Tiberius with a Telephone

by Patrick Mullins

  I only agreed to the 1971–72 budget on the basis that if their [Treasury’s] estimates turned out to be correct, and I believed they would turn out to be correct, then they would have to give me another budget because I said they were confused with the various types of inflationary pressures, cost pressures, and demand pressures. They gave me an assurance on the third of September when America went off gold and out of Bretton Woods. I got the Reserve Bank and the Treasury together and told them they would have to give me a mini-budget. They both said I was silly but I called another meeting three weeks later and Treasury said I was still wrong. Reserve said I was right. I asked them to give me a mini-budget. It took me until the twenty-first of May [1972] to get it and if you see the correspondence on it and the records of conversation, you would be horrified. So you can’t get this inbredness, this self-centredness, this determination to run their own race because nobody else knew what was good or what was right, so I do agree with you.

  Towards the end of the session, McMahon said that he had two points to make. The first was on wasted resources. The second, in the event, escaped him. ‘The other point I have forgotten, but when I do remember it in the car …’

  ‘Would you let us know?’

  ‘Yes, I will give you a ring,’ McMahon promised.

  He would never ease up on his criticism of ASIS and ASIO. He recounted his attempts to abolish ASIS on television in 1977, and again in 1983, when a botched mock-raid by ASIS staff resulted in a second royal commission to be headed (again) by Justice Hope. ‘ASIS should have been abolished as a non-feasible part of our intelligence service ten years ago,’ McMahon would say. ‘It is no use to any government. It is sheer madness to have the leader of the country and his top cabinet ministers kept in the dark by people who believe themselves to be under no obligation to consult or answer to their government.’66

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Never

  1984

  When Bowman handed in a formal note of his resignation on 6 June, McMahon came to his office to discuss it. ‘Yes, I accept what you say here,’ he said, pointing to the note in his hand, ‘but there is a point that isn’t here — I spoke with Smart, and twice he said it was just to be made easier to read.’

  It was back to the manuscript. For the third time, Bowman recapitulated what he had said about the changed nature of the work: how they had decided to rewrite the manuscript, how the autobiography had become a memoir, how an editing job had become a writing job. McMahon nodded, understood, agreed that this had been discussed already. But it was in one ear and out the other. He was already moving on, ignoring his ghostwriter’s advice. He intended to hand over all of the post-Menzies material to his publishers, and leave it to them to sort out, he said. He needed a private secretary, he went on, and left the office, waving the now heavily underlined note and saying as he went, ‘Don’t you worry, I accept this.’

  Soon enough, Campbell was telling Bowman that McMahon was talking about starting all over again, with the original manuscript, as though Bowman had never been there.1

  McMahon’s emphatic belief that everyone had it wrong but him affected all that he did. His book — the way to correct those views, to rebut them — was all-important. Any kind of slight on it was a slight on him, too. On 15 June, he came into the office complaining that Sonia had upset him. While out the night before, Sir Roden Cutler had asked how the work on the autobiography was going. Before he could answer, Sonia had interrupted: ‘Oh, don’t ask him about that — he’ll never be finished.’2

  She was right, but he did not want to hear it. McMahon was ready to accept any sign of progress, anything that might seem like the book was getting done. He gave Campbell an old draft of the beginning of the manuscript — potentially the first ever done, in Bowman’s opinion — and told him to type it up. Campbell’s response was to put in front of him the most recent version by Bowman and ask if he really wanted it replaced. At this, McMahon gave his best about-face: ‘He read it and said it was the best so far, and he had never seen it before. He was adamant,’ Bowman recorded. ‘Never.’3

