Davis nevertheless encountered resistance. Sinclair scorned the idea of issuing press statements. ‘You can’t manufacture news,’ he said.41 MacDonald told Davis people were suspicious of him: ‘A lot of people are not very happy about you joining us, you know.’42 Davis was unrepentant. It was his job to provide an expertise that seemed otherwise absent. He advised McMahon on what colour shirts to wear: ‘No, Mr Mac, yellow’s not good for TV — blue or pink is fine.’43 In a campaign visit to Moonee Ponds, someone handed McMahon a Chiko roll. Aware of rumours about McMahon’s sexuality and words that could flow from an inopportune photo, Davis snatched it away. ‘Oh, what did you do that for?’ McMahon asked. Davis did not enlighten him.
‘It was commonsense really,’ Davis said later. ‘I looked good because no one else was doing it. Billy called the staff in then and said, “Do anything this man wants.” Of course that had the effect of losing his staff’s support from that moment on, but I coped. They came around.’44
But McMahon would not always be agreeable or amenable to advice. He resisted Davis’s urging to do away with the teleprompter, and he would not always accept guidance on what to say. On 23 November, as he prepped for a television interview with Channel 7, McMahon told Davis that he was going to talk about how much he had done as the party’s leader, how he had taken decisions himself. Davis told him immediately it would be a silly thing to do and not to do it. Had McMahon not been lauding his cabinet only recently? Had he not been comparing it, favourably, with Whitlam’s shadow cabinet? Would this not sound like criticism of his cabinet? But McMahon would not be dissuaded.45 When he was asked during the interview what he had learned over the past twenty months of his prime ministership, he answered without hesitation:
McMahon: I have learned a lot. I have learned, first of all, the fact that I now must make more decisions than I had intentions of making when I first became the Prime Minister. I wanted to be the head of a team. I wanted to delegate the authority to the relevant Ministers responsible for the Departments.
Interviewer: What went wrong with that principle?
McMahon: I couldn’t get the work done quickly enough and I found frequently that the political approaches to it were not as good as I thought they should be. So from September last year I gradually started to change, and I have been changing a little more quickly as the days have gone by — and I believe with success.46
McMahon undoubtedly believed the comments. He had long spoken of his belief that he was the engine room of the government, that he was both its best political judge and actor. He had told newspapers and businessmen, associates, and people in the Liberal Party of his frustration with his colleagues in the ministry: that they were unable to make the right decisions, that he had to carry the government on his own back. ‘You know, I had to fight for every one of those initiatives. All of them,’ he told two journalists on a flight from Adelaide to Melbourne.47 But however true McMahon felt these were, they were poor sentiments to voice during an election campaign. Bolstering his own image in this way undermined his colleagues. ‘It was an inept answer,’ John Howard thought.48
‘I’m worried about that,’ Davis said to MacDonald, when he heard McMahon. ‘It looks like criticism of the ministry.’ MacDonald told him not to worry, that McMahon had said it all before: ‘There’s nothing new in it.’49 Unfortunately, two journalists — the ABC’s Ken Begg and News Ltd’s Robert Baudino — were in the studio listening to McMahon speak. They reported the comments immediately, before anyone could intervene to have them edited or cut from the programme. ‘Well, he’s fucked himself now,’ Baudino said.
It took very little time for McMahon to realise that he had erred. Amid a wave of telephone calls and criticism, he soon realised the gravity of the mistake. Initially, he lashed out and attempted to blame Davis, who turned to Sonia. ‘Mrs Mac, you’ve got to help,’ Davis said. ‘What did I tell him?’50 But Sonia knew that McMahon required support, too. On a plane from Brisbane to Sydney, seeing him sitting silent and shattered, she knelt in the aisle, by his seat, to hold his hand. She refused entreaties from the flight attendant to return to her own seat. ‘I will stay here,’ she said.
When the plane landed, Davis had a statement issued denying that McMahon had intended any kind of reflection on his ministry and asserting that his remarks had been ‘misconstrued’. The real issue, the statement went on, was Whitlam’s twenty-seven-man cabinet and how impracticable it would be.51 The statement did nothing to alter the consensus that McMahon had stumbled again; if anything, it simply drew more attention to the issue.
