Beard, a deeply read classicist, is also a commentator, TV star and bestselling author; one of the great populist-scholars of our time, she has brought the ancient world into contemporary consciousness like no other.

She is right to insist that the inhabitants of the past can’t be expected to project any sort of ready-made solution onto our troubles. Besides, judging by the findings of her latest research, the kinds of suggestions the Romans themselves would make might not be palatable; they might indeed hasten the decline of our familiar institutions and make the slide towards one-man rule inexorable.

Beard’s third book-length analysis of Rome — following her narrative history of Rome SPQR (2015) and the quirkier art history of Twelve Caesars (2021) — focuses on the emperors who ruled Rome for more than 300 years from Augustus to Alexander Severus. Her latest book, Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World, is not a chronological narrative of the careers of individual emperors but a thematic, institutional description of what Beard calls the “category” of emperor: the Roman system of one-man rule.

This institutional approach allows her to discern patterns and themes, and to ask questions like: How did one-man rule work? How did the emperors get things done, in Rome and abroad? And, more pertinently, how did they get a republic — albeit a deeply flawed oligarchy already succumbing to warlordism and civil war, and a slave state to boot, but a vibrant political and social culture all the same — to accept, comply with, and ultimately embody a system of autocracy, a culture of political strongmen?

The first part of Beard’s answer is that the emperors purchased stability by bringing the military under close personal control. Under the Roman republic, legions had theoretically been controlled by the Senate but increasingly, in practice, by wealthy warlords. From Augustus, the emperors put the legionaries, auxiliaries and veterans on the state budget and acted as commander-in-chief — to use the American term — to exert force against external enemies on the distant frontiers and to protect the regime against internal ones in Rome.

This did not mean Rome was “full of men in uniform and march-pasts… such as Trooping of the Colour or Bastille Day,” Beard notes. “The city of Rome itself was strikingly demilitarised even by the current standards of Western capitals.”

Indeed, a second part of Beard’s answer is that the emperors were also careful to preserve the trappings of republican norms and institutions. Even if the Senate became a powerless debating forum, and even if the consular officials served for only two months instead of twelve as formerly, they kept the wealthy “senatorial elite,” as Beard calls them, busy, respectable and ever looking to promotion and proximity to imperial power. And, as Beard dryly notes, replacing elections with imperial appointment saved the elite the tedium and expense of populist politics.

With the imperial palace now the real source of executive authority, who did the actual work of running the city and the empire? Beard describes a system of “government by correspondence,” with letters flowing between the emperor and governors around the empire. The emperor was also personally involved in receiving petitions and adjudicating tricky lawsuits. Literate and loyal staff were needed.

But this kind of work was too menial for the wealthy elite. They would rather govern a province or command a legion than push paper in the palace. Besides, allowing a powerful citizen to become established in the back rooms of the palace was a risk an emperor might well have wanted to avoid.

Better, it seems, to rely on trusted and tractable slaves. In the imperial court, it was slaves and ex-slaves, or freedmen, who did most of the actual work. Cooks, doctors, footmen, hairdressers, gardeners and the all-important food-tasters: they provided the personal service to keep the ruler, and his family, comfortable and alive.

And they also provided the administrative, managerial and clerical muscle that the imperial system — the financial controllers, secretaries, letter writers in Latin and in Greek, librarians, petitions clerks, advisers and counsellors, and trusted emissaries — needed to control a boisterous city and a huge empire. Skilled and experienced officials provided administrative continuity from one emperor to the next.

But this politico-administrative logic generated what Beard calls “pressure points” in the imperial system. Senators were aghast that freedmen could enjoy imperial trust and exercise imperial power. Ultimately, it forced the question: who was really running the show? Pliny complained that the “chief sign of a powerless emperor was powerful freedmen.” As Beard acutely observes, that “d” in freedman is crucial.

Ultimately, though, even strongmen weaken and die, highlighting the ultimate vulnerability of one-man rule: mortality and the problem of succession. All despots are would-be dynasts, but hereditary succession can be messy when it involves feckless sons or scheming brothers; mutinous generals and seditious senators pose further risks. Augustus hit upon a novel solution. His natural heirs having all died, he ended up choosing his wife’s son by a former marriage, Tiberius, and made his wishes clear by “adopting” him as his son.

Adoptive succession became the norm. It served to widen the talent pool, even creating the impression of an imperial meritocracy, Beard observes, “while still presenting the transmission of power in family terms.” It was not until 79 CE, after more than a hundred years of imperial rule, that a biological son (Titus) actually succeeded his father (Vespasian); it didn’t happen again for another century. Meanwhile, for eighty years, five emperors in a row from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius “adopted” their successors.

It is as if an American president could nominate a vice-president into a powerless but prominent role on the explicit understanding that she will succeed when the president dies (and not before). There is no “lesson” in this for today’s politics, of course.

Though plenty of assassinations and two further civil wars caused rapid turnover in the imperial throne, the practice of adoption did stabilise and strengthen the imperial system.

Beard’s entertaining style conceals the seemingly effortless command of the scholarship that underpins Emperor of Rome. She ranges across time and across source material; she tirelessly draws on the archaeological evidence of palaces, statues and coins, the literary evidence of poetry, speeches, letters and histories, the epigraphic evidence of tombstones and miraculously preserved legal documents; she takes nothing at face value, and is constantly challenging received historiographical wisdom. A particular pleasure are the bibliographical essays that summarise the relevant scholarship of each chapter in place of footnotes.

But at times the great populariser is guilty of over-popularising. Her focus on the institution of the emperor doesn’t prevent her from indulging some of the juicier tales. “This was a world of toddlers and teenagers as well as grown-ups and greybeards” is one of several sentences that could safely have been subbed out. Mary Beard is also unaccountably mean to Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, retitling the great Stoic’s philosophical autobiography as Jottings to Himself.

Anyone familiar with the murderous court intrigues of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor Court in Wolf Hall, or the tamer Windsor jostling in The Crown, will be right at home in Beard’s imperial Rome. Less fictionally, the cronyism and flattery of Trump’s (first?) White House, its performative bombast and self-indulgent fakery, may also be recognisable in Beard’s account of the same pathologies displayed by the ancient autocrats. Don’t forget that Rome, cynical and secular, even posthumously declared some of its emperors as divine.

As one-man rule arrived and stayed, Beard points out, scarcely anyone complained. Senators became, in the words of Tacitus, ineffective dissidents or cowards, flatterers and job-seekers; “power dining” with the emperor became, as she brilliantly demonstrates, an occasion of risk and uncertainty as well as an opportunity for promotion and proximity to power.

In short, “despite the loud protests against the crimes and misdemeanours of individual rulers, or the discontent with some aspects of one-man rule, there is hardly any trace of significant resistance to one-man rule as such.”

Indeed, as Beard observes in the closing paragraphs of this book, autocracy throughout history has depended on people at all levels accepting and adjusting. “It is not violence or the secret police, it is collaboration and cooperation — knowing or naive, well-meaning or not — that keeps autocracy going.” This is the lesson we are to mark. •

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World
By Mary Beard | Allen & Unwin | $65 | 512 pages

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My Damascene conversion came only recently, and it occurred at Bega, a dairy town on the NSW south coast near where I now live. Far from the urban smog and traffic jams and celebrities, the south coast celebrates its own distinct cultural vibe. It has just reopened its art gallery — mid-town, gem-like — with an exhibition of the 2023 Archibald finalists.

Like any collective venture in regional Australia, the gallery needs volunteers. I put my hand up, and since the gallery opened I’ve spent several full days as a gallery volunteer prowling around in the silent presence of the fifty-seven portraits. It’s been a full-immersion experience, and now, like any new convert, I’ve become a zealous proselytiser.

What is it about the Archibalds? Since childhood, we’ve learned to appraise the people we meet by looking at their faces. We learn their age, their experience, their character; we understand whom we can trust. Show us fifty-seven faces on the walls of an art gallery and it’s the same: we’re all experts.

So people feel comfortable walking into the Archibalds — this is as true in Bega as it is in the city — and expressing strong opinions about what (that is, who) they see. Greeting them as familiars, paying them rapt attention, glancing at them sideways or dismissing them with a shrug.

Inevitably the popular portraits are of popular people. The winner of the People’s Choice award in Sydney was Noni Hazlehurst, who appears in Jaq Grantford’s portrait as a wise friendly spirit peering at us through a misty window — the epitome of trustworthiness, with fond memories of Play School thrown in for those of a certain vintage.

The challenge for the artists is to reveal the inner character of their subject by displaying their external appearance — their face, clothing, posture, location. And the challenge for the viewer is to decipher the inner life by inspecting that external paraphernalia. There’s a dual level operating, and we zoom backwards and forwards as we go.

Zoe Young’s portrait of NRL star Latrell Mitchell captures this best. It is actually two paintings, both larger than life. On the left we see the public footballing star, isolated mid-game under artificial lights, his Rabbitohs jumper covered with logos; he’s further objectified because we can only see him via the medium of a TV screen. On the right we see the private man, stripped to his waist, holding his child, under natural light in the natural landscape of his Country. Each Latrell is looking towards the other, across the frame of the paintings, but neither is connecting; one wonders how the man keeps both sides together.

It’s a profound moment, and when the school group came through the Bega gallery last week, they spent more time talking about Latrell than about Noni.

Being able to host an exhibition of this scale is a big deal for Bega. Sydney is a six-hour drive up the highway, so having the Archibald come here provides connection and stimulation. Tourists like having something different to do, school kids appreciate it, but the locals love it most of all. They feel respected, as they should, and treat the occasion seriously.

