Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

  McMahon, with pressure from the DLP, would certainly maintain tight censorship of sexuality and would probably tighten it more than it is now.

  The ALP promises abolition of all censorship except cinema advertising. It intends to maintain censorship for children.

  The ALP contains within it moral rearmament supporters, methodists, socialist puritans and a strong catholic bloc. They might introduce slightly more liberal book censorship but there is not a hope in hell that they will ever abolish it. Anyhow, uniform censorship has broken down and no matter what the ALP does at a federal level the states would thwart them.

  One new-wave politician I talked with recently told me how he had evaded the issue of the Little Red School Book in his electorate by dismissing a question about it with ‘It is marxist’. He said the questioner didn’t bother to ask him if that meant it should be banned.

  He then said the usual high-minded pseudo-liberal response on censorship: ‘Anyhow, what about all the garbage on the newsstands – if people were really worried about what is being printed, they’d look at the lies of the capitalist press’ (i.e., we are for ‘correct’ censorship).

  I doubt whether the ALP would do anything much about censorship.

  Abortion reform

  The ALP has offered a conscience vote in parliament if they are elected. If they did get around to taking the vote (which I doubt) it would be lost. If it were passed it would apply only to the ACT (the states would maintain their own laws).

  But the great advantage of the states is that at any one time there might be one state that has liberal laws on abortion. This allows some people to overcome the trauma of unwanted pregnancy by travelling to that state.

  My new-wave ALP politician said, ‘I’m against abortion because it brutalises the nurse and the doctor involved because they have to destroy the foetus. I’m unresolved about how I would vote.’

  He avoided the public meeting at which the candidates were to put their positions.

  Homosexual law reform

  The ALP old-timers say, ‘There are no votes in poofters.’

  My new-wave politician said that he can’t see why people should be punished for being ‘what they are’.

  I can’t see this coming to the vote for years. Public opinion runs at about 65 per cent against homosexual law reform. Again, even if the law were reformed at federal level, this would affect only the ACT.

  Legalisation of marijuana

  Not a chance.

  Conscription

  Yes, the ALP will probably abolish it but it has to be remembered that they are not against conscription as a principle of freedom.

  As my new-wave man said, ‘I’m for it in times of real crisis – one in, all in.’

  I want to be the person who decides if it is a ‘real crisis’ and which side I’m fighting on, if any.

  On this issue the ALP’s position is fundamentally the same as the Liberal Party’s – except they disagree slightly over which wars to conscript for. It is an example, though, of two parties agreeing on a principle but behaving differently and thus making a difference to the lives of many young people.

  The arts

  In return for more money for the arts we will have a centralised funding system.

  Albie Thoms talked with Senator Doug McClelland, shadow minister for the arts, and McClelland wanted to ‘tidy it up’. He thought there were too many different committees and bodies dabbling in arts funding.

  Albie told him that we liked it untidy – less political supervision – and that when it was untidy the government didn’t always know what was happening.

  The British Labour government in its first year of office doubled the grants to the arts. So the prediction is that there will be more money in exchange for more control.

  The liberation of women

  This is only marginally a matter of legislation. Maybe there is more chance of equal pay in federal awards.

  My new-wave ALP man did not have an appreciation of the socio-psychological issues involved in liberation and could not see past the conventional marriage.

  Social services for unmarried mothers and other related pensions would increase.

  Freedom of protest

  Let’s see how the ALP reacts to satire and critical interviewing on ‘This Day Tonight’, to demonstrations outside Parliament House. You wait, the batons will swing again.

  Secret police, ASIO

  You bet the ALP will keep ASIO going, along with telephone taps, dossiers and harassment of those people seen as a ‘threat to the system’.

  Alcohol

  The ALP will abolish the wine tax. Wine will be cheaper?

