,’ Bowman all but sighed in his diary.3

  When McMahon returned, he was upset. He did not like what he had read, did not like the structure of the chapters, and he was panicking about the lack of progress. Bowman had his own schedule in mind — a chapter a week, he had decided — and was by now working on the seventh chapter. But this was not quick enough for McMahon. Bowman reminded him of their conversation the previous week, emphasising that the job had turned out not to be an editing job, but a writing one. ‘I refused to say when it [the book] might be finished; I said that it had been clear from the outset that it could not be done in the six months I had been willing to give to editing. It would now require months more.’4

  Blunt talk like this provoked McMahon. He told Bowman that twenty people were pressing him for the manuscript. If the book did not come out by the end of the year then he would be forgotten, he said. It needed to be published in September — barely four months away!

  Bowman was incredulous, but McMahon was still going. Bowman should go back to editing the manuscript. Richard Smart had been looking for him to do just that, after all.

  Bowman cut in. ‘Fine, let Smart find someone to edit it.’ He was unable to do so, he went on. The work was of an impossible standard.

  ‘That’s an insult,’ McMahon said.

  Bowman ignored this, and McMahon suggested they meet with Smart. Bowman agreed wholeheartedly. ‘He rang Smart — tried to get him to agree that the MS needed only a bit of improvement for easier reading,’ Bowman wrote in his diary. But on the other end of the telephone call, Smart wisely kept his distance. When McMahon mentioned a meeting, the conversation ended almost immediately. ‘He doesn’t think a meeting now would serve any purpose,’ McMahon told Bowman, after hanging up.

  Bowman was satisfied: ‘An excellent outcome! It shows WM that he is on very shaky ground.’

  The to-ing and fro-ing went on. Bowman reiterated that everything he produc
ed was a draft — if McMahon wanted more of the 1961 letters to Menzies, they could be added in an appendix; if he did not want Holt praised so much in the chapter on labour and national service, then he could cut it out later. It was a draft. Moreover, Bowman said, McMahon’s going through the draft and rewriting it, after Bowman had drafted it, was perfectly agreeable. These statements resolved nothing.5

  The difficulties could hardly be said to have been unexpected. For all of McMahon’s idiosyncracies and demands, he was hardly different from other politicians. The former British prime minister Anthony Eden famously gave his ghostwriters hell as he worked on his autobiography. Unsatisfactory drafts would be the subject of fierce, detailed, and harsh critiques; efforts that Eden found especially wanting would be hurled out the window, onto the flowerbeds outside.6 Churchill, too, could be sharp with assistants who were short on facts, and was not above marking up drafts five or six times over.7

  Nonetheless, by Friday, the tension in the office was thick again. Bowman and McMahon were not talking, and McMahon was trying to keep Bowman and Campbell from speaking, too. This latter effort was unsuccessful: Campbell told Bowman that McMahon had paid him $2,000 — not everything he was owed, but enough that Campbell was willing to stay on until the end of June.

  Things had not improved by the following week. McMahon was muddled, tired, and flustered. On the Monday, he called Bowman into the office and demanded to know what he was working on. Bowman told him that he was up to the Treasury period — he had stated this in a note that he had given to McMahon on Friday, along with a completed draft of the seventh chapter. Bowman told McMahon he was reading McMahon’s original draft on the Treasury at that very moment:

  He then in an extremely muddled way began to talk about some aspects of Chapter 7, without actually referring to the chapter. He sought from George some file material which in fact I had affixed to the draft chapter for reference and George was unaware of the material. When I referred to other aspects of the chapter it was clear that they had gone out of his mind, and he had only the vaguest notion of what was actually in it.

  The conversation was directionless, trailing into irrelevancies and questions, claims, and sources. Midway, with Bowman still there in the office, McMahon called his brother, Sam. He wanted to know all about when Roland Wilson, the secretary to the Treasury, telephoned Sam for information about McMahon, who was apparently being very tough on Roland. Sam promised to put some thoughts down on paper, and rang off. A subsequent tangent, on Sonia’s family and her background and where to place it in the book, prompted ‘real enthusiasm’ from McMahon: ‘He seems to envisage acres devoted to it.’ But this, too, fizzled. Then there was another spurt of activity. Campbell was hauled into the office and questioned whether Menzies had made an announcement about state aid while at Waverley College on 20 October 1963. To his cautious answer that, yes, Menzies had made the announcement, at least according to one source, McMahon seemed satisfied: ‘It was good enough.’ But then Campbell returned to announce that his source had just telephoned to say that she had not been present herself at the announcement, but that she knew of another person who had been. McMahon told Bowman and Campbell to check with that source. The ghostwriter was exasperated. Already certain that McMahon was wrong, he just saw further wasted time.

  After Campbell left, the conversation about the book resumed as though it had never been interrupted. McMahon seemed not to have deviated from his original line. He kept telling Bowman that Smart had said that all that was necessary was to make the manuscript a bit more readable. The book had to be in his style, he said. The thought seemed to agitate him. It had to be in his style.

  And then, from there, McMahon seemed just to give way. As though his moods and demands had stemmed wholly from this one cause, he deflated. He began talking about his general state of being, his health, and his mind. ‘I’m nearly seventy-seven,’ he said plaintively. The previous week had been dreadful. A trip away, over the weekend, had been too much for him. He had to have a private secretary to take care of things for him.