One of the little tricks portraitists can use is to give their sitter a prop — something distinctive to hold or wear or sit on — which helps us identify and understand them. This can be wonderfully subtle, as in the portrait of journalist Katharine Murphy. She looks just as we know her from Insiders — except here, as she serenely sits for Judith Sinnamon, she’s actually listening to a podcast through an ear bud. She’s busy, right?, and won’t waste a moment.

Without doubt the best prop in the show, not at all subtle, is an oversized crown made out of shiny colourful baubles and dolls’ heads and other tinselly things, worn with style by the late lamented comedian Cal Wilson. You can’t look at it without smiling. (Andrea Huelin’s portrait won the Packing Room prize in 2023.)

So, props are great. My pet peeve is text. I’m a text person, but to me, too much text defeats the purpose of a visual image and weakens the emphasis on the face. (And I note that none of the previous winners employs text.)

The question I get asked most frequently by visitors, as I stand around waiting to be asked questions, is: who won? Because ultimately the Archibald is a competition, and we need to rank what we see against everything else on display and come up with a favourite.

I point our visitors to the last portrait they’ll see before leaving the exhibition: Julia Gutman’s painting of singer-songwriter Montaigne. It’s a beautiful evocation, in oils and embroidered textiles, of a young musician’s dynamic creativity, with the excellent title Head in the Sky, Feet on the Ground. Some of the visitors grumble about textiles not being “appropriate” but most are delighted with the choice of the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales…

… except, in the Archibald sprit of everyone being entitled to their own opinion, I think it’s a shame they overlooked Natasha Bieniek’s Self-Portrait — tiny, exquisite, a microscopic universe of light and vegetation. And not a celebrity. •

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Labor’s Dorothy Tangney made history in 1943 when she became the first woman elected to the Australian Senate. But though she sat in that chamber for twenty-five years, no Labor woman ever joined her. Instead, she watched as the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh women were elected to the Senate — all of them Liberals. And while Tangney spent her entire career on the backbench, two of those six Liberals managed to become ministers.

They hardly shattered the glass ceiling. But that first wave of elected Liberal women — six senators, along with Enid Lyons elected to the House in 1943 — were real pioneers, prising open the men’s world of parliament.

Who were these pioneering women? And how did they get there? Recent biographies of two of them, Dame Annabelle Rankin and Dame Margaret Guilfoyle, describe two very different women who took strikingly different paths to power and who, against the odds and in different eras, became ministers.

Rankin, a Queenslander who became the first Liberal woman in the Senate, served from 1946 and eventually became Australia’s first female minister; her biography is written by long-time Canberra journalist and lobbyist Peter Sekuless. Three months after Rankin left the Senate, in 1971, Margaret Guilfoyle, a Victorian, entered; she served until 1987, becoming a senior and powerful cabinet minister. Her life is told by the prolific Anne Henderson of the Sydney Institute.

For both, the path to power, and the exercise of it required innovation, political smarts and sheer tireless persistence. But both operated within heavy constraints imposed on them by the masculine character of their chosen career. These biographies tell us important stories about the past that prompt good questions about the present: in particular, they stand as an implicit challenge to the present-day Liberal Party which, by its own admission, struggles to find and promote female members of parliament.

Annabelle Rankin came from a prosperous middle-class family in Queensland’s coastal Wide Bay region. Her father, a Boer war veteran, was elected to state parliament as a conservative; he then ran a colliery. The elder of two daughters, Annabelle later claimed in a well-worn anecdote that a childhood game had involved imitating her father “being a member of parliament. I would play that I was opening fetes and all that sort of thing and making speeches.”

Rankin attended the all-girls Glennie (Anglican) School in Toowoomba, and her path forward continued via women’s and girls’ associations as state secretary of the Girl Guides and assistant commissioner with the YWCA. But it was the second world war that made her, opening up leadership roles in two women’s paramilitary forces, the Voluntary Aid Detachment and the Australian Women’s Army Service.

Sekuless suggests Rankin’s constant travel and networking within local communities in these roles provided invaluable training for the future senator. Before long, her political potential was recognised and she was encouraged — by a man — to seek Senate preselection with the conservative-leaning Queensland People’s Party, or QPP (which soon merged into the Liberal Party).

In July 1946 Rankin, a thirty-eight-year-old single woman, found herself as one of two women and four men seeking endorsement for two QPP Senate spots. The gender make-up of the interviewing panel is not recorded, but one can assume a predominant male gaze. One of those present, state director Charles Porter, resorted to the language of love to describe the “splendid” impression Rankin made:

She was a strikingly handsome young woman, with a fine lot of auburn hair and she had this ringing clear voice, and she enunciated the principles that she believed in with such a fervour and dedication that was almost a passion…

She also wore her service uniform, which no doubt helped.

After making her speech to the panel, Rankin went home convinced she had lost, walked the dog and went to bed. But she’d won, and within days — a novice and a novelty — she was campaigning around the state. Her first rally, near her hometown at Maryborough, attracted 150, two-thirds of them women, and it was the women who led the cheering as Rankin outlined her political philosophy/strategy.

“I honestly believe,” she told the meeting, “that the need of a woman’s voice in the Senate is vitally necessary.” The audience applauded, and she went on: “For a number of years I have worked with women’s and children’s organisations all over Queensland. I have been honoured and privileged to meet and know so many women and men of our fighting services during my service years during the war years. I worked for those women and men during the war, and I want to go on working to help the woman and the wife during the years of peace.”

Rankin and her handlers carefully fostered her image: within a month, she was being widely described in the press as “our Annabelle,” creating what Sekuless describes as “a cosy familiarity” about her. She also carefully deflected questions about her decision to remain single. (Sekuless suggests there may have been a fiancé, who may have died, but he leaves it unclear.) In any event, Rankin routinely generated a high personal vote; in 1946, at third spot, she recorded twice the vote of the man at number two.

Rankin became the first female opposition whip, but was dumped when Menzies won government in 1949. Reinstated as whip in 1951 and despite tireless service, she was never promoted to the ministry by Menzies. It was Harold Holt who appointed her as the first female minister in 1966 (in the housing portfolio; Enid Lyons had been made a minister in 1949, but without portfolio — a deliberately toothless honorific).

Rankin then suffered the distinction of becoming the first woman dumped from the ministry (in 1971, by Billy McMahon). She quit the Senate in March 1971, reportedly in tears, and accepted as consolation prize another first — as first female head of a diplomatic mission (high commissioner to New Zealand).

The Belfast-born, state school–educated Presbyterian Margaret McCartney had few of Rankin’s social advantages. Night school at Taylor’s College led to accountancy qualifications, a corporate job, and a friendship with young RAAF veteran Stan Guilfoyle. They married in 1952.

Margaret and Stan quickly got involved in local Liberal Party work. Stan’s mother was a member of the Australian Women’s National League — one of the women’s organisations that later merged into the Liberal Party — and she had enrolled Stan as a Liberal while he was still in uniform; he was destined to be elected to the state executive.

Margaret became branch secretary in South Camberwell, set up her own accountancy business and produced three children. With the state’s Liberal Party division requiring fifty–fifty organisational power-sharing between men and women, Margaret steadily acquired influence and leadership in the Victorian Liberal Women’s section, the state executive and the Federal Council.

But these positions didn’t translate easily into parliamentary preselection. When senator Ivy Wedgwood, elected to the Senate for the Liberals in 1950, prepared to step down in 1971, it was Stan she first approached about replacing her; only when he demurred did Margaret come into the frame.

Even so, of the twenty candidates for Wedgwood’s spot, seventeen were men. Guilfoyle was opposed by the premier, Henry Bolte, and by a (male) member of the interview panel who asked her who would look after the children if she were in the Senate. An unimpressed Beryl Beaurepaire, another member of the panel, put the same question to the next (male) candidate. Guilfoyle won.

Guilfoyle became the third female Liberal senator elected from Victoria (after Wedgwood and Marie Breen) and the seventh overall. In opposition during 1975 she was one of the key Liberal senators, along with Reg Withers and Ivor Greenwood, who hung tough in refusing to pass Gough Whitlam’s budget, paving the way for his dismissal. Her reward was a senior position in the incoming Fraser government, becoming the first female member of cabinet as minister for social security (1975–80) and finance (1980–83).

As a young journalist in the press gallery I had the distinct joy of covering both the Senate and the social security portfolio. To visit Guilfoyle’s office was to undertake quite a trek: she occupied room M152, the most remote point on the southwest corner of the old Parliament House, accessed at the end of a long, gloomy, empty, creaking corridor.

The office was diametrically opposite the prime minister’s office in the northeast corner, and this seemed a metaphor for the way the Senate exercised power in those days — with aloof disregard for the hustle and bustle of executive government. There was no mistaking the silent sense of power in the air. Once admitted, I would sit with her private secretary Rod Kemp, who imparted as background a few carefully selected crumbs of news.

Henderson provides the broad context of Guilfoyle’s portfolio battles and crises, informed by interviews with former staffers and departmental officers, and analyses the complex way in which, even as a Fraser loyalist, Guilfoyle’s defence of her social security budget and turf managed to thwart the prime minister’s overall drive for reforms.

These interviews yield the gem that Guilfoyle’s always-assured and measured parliamentary performance was enabled by her “handbag statistics” — a notebook of key portfolio facts maintained by her department. But unfortunately we don’t hear Guilfoyle’s own voice; perhaps because of that same understated style, her Hansard is dull rather than daring.