  Secrecy in government

  As John Edwards has pointed out in the Financial Review, Whitlam is already forgetting some of the good intentions behind the book Secrecy – Political Censorship in Australia, by Jim Spigelman, a Whitlam aide. I bet Spigelman forgets too, once in power.

  Freedom of movement

  This is my own single-handed campaign against the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth century. My only support comes for the young working class who also support abolition of the Enclosure Acts.

  I want to see all the large properties of the west and central west, all crown land, all state forests, open to public use, including hunting.

  Let them run their sheep and cattle but let campers, poets, hermits, and hunters also use it. And communalists too.

  We are prisoners of the city while a handful of people sit on the land.

  National parks are small, policed playgrounds in which we have to behave ourselves. I want land without rangers or restrictions.

  No one listens to me.

  Conclusion

  Politicians are prisoners of civic decency and prevailing morality. They will therefore enforce the prevailing morality. That is not our morality.

  I don’t find politics immoral; I find political activity befuddles the intellect. It is so much based on verbal formulations which will gain appeal and then power. And these formulations are distorting; they are reductions of complexity.

  To involve yourself in politics, except as an area of study, is to tangle yourself in a mess of illusions, mystifications and intellectual compromises.

  Already, in writing this piece, I was looking for a refinement to the standard libertarian political position. But having learned my libertarian catechism so well I wasn’t going to miss an opportunity of proving myself in the eyes of the tribal elders.

  As I said in an ABC interview in 1979, this was the last serious statement of the standard hard-line libertarian position. By the mid seventies the Libertarian Society was a faded entity.

  But it still contributed to me the fundamentals of my social analysis.

  As part of my contract with the Bulletin I offered to cover the election campaign in the electorate of Macarthur where I had grown up. My family still lived there. It gave me an opportunity to do research too on the book The Electrical Experience.

  I spent the time with each of the three major candidates (Liberal, Labor, independent Liberal), door-knocking, talking to people in pubs and clubs, calling on shopkeepers, swapping snake stories with farmers.

  It was the first time that I had looked again at where I came from and it was the first time for years that I had looked seriously at orthodox politics.

  Shades of the Electorate

  (adapted, from the Bulletin, 25.11.72)

  As Macarthur is, so is the nation. Almost. It just about has every socio-economic component. It has ‘new towns’, ‘old towns’, industrial workers, fishing villages, Aboriginal settlements, migrant communities, army camps, farms of all sorts, and seaside villages of retired people from Sydney’s suburbia. It has no Kings Cross.

  It runs from just below Port Kembla’s heavy industry, down the beaches and dairies of the south coast to just past Nowra, across the mouth of Jervis Bay (big enough to hold the entire Australian fleet) and up the mountains to the highland farms and roadside stalls of Picton, Bowr
al and Campbelltown.

  The genesis illusion

  Within three years about six thousand families have moved into new houses in new streets with new shopping centres and new schools.

  While every generation has a ‘genesis illusion’ – that feeling that the world began with them – these new towns must give the people who live in them the feeling that the world was built yesterday.

  Jeff Bate, the sitting Liberal member, said they want a ‘new life in every respect’. This could mean that they discard their parent’s voting habits (assumed to be Labor). Or it could mean they vote for a new government to go with their new world.

  The new towns are built on the core of two old towns, Campbelltown and Dapto, now almost obliterated. The urban services are not yet working smoothly, the cement is still wet, the lawns are still growing, and debt is still high. Everything is raw with hardly any visible tie with a past. Where there was something old it has been demolished or hidden. In Campbelltown they have a neo-classical court house built last century which has now been encased in a grey brick contemporary facade to link it to the new ‘community complex’, next to a New World supermarket.

  The last weekend

  Retired city workers have been moving to live on the coast. Over the years they found a ‘spot’ and, piece by piece, they built a ‘weekender’ which has now become for many of them a ‘life-ender’. The work week with its respite at the weekend was in fact an enactment of their total life. They have now begun the last long weekend of their lives.