  His moods oscillated between indecision and reverie, between pettiness and silliness, between reality and seriousness. When Phillip Lynch died on 19 June, journalists called the office for a comment, and McMahon gave a rare performance. ‘From his office,’ wrote Bowman, ‘float tributes to Lynch. Man of commonsense … Never sought the highest office but sought to serve in the national interest … Very sad … Deserves to be remembered with gratitude by the people of this country. All delivered in the most unctuous tones. No hesitation. Constant stream of words.’4 And then the next day there was the silliness: McMahon ‘lolling about in a chair, speaking with a slur, waving two fingers to show Gorton’s sexual proclivities’ as he imitated Menzies ridiculing the suggestion that Gorton might have gone to Washington as Australia’s ambassador in the 1960s.5

  Inevitably, McMahon was backsliding, forgetting, falling into the belief that all around him were failing him. On 21 June, when George Campbell rang the office to say that he would be late that day, McMahon told Cawthorn to call him back and fire him. He would not be needed, he told her. Cawthorn decided that hiring and firing staff was not her business, and did not tell Campbell.6 When Campbell returned, McMahon said nothing.

  He was jittery, frantic, disconcerted, and obsessed. ‘I’ve got to rush this book through,’ he told Cawthorn. ‘I’ve been eighteen months at it!’7

  But time was slipping away from him. Bowman was leaving, with repeated reminders that it was soon. When his ghostwriter left a note saying that Canberra needed to be informed of his imminent departure, McMahon hurried down to his office. ‘Yes, yes, I’ll fix that,’ he said. ‘Unless you can stay for another week?’

  Bowman would not countenance it. ‘I’m sorry — I’ve made other arrangements. I’m afraid it’s not possible. I’m sorry.’

  ‘No no,’ McMahon said, ‘that’s quite understandable.’8

  He was in the golden day’s decline, tiring and weakening. During one visit to Bowman’s office, McMahon’s announcement that he hated going out at night prompted the ghostwriter to see something ineffably sad in him. ‘He was rather pitiful, [the] poor man,’ wrote Bowman.9

  On Bowman’s final day at work, McMahon had him in for a cup of coffee. He told him about his family and an uncle who had married his housekeeper while lying on his deathbed. He told him about a journalist who was always inviting himself over for dinner, and who, when McMahon was prime minister, glowered at him while on a plane trip and told him not to speak with him. ‘My job is to cut you down, and there are others in the plane on the same mission.’ The long talk was of no use to the book. This was McMahon being nice. So, too, was his invitation, declined, that Bowman join him for a drink after work.10

  One of the ghostwriter’s last acts was to supply a list of publishers and a note to Campbell setting out where the manuscript stood. As of 29 June, there were eight fully drafted chapters completed, he said. They were to be re-drafted and revised as the rest of the book took shape, but, for the moment, they were readable and coherent, shorn of repetition and adhering to accepted fact. There were also a series of sections from the original manuscript that, while polished, did not fit into the structure of the book. A note of resignation permeated Bowman’s advice. ‘None of this matters much, at this stage anyway,’ he wrote, ‘because Sir William has taken all the material referred to above, and rewritten it and restored earlier material. I have not seen the outcome.’11

  Despite his skills and work, his efforts and the trials, Bowman had failed at the basic task of the ghostwriter: to write the book that McMahon was himself unable to write. It was a failing of both his and McMahon’s, and, understandably, not one that bothered Bowman. He was finished.

  McMahon, however, was not.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Persistence

  1975–1982

  The Li
beral and Country parties unified under Malcolm Fraser. Driven in no small part by the government’s economic woes — including what was, by early 1975, the highest levels of inflation ever known in Australia — the Coalition parties were growing increasingly concerned by the way the country was being governed. Fraser had deferred the prospect of blocking supply unless ‘reprehensible circumstances’ presented themselves; and yet, inevitably in the months that followed, those circumstances appeared to have arisen.