McMahon’s ministers were aghast. Anthony was scathing of the blunder. ‘My Party worked flat out to try to keep in harmony with McMahon until the last week when he made that statement that he couldn’t trust our Party and some of his own members,’ he recalled. ‘It put us in a difficult position.’52 Snedden buried his head in his hands when he saw the comments broadcast. ‘It’s the end,’ he said. ‘We’re finished.’53 Howson despaired of the headlines as much as of what followed: when he tried to find guidance for a suitable response, he could get nothing from McMahon’s campaign.54 McMahon’s allies were blunt about the effect the comments had. ‘If you hadn’t lost it already, you did it tonight on TV,’ Harry Bland told McMahon over the phone.55
The fallout caused the government to change its tactics. New South Wales DLP senator Jack Kane had warned McMahon that the election was likely to be lost without some eye-catching issue to campaign on, and thus pushed for an attack on the ‘permissive society’, on abortion, on censorship. New South Wales premier Bob Askin, who had already been speaking on these issues, agreed on grounds that it could put Labor on the run, particularly amid a planned all-out bombardment from religious groups and the DLP on Labor’s policy regarding abortion. The hesitation in McMahon’s office faded once the results of that weekend’s Gallup poll became known. Labor’s forecast 49 per cent share of the vote dwarfed the 41 per cent polled for the Liberal and Country parties. The voices in McMahon’s office spoke as one: he should go on the attack.
Phil Davis urged McMahon to do it. He enlisted Sonia’s help to convince McMahon. While travelling to a campaign stop, Davis told McMahon that abortion was an issue in the campaign. ‘Before he could answer, I said, “What do you think, Mrs Mac?” And she and I had this conversation that we had pre-planned. And Billy ran with it.’56 But whether McMahon believed it was another matter. ‘I’m not sure that the PM really had his heart in that line of advocacy,’ Howard would say later.57
Nonetheless, what appeared on the following Monday’s Sydney Morning Herald was a full-throated attack on Labor’s policies on ‘moral issues’.58 McMahon’s campaign had issued a statement to the press that called attention to differences between the government and Labor, and papers like the Herald ran it almost in totum. Although admitting that morals should be private and a matter for individual conscience, McMahon argued that if moral actions impinged on others and were likely to corrupt them, the government should intervene. Therefore, his government did not believe in abortion on demand or request, but there was justification for ‘therapeutic abortion’. Drug addicts should receive treatment, yes — but ‘we would not, as some Labor Party members urge, remove the penalties for drug-taking, including marihuana’. And while the government should not be heavy-handed or paternalistic on censorship issues, it was his view that ‘the Australian people expect us to act on hard-core pornography and we will continue to do so’.59 Askin was similarly inflammatory: ‘When people declare that their private lives are no concern of the government or of anyone else, they are talking like a cancerous cell that no longer obeys the laws of the body.’60
Was this line of attack effective? Only a day later, divisions among Catholic and Protestant clergy over the question of a conscience vote on abortion, as well as dissension over the effectiveness of both party’s policies on poverty, suggested that moral issues were eye-catching but not necessarily likely
to gain traction for the government.61 Admissions from McMahon’s ministers that they had different ideas about abortion, censorship, drugs, and pornography also made the attacks less effective. By 29 November, when McMahon attended a scheduled lunch at the National Press Club (where he would speak and turn the sod for the new site), it seemed that the issue had failed. Under questioning from journalists, McMahon admitted that, like Labor’s policy had it, he would prefer a conscience vote on abortion, were it to come up in the Parliament.62
But McMahon would never stop searching for a way to regain the initiative and sharpen the lines of difference with Labor. Some of his criticisms and arguments were prescient. In his speech to the Press Club, McMahon went to great lengths to cite the economic effects of Labor’s promises, should they be enacted. He argued that Whitlam’s stated reliance on the continued growth of Commonwealth receipts to pay for his promises were ‘too clever by half’ and unrealistic. Arguing that Whitlam was attempting to buy his way into office, McMahon pointed out that estimates of the costs of Labor’s promises were $1,330m — against $375m for his own election proposals. ‘That is four times the cost,’ McMahon said. ‘Either taxes will have to be increased or many of Labor’s promises would have to be quietly dropped as forgotten election gimmicks.’ It was all ‘Mandrake economics’, McMahon said.63 According to Gaul, the attack was not insincere: ‘He was very apprehensive about the size of the promises Labor was making for the 1972 election.’64
