Sydney Noir

by Michael Duffy

  Historian Ian Hancock, for his chapter on Askin in the 2006 book, The Premiers of NSW, asked David Hickie who his main sources were. After being told, he concluded they were ‘too well placed to be dismissed’. He did not name those sources, presumably because even in 2006 David Hickie didn’t want them known.10 Hancock accepted Hickie’s claims about Askin, without providing any further evidence.

  The most recent fresh claims for Askin’s corruption come from Abe Saffron’s son Alan, who in his 2008 memoir, Gentle Satan, claimed his father was chosen by Bob Askin in 1967 to ‘coordinate all the pay-offs for illegal activities in Sydney’. His father already knew Askin, who ‘would meet Dad at coffee shops, restaurants and bars’. The new arrangement was discussed at ‘a secret meeting out of town’ between Askin, Saffron and Police Commissioner Norm Allan.11 From 1969, Askin and Allan were getting ‘at least $5000 to $10 000 a week’.12

  Alan Saffron worked as his father’s bookkeeper and would put cash into envelopes addressed to ‘a large number of high-ranking police, politicians, judges and immigration officials’. But he doesn’t say if one of those names was Askin so his evidence, too, appears to be indirect.13 And of course, Saffron’s claim contradicts Hickie’s and Hall’s.

  In addition to the examples, there are the circumstantial arguments, that Askin must have been corrupt because organised crime flourished while he was premier and because he left a large estate, well beyond what he earned from his salary and pension.

  As we have shown, the first of these arguments ignores the fact that organised crime existed before and after Askin, under many premiers we have no reason to suspect of corruption. SP bookmaking had been widespread for decades. It was so open that when the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Off-the-Course Betting in New South Wales was set up in 1962 (three years before Askin became premier), some 500 Sydney SP bookies formed the Racing Commission Agents Association and hired a Queen’s Counsel to represent their interest at the inquiry. Many of the bookies gave evidence publicly.14

  The Commission’s report noted that government tolerance of SP extended back some thirty or forty years, while the representative of the Council of Churches criticised the current Labor Government as being ‘far too lax in regard to the SP. If they let it be known to the police that they wanted it controlled, it would be controlled overnight’.15

  The other major circumstantial argument involves the estate. When Askin died in 1981 he left an estate of some $1 957 995, most of it to his wife. When she died three years later, her estate was reported as $3 724 879, almost $11 million in 2016 dollars. Critics have assumed this amount of money could not have been obtained by legal means. We believe it could.

  Askin was fortunate to be premier during both a property boom (1968–72) and a mining one (1969–70). The latter came to be sym-bolised by Poseidon, a small miner with nickel prospects in Western Australia. In September it announced a massive deposit of nickel had been found, and the share price rose from $1.60 to $280 three months later, close to a month’s average wage. Everyone was buying shares, leading the Sydney Morning Herald to editorialise that ‘The greatest part of stock exchange business is now a casino and the casino atmosphere is gradually extending its hold on the national consciousness. The Great God Greed is claiming new adherents in unexpected places’.16

  Askin was a keen investor himself, and took advantage of share offers from big companies, as did many politicians of the day. He was also prepared to use inside knowledge from his job to make a buck. In July 1969, a company named Gem Exploration and Minerals applied to the government for two exploration leases. In September the company made a public share issue and Askin acquired 5000 shares. The government approved the leases and he sold his shares at a considerable profit.17

  This was discovered by the opposition and the media at the time. It is reasonable to assume that the Askins were involved in dozens, perhaps hundreds, of similar transactions, which might go a long way to answering the question of how they managed to leave so much money. Of course we do not approve of such abuses, but they are not the same as taking enormous taking weekly payments from gangsters.

  Askin also obtained useful information from the powerful businessmen he mixed with. He used this for investment decisions, at a time when the concept of insider trading was primitive. (His former press secretary Geoffrey Reading provided several examples in his memoir.) Until the mining boom, relatively few people bought shares, and many of those who did possessed confidential knowledge about the companies they invested in. It is likely Askin made a great deal of money from share trading and other investments.