These easily readable biographies form part of a series of short biographical monographs edited by political scientist Scott Prasser and published by Connor Court. Prasser describes the series as “scholarly rather than academic” — a very fine distinction that seems to mean narrative in form with clear referencing of sources. Fair enough, though a few of the “academic” virtues would not be out of place, such as a critical approach to sources and a more considered acknowledgement of previously published research (for example, Marian Sawer and Marian Simms’s A Woman’s Place: Women and Politics in Australia).

Neither author really probes the institutional obstacles and advantages facing these women. As becomes clear, though, both careers were at least partly subject to the will and whim of the (male) prime ministers of the day. Menzies fully recognised the importance of women for the Liberal Party, as a matter of organisational structure, political philosophy and electoral strategy. But talented women were routinely overlooked in preselections. And as PM he ruthlessly pruned the ministerial careers of colleagues male and female.

Rankin had to wait for her promotion until Menzies had finally gone. Fraser, by contrast, had to repay Guilfoyle’s loyalty in 1975 with portfolio heft in government; it probably helped that she was Victorian in a time when all but one Liberal prime minister had been from the jewel-like state.

Equally, it’s clear — though again, not analysed in either biography — that the political careers of these women depended heavily on the dynamics of the Senate. Fewer elections, longer terms and a less volatile statewide electorate helped to protect incumbents, including women. Once Rankin was in, she stayed in. A similar dynamic was at work in Victoria.

In fact, Guilfoyle’s replacement of Wedgwood was a watershed moment, effectively reserving one Senate spot in Victoria for women. (When Guilfoyle retired in 1987, she was replaced by Kay Patterson; when Patterson retired in 2008, Helen Kroger was elected; but the sixty-three-year line came to an end in 2013 when Kroger, from third spot, lost to Ricky Muir the Motoring Enthusiast — a perfect symbol of the decline of Liberals, and Liberal women, in Victoria.)

But these institutional explanations deny the agency exercised by each of these women in negotiating a narrow path into and through their male-dominated workplace.

After one setback in 1949 — when she was dropped as opposition whip — Rankin sought the comfort of Enid Lyons. Lyons told her that she would be accepted, “so long as you manage to do the work that men do and do it as well, and at the same time don’t antagonise them.” In remarkably similar terms, the newly elected Guilfoyle was advised by husband Stan “not to take on any responsibilities or portfolios that were women’s issues. If she was to make it, she would make it as a person like any man.”

Both women did indeed do “the work that men do”: long hours, late nights and mute persistence in hard slog. Both had a prodigious work ethic. It might have been harder for Rankin, a curio item in the 1940s and 1950s, than for Guilfoyle, who in the 1970s and 1980s was able to become a serious player. Rankin remained unmarried and lacked the personal support of a family; Guilfoyle had to negotiate a more complicated work–family balance.

But who would offer such advice to today’s female MPs? With unprecedented numbers of women in parliament, ten cabinet ministers, and teal and Green crossbenchers galore, the numbers have changed, thanks in part to Labor quotas. The nature of representative political work has changed as well. In today’s politics, does anyone (even a man) need to work “like” a man or “as well as” a man?

As for “antagonising” male politicians, Julia Gillard and others have shown that outing misogynists is a legitimate and valuable part of a female political career. But in an earlier era, it is notable that so many of these Liberal pioneers were rewarded — partly in tacit exchange for not antagonising the men — with the highest imperial honours. Rankin, Guilfoyle, Wedgwood, Lyons were all titled “Dame.” Even Tangney accepted one, though it was against Labor policy. •

Annabelle Rankin
By Peter Sekuless | Connor Court | $19.95 | 134 pages

Margaret Guilfoyle
By Anne Henderson | Connor Court | $19.95 | 84 pages

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Menzies, aged seventy, is about to open a new telescope in the Canberra hinterland. Long experience of public speaking in the open air has given him an aversion to flies, and he has hit on the deterrent of shrouding himself in insecticide.

The young man is Tony Eggleton, thirty-three. Just hired as Menzies’s press secretary, he is ambitious, conservative and diligent. If spraying the prime ministerial personage is part of the job, he’ll do it obligingly and he’ll do it thoroughly. And later that day he will type up the incident in a note for his private file.

Here is a puzzle worth unravelling. Aren’t nice guys supposed to come last in politics? Yet that obliging young man ended up as top dog in the Liberal Party organisation. “Neither belligerence nor assertiveness were part of his persona,” according to biographer Tom Frame in his new book, A Very Proper Man; yet he became a prominent player in every twist and turn of the Liberal saga over twenty-five years from Menzies to Hewson: Holt’s disappearance, Gorton’s chaos, Whitlam’s dismissal, Fraser’s supremacy, Howard’s and Peacock’s failures, the Joh-for-Canberra fizzer. He was there through eleven federal elections, including a still-unbeaten record of seven as the Liberals’ national campaign director. And he went on to work at a high level in international affairs, in the Commonwealth during the Whitlam years and in the development assistance organisation CARE International.

Along the way, Eggleton practised a lifelong discipline of typing up notes recording his immediate impressions of events he was involved in. The result, says Frame, is “thousands of documents, memoranda, letters, newspaper clippings and photographs” in thirteen boxes, as well as a “personal chronicle” written by Eggleton for his family.

This remarkable trove of contemporaneous firsthand records sees the light of day for the first time in Frame’s biography. A Very Proper Man contains no startling revelation that reshapes our understanding of Liberal politics; but its deep detail, long span and central perspective will make it a very valuable resource for future historians of Liberal politics.

Frame declares himself a friend of Eggleton, and this is a friendly biography. But while it is thorough and substantial in tracing Eggleton’s progress, I don’t think it fully succeeds in explaining his success and longevity.

Born into a middle-class family in Swindon, England, in 1932, Tony (not Anthony) Eggleton left school at fifteen to become a reporter with the local newspaper. Rapid promotion led to an invitation in 1950 to cross the globe to join the Bendigo Advertiser. Supportive parents paid his passage; the adventure became a career. He joined the ABC in Melbourne the following year; by the end of 1954 he was an “A” grade journalist responsible for morning bulletins of radio news. Then along came TV, and Eggleton was included in the ABC’s first training courses — truly, as Frame notes, a “career-enhancing opportunity.”

When the ABC’s Melbourne office began a TV news service shortly before the opening ceremony of the Melbourne Olympics, Eggleton was chief of staff. In his new role, his working life involved “identifying good news stories, assigning reporters and cameramen, supervising newsroom management and logistics, and assessing the film ‘rushes’ in the viewing room. With his office in a prominent corner of the newsroom, he was close to all the drafting, editing and production.”

And then he joined the navy, as its coordinator of public relations. Why? He had reached the top of the ladder in journalism at the age of twenty-seven; perhaps he saw a path into government, to a life among the news makers rather than the news reporters. If so it was an inspired gamble.

The navy minister was John Gorton, whom Eggleton had profiled for the Bendigo newspaper as a newly elected senator from Victoria. Gorton remembered him and liked his work — not least, perhaps, an opinion piece in which Eggleton had declared his support for Menzies’s proposed Communist Party dissolution bill. (“The local branch of the Communist Party is… an active tentacle of the Kremlin octopus… We must ensure the reds are prevented from infiltrating further.”) Gorton, the most junior minister in the government and not entitled to a staff press secretary, was hungry for profile and looking for someone experienced in the new medium of television.

Gorton overruled his department and offered Eggleton the job, and in March 1960 Eggleton moved to Canberra and into the Liberal orbit. They made a complementary pair: Eggleton initiated the now-standard practice of issuing ministerial announcements on Sundays, typically quiet news days; Gorton got increased coverage and was delighted. Eggleton also set up a navy film unit to produce professional newsreels of ships and sailors, and distribute them to TV stations. This innovation, too, has continued.

Frame, who has written extensively on Australian naval history, suggests Eggleton was perhaps too good at his job, insofar as his “effective promotion” of the navy may have obscured the problems that would manifest in a series of collisions and other fatal mishaps. These incidents culminated on the evening of 10 February 1964 when the aircraft carrier Melbourne collided with the destroyer Voyager. Eighty-two men were killed in the navy’s worst peacetime disaster.

Frame provides a terrific description of how Eggleton battled the bureaucracy to ensure “a continuing flow of accurate information” to the public, for which he received the respect of the media and, as it turned out, the prime minister. Menzies appointed him press secretary in late 1965 and allowed him to organise a live broadcast of the press conference in early 1966 at which the prime minister announced his retirement.

Eggleton was passed down, like a piece of valuable china, to the incoming prime minister Harold Holt. If Voyager was Eggleton’s trial run in crisis management, Holt’s disappearance in the surf off Portsea in December 1967 triggered his supreme test.

Thanks to his press gallery contacts, Eggleton appears to have been the first of Holt’s people to hear rumours of something amiss. He was the first to get to Portsea, travelling with Holt’s wife Zara. While the military and police conducted their fruitless search, Eggleton took control of the external story, filling the leadership vacuum and managing the maelstrom of media and public anxiety by personally conducting six televised press conferences over three days. He also communicated with the governor-general, the Liberal Party and US president Lyndon Johnson. In the process he became famous.

When the Liberal Party met in Canberra in January to elect Holt’s replacement, it was naturally Eggleton who announced to the media that the new prime minister was John Gorton. Gorton’s trainwreck prime ministership provides Frame’s most entertaining and astonishing chapter, informed by Eggleton’s contemporaneous file notes covering Gorton’s divisive and conspiratorial relationship with his staffer Ainsley Gotto, his hatred of the media, and his numerous domestic and international faux pas.