McMahon also tried to revive questions about who would control Labor and the type of administration Australians could expect under an ALP government. ‘It may well be that a Labor government in the 1970s would be more subject to outside, non-elected direction than in the 1940s,’ he said. ‘It is certainly true that the influence of the left-wing unions through Mr Hawke and the ACTU executive is stronger.’ McMahon cited his ‘good friend’ Bob Askin’s claim that Labor wished to ‘murder’ the state governments. McMahon criticised Labor’s tendency for centralism and the growth of government power. ‘The whole thrust of the socialist takeover scheme is the concentration of all political power here in Canberra,’ he said.65 Coming barely seven days after his comment that he wished the Commonwealth could secure powers to control prices and wages, the attack was ineffective.66 Neither issue — union control nor Labor’s centralism — would bite during those final days. They were too late, and too shopworn from use in elections of the past. ‘We decided to kick the commie can at the end of the campaign, which went down like a lead balloon,’ Davis recalled. ‘We made an error there. I should have talked him [McMahon] out of that one.’67
McMahon had known that the speech at the Press Club was important. He had chosen the date knowing it was the final occasion on which political matters could be broadcast on television and radio before the mandated election blackout, and had thought the occasion significant enough to use the preceding day to prepare for it. But his aim of delivering an effective speech was almost immediately undermined by his manner. When he reached the stage and faced the room, he turned away, sheltering his face behind his arm. The lights were too bright. He gesticulated for the television crews to turn them down. ‘It was something an ordinary person might do,’ one journalist thought. ‘That was the trouble.’68
There was also the unfavourable contrast with Whitlam. Only two days before, Whitlam had arrived and spoken without notes, confidently and proudly. McMahon, however, had insisted on using the autocue. Gripping its edges, microphones aimed at his sternum, he read his speech dutifully, carefully. Representatives of the Press Club were displeased. To their ‘considerable annoyance’, the lectern that bore the Press Club’s name had been replaced by the autocue. Moreover, the need for an uninterrupted line of sight between McMahon and the autocue operator created an opportunity for confusion to occur. ‘The autocue operator had a good view as long as everyone was sitting down,’ Peter Sekuless, the club’s treasurer, recalled, ‘but as waiters flitted back and forth along the official table his view was blocked and the prime minister’s flow of words became erratic.’69
McMahon’s gratuitous complaints about the burden he carried as prime minister tinged coverage as the campaign went into the blackout period. ‘What I would change most, if I could, would be to get quicker decisions in government itself,’ he said. ‘And I would also wish to change the quantity of work that has to be handled by the prime minister, so that he can tend to the important issues that have to be faced and make quick decisions on those issues. The critical [element] for me has been the amount of work that comes across my table. Much of it could be handled by somebody else.’ It was silly. He sounded small, not up to the task of being prime minister. Then he lashed out at the press. On This Day Tonight, he said that the press had tried to destroy Harold Holt and John Gorton, and was now trying to do the same to him. He said that some sections of the press had ‘tasted blood’ and thought it good to destroy the Liberal Party.70 ‘I think now there has been more unfairness than I can remember for a long time,’ he said elsewhere. ‘… Some sections of the media, particularly one section, have been malevolent, even malicious.’71
MCMAHON’S complaints about the media were not incorrect — but he hardly told the full story. Some sections of the media were adamantly opposed to him; others were still in his favour. What became notable over the course of the campaign was the ways that the government reacted to these allies and enemies, and its hurt when its long-held advantages in the media were overturned.