  The claim that Askin was bribed massively by organised criminals raises the question of why it would have been necessary to do that, given that other premiers were apparently prepared to tolerate crime for free. The most logical answer would be that Askin was unusually greedy. But if that’s the case, he would presumably have extracted large sums of money from many criminals in addition to Perce Galea, who represented only a small part of the underworld. That would presumably mean Askin’s total annual bribe while premier would have been many times $100 000. If that were so, and given his abstemious habits, his estate might have been much more than $3.7 million, in which case it becomes an exhibit for the defence, not the prosecution.

  We don’t know enough to put that argument, but it is about as plausible as its opposite.

  The Taxation Office investigated the estate and took what Geoffrey Reading says was considerably less than a million dollars in unpaid taxes and penalties. Reading says the only reason the taxes were assumed to be unpaid was because Askin’s accountant, Bill Bentley, was dead, and Askin’s financial records had disappeared. Reading quotes the view of the solicitor who handled the estate, Barry Geraghty, that Askin could have accounted for every cent had he been alive.

  The disappearance of the records is, of course, very odd. Reading says that six months before he died, Askin told him he was worried there might be criticism of the size of his estate. He asked if Reading would tell the media the following. ‘For many years Askin was the highest paid public officer in the state; his lifestyle was frugal; he had always been a great believer in insurance and from his early days in the Rural Bank had taken out a series of maturing endow-ment policies; he was a very successful punter; he was a beneficiary under the will of his late brother; as a former banker and State Treasurer it is obvious he was skilled in financial and commercial affairs; he was a most successful stock market investor.’

  That’s well enough, but it makes you wonder why Askin didn’t leave complete financial records, if he was so worried about his reputation. Wouldn’t he have wanted his integrity proved with documents rather than asserted by a press agent? Possibly he wanted both, and something happened to the documents. We just don’t know.

  After Askin’s death, Reading pretty much followed that script and added some detail. ‘(Askin’s) investment adviser was the very well known, respected and astute accountant, Bill Bentley, then in his eighties. They met every week or ten days at the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, Kirribilli, to transact company business. At one stage Askin was one of the biggest shareholders in Swan Breweries, and also Lifesavers, and later, when invited to join the board, in TNT Ltd as well. But he invested money in other less orthodox areas. He lent money on the security of hotels to his good friend, the northern suburbs hotelier, Ken Ryan …

  ‘The Premier always had a weather eye peeled for the passing dollar. On one occasion he borrowed a very large sum from the ANZ Bank and lent it the next day to a big home unit developer at two per cent more interest than he was charged by the bank. On another occasion, flying with a plane load of merchant princes to open a new Toohey’s brewery plant in Newcastle, he learnt that a failing ten-pin bowling company was to be liquidated and its assets sold within a couple of weeks. The shares were quoted on the exchange at a few cents, and the realisable assets were worth more than double this; Askin invested heavily and made a killing.’

  Askin’s
driver, Russ Ferguson, who received $10 000 from the Askin estate, said, ‘Every day he would give me the banking to do in my lunch time. I had to go to about five banks, it would take me about half my lunch hour. I mostly banked cheques from stocks. He would get a lot of cheques in.’

  Robert and Mollie Askin’s trustee John Charody told Reading that Askin’s surviving papers would be ‘released in the near future’. That was in or before 1989, when Reading’s book was published. No papers have been released. Reading expresses frustration that those handling the Askin estate did not release information to scotch the lurid rumours to which it gave birth, including that the Tax Office had taken $2 million from it. He believes that if that had occurred, Askin’s reputation might have been saved. It remains a major question why those – unlike Reading himself – aware of the whole truth chose not to reveal it.