The highlight, deservedly, is the late-night drinks party at the residence of the US ambassador Bill Crook on 1 November 1968 — surely the most infamous and embarrassing incident ever in the Australia–US relationship.

Earlier that day, Crook had met with Gorton to confirm LBJ’s announced suspension of bombing of North Vietnam. The advice was tardy, annoying Gorton, who kept the ambassador waiting. That evening Gotto attended a dinner with others at Crook’s residence, and pressured Eggleton to persuade the prime minister to pay a visit to smooth things over. Gorton went to a press gallery dinner instead, and it was only late at night, well lubricated and in the company of a young journalist, Geraldine Willesee, that he agreed to do so. What could possibly go wrong?

In what now reads like soap opera, Gorton was miffed to see Gotto with another guest and Gotto was appalled to see Gorton with Willesee. Eggleton thought it was “incredible… unreal.” While music and dancing continued, Gorton at some point divulged that he wanted to withdraw Australian troops from South Vietnam but was prevented by Liberal Party policy. Crook invited Eggleton into the study for a private talk about Vietnam. Eggleton finally extracted Gorton “between 2am and 3am.”

Frame asserts that Gorton had “fallen short of every standard of acceptable behaviour,” and that when the story came out months later it was Eggleton’s personal reputation that helped save the PM. This seems fair. The Liberals were spending their inherited political capital like drunken sailors — or ex–navy ministers — and Eggleton proved himself the only adult in the room.

When Gorton was finally replaced by William McMahon in 1971, Eggleton opted to join the Commonwealth secretariat in London. He was lured back to Canberra in 1974 to help the Liberals, now in opposition, as the party’s federal director. In this role he worked very closely with Malcolm Fraser as PM, winning three elections, only to then lose four in a row to Labor’s Bob Hawke and retire in 1990.

So what does explain Eggleton’s longevity and prominence? Part of the answer is his loyalty to the cause. Hardworking, methodical, unflappable, an early riser and a non-drinker, he started out as useful and became indispensable.

Eggleton himself told a press gallery farewell dinner that as press secretary he had been “valet, chauffeur, decoy, bag carrier, sounding board and whipping boy.” He protests too much; he also brought exceptional skills in managing the news flow to suit his political masters, while also retaining the confidence of the working press. Veteran journo Alan Reid (providing Frame with his title) described him as “a very proper man.”

A further part of the answer lies with the old adage that proximity is power. Menzies disliked talking on the phone; he let Eggleton answer his calls. Gorton hated briefing the media; he let Eggleton do it for him. When Fraser campaigned, Eggleton travelled with him on the plane. Eggleton spent his career “in the room,” listening and learning and becoming, in the admiring description of another veteran scribe, Max Walsh, a “one-man intelligence network.”

Importantly, he didn’t seek to wield power or advise on policy outside his area of responsibility. He didn’t take sides and he didn’t blab. (A later Liberal press secretary, David Barnett, described Eggleton as like a built-in wardrobe — invisible and discreet.) Tact and discretion earned him the trust of those he dealt with and extended his influence.

At the same time, as he grew in experience and influence, he didn’t fail to perceive the benefits of centralised coordination of the government’s and the party’s communications. While still press secretary, he suggested the prime minister’s department create an office of public affairs and information to monitor and coordinate media units within the various departments and ministerial offices. In opposition, under Billy Snedden and later Andrew Peacock, he expanded the remit of the party office at the expense of the leader’s office.

Similarly, and more significantly and permanently, he secured appointment, under Fraser, as the Liberals’ first national campaign director, with effective (though often porous and conditional) control over the campaign activities of the nominally autonomous state divisions. Frame’s narrative is a bit light on here and could have devoted more space to the internal workings of the Liberal organisation and the personnel under Eggleton’s long regime.

As noted, this is a friendly biography. Frame’s criticisms, muted and elliptical, are largely confined to the introduction. He suggests that Eggleton should at times have “taken a stronger stand against bad behaviour” without specifying which incidents he is referring to. It seems clear that Eggleton’s tolerance of Gorton, especially his appalling behaviour at the US residence, is one of those occasions.

By today’s less forgiving standards, senior advisers become complicit if they put political or personal loyalty ahead of a higher responsibility to the nation or the government — especially if they are public servants, as Eggleton was at this stage. They have the option of calling it out, or walking away. Eggleton did neither.

Likewise, when Fraser blocked supply to the Whitlam government, Eggleton’s predecessor Tim Pascoe opposed the strategy. He even presented a memo to Fraser in October 1975 arguing that forcing an election for short-term gain would deprive Fraser of long-term moral authority. (Fraser burned the memo and never forgave Pascoe.) But Eggleton had no such qualms. In his own personal file note on 10 November 1975, he wrote that the governor-general would surely soon feel compelled to intervene; meanwhile, Liberal fundraising was ahead of target.

Such are the dilemmas and tensions inherent in the concept of political professionalism, which requires primary devotion to the client but also adherence to objective standards of conduct. It is only easy with hindsight. (For the record, I should note Eggleton’s generous consideration in giving me a lengthy interview for my doctoral research into the Liberal and Labor campaign professionals; he is indeed a very proper man.)

After he retired in 1990, feted and honoured, Eggleton worked in the aid sector with development assistance organisation CARE. Fraser, now chair of the global body, had invited him to apply to become its secretary-general. They travelled extensively and were an effective team, which suggests their close political relationship was based on solid personal sympathies.

Picture this then. A light plane touches down on a tiny airstrip somewhere in Somalia during the civil war in the early 1990s. Malcolm Fraser alights and, with him, a dapper and still obliging Eggleton. They climb aboard a convoy of jeeps, with a machine gunner for protection. Fraser, however, urgently needs to pee. There is no toilet, not even a tree. While Fraser unzipped, Eggleton was, in Frame’s words, “assigned the task of acting as a tree to afford the very tall prime minister a little dignity.” One can’t help admiring the man. •

A Very Proper Man: The Life of Tony Eggleton
By Tom Frame | Connor Court | $49.95 | 320 pages

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Just last month, the nuclear subs deal was presented by one commentator as a crossing of the Rubicon, a reference to Caesar’s point of no return in his invasion of Rome. During the bushfires, Scott Morrison’s Hawaiian holiday irresistibly summoned the image of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Kevin Rudd gleefully destabilised Julia Gillard on the Ides of March, recalling the day of Caesar’s assassination.

Gough Whitlam, of course, was the supreme master of this game. He likened prime minister Billy McMahon, scheming on the Isle of Capri, to “Tiberius with a telephone” and a well-lubricated governor-general Sir John Kerr, “weaving his way from the Imperial box” at the 1977 Melbourne Cup, to Caligula: “The fascinated crowd and a million viewers may have thought the horse would have made a better proconsul.”

Mary Beard has the answer. In Twelve Caesars, the professor of classics at Cambridge University explores in fascinating and entertaining detail how the long-dead Roman emperors have lived on in the Western imagination, providing a rich store of moral and political exemplars to instruct, warn and mock their successors.

Her title pays homage to Suetonius, the Roman historian whose Lives of the Twelve Caesars recorded the virtues and vices of the first emperors in salacious and sometimes horrifying detail. In doing so he turned those dozen autocrats into an enduring canon: the dictator Julius Caesar, appointed after the demise of the republic in 48 BCE; the Julio-Claudian emperors Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, who came after Caesar’s assassination and a civil war; the three short-lived emperors Galba, Otho and Vitellius, who ruled during another civil war in 69 CE; and the Flavian dynasty of Vespasian, Titus and Domitian, who was assassinated in 96 CE.

In this book, as her subtitle suggests, Beard is interested in the “images of power” — that is, the visual representations of the emperors. As she did in SPQR, her 2015 bestselling history of Rome, she reveals her great talent for transforming the arcane and ancient into the relevant and contemporary, and for bringing the highest levels of scholarship into a popular and entertaining narrative.

The medium in which the most numerous of these images are preserved are the coins bearing the emperors’ portrait and name, which helped the regime enforce its authority throughout its huge empire. With a slogan or a symbol on the reverse side, they made for effective propaganda. Production of individual images on this scale had never been required during the republic, with its regular rotation and sharing of power (in theory, at least) among numerous office-holders.

Statues and busts of the emperors were also widely disseminated, with more than 200 inscribed pedestals of Augustus alone having survived. Judging by the fragmentary remains of pastry moulds found amid the ruins of Roman kitchens, imperial portraits even appeared on cakes and biscuits.

But identifying who is depicted on any particular sculpture is frustratingly difficult. Most have been separated from their named plinths, and few display the physical characteristics Suetonius so vividly describes. Indeed many of them, found thousands of kilometres apart, look broadly similar; it’s difficult to distinguish an Augustus from a Tiberius, a Caligula, a Claudius or a Nero.

Beard suggests that individual likeness might not have been the point — that they shouldn’t be taken at face value, as it were. Image-making may have instead been designed to achieve “carefully constructed similarity (as well as the occasional difference).” Whatever the physical characteristics of individual emperors, their statues and busts seem designed to assert a shared imperial authority, which became even more apparent as the emperors began to be regarded as divinities.

Idealisation and anonymising are even more apparent in the images of the emperors’ female relatives. At the imperial court, wives and mothers were political players, especially in questions of succession; they were accused of adultery, incest and poisoning. Yet their statues and busts blandly represent dynastic stability and fecundity. Again, likeness is not the point.