  They still often wear the emblems of their former life. They get about in overalls and boiler suits and carry carpenters’ or metal-workers’ rules. On their piece of land, and about their house and boat and car, they try to make work similar to that they left behind. They construct and they fabricate. Their wives sit inside, blinds drawn, watching daytime television. Outside is the long white beach and the dazzling blue bay. Not much fun for the old.

  These seaside villages are threatened by talk about turning the bay into an industrial ‘complex’ with nuclear power. It is as if the working world they retired from is nightmarishly to pursue them and harass them. As if heavy industry is going to leave the city too, and come to live by the seaside.

  They are also disturbed by young people who come to sleep on the beach, bringing surf boards, motorbikes and vans, and who have rowdy parties through the night. Who fire rifles at nothing in particular. There is squabbling over who controls the beaches. They are pursued by their lost youth.

  The ideology of self-employment

  Dairy farmers, fishermen and migrant farmers produce milk, butter, cheese, fish, oysters, prawns, apples, cider, peas, potatoes, pumpkins, cabbages, beans, tomatoes, cherries, pears, strawberries, chickens, eggs, turkeys, ducks, pheasants, pigs, wool, beef and nursery plants.

  They own their own land, run their own business, but work with their hands.

  The towns make bricks, machinery, plastics, clothing, paper, rubber and cement.

  Many independent people work long hours and do all the worrying. They are buffeted by the economic cycles of weather and markets. They are made anxious by talk of a thirty-five-hour week and are resentful of what they see as easy gains and irresponsibility of unionised labour.

  The privileges of self-employment seem dim.

  They sometimes feel that they’re the only people in Australia pulling their weight, keeping the country going, upholding the traditions of enterprise, initiative, community service and self-reliance. They feel ill-rewarded for the role they play. They can be disgusted with people who do not hold self-employment as the ultimate goal. They cannot see that it is an economic impossibility for everyone to be self-employed. Anyone who is not self-employed is a life failure. They are irritated by bureaucrats.

  This is the class from which so many of our politicians come. The three main contestants in Macarthur – Labor, Liberal and independent – come from it.

  Tossing the old man

  Henry Jefferson Bate (‘Jeff’), the sitting member, is sixty-six years old, married to Dame Zara (former wife of the late Prime Minister Holt), a dairy farmer who has held the seat for twenty-five years.

  Like many of his generation he has become more conservative politically as he has grown older. He is compelling, canny, and drives like a wild young man. He still isn’t sure what to wear to a Bowral Country Club golf day and seeks Dame Zara’s advice, but she doesn’t know what is expected of a country member. He pulls on a royal-blue skivvy, puts on a double-breasted suit-coat and a pair of non-matching trousers. He puts on riding boots.

  He always wears riding boots or gum boots.

  A dairy farmer going into town.

  He was raised to hate catholics, Victorians and rabbits and now he says he only hates rabbits.

  ‘He doesn’t really hate rabbits,’ Dame Zara says. ‘He gets upset about poisoning them.’

  He doesn’t hate catholics. He even finds himself more in agreement with catholic Vincent Gair, leader of the DLP, than he does with some of his own Liberal Party.

  He lost pre-selection this year and that is the deep and hidden pain.

  Jeff Bate is running for the first time as an independent. The Old Man was challenged for Liberal pre-selection by a young warrior, Max Dunbier, thirty-four, and the Old Man lost.

  Jeff sees it as treachery.

  ‘I worried about national issues but they wanted me to go to the flower shows,’ he complains, explaining his loss of support among the Liberal Party pre-selectors.

  Max Dunbier had the state seat for one term, has a property, runs a few trucks, was once a second-hand car salesman. He followed the usual path to parliament – the service clubs, community organisations, shire council.

  He is a man with personal drive, energy and activity but is puzzled by a weight problem – ‘I do all this walking, door-knocking and running about and still put on weight.’