  Geoffrey Reading’s explanation of Maxwell Newton’s claim to have delivered money to Askin (assuming it is true) is that it was common for many supporters to call on the Premier with substantial cash donations. They included Sir Peter Abeles, Sir Roderick Miller, and Sir Elton Griffin. Reading says these were political donations, not bribes. The reason Askin took them himself, rather that directing the donors to Liberal Party headquarters, was because there it was likely to get funnelled to Canberra for federal election-eering. Askin wanted the money for his expensive state election campaigns.

  This is plausible – fights over the use of donations are still common between the state branches of the Liberal Party and the federal organisation. Did the donors receive any favours for their money? It would seem likely. Political donations have often served as a legal form of corruption. But they were never unique to Sir Robert Askin.

  Despite Reading’s arguments, almost no one had a good word to say about Askin publicly from 1981 to 2004, when former journalist and author Norman Abjorensen looked at the corruption allegations for a university thesis on leadership in the Liberal Party. He interviewed John Carrick, general secretary of the Liberal Party in the 1960s and from 1970 a senator, who said he had been aware of the corruption rumours, had investigated them formally and infor-mally, and found nothing. Carrick said:

  ‘I have met heads of his departments and said is there anything he did that was wrong. No one could ever remember anything! He was not a crook. Not in terms of running the state. I think he might have got a few favours from knighting a few people that I wouldn’t have knighted. And that was it.’

  Others who were in a position to know if Askin was corrupt and denied it to Abjorensen included Sir Roden Cutler, the former Governor of New South Wales, and Tom Lewis, a longtime colleague of Askin. Lewis said Askin did accept political donations, which the party organisation was not aware of and which went into a campaign fund of which Lewis was a trustee. This was not illegal and Askin did not use the money for personal expenditure.18

  In 2015 businessman Paul Loughnan was awarded a PhD by the University of New England for a thesis on Askin’s political career that also looked briefly at his earlier life. It is the most substantial study of Askin’s leadership and government, in other words the closest we have to a biography, and we are grateful for the opportunity to draw extensively on Dr Loughnan’s work.

  Loughnan interviewed David Hickie and learned that his ‘impeccable’ source was, in fact, Perce Galea himself. Galea was a family acquaintance who had died in 1977 while Hickie was still at university. Loughnan speculated that Galea might have lied to the young Hickie, perhaps out of resentment towards Askin. By the end of his life, Galea was bitter because Askin had reneged on a perceived promise to legalise Sydney’s casinos, a step that could have legiti-mised Galea’s fortune. It is possible the young Hickie, despite his undoubted talents as a reporter, was deceived by the old gangster.

  Loughnan pointed out, as we have done, that Askin could have made his fortune from investments, and that while organised crime flourished under Askin, this continued under his successors. Informed guesses for the number of casinos at the time are: Askin – thirteen, Neville Wran – eleven, and Nick Greiner – twenty. No one has ever suggested Greiner was on the take.

  Loughnan asked crime expert Bob Bottom about Askin, and was told: ‘There has never been any first hand proof that (Askin) personally received any bribe money relating to illegal casinos … No police intelligence reports or telephone intercept records which I had access to ever detected anything linked to Askin.’

  The Moffitt Royal Commission, as we have seen, was set up by Askin and after asking 50 000 questions of 154 witnesses found nothing to his discredit.19 Its terms of reference were fairly narrow, but even so, it would have been reckless for Askin to set it up at all had he been receiving thousands of dollars a week in bribes from violent criminals. Justice Moffitt wrote years later that, ‘There was no evidence, hearsay or otherwise, before the Royal Commission over which I presided in 1973 of improper conduct on the part of Sir Robert Askin’.20

  Loughnan interviewed many Liberal politicians who’d worked with Askin over a long period and were familiar with the views he expressed and the decisions he took. Most were emphatic he was not corrupt. He also talked to John Hatton, the independent member of the NSW Parliament and famous corruption fighter, who had been misreported as accusing Askin of corruption. Hatton told Loughnan he had no evidence of such behaviour on Askin’s part.21 A final point from Loughnan worth repeating is this thought from David McNicoll, a journalist and editor who knew Askin and wrote in 1985: ‘If Askin was accepting bribes he had strange ways of enjoying the fruits. His lifestyle was almost depressingly simple. He never aspired to a more glamorous home than a Manly cottage; he entertained hardly at all.’22

  It’s a good point. Askin enjoyed investment, as he enjoyed other forms of gambling (although it’s doubtful he was a big punter). But he was not a big spender, and there were no children to leave anything to, not even any nieces or nephews. It seems strange he would have put everything at risk in the way Hickie and others have claimed, for what?