That Sir Frank Packer might try to help McMahon, for example, was a given — but his initial interventions, in mid-November, were so clumsy and heavy-handed that they did not pass muster.72 At seven o’clock on 15 November, just as stations in the Channel 9 network expected to see the weekly broadcast of A Current Affair, an editorial written by David McNicoll was played instead. ‘It will not take the solid, middle-of-the-road voter long to work out which policy — Mr Whitlam’s or Mr McMahon’s — is the best for Australia and the best for him,’ it began. The editorial pasted Labor as decadent, secretive, unrealistic, and McMahon’s government as entirely the opposite. But the broadcast came unstuck almost immediately. Mike Willesee, compère of A Current Affair, complained that he had not known of it, and Colin Bednall, a former managing director for Packer at GTV-9 now standing for Labor in the seat of Flinders, angrily pointed out that the editorial had breached the Broadcasting and Television Act.73 Bednall was quite right, but the ability of the Australian Broadcasting Control Board to enforce a penalty — such as demanding equal time for Labor — was non-existent. A week later, with brazen impunity, TCN-9 and GTV-9 would screen another editorial criticising Labor. Staffers in Packer’s employ were never particularly embarrassed by what they did. Clyde Packer admitted that he had deliberately kept Labor people out of the news, and the company continued to allow Brian Morelli to help McMahon’s television campaign. Moreover, strong evidence would later emerge that Packer had given almost $19,000 worth of free television advertising time to the DLP.74
Other press organisations were less friendly, more intractable, unrelentingly hostile. McMahon was not imagining it: there were journalists who took no small degree of pleasure in chronicling every fault and flaw in the campaign. Gaul was certain of it: ‘I had to deal with them every day, and I can attest to that.’75
Richard Farmer, a self-described ‘strange little git with long hair and everything’ who had written for Maxwell Newton but now wrote for The Daily Telegraph, provoked anger with his coverage of McMahon’s campaign. Assigned to write a column that took readers behind the scenes, Farmer took regular shots at McMahon. ‘That was my job: to make fun of this man, wherever I could,’ Farmer explained later. ‘[Rupert] Murdoch had decided he had to go.’ McMahon had no idea that complaining about Farmer would be ineffectual. After antagonising McMahon with a particular line of questioning, Farmer received a telephone call from Murdoch. McMahon had telephoned him, Murdoch said, to demand that Farmer be reined in or transferred
from the campaign. But Murdoch would do no such thing; in fact, he would alter long-held plans for Farmer to cover Whitlam’s campaign. ‘You’d better stick with McMahon the whole way,’ Murdoch said.76
On Wednesday 22 November, while arguing that his government was keeping up with the times, McMahon told a radio audience about the review of Australia’s policy on China that he had initiated while minister for foreign affairs. ‘Everyone should get a copy of it and read it,’ he intoned. But when reporters tried to do so, they found that the review was secret. It would not be released until it was declassified; its contents would not be known unless it was leaked. When quizzed, McMahon’s team claimed that McMahon had referred to a speech, not a briefing. Writing about this for the next day’s Telegraph, Farmer was sceptical. ‘Could a copy be made available so the Australian people could see this memorable document? Well, unfortunately, no.’77
When McMahon read that report the next day, while on the plane to Hobart, he grew angry. After the plane had landed, he spied Farmer emerging from the steps near the tail. He broke off from talking with the delegation that had turned out to meet him, walked across to Farmer, and began to harangue him about the report, saying that he was wrong, that he had referred to a speech. Farmer was unmoved: all he had done was report what had happened. This calm response seemed to make McMahon angrier. ‘He was furious,’ Farmer said later. McMahon seemed out of control to Farmer, so much so that he thought McMahon might hit him. Recalling that McMahon had once boxed tempered Farmer’s willingness to continue the conversation. Davis intervened when it became clear that the argument was becoming dangerously heated. How about they discussed this elsewhere, later, he suggested pointedly, and not in view of the cameras?
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