  The key issue was the so-called ‘Loans Affair’, in which the government sought to raise loans for large infrastructure projects by sourcing money from the Middle East, which was awash in petro-dollars following the surge in oil revenue. A Pakistani money-dealer called Tirath Khemlani promised that he could secure adequate funds, and a meeting of the Executive Council on 13 December authorised minerals and energy minister Rex Connor to seek a loan of up to US$4,000m. This authority was revoked on 7 January 1975, but three weeks later Connor would receive authority to seek US$2,000m. Leaks from the Treasury and press investigations would eventually see Connor’s authority revoked once and for all on 20 May, but claims and allegations about the effects of such a loan and payments caused a furore that was further inflamed by revelations, in June, that treasurer and deputy prime minister Jim Cairns had signed a letter promising to pay a brokerage fee for funds raised by an Australian broker. Because it contradicted Cairns’ statements in the House about such matters, Whitlam sacked the treasurer.

  Whitlam sought to avert the rising press criticism and re-establish his control of matters by calling a special sitting of Parliament and tabling all documents related to the matter. But the ploy was undermined when The Sydney Morning Herald obtained copies of telexes between Khemlani and Connor that heavily implied Connor had continued to pursue loans after his authority to do so had been revoked. Whitlam was forced to sack Connor — not for continuing to communicate with Khemlani when his authority had been revoked, but for causing Whitlam to mislead Parliament when he tabled all the documents relating to the loan-raising attempts.

  McMahon was scathing about the Whitlam government’s conduct. Speaking in June, McMahon ticked off a litany of failures: the Murphy raid on ASIO, the Gair affair, and the way that Whitlam had forced the resignation of Speaker Jim Cope.1 Not a month later, he was speaking caustically about the Loans Affair. During the special sitting that Whitlam called in July, McMahon compared his record in raising loans overseas with Labor’s, and pointed out the importance of maintaining Australia’s credit rating:

  What we are arguing about now is the means adopted by the Australian Labor Party to get these loans, that is about those it has treated as agents, the degree of secrecy and the motivation for that secrecy … The Cairns and Khemlani affairs have made us a laughing stock.2

  Fear that Australia’s reputation was sinking into the mire, as well as an awareness that the government still had at least eighteen months to run until the next (scheduled) election, Fraser announced that the opposition had decided that the threshold of ‘reprehensible circumstances’ had been met: ‘We must use the power vested in us by the Constitution and delay the passage of the government’s money Bills through the Senate, until the Parliament goes to the people.’3

  McMahon was wholly in favour of this decision. As he told students while appearing at the University of New South Wales on 21 October, the opposition had the ‘legal power’ to stop appropriation Bills, and on moral grounds the time was right for an election. ‘We would be wise to reject the appropriation Bills,’ he said. ‘The present federal government crisis should be put to the vote.’ Students at the university were not convinced: between the cheers, some heckled and threw fruit peels at him.4

  Two days later, McMahon appeared alongside Neville Wran, leader of the opposition in New South Wales, at a meeting at Macquarie University. Understandably, given the intense coverage that the issue was getting, McMahon spoke about the Loans Affair and the opposition decision to block supply. It was a wide-ranging talk. McMahon said that he did not believe the House of Representatives should determine who governed the country, as Whitlam had recently stated. ‘My own view is that the people of this country are sovereign,’ he said. ‘They should be given a vote to decide what government they want … I want the people to be able to express their views freely and adequately. It’s time they were given the chance to do so.’ McMahon was dismissive of Khemlani, calling him ‘Old rice and monkey nuts,’ and he argued that because of the dubious caveat that the government’s sought-after loans were only ever to be temporary, there had been a conspiracy to undermine the constitution. Under section 86 of the constitution, that was a criminal offence, he said. After discussing the economy, McMahon emphasised yet again that ‘we have to get him [Whitlam] out and let the people judge’.

