Lazarus Rising. John Howard

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СКАЧАТЬ ministership through an early election, Malcolm Fraser was always attended by early election speculation. I felt sure that he wanted, if possible, to have an early election at the end of 1982. I was against this. My principal reason was that the public had grown sick and tired of elections being called to accommodate what they saw as the political interests of the incumbent government. The Liberal Party organisation was in no mood to fight an early election. Fraser was both stunned and angry at opposition to an early election.

      Suddenly, in October 1982, Phillip Lynch announced that, because of ill-health, he would retire from parliament, leaving a vacancy in his seat of Flinders to be filled at a by-election before the end of the year. Within a few days there was a real bombshell. Malcolm Fraser developed severe back problems and had to enter hospital for surgery which would sideline him for up to two months. This put paid to any possibility of an election at the end of the year.

      It also meant that I would lead the Liberal campaign effort in the by-election, as acting party leader in Fraser’s absence. What is more, I was left with most of the responsibility for a wages pause, which Fraser had initiated only a few weeks earlier. It had struck a chord with Australians. By now, employment was falling like a stone, and even some of the more difficult elements of the trade union movement embraced the idea of holding down wages as a trade-off for some others keeping their jobs. As part of the healing process, Andrew Peacock was able to return to cabinet in November, taking the place of the retiring Phillip Lynch.

      Bob Hawke had entered parliament in 1980. From that moment onwards there was constant speculation about his replacing Hayden. On 16 July 1982, with the open support of the NSW right, led by Keating, Hawke challenged Hayden. The result was the best possible for the Government. Hayden defeated Hawke by a margin of only five votes: 42 to 37. It left Hayden debilitated and Hawke, despite his wordy protestations, as an untamed predator. Hayden needed a good result in Flinders to consolidate his leadership.

      Lynch had held Flinders at the 1980 election with a margin of 5 per cent, and with a by-election in the depths of a recession, it seemed ripe for the taking by Labor. The ALP got off to an atrocious start by choosing a very poor candidate, a local real-estate agent by the name of Rogan Ward. He was uninspiring on the campaign trail. In by-elections, particularly highprofile ones, and Flinders was certainly one of these, there is constant publicity surrounding the candidate. A bad candidate can get lost in a general election. He or she can’t hide in a by-election.

      The Liberal Party’s candidate was a local solicitor, Peter Reith. I opened his campaign with a rally at Mornington High School on 12 November. My travel to the event attracted more than the usual publicity. I had burst an eardrum and had medical advice not to fly. I therefore took the Riverina Express from Central Station in Sydney to Spencer Street Station in Melbourne. It had been a long time since a senior political figure had travelled between Sydney and Melbourne by rail, and there was quite a bit of interest in this.

      The Liberal Party’s one campaign theme was the wage pause. We said to the people of Flinders that the country was in a recession, unemployment was rising and one way which meshed with the Australian notion of mateship, of helping those whose jobs were at risk, was for those who had jobs to forgo wage increases to help their fellow Australians who were at risk. It seemed to catch on. But I didn’t imagine for a moment that it would be sufficient to prevent the seat falling to the Labor Party. Reith was a very good candidate, and he and his wife, with their then young family, presented a good image of a local family, strongly identified with the aspirations and the future of the electorate.

      The Labor Party was knocked sideways, three days out from the election, by an article appearing in the Melbourne Age suggesting that the Labor candidate, Ward, had been involved in some shady real-estate deals. Rogan Ward denied the allegations. It was manna from heaven for the Liberal campaign. I stayed in Sydney the day of the by-election, 4 December, and rather nervously awaited the result. Finally, I rang Grahame Morris, who had been ‘minding’ Peter Reith throughout the campaign, and to my great delight he said, ‘I am about to go in and tell Peter that he has been elected as the member for Flinders. It has been a great result. The swing against us was only 3 per cent.’ This was an amazing outcome, the deficiencies of Rogan Ward notwithstanding. It had huge implications for both the Government and the opposition.

      Labor’s dismay was palpable. How could it be, that, in the middle of a recession, with unemployment heading towards 10 per cent and the incumbent government having been there for seven years, it was not possible to achieve a swing of 5 per cent? It defied all political reasoning. Inside the Labor Party, the near-universal judgement was that Hayden was the problem. The media hounded Hawke for a response. He had one of his celebrated temper outbursts, telling some television journalists to ‘get a grip of yourselves!’ This kind of response only reinforced his appeal to the Australian public.

      The Flinders by-election came to occupy a special place in Australian political history. It crippled Bill Hayden’s leadership, thus creating the eventual circumstances for Hawke to take the Labor leadership in a most remarkable way in February 1983. It also produced, in Peter Keaston Reith, the only person who won a seat in federal parliament, but was never sworn in, because the parliament to which he had been elected did not sit again after the poll in the by-election had been formally declared, and lost the seat at a subsequent general election.

      Parliament resumed for a week immediately after the by-election, and there was relief and mild hope at the Christmas drinks in my office for colleagues. It proved to be a false dawn, for the by-election outcome had been precisely the wake-up call which the Labor Party required to galvanise the forces needed to change its leadership.

      For me, the beginning of 1983 was a sad one. My mother died on 9 January, just a few weeks after her 83rd birthday. Mum had survived my father by more than 27 years, and had lived for most of that time with extremely good health. She had taken a quiet pleasure out of my political success, but with the typical caution of a person of her generation, who felt that success for themselves or their family was always somewhat unexpected. Mum’s tenacity and single-minded fidelity to things in which she believed had left its mark on me.

      My parents’ lives had been a world away from my own, and even more so from those of my children. My mother was buried from the Earlwood Methodist (by then Uniting) Church, which had been such an important part of our earlier lives. My three brothers had each married there, and my father also had been buried from there.

      It soon became obvious that Malcolm Fraser had not lost his desire to have an early election. He believed it was only a matter of time before Hawke replaced Hayden as Labor leader, and was determined that the poll should take place before this occurred, leaving him facing a much stronger opponent. During his convalescence he had developed a campaign theme, based on the belief that Australia could not wait for the rest of the world to deliver it economic recovery. It was something he pounded home to me when I visited him on holiday in January. The election slogan became ‘We’re not waiting for the world', complete with lyrics sung by the popular Colleen Hewitt.

      Our January holiday at Hawks Nest was interrupted by my having to go to Canberra on 2 February for a meeting with the major banks to discuss issues relating to the proposed entry of foreign banks into Australia. That was a useful blind for a meeting with the Prime Minister, Tony Eggleton, the party’s federal director, and Peter Nixon, whose advice Fraser always respected. Fraser wanted a poll on 5 March. He remained preoccupied with the possibility of Hawke replacing Hayden and intensely pessimistic about rural Australia, speaking as if he believed that the drought would never break. The mood at that point was optimistic about our prospects, due to the Flinders result and the belief that Fraser would face Hayden. Eggleton said to both Nixon and me, ‘I think we should win.’

      I returned to Hawks Nest that evening, and over dinner I disclosed our plans to Janette, including that Fraser would announce the election the following day. In response she said, ‘Are you sure that they won’t change leaders on you?’ I said that that was highly unlikely. Janette’s СКАЧАТЬ