Beard, best known as a historian of Rome, takes her analysis well past the imperial age, exploring the “images of power” produced by medieval, Renaissance and baroque artists, by the Victorians and into the modern era. Twelve Caesars ranges widely across paintings, drawings and books; marble and bronze; metalwork and tapestry; from Titian and van Dyck to Alma-Tadema and Anselm Kiefer. For two millennia, images of the Twelve Caesars have been lost and rediscovered by archaeologists; imitated, copied and reinterpreted by artists — and by forgers; bought and sold by dealers and collectors; displayed by kings, wealthy elites and museums; looted by armies; burnt in fires.

It’s here that Beard tells a wonderful story about the Aldobrandini Tazze, a set of twelve “grand and exquisitely decorated silver-gilt dishes” dating from the late 1500s. Incorporating thirty-seven kilograms of silver, the set is a showy product of extreme wealth and elite taste. For Beard, it constitutes the earliest surviving attempt to illustrate Suetonius’s Lives in material form: each bowl is decorated with scenes from Suetonius’s account of the life of one of the Caesars, and at the centre of each bowl stands a miniature statue of the appropriate emperor.

So far so good. The Caesar statues are even inscribed with their names, making identification certain. But there’s a problem: the statues were made to be screwed in and out of the dishes — presumably so they could be cleaned and polished — and somewhere along the line, several of them were screwed back into the wrong ones. (It’s so hard to get good help!)

Over the centuries, the dishes were auctioned off in ones and twos to collectors and dealers and museums. The statues became irretrievably separated from their correct locations.

Enter Professor Beard, scholar and sleuth. In 2010 she popped into London’s Victoria and Albert Museum to inspect its single dish, which the museum believed to depict Domitian. Beard confirmed the statue was indeed inscribed as Domitian. But — and you can imagine the V&A curatorial staff experiencing a tremor at this point — “it was soon clear that there was something very wrong indeed with the scenes on the bowl.” In particular, Beard noticed that the supposed scene of Domitian’s triumphal procession after defeating the Germans “had nothing to do with” Suetonius’s description of the event. Instead, it looked more like the triumph of Tiberius.

“For me,” she writes, “it was a clear hint that the bowl had been wrongly identified and was attached to the wrong emperor. So it turned out… It took only a careful look, and a text of Suetonius, to see that the wrong emperor was on the wrong bowl.” The real Domitian bowl has turned up in Minneapolis, accompanied by the statue of Augustus, and the Augustus bowl is in Los Angeles with Nero.

Beard reports another clever piece of research, this time involving a series of twelve Flemish tapestries depicting the life of Julius Caesar that were bought by Henry VIII in the 1540s and hung in Hampton Court. The tapestries disappeared, probably simply worn out, in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Thanks to the work of art historians using documentary archives and studying copies, the scenes have been largely reconstructed, but several curious misidentifications persist.

Why, for example, does the scene supposedly showing the (male) soothsayer Spurinna predicting the death of Caesar actually show a woman? And why does that woman have a cauldron, bats and snakes? Because, Beard triumphantly points out, the scene is taken from Pharsalia, an epic by the first-century poet Lucan. In Lucan’s narrative, the witch Erichtho predicts, in gruesome detail, the death not of Caesar but of his civil war rival Pompey.

Twelve Caesars is a rich but loosely arranged miscellany. At one level it reads like an upmarket version of Fake or Fortune?, the BBC program that tests the authenticity and provenance of unrecognised art works. I am sure the TV rights for Beard’s book will be snapped up. Fiona Bruce had better watch out.

But Beard provides instruction as well as entertainment, and the fun of chasing down the provenance of arcane objets is not intended to conceal the more important puzzle that lies beneath. Why have these emperors exercised such a continuing and profound fascination? Why have their images been so frequently and carefully studied, emulated and multiplied?

They were, after all, an unattractive bunch, less known for civic virtue than for personal vice — “death, destruction, imperial sadism and excess,” as Beard puts it. Only one of the twelve, Vespasian, died in his own bed; or two, if you count Tiberius, who died there only because that is where he was when (probably) suffocated by a loving relative.

The rest were assassinated, poisoned, forced to “fall on their own sword” or, in the case of Vitellius, dragged through Rome by a lynch mob, “tortured, beaten to death, impaled on a hook and thrown into the Tiber.” Though they are arranged into “dynasties,” many sons were executed and only one (Titus) succeeded his father as emperor. After the relative tidiness of republican rule, the Roman imperial system never worked out an orderly transfer of power from one autocrat to the next

And here of course is one answer to the puzzle. The emperors provided important lessons to subsequent rulers. For wannabe autocrats, absolute power is, of course, its own attraction. When Julius Caesar terminated the Roman republic he took the title “dictator.” Literally, his word was law. Mussolini took the same title, set up a fascist regime, and sought to recreate a Roman Empire in Africa.

But even more orthodox rulers — such as those kings and emperors who continued to carry the name of Caesar (as Kaiser and Czar) right through to the early twentieth century — might have found useful lessons about the hazards of succession, the perils of civil war, and the interplay of court politics and national welfare. Beard suggests that the Renaissance and later artists, who were commissioned by princes and dukes to portray the lives of imperial Caesars, not infrequently combined flattery with coded nuance, hidden meanings, and “unsettling version[s] of one-man rule.”

Today, this enduring artistic project, the visual reinterpretation of the Twelve Caesars, appears to be in decline. Briefly traversing the TV drama I, Claudius, the Carry On franchise and Gladiator, Beard bemoans the “visual descent of a once challenging iconography into the realm of a visual cliché.”

The same can be said of our political language. Whitlam’s elaborate put-downs were informed by his education in the classics; it is hard to identify anyone today who could follow his lead. A cartoon of Nero fiddling is indeed nothing more than a visual cliché. Then again, we are democrats and — unless Trump returns — have no need for tales of imperial excess.

This is a beautifully produced hardback. The text, with fifty pages of notes and bibliography, is brilliantly illustrated with 242 colour plates and just enough family trees to help the reader distinguish the Julio-Claudians from the Flavians, and Agrippina the Elder from Agrippina the Younger. Princeton University Press is to be congratulated. •

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The son of an industrial chemist from northern England who brought his family to Australia in 1957, Barton was raised in the working-class Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth and gained degrees in microbiology and biochemistry from the University of Adelaide. But what to do with this classic STEM education?

A vaguely worded advertisement he spotted in the government gazette in 1972 sought a junior scientist for the Department of Defence. He applied, and the job turned out to be an analyst position with Australia’s intelligence assessment agency, the Joint Intelligence Organisation.

Hired by the JIO’s Defence Science and Technical Intelligence directorate, and shuffled into the arcane field of Middle Eastern nuclear chemical and biological weaponry, Barton went on to spend thirty-plus years as an Australian intelligence analyst and assessment officer. His scientific and technical skills, plus some training in spycraft, led him from Canberra to London, Somalia and, ultimately, Iraq, where he found himself in the vortex of the biggest intelligence controversy of our time: the search for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, Barton was acting director of intelligence analysis at the Defence Intelligence Organisation. It was his job to brief prime minister Bob Hawke about the risks — chemical, nuclear and biological — facing Australia’s naval vessels supporting the US-led coalition in what we now call the first Gulf war.

“I told him that we knew what kind of chemical agents and weapons Iraq had, and what the [Australian ships] might expect to face in the Gulf region,” writes Barton. “As for nuclear weapons I assured him that Iraq was a decade away, and probably more, from developing a bomb. We had little intelligence on Iraqi biological weapons, and although I thought the threat was low, I believed it would be prudent for our forces to be prepared. He nodded and seemed satisfied with this. Perhaps if he had learned what I discovered later, he would have felt differently.”

These “later” discoveries came through Barton’s intensive work as a weapons inspector in Iraq, where he was a member of the UN inspection teams, UNSCOM and UNMOVIC, under Swedish diplomats Rolf Ekéus and, in the lead-up to the second Gulf war, Hans Blix. Separately, he was attached to GATEWAY, a CIA-run operation to gather intelligence alongside, and about, the UN inspectors. He later joined the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group as special adviser first to David Kay and then to Charles Duelfer.

As recounted by Barton, the life of a weapons inspector involves dangerous field assignments, frustrating interrogations of uncooperative Iraqi scientists and military leaders, jigsaw-like puzzling through caches of seized documents, detailed tracing of the movement of potentially lethal chemicals, and a delicate balancing of international political and intelligence interests. Barton entered smouldering warehouses and bunkers containing stockpiles of unknown chemicals and live munitions, seized documents that revealed sophisticated Iraqi weapons programs, and prepared reports for the UN Security Council.

It is exciting stuff. Barton writes in an easy conversational style with plenty of anecdotes, and he negotiates many of the more confidential passages with the use of false names, nicknames, first names or, sometimes, simply no names at all.

One seized document he studied demonstrated that as early as May 1990 — seven months before the first Gulf war — Iraqi scientists had put that country “on the brink” of making a nuclear bomb. Having briefed Hawke that an Iraqi bomb was at least a decade away, Barton has spent troubled nights wondering if this much more threatening knowledge would have changed Australia’s calculations about the merits of sending those ships to the Gulf in 1991.

The Hawke briefing aside, there is little in this account of what any of the revelations about Iraqi weaponry may have meant for Australian decision-making as part of US president George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing.” That story is better told in more analytical and comprehensive accounts elsewhere.

Instead, Barton’s target lies elsewhere. A consistent thread through the weave of his narrative is its severe indictment of the intelligence performance of our closest ally. He writes to make a point, to demonstrate how the CIA’s intelligence capacity was distorted by its excessive responsiveness to political pressure.