  There are too many unanswered questions. What we can say is that no other major public figure in Australian history has been widely considered to be so corrupt on so little evidence. Which rasies the question of Why?

  In September 1974, Nation Review, under the heading, ‘The Best of the Filthmaster’, published a list of comments by Sir Robert Askin that illustrated ‘the depths of reaction which he has managed to plumb during his years in power, now mercifully drawing to a close’. It suggests why he was so much disliked in some circles.

  ‘Most political observers agree that the real masters of the Labor Party are Messrs Hawke, Mundey, Carmichael … and all the rest of the left-wingers with a good sprinkling of commos … Don’t under-estimate the danger of some of these vermin.’

  ‘Several years ago I gave church leaders an assurance that I would not tinker about with the laws on abortion and homosexuality. There will be no change by any government I have the honour to lead.’ The Labor Party ‘wants to flood the country with black people’.

  ‘It is a government’s job to create an atmosphere where private enterprise can flourish and make profits.’

  ‘This “smoking is a health hazard” (is) the most stupid advertise-ment I’ve ever seen. It’s silly and serves no purpose.’23

  The generation of the 1960s was one of those that has a pro-found impact on the world. Such generations, more than most, change a great deal, starting with the way we see the immediate past. Robert Askin, as an archetypal conservative rumoured to be linked to corruption, was a splendid vehicle for this, a demon for the taking and the making. This is not to suggest there was anything amiss with the actions of those who reported on his behaviour. But it could help explain the enthusiasm with which those reports were greeted by the public. Robert Askin became not only Sydney’s Richard Nixon (the film All the President’s Men had appeared in 1976) but its Godfather.

  We are all captives to the intellectual currents of our time. Usually those currents move on, but
a feature of this case is that once the picture of Askin as all-powerful crime controller was proposed and accepted in the 1980s, interest in the subject largely evaporated. Almost no serious writer has considered Askin or even the broad picture of corruption in Sydney in the 1960s ever since. Many more books have been written, but they recycle the received wisdom.

  The mystery remains. In closing we can only say that we do not consider the matter closed. We would welcome contact from anyone with evidence that bears on the subject of this book, whether it supports it or not. Whatever view one takes, it was a fascinating and important period in Sydney’s history.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Anon., Tharunka, 8 November 1973, ‘Smack’ p. 30

  2 Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Off-the-course Betting in NSW by Justice Edward Kinsella (‘Kinsella Royal Commission’), Sydney 1963, p. 25

  3 Ibid., pp. 9, 17–18

  4 Anon., Tharunka, 1973

  5 David Hickie, National Times, 13 September 1981, ‘Askin: Friend to Organised Crime’, pp. 1, 8

  6 Donald Horne, Time of Hope, Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1980, p. 85

  7 Peter Grabosky, Sydney in Ferment: Crime, Dissent and Official Reaction 1788 to 1973, ANU Press, Canberra 1977, p. 149

  8 Horne, Time of Hope, p. 9

  9 Grabosky, Sydney in Ferment, p. 143

  10 Ibid., p. 147

  11 Horne, Time of Hope, p. 85

  1966 • HOW SYDNEY WORKED

  1 David Hickie, The Prince and the Premier, Angus & Robertson, North Ryde 1985, p. 280

  2 Daily Mirror, 4 February 1966

  3 http://www.theguardian.com/uk/shortcuts/2012/nov/04/gypsy-hill-greatest-gangsters-moll