  The opportunity was too good to pass up. He had had enough, Bowman decided impulsively. ‘Well, Bill,’ he interrupted, ‘would you like me to finish up?’

  McMahon did not respond. Ten minutes of idle, rambling conversation followed. But then, soon, in a roundabout way, he mentioned that, well, yes, he would like to get a secretary. Bowman could finish up. Yes. The two men agreed that Bowman would finish up his work at the end of June — in three weeks’ time.

  ‘For the rest of the day he was quite communicative and friendly,’ Bowman recalled. And so, for a short while again, all seemed well.8

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  In Calm and in Crisis

  1972

  McMahon was starting from behind. He knew it and he felt it. Once Parliament was dissolved and the election campaign began, the pressure upon him became immense. In spite of the confidence with which he had fronted Hasluck, McMahon was on edge. Edgar Holt, who had been dragooned into McMahon’s office once the campaign started, found the prime minister ‘tense, highly strung, and looking for signs and portents’.1 John Howard, the metropolitan vice-president of the New South Wales Liberal Party, had joined McMahon’s office in October with the task of building better links between the office and the party organisation. Howard thought McMahon embattled, ‘nervous about his prospects and suspicious of the MPs around him’.2 This impression did not change during the campaign. Bad news and criticism took a toll on McMahon. As Peter Howson was to say, ‘As soon as he gets depressed, he shows it, and one has a continual state of troubles. Therefore, as much as one would like to criticise him at various times, one always has to remember the long-term effect of criticism.’3

  From the outset, there seemed rarely a prospect that McMahon would be able to hold Whitlam back. There were few omens that he might pull off a miracle. The struggle was constant. ‘The campaign was very difficult,’ Jonathan Gaul would say.4 On the first weekend, 4 November, a Gallup poll showed that the government’s support had fallen, down from 45 per cent to 42 per cent, against Labor’s 47 per cent. It was a ‘bombshell’, and in the party there was a ‘fair bit of gloom’ about.5 Then there were problems putting together the policy speech that McMahon would give on 14 November. When McMahon gave a draft of the speech to Doug Anthony, essentially as a gesture of goodwill, his deputy reacted immediately. A proposal to establish a Department of Secondary Industry received short shrift: it had to go, he said. Anthony was also concerned by the proposal to give eighteen-year-olds the right to vote; after consultations with the Country Party organisation, Anthony insisted that it also come out of the speech.6

  No one knew what would make it in. It was a ‘scramble’, Edgar Holt recalled. Drafts were written, revised, cut apart, and stitched back together. ‘For incomprehensible reasons, unless it was because Menzies wrote his own policy speeches and revealed them like Holy Writ,’ Holt would say later, ‘… McMahon preserved the traditional exercise of policy-speech production without any of Menzies’ feeling for words’.7 The problem of McMahon’s facility with words was exacerbated by the need to deliver the policy speech on television.

  McMahon had practised delivering the speech for more than a week. Concerned by the prospect of hecklers, the decision had been taken to eschew a public delivery; aware that there might be need to break up the taping into segments, McMahon’s office also decided to tape it without an audience. In his office in Sydney, McMahon practised again and again, receiving feedback from his staff and Sonia. But their well-meant criticism began to grate. His temper frayed. Eventually, he was heard to mutter that if he could not please anyone he might as well record the speech with his head in a toilet bowl.8

  When the time came to tape the speech, on Sunday 12 November, McMahon was tired, moody, frustrated. It took four hours to tape all of the segments to a standard that Brian Morelli — seconded from TCN-9 for the duration of the campaign — wa
s satisfied with. Screened on 14 November, the speech outlined a substantial programme in domestic policy issues, with a particular focus on ‘young Australians’. The government would help young people buy land for houses by guaranteeing loans, and by paying half of the annual interest on a housing loan, up to a limit of $250, in the first year, and $25 less for each year that followed. McMahon lauded the significant increases his government had made in education spending, and announced plans to provide $25m to expand pre-school education, to double the number of technical scholarships to 5,000 per year, to offer an allowance of $400 per year for students in isolated areas, and $10m spending per year on primary school libraries. There would be a free, nation-wide dental scheme for school children; the government would match state government spending on community health services; and it would peg increases in the aged, invalid, and widows’ pensions to the consumer price index.

  McMahon also spoke about urban affairs and the National Urban and Regional Development Authority, highlighting that the authority would begin its work in land acquisition and building with $80m per year. He promised to spend $1,250m on roads over five years, $330m on improving public transport, and to link all state capitals and Alice Springs with the standard-gauge railway system. McMahon reaffirmed the selective immigration system and, because there was now a need to ‘identify in positive terms the role of women in our society’, said that a re-elected Liberal-Country Party government would hold a royal commission into improving the status of women in Australia.9

  McMahon emphasised the government’s economic record, and argued that the fight against inflation was close to won. Buoyed by that day’s release of the unemployment figures, which showed a drop from the high of 1.96 per cent, McMahon pledged that his government would continue its ‘responsible, sound policies’.