Barton’s first confidence-shaking experience of CIA intelligence occurred early in his career. In mid 1981 reports emerged from Laos and Cambodia of sickness caused by “yellow rain.” CIA analysis pointed to a chemical agent the Soviet Union was supplying to its Vietnamese allies, leading then US secretary of state Alexander Haig to accuse the Soviets of chemical warfare. For the Australian investigators, though, led by Barton, the data didn’t add up: sickness reports were inconsistent and didn’t tally with the fungal-borne mycotoxins the CIA had identified in the samples.

In their report at the time, Barton and a colleague “concluded that there had been no chemical warfare in Indochina. The CIA had gotten it dead wrong.” Barton explains: “Bees often defecate in swarms, and their faeces falls to the ground in sticky droplets like rain. Since a food source for bees is pollen, their droppings are yellow. What the CIA had actually collected was dried bee poo, some of which had become mouldy, perhaps in transit, and so was contaminated with tiny amounts of toxin.”

Barton attributes the intelligence error to political influence — in other words, the analysis was shaped to fit the political conclusions that had already been announced. He was also shocked by the CIA’s response to his report: a personal letter went to the head of JIO questioning Barton’s analysis and accusing him of “perverse and mischievous” behaviour. The insult clearly rankles with him to this day.

In Iraq, as the drums of war were beating ever more loudly, the CIA was under ever greater pressure to find what it had been told to look for. Indeed, George W. Bush and his secretary of state, Colin Powell, had declared not only that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction existed but also that they posed an existential threat. Barton, by contrast, had become convinced that the Iraqis had destroyed most of their weapons of mass destruction, and that whatever remained was likely to have passed its use-by date — in other words, that the Iraqi program posed no continuing threat.

Yet the United States and Britain accused Iraq of possessing capabilities that the UN inspectors under Blix — and, Barton suspected, the Iraqis themselves — had no knowledge of. Even more emphatically, at the Iraq Survey Group, “everything was premised on the belief that there were hidden weapons out there, and all they had to do was find them.”

This dilemma led the ISG’s first director, the highly regarded David Kay, to walk away. When his successor, Charles Duelfer, was introduced to staff in an excruciating scene witnessed by Barton, CIA director George Tenet bluntly asserted, “Iraq has hidden weapons out there, and it’s your job to find them!” Barton, remembering the saga of the bee poo, concluded: “Politics was once again taking precedence over intelligence findings.”

So it turned out. The intelligence was wrong. There were no weapons of mass destruction — or none any longer. “It was the politicians who made the decision to go to war, but it was the massive failure of CIA intelligence that facilitated it,” writes Barton. “In my view the CIA was as culpable as their political masters.” This lesson alone is worth the price of the book.

Barton writes as probably the best-informed Australian on the subject of Iraqi weapons development. His only rival for the title would be diplomat Richard Butler, who followed Ekéus as head of UNSCOM; but though Barton’s involvement was at a lower level, it was for a longer period and arguably gave him more on-the-ground knowledge. Curiously, Barton doesn’t mention Butler at any point.

Even so, it is not entirely clear how an intelligence agent who held senior positions in the Australian system and operated in elite international networks is able to write any sort of memoir. To be fair, much of his account deals with his service with the United Nations, in Mogadishu as well as Iraq, when by definition his activities and reports were ultimately public. But he was employed by Australian intelligence for most of the time and he is still bound, as he acknowledges, by the Official Secrets Act.

Bob Hawke’s 1994 memoir, for example, is much more circumspect about the intelligence briefings he received at this time. Though Barton’s story doesn’t show Hawke in a negative light, I suspect the late prime minister would hardly have approved of discussion of his highly confidential briefings. And for what it’s worth, I doubt that a more accurate representation of the Iraqi nuclear threat would have deterred Hawke, who was determined not to appease an aggressor. •

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Winning is tough, especially from opposition. Many capable leaders and solid campaigns will fail. But as journalist, biographer and academic Chris Wallace insists, every election is winnable, and this loss was unnecessary. Given the narrowness of the loss, the vulnerability of the incumbent and the scale of Australia’s still-unmet policy challenges, she is right to insist on understanding what went wrong.

To this end, she has published a brisk, partisan and boldly titled analysis that provides a checklist of ten critical lessons Labor needs to learn to avoid a repeat.

Chris Wallace is a former press gallery journalist who was proprietor of an excellent Canberra drinking hole, Das Kapital. She is also the biographer, sometimes controversially, of John Hewson, Germaine Greer, Don Bradman and Julia Gillard. Now on staff at ANU’s School of History, she writes as an entertaining insider. Even while choking down another reflux of regret, most party supporters will recognise the inherent common sense in many of her recommendations, which cover leadership, policy, politics, communications and mindset.

Wallace is not the first, of course, to offer advice to Labor following the debacle of May 2019. The party has published a forensic review by party elders Craig Emerson and Jay Weatherill, which attributed the defeat to “a weak strategy that could not adapt to the change in Liberal leadership, a cluttered policy agenda that looked risky, and an unpopular leader.” The pair made twenty-eight recommendations covering the party’s philosophy, organisation, campaigning, research and platform. More recently, academic researchers (me among them) have provided their own analysis and explanation of what they called “Morrison’s Miracle.”

The problem comes in the implementation. How does any organisation, collective and path-dependent, agree to change behaviour? How does a political party learn?

Wallace uses a sporting analogy to suggest that Labor might emulate a successful football team in which everyone in management and on the field is imbued with “a culture of permanent attention to performance and accountability.” But that’s quixotic, she concedes.

Political parties, after all, are not unitary actors. No one is really “in charge.” On the contrary, power is widely dispersed across multiple locations, functions and spheres of influence. At work are factions, rivalries, hierarchies, ambitions and traditions. All of which is to say that parties are political. It’s hard for them to agree on and follow a single course of action, they forget the lessons they learned in previous cycles, and they frequently fail to reach optimal efficiency. They usually “want” to win elections, but they often don’t do so.

Directed at a collective “Labor,” Wallace’s recommendations don’t single out any one person or group as responsible for giving effect to her changes.  Electing the leader is the role of caucus (and, sometimes, the members). Allocating frontbench jobs is the role of the leader (influenced by caucus and factions and regions and chambers). Determining policy is the job of — where do you start? — the party’s national conference, or the caucus, or the shadow minister, or the members. Anything to do with the economy, industry or industrial relations must involve the trade unions. Choosing the market researcher and running the ad campaign is the job of head office.

So implementing Wallace’s recommendations is easier said than done.

Take her first recommendation: “Elect a leader who can do the substance and theatre of politics.” Her discussion of this point highlights the importance of performance in democratic politics, and zeroes in on opposition leader Bill Shorten’s low polling numbers relative to Labor’s, and his “wooden ways” on the campaign trail relative to prime minister Scott Morrison. Where Morrison seemed to radiate energy and interacted enthusiastically with voters, Shorten, she writes, was too self-controlled, “smiling but slightly distant, looking ahead to the next person whose hand had to be shaken almost before he finished shaking the one in front of him.”

True, and I would have added a critique of Shorten’s other hand, too often stuck in his pocket. Trying to look cool and casual no doubt, but coming over like he didn’t really want to engage with the voters in front of him.

Wallace’s recommendation is radical surgery: elect a different leader (as opposed to, say, referring the existing one to a consultant for advice on loosening up and lifting his or her performance). In 1983, caucus did exactly this, dumping Bill Hayden for Bob Hawke and ensuring a great victory.

Could the same have happened to Shorten before 2019? He was protected by the 2013 rule change that prevented caucus coups after the Rudd–Gillard–Rudd bloodshed; this had bought welcome stability, which in turn strengthened Shorten’s leadership. He had campaigned well enough in 2016 and in the by-elections of 2018. And there was no Bob Hawke prowling on the sidelines.

Perhaps the question is, at what point in the electoral cycle does caucus start considering this advice in relation to the current leader and the next election?

Another of Wallace’s hard-to-do recommendations is to “make regional variations work for you, not against you.” Pointing to Labor’s glaring lack of MPs from Queensland, where the Coalition gained a swing of 4.3 per cent, Wallace condemns Shorten for “straddling the barbed-wire fence” on the Adani coal project. His attempted finesse — to require the mine project to secure environmental approvals — satisfied neither coalmining communities in regional Queensland nor green-leaning voters down south.

Wallace suggests Shorten should have engaged in sustained personal engagement with Queenslanders, including the pro-mine unions, listening to their concerns and developing a workable solution to the impasse. It would have included a well-funded transition package: imperfect perhaps but fair, and better than the alternatives on offer in the election. Turning regional variations to advantage, rather than getting skewered by them, would demonstrate leadership and a capacity for good government.

As Wallace points out, Labor has done this in the past in relation to difficult regional issues: uranium, the Murray–Darling and (1983 again) the Tasmanian dam (though it’s often forgotten that Labor lost all five Tasmanian seats in that election):

It is Labor’s problem to solve. The Adani divide is mirrored within Labor itself. If the party reaches a robust agreed internal position bridging sunset industrial era development and jobs to sunrise information era development and jobs consistent with planetary survival and thriving, it will be unified, electable and ready to govern well.

As far as it goes — that is, as a policy process rather than a policy solution — this argument is fine. The irony, of course, is that in relation to other elements of its election platform, Labor followed Wallace’s advice. She is highly critical of shadow treasurer Chris Bowen and his politically toxic reforms of negative gearing and franking credits, but these reforms were aimed at ensuring Labor’s promises were fully funded within a budget surplus — arguably, showing Labor as unified, electable and ready to govern. It’s true that they created policy losers — breaching another of Wallace’s recommendations — especially after being transformed into “death taxes” by the Coalition’s negative advertising; but any Adani package would struggle for a win–win.