  The first question that he was faced with, however, spurred a deeper explanation of what McMahon thought should not happen once supply had been blocked or rejected. Asked to describe the power the governor-general possessed under the constitution to dissolve Parliament, McMahon answered that, per Edmund Barton and Quick and Garran’s Annotated Constitution, the prerogative rights of the Queen’s representative and the demitted powers of the governor-general in council ‘can never be executed without the advice of a responsible minister’.5 There might be room for exceptions, McMahon admitted. Should a governor-general get involved? According to McMahon, the answer was no:

  I would be fearful of the exercise of such a power by the governor-general in his own right. It could well involve an appointment to this office, which is part of the constitutional government, for purely political purposes. We don’t want this happening …6

  McMahon’s comments were significant, even if (as he was to say later) ‘nobody seemed to care’ about what he had said. His comments represented a very public consideration of whether the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, should intervene in the developing stand-off between Whitlam and Fraser. Fraser was apparently confident that Kerr would intervene, if unsure what that intervention would look like. For his part, Kerr, who had been appointed by Whitlam in 1974, was uncertain: he approached Nugget Coombs to ask what action he should take. Coombs told him to make the Senate vote on supply; if it would not, he should ‘dismiss either the whole Senate or that part which was due for earliest re-election’.7 Kerr approached Whitlam to ask if he could seek advice from the High Court, but, after reading advice prepared by the former solicitor-general and current Liberal MP Robert Ellicott, seemed ready to scotch the idea of intervention. ‘It’s bullshit, isn’t it?’ he said.8 Legal and political advice of varying degrees of merit and self-interest was being sent to Kerr: Menzies issued a statement that was then rebutted by the former judge of the Commonwealth Industrial Court, Sir Richard Eggleston; Richard McGarvie, a future governor of Victoria, expressed alarm at the idea of intervening; and advice prepared for the Liberal Party boiled the issue down to one of legality alone, where questions of politics, constitution, and convention were rendered irrelevant.

  Whether McMahon was aware that Kerr was looking for advice or alarmed at the prospect that Kerr might make some intervention is unknown; nonetheless, within a fortnight of making the remarks at Macquarie University, he had a copy made and sent to Government House. Rob Ashley, McMahon’s private secretary, was asked to take the sealed envelope to the gatehouse at the governor-general’s residence. ‘They’re expecting it,’ McMahon said. It was an unusual request. Delivering papers was not one of Ashley’s normal duties, nor was it normal to have him take a Commonwealth car. Delivering the envelope could well have been handled by a driver, too. The peculiarity of the request is what caused it to lodge in Ashley’s mind. ‘When I got there [to Government House],’ Ashley said later, ‘I jumped out and said, “You’re expecting these from Sir William McMahon.” And they said, “Yes, we are.”’9

  McMahon would also recall the delivery of that envelope for years. The governor-general, he would say, had ‘ack
nowledged receipt’ of it. Kerr was aware of the counsel it contained. Though it must be noted that McMahon could have altered the effect of that counsel in a covering letter, his remarks were a clear reflection of his long-held beliefs against use of reserve or other powers to dismiss an elected representative. Contrary to what Malcolm Fraser might want, John Kerr might do, and Sir John Peden might once have taught, McMahon believed that the governor-general did not have the power or the constitutional right to dismiss an elected representative in this way.10 In years to come, he would argue that Parliament should define by statute the ambiguity and potentiality of the use of reserve powers by a governor-general.11

  But that was what happened. On 11 November, after weeks of escalating tension and back-and-forth between both sides in the Parliament, Kerr dismissed the Whitlam Labor government and appointed Fraser as caretaker prime minister, with an assurance that Fraser would secure the passage of supply and subsequently recommend the dissolution of both Houses of Parliament. Fraser did both, but not before a motion of no confidence was passed by the new Labor opposition that afternoon. Robert Ashley thought it staggering. ‘No one can continue in office after that,’ he said. McMahon’s response was immediate: ‘Malcolm Fraser is the only man in Australia who would.’12 Kerr’s subsequent refusal to see the Speaker of the House, and receive the motion of no confidence, was a withdrawal of the power of the House of Representatives. It was, as Jenny Hocking has termed it, the second dismissal of the day, even if overshadowed by the drama of the initial dismissal. It was a blow that ensured the Labor Party staggered into the immediate election campaign, due to culminate on 13 December. It was the act that brought Parliament into the greatest disrepute, McMahon would later agree.13