Lazarus Rising. John Howard

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СКАЧАТЬ providing details of Soviet spying in Australia. It was a dramatic event, complete with KGB agents arriving to take Mrs Petrov back to Moscow. There were wild scenes at Sydney Airport as, seemingly against her will, she was taken on board an aircraft, Soviet-bound. On instructions from the Government, police intervened when the plane stopped for refuelling at Darwin, and having satisfied themselves that she did not wish to return to Moscow, relieved her KGB escort. The agents returned empty-handed to an uncertain welcome in Russia, and Mrs Petrov rejoined her husband. They spent the rest of their lives in Australia.

      Menzies swiftly established a Royal Commission to examine the extent of Soviet espionage in Australia. This happened on the eve of the 1954 federal election. When the ALP lost that election quite narrowly, its leader, Dr Bert Evatt, convinced himself that the whole Petrov Affair had been a giant conspiracy, orchestrated by Bob Menzies to damage the ALP by raising the communist issue on the eve of the election. As a barrister, Evatt had appeared before the commission, representing people who had previously worked for him. He attacked the Royal Commissioners who, ultimately, withdrew his right to appear.

      Dad and I both listened in astonishment as Evatt told parliament that he had written to the Soviet Foreign Minister, Molotov, asking whether or not Petrov had been a Russian spy. Molotov had written back denying that Petrov had spied for the Soviet Union. Evatt actually believed Molotov. This extraordinary incident did immense damage to Evatt’s credibility, and was a clear sign of the paranoia that he had developed as a result of losing the 1954 election. It was a forewarning to many in his party of the erratic behaviour of his which was to come, and which contributed so much to the momentous split in the Labor Party in 1955.

      My parents held conservative foreign policy views. They were staunchly anti-communist and saw Britain and America, in that order, as our real friends. Whenever we talked history, and this would have been in the 1950s, when memories of World War II were still relatively fresh, I was left in no doubt that my parents felt that the appeasement policies of the ‘30s, espoused by Neville Chamberlain and supported, to varying degrees, by most Australian leaders, including Robert Menzies and John Curtin, had been wrong.

      Mum and Dad, especially the latter, were ardent admirers of Winston Churchill. I was born on 26 July 1939, at a time when Churchill was still out of favour, regarded as too belligerent and scorned by many in the British Establishment as temperamentally unsuited for leading the nation. Few thought that just 10 months later the House of Commons would, in desperation, turn to him. My parents gave me Winston as a second Christian name because my father had strongly supported Churchill’s opposition to appeasement and shared his forebodings about its consequences. All my life, I have taken quiet pride in the fact that my own father was on the side of history in his attitudes to the 1930s, and I have a second name and a birth date to prove it.

      I have often wondered how it was that I developed such an intense interest in politics so early, and why it was that it became such a lifelong passion. A big reason was that politics was talked about at home from as long as I can remember. Being the youngest, I was exposed to politics from an early age, with my parents being willing to explain issues and never hustling me away because I was too young. My parents often disagreed with actions of governments, but were not cynical about them and always encouraged in their children respect for society’s institutions. I was brought up to believe that governments could do good things, if only they were comprised of the right people.

      These were all influences which meant that I saw politics as good public service, as a way in which change could be achieved. That was important, but not as crucial as my seeing politics as an arena in which ideas and values could be debated, contested and adopted. That was the foundation of my lifelong view that politics is, more than anything else, a battle of ideas. Not only did I enthuse about the contest of ideas, I revelled in the experience of the contest itself. Debating, arguing, testing ideas about how society could be improved energised me.

      The influence of parents on their children’s political views is a fascinating study. I embraced most of my parents’ political attitudes, particularly their support for private enterprise and especially of the small-business variety. Mum and Dad were often quite tough on people who worked for the Government. They thought that people in the private sector did all the work. In politics, I encountered numerous public servants who worked very hard indeed.

      Dad had been a heavy smoker all his life, which no doubt aggravated his lungs, already damaged by the gassing he had suffered close to 40 years earlier during his war service. With all that is now known of the harmful consequences of smoking, we tend to shake our heads at the foolishness of a generation which so extensively embraced the habit, often, as in my father’s case, worsening a war-caused condition.

      Yet, given the older belief that smoking calmed the nerves, and the horrors which these men had experienced, their nicotine addiction was entirely understandable. With none of the reasons my father had, I smoked from the age of 21 until I was 39, finally kicking the habit while I was Treasurer in the Fraser Government. I didn’t find it easy, and given what Dad had experienced in war, I could understand why he kept smoking until a few months before his death.

      1954 was the last year that my father enjoyed reasonably good health. A combination of the chronic bronchitis which afflicted him as well as intense worrying about his business exacted its toll. The following year saw his health collapse dramatically: he suffered in rapid succession from pleurisy and an attack of double pneumonia. Dad spent a large part of 1955 resting at home, away from his business. He would be there when I returned from school. We would often talk politics or play chess. It was, despite Dad’s ill-health, a wonderful conjunction in our lives which drew us much closer together in the space of just a few months. Regrettably it was not to last.

      Towards the end of the year he made arrangements to lease the business to a trusted associate who had operated the workshop in the garage for close to a decade. Sadly, on the very day, 30 November, that he was to hand over he died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage, at the age of 59. When it happened I was playing cricket for my school at Blick Oval, Canterbury. My brother Wal arrived and told me that Dad had suffered a stroke, and that I should come home. When we were both in his car he put his arm around me and simply said, ‘He’s gone.’

      I missed my father intensely. We had really got to know each other so much better during the last two years of his life; we had found a great common point of interest in politics. On many occasions, years later, I would think to myself how much pride Dad would have derived from my political career. Those last months in 1955, when we spent much more time with each other, I recall even to this day.

      Understandably, my life changed enormously after the death of my father. My two eldest brothers had both married only months before his death, Bob had left school and gone to teachers’ college and, as a result, I was thrown even more into the company of my mother. We talked endlessly about family history, current events and, of course, the need for me to succeed at school and go on to university.

       2 INDULGING THE TASTE

      Although undecided until my last year at school, I enrolled at Sydney University for a law degree. There is no doubt that I was influenced by my brother Stan having become a lawyer. He became a partner in one of Sydney’s best-known firms, Stephen Jaques and Stephen (much later Mallesons), aged only 27, and would be a most successful and highly regarded corporate lawyer as the years went by.

      Thanks to Stan I had a great experience for eight weeks between school and university. He arranged a job for me as an assistant to a barrister’s clerk in Denman Chambers in Phillip Street, Sydney. In Phillip Street, each floor of barristers was looked after by a clerk; the really good ones were invaluable, such as Jack Craig, with whom Stan had arranged my job. The barristers looked after by Jack Craig were some of the best and most colourful then at the Sydney bar. СКАЧАТЬ