Which brings us to Noah Carroll.

This name does not appear in Wallace’s book, nor in the Emerson–Weatherill review. It should, because Noah Carroll was Labor’s national secretary and, as such, the campaign manager of the 2019 election.

When Wallace says that Labor must improve its polling and polling analysis, must produce brilliant advertising and must wise up on social media, she is talking about head office functions that were the responsibility of the national campaign manager.

Even more damning, when Emerson and Weatherill conclude that Labor had no persuasive strategy to win the election, no simple narrative to unite its many policies, no formal campaign committee or other forum to execute the campaign strategy; and when they find that Labor targeted too many seats and didn’t reframe its campaign after “daggy dad” Morrison replaced “top end of town” Turnbull, they are talking about the failures of Noah Carroll. Spare him no blushes. He walked away from head office after the defeat and was last seen working for a Big Four management consultancy.

Wallace makes ten recommendations, Emerson and Weatherill twenty-eight. In the interests of parsimony, I reckon I could boil it down to one single, vital, structural recommendation. There needs to be proper functional separation between the leader’s office and a head office run by a national secretary with the capacity to manage a professional national campaign. The leader’s office does the policy, the media, the front-of-house — but the party office has to turn it into a campaign strategy and execute it.

There are very few iron laws in election campaigns. But it is difficult to find a successful modern (post-1972) campaign, Labor or Liberal, in which that separation was not evident. The Liberals broke the iron law in 1993, losing their unlosable election; Labor broke it in 1996, and again in 2013.

In 2019, it seems, Labor did it again. The strategic void, the research failures, the inability to target the right message about the right issues to the voters who mattered in the seats that mattered — all these suggest a head office lacking professional campaign management. Perhaps Carroll — favoured son of the Victorian right, architect of the 2014 state election campaign that took Labor’s Daniel Andrews to power, and close confidant of Bill Shorten — wasn’t able to provide the scepticism, independence and separation essential to the job. The Liberals, it has emerged, knew what seats they needed to win to scratch out a narrow but famous victory; Labor had too many paths to victory and never managed to choose any of them. •

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Amid these marvels, a modest display case located just inside the front door is easy to miss. It is empty except for a couple of framed colour photographs, one showing a golden chalice inscribed “Emperor Tewodros,” the other showing an intricate necklace of silver and beads. But the accompanying labels, in English and Amharic, provide an eloquent explanation.

The first reads: “Looted by British troops, 1869.” The other: “Currently housed at Victoria and Albert Museum, London.”

The missing objects form part of a hoard of treasures plundered 150 years ago by British soldiers under Lord Napier after a punitive raid against Ethiopia’s Emperor Tewodros. Gathering up as much as they could carry and burning the rest, the army took the gold and silver, the jewellery, the sacred religious items back to London where — in a further travesty — they auctioned it off to defray the costs of the military expedition.

Many of the best items, including Tewodros’s exquisite gold crown, are on display today in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Ethiopia has asked repeatedly for their return, but all the V&A has offered is a “loan.”

This stand-off is an echo of the better-known dispute between Greece and the British Museum over the marble sculptures stolen by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon in 1801. But unlike the Greeks, Ethiopia can’t afford a grand building like Athens’s new Acropolis Museum, built to await the return of the marbles from London. Nor has it attracted the passionate advocacy of the well-connected London literary set, schooled in the “glory that was Greece” and ready with their pamphlets and books, their networks and committees. Ethiopian history is a closed book by contrast; its diaspora in the West is limited in size and voice; and, no doubt, the imperial connotations of a stolen crown seem less noble than the profoundly democratic narrative of the looted marbles.

So the Institute of Ethiopian Studies can only remember, mourn and accuse.

Geoffrey Robertson’s latest book, Who Owns History?, gives new impetus to the debate about the return of the Parthenon marbles and looted cultural heritage more generally.

In this account, Lord Elgin’s action in removing the marbles was plainly illegal: he did have permission to draw the sculptures and make plaster casts, but no document has ever been produced to show that the Ottoman authorities granted permission for removal. (The British Museum claims he acted “with the full knowledge and permission of the Ottoman authorities.”) Moreover, Elgin engaged in activities — bribery, deception, conspiracy — that were improper, to say the least, for a British ambassador in Constantinople. He compounded his theft by inflicting permanent damage on the marbles (some were sawn in half; some were mislaid in transit in  a shipwreck) and on the ancient building itself. Hypocritical, you might say, for a professed philhellene.

Later, bankrupt, Elgin sold the marbles in 1816 to the British government, which deposited them, by act of parliament, in the British Museum. Subsequent trustees, directors and curators of the museum have inflicted further damage on the marbles. Meanwhile, the Greek government and the Greek people have pleaded for their return from what the country’s president last year called their “murky prison” in London.

Robertson is a practised advocate — a celebrity barrister in the Old Bailey and international human rights advocate — and reading this part of his book is like sitting through an aerial bombardment or some sort of sonic tidal wide. He piles his evidence in great waves, his case unfurling like a great rolling fugue for brass trumpets. He scathingly pillories the prisoner in the dock (the British Museum). He hammers his strong points once, twice and three times in case we missed them the first and second times. He deftly sidesteps his weaknesses and omissions.

It’s a comprehensive account, but it contains little new evidence. Much of the research for this book seems to have originated as a consultancy project for the Greek Ministry of Culture, which may explain the stylistic clunkiness and some gloriously legalistic phrasing (“It follows that the British Museum’s first proposition is otiose”) that should not have been waved through by the editor.

Robertson’s admiration for classical Athens is transparent. Given the centrality of imperial rapaciousness to the case for returning the marbles, though, some acknowledgement of Athens’s belligerently imperial character would have strengthened his argument. It was only by extracting tribute from its subject cities that Pericles could pay for his huge public works program atop the Acropolis.

Robertson’s larger contribution lies with his second theme, which frames the broader debate about the return of plundered heritage within a reasoned, though speculative, framework of international law. He proposes an international convention and tribunal to adjudicate and enforce the “right of return” of heritage objects. If ever such a body is set up, his chapter identifying the factors the tribunal should weigh will prove a useful template.

Robertson identifies seven positive criteria any tribunal should consider: an object’s cultural value (pricelessness or special significance); its international importance (by reference to the UNESCO World Heritage list, for example); if it was taken as a “spoil” of war; if it was acquired illegally (by grave robbing leading to the private art market, for example); if it was acquired unconscionably (by forced sale, for example); if it was acquired legitimately but is still of great heritage significance; and if the holding institution (museum) has been careless or disrespectful in its custody.

Offsetting these criteria, Robertson posits three further considerations for the tribunal to weigh against return of a heritage object: if a returned object could not be preserved securely in its country of origin; if it was to be used for propaganda purposes; and if its return would reward states that trampled on the human rights of its citizens.

Taken together, these criteria would enable the tribunal to order the return of the Parthenon marbles as objects of priceless value with universal and national significance that were illegally acquired. The careless custody angle would also doubtless be argued, leaving the British Museum to compare its inadequate and faded sixty-year-old display gallery with the sparkle of the new Acropolis Museum.

Robertson goes on to show how other items of plunder would be considered by the tribunal. The crown of Tewodros and other Ethiopian treasures stolen in 1869 would be returned because of, at least, their national heritage value and their acquisition as spoils of war. The Benin bronzes, acquired in remarkably similar circumstances by another rapacious British military raid in 1897, would likewise be ordered back to Nigeria. The tribunal would likely order Queen Elizabeth to hand back the Koh-i-Noor diamond, unconscionably acquired as a forced “gift” by a young maharajah to Queen Victoria — though it would have to weigh the rival claims of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. The bust of Nefertiti would depart Berlin’s Neues Museum for Egypt because of its unique historical and cultural significance and its acquisition by deception.

His positive criteria, then, recognise a direct connection between the claimant state and the artists working in the original political entity. But Robertson’s tribunal would need to interrogate this closely: timing and sequence are critical. The modern Greek state, founded shortly after the Elgin heist in the 1820s, must successfully identify itself as the legitimate claimant for the artistic output of fifth-century BCE Athens. Cultural and ethnic considerations — notably, shared language — would help. Intervening periods of Greek occupation (Roman, Frankish, Ottoman) would need to be “seen through.” Ethiopia actually has a much stronger claim than Athens for its treasures: it was already a sovereign nation within established boundaries when Tewodros’s crown was stolen, and it has remained so ever since, never colonised, and with an undisrupted line of government.

But there is a deeper problem inherent in Robertson’s approach: his vagueness around the concept of cultural value or significance. He waxes long and hard about the “supreme importance” of the Parthenon marbles “to the world as well as to Greece,” derived from their intimate association with the emergence of democracy in classical Athens. But this argument cuts both ways. If the marbles have international or global significance, then this supports the universalist claims of the British Museum (“Here [the marbles] are seen by a world audience and are actively studied and researched by an international community of scholars”) and erodes the more limited national claims of the Greeks.

Indeed, there is a troubling relativism at work when Robertson claims that the Benin bronzes are artworks of “significance to Africa, but not to the world in the way that the Marbles have international resonance.” Isn’t this what gets the Ramsay Centre’s Western Civilisation program into trouble?