  His aide for the day was Keith McKinnon, dairy farmer from near Picton, president of the Liberal Party branch. The McKinnon family has lived on the same land since 1840. Sadly, changes in land use seem destined to cut up his property into ten-hectare lots which may then be taken over by urban development.

  Keith McKinnon was a Bate man but changed at the last preselection battle. He had defended Jeff over the years against charges of neglect of the electorate.

  Whatever were the personal, party and electorate wrangles that led Jeff to lose the pre-selection, his age and the nature of things would have meant that sooner or later there would have been a challenge from Max’s generation.

  Some Liberal Party people have been embarrassed by Jeff’s refusal to withdraw. They have had to decide between an old friend and the party. Some have become evasive. Branches are split; some branches are immobilised. Some, including party aristocrats, have defected to Jeff. Some have ‘gone away for the weekend’. Some back both horses with donations.

  The man of education versus the man of affairs

  Max and Jeff act out the classical old bull against young bull drama.

  Max Dunbier and the ALP candidate John Kerin, both thirty-four, represent the struggle between two warriors for supremacy.

  They are, in style, two types of Australian.

  John Kerin is a man of education. Max Dunbier is more the man of affairs and ‘common sense’. John has come along the same path as Max – community affairs, shire council, branch politics, but with a different mind and personality.

  John told me that the crucial thing in his political and personal development was ‘tertiary education’. An old-time Labor man might have said the depression, the war, or Ben Chifley; John Kerin says ‘tertiary education’.

  He came from a hard-working poultry-farming family. He worked as a labourer and then back on the farm. He did his matriculation and degree by external studies. He’s doing a second degree now, while working as a research officer in the Bureau of Agricultural Economics.

  One of his Dapto ALP campaigners said that John didn’t do
enough back-slapping and joke-telling but that he was getting better.

  He uses words like ‘ideology’, ‘infrastructure’, ‘disorientation’, ‘ecology’. Unlike Max and Jeff, John Kerin, like many formally educated Australians, has to modify his vocabulary in some conversations – he has a high-range and low-range vocabulary.

  He sees himself as representing the New Politics (sincerity, research no bullshit). Jeff, he says (each candidate referred to the other by first name), belongs to the political style of the turn of the century – fundamentalism. Max belongs to the fast-talking fifties. Both are finished.

  For John, research is the new pragmatism.

  Many of his reflexes are middle-class and come from the ideology of self-employment. He doesn’t like loafing, diddling the boss or perks.

  How they fight – the black campaign and the white campaign

  There are the formal policies stated at public meetings and in pamphlets. But there is also the ‘black campaign’. The black campaign is on the private oral circuit which is crucial in public opinion formation.

  ‘Black’ propaganda includes slanders, misquotation, distortion of your own party’s official policy when needed, distortion of the opponent’s policy, rumour, damaging anecdotes and nicknames, jokes about the other candidates, and their peccadillos.

  Of course, it goes on nationally, and it goes on fiercely in any electorate.

  The following are examples of black campaigning which I picked up in the electorate. I won’t pin them on any one candidate but they were used against one or more of the six candidates, either by them or by their supporters.

  Sexual immorality (in one case, simply that a candidate is married to a divorcée); doesn’t pay debts (heard about two of the candidates); taxation fraud; sexual maladjustment (doesn’t sleep with his wife); use of threats to extract campaign money for migrant farmers; misuse of public property while in public office; crooked business deals; corrupt branches; rigged branches; being financially assisted by opponents and other dubious sources; bribery; misrepresentation of qualifications and war experience; vulgarity; snobbery; inappropriate social behaviour (a candidate’s wife who wore the wrong clothes to an official function); excessive drinking; insincerity (a story told of a candidate who shook hands with one person while talking to another); prejudice against migrants; if the ALP gets in the streets will be overrun with poofters; the only time you see Jeff Bate is in the Women’s Weekly; the ALP will alter the constitution so as to secure power for ever.