The three negative criteria would certainly reassure Western governments and cultural institutions that their storerooms will not be emptied in favour of corrupt, neglectful or insecure regimes. But the fact that many countries — Iraq, Turkey, Brunei, Russia, China — would likely fall foul of one or more of these considerations makes it much less likely that international agreement could be found for any convention, and would severely limit the operation of any right of return.

The human rights criterion, moreover, relies on a reading of restitution as itself upholding a human right — namely, the right to understand and enjoy one’s own culture. Human rights are of course universal, but this will be a hard sell outside the West. Authoritarian and party-led states, many of them former colonies and understandably hungry for the return of their heritage, will likely not appreciate another lecture on human rights.

Robertson’s tribunal would clearly have its work cut out.

The prospect of returning plundered heritage poses a profound existential question for the British Museum, the V&A and indeed all other Western collecting institutions. As the hapless British prime minister David Cameron put it when he was asked about the return of the Koh-i-Noor diamond during a visit to the Punjab: “If you say ‘yes’ to one request, you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty.”

Forget that the diamond itself is not in the museum but in the royal collection; Cameron put his finger on these institutions’ central postcolonial fear. Return one object and you open the floodgates. The fear was made more tangible a couple of years later when French president Emmanuel Macron declared his support for the “temporary or permanent” restitution of African cultural heritage acquired during France’s colonial era: “African heritage cannot be a prisoner of European museums.” Apart from the commissioning of an expert report, though, the French have undertaken little actual restitution.

Macron’s policy underlined the tendentious nature of defences of the great museums of London, Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam. Cloaking themselves as encyclopedic repositories of universal, supranational human culture, open to all to visit, photograph and research, are they not actually the self-interested beneficiaries of colonialism, implicated in the imperial projects of previous centuries and compromised to this day by their continuing denialism? And what about their network of accomplices, if that is the right word — the English missionary, the French art specialist, the German archaeologist, the American collector?

Australians must not feel comfortably removed from this debate. As both colony and coloniser, we too are deeply implicated. The grieving pleas by Indigenous Australians for the return of human remains are not all directed at European institutions; Mungo Man was returned only in 2017 from the research laboratory at the Australian National University. Cultural objects such as the Gweagal Shield — likely dating back to the first contact between Eora people and James Cook in 1770, and retained now in the British Museum — are also subject to claim for return, even though they have likely survived only because they were taken away.

Equally, Australians must contemplate a two-way exchange, where objects held by Australian institutions are returned to rightful owners overseas. The Australian National Gallery was forced to return a number of Indian statues purchased through a dodgy New York art dealer. The Shellal mosaic in the Australian War Memorial — a beautiful fragment of ancient Roman mosaic discovered by Australian soldiers in Gaza in 1917 — is at best a war trophy but more likely a straightforward example of pilfering. Should we not also look with a critical eye at the significant collections in Australian museums from Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific dating from our own period as coloniser?

The quest for a solution to the Parthenon marbles dispute through international law reflects the fact that the British Museum has legitimate title backed by specific legislation and can’t be forced under British law to return them. Even so, an enforceable right of return under as-yet unnegotiated international covenants before an as-yet unconstituted tribunal would require an immense institutional transformation — a transformation that seems, for this reader, insurmountable.

But there is of course a much simpler reason to return the Parthenon marbles. Doing so would be an act not merely of restitution or repatriation, but also of reunification.

The Parthenon marbles constitute a single ancient masterpiece, embodying in sculpture and architecture a grand narrative, a sublime artistic vision of civic virtue and divine benevolence. Christopher Hitchens described them as a “poem in stone that was carved as a unity and that tells a single story.” Elgin tore it in half. He took around seventy-five metres of frieze, leaving eighty-five metres behind; the best fifteen of the ninety-two metopes; and seventeen figures from the two pediments — an act of dismemberment and fragmentation that was a triumph of individual greed and selfishness over the collective conscience. The rest remains in Athens.

Robertson endorses and echoes Hitchens, so it is not clear why reunification — the bringing together of objects of cultural heritage that have been separated by war or theft — should not constitute a standalone criterion for consideration by Robertson’s proposed tribunal.

Can the British Museum be induced to return the marbles as a gift? Frankly, that isn’t likely. But an act of grace and generosity to achieve reunification of this astounding artwork would be perhaps marginally more likely, and certainly more palatable to the museum, than an act of enforced restitution in acknowledgement of past wrongs.

Whatever the merits of displaying some of the marbles in the British Museum and some in the new Acropolis, they fade and vanish against the magical prospect of seeing them all reunited, telling their story and projecting their vision once more, in a single location. And that location has to be Athens. •

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Freudenberg did much to change that hopeless reality. An early middle-class convert to the party of the working class, he played a critical role in the transformational electoral successes of Gough Whitlam, Neville Wran and Bob Hawke. As one of the nation’s first political staffers, and surely the longest-serving, he was a gifted and learned wordsmith, enabling Labor’s leaders to articulate the case for policy change and political reform. As an author and Labor historian, he documented the party’s epic transformation in his 1977 record of Gough Whitlam’s leadership of the party, A Certain Grandeur.

In the backrooms of Labor’s campaigns Graham was an ever-reassuring figure, trusted, thoughtful and indefatigable, swathed like a not-so-dormant volcano in a permanent cloud of tobacco smoke, the upper slopes of his rumpled three-piece pinstripe lightly dusted with ash.

What made him such an effective speechwriter? The first part of the answer is that he cared, passionately, for the Labor cause and believed that Labor’s best opportunity to take government was to argue its cause. He operated on the assumption that Labor’s leaders could and eventually would win that argument — and it would not be done with a glib soundbite for the cameras but with extended and repeated argument, set out in speeches, which needed time, persistence, reasoning and courage. Labor’s best forum, he believed, was parliament; but the argument had to be won everywhere — in the party, in the unions, in the community. Ultimately, he trusted the men and women of Australia, respected their intelligence, and expected that they would reward Labor once it had presented its case and won the argument.

Behind the passion there was, of course, a lot of technique. Freudenberg’s lifelong reading of Shakespeare and the political speeches of Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill provided deep wells of inspiration and technical knowledge of the craft. Ruth Cullen’s retrospective documentary about Freudenberg, The Scribe, illustrates this so well, with her subject insisting that plagiarising the greats was an essential, even admirable, aspect of the craft. He even plagiarised himself. In Cullen’s documentary, he asserts that he only ever really wrote one speech — “Vote Labor” — but did it hundreds of times over.

Inspired by those examples, he wrote many excellent speeches, including Hawke’s at Lone Pine for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Anzac Day landing, Whitlam’s 1972 policy speech, and Whitlam’s gutsy diatribe — “certainly, the impotent are pure” — at the Victorian Labor state conference in June 1967. But perhaps his greatest — the one that made the most powerful case, in the most difficult political circumstances, with the greatest historical impact; the one that best showcased his skills — was the “drumbeat” speech delivered by Calwell in the House of Representatives on 4 May 1965.

Freudenberg had joined Calwell’s staff as press secretary in 1960, aged twenty-six, and had recently set out Calwell’s entire manifesto by ghostwriting the book Labor’s Role in Modern Society. Now, in this remarkable speech, Calwell declared Labor’s opposition to the Menzies government’s decision to commit the first battalion of the Australian army to fight in South Vietnam. It must have been hard to elevate Calwell — voice like an iron rasp, face like a granite slab with glasses — to the level of statesman, but this did it:

[W]e oppose this decision firmly and completely.

We do not think it is a wise decision. We do not think it is a timely decision. We do not think it is a right decision.

We do not think it will help the fight against communism. On the contrary, we believe it will harm that fight in the long term.

We do not believe it will promote the welfare of the people of Vietnam. On the contrary, we believe it will prolong and deepen the suffering of that unhappy people so that Australia’s very name may become a term of reproach among them.

We do not believe that it represents a wise or even intelligent response to the challenge of Chinese power. On the contrary, we believe it mistakes entirely the nature of that power, and that it materially assists China in her subversive aims. Indeed, we cannot conceive a decision by this government more likely to promote the long-term interests of China in Asia and the Pacific.

We of the Labor Party do not believe that this decision serves, or is consistent with, the immediate strategic interests of Australia. On the contrary, we believe that, by sending one quarter of our pitifully small effective military strength to distant Vietnam, this government dangerously denudes Australia and its immediate strategic environs of effective defence power.

Thus, for all these and other reasons, we believe we have no choice but to oppose this decision in the name of Australia and of Australia’s security.

These are words to be spoken out loud, listened to, heeded and quoted. Here is a perfect integration of policy substance and rhetorical form. Each assertion (“We do not…”) is perfectly balanced against another (“On the contrary…”), building Labor’s platform block by block as it demolishes the Coalition’s defensive wall, and appropriating for Labor the Coalition’s position as the true representative of Australia’s national interest and national security. There is no jargon or pretend technicality, yet the vocabulary is rich and every sentence is complete and grammatically strong. The tricolon of the first paragraph (“wise… timely… right”) could be straight out of Cicero.

This is a “high” style of speechwriting — formal, balanced, steady, cumulative, moral. Let’s plagiarise Freudenberg’s title of his history of Whitlam’s leadership and say it has “a certain grandeur.” Its restraint grants great power to those moments when emotions are expressed: thus the impact when we are invited to experience the “suffering of that unhappy people” and to feel the shame that “Australia’s very name may become a term of reproach among them.”

Calwell spoke of the risk of America’s humiliation in Vietnam and the likelihood of Australian conscripts being sent to supplement the regular troops. Both claims were prophetic (as Freudenberg himself claimed in his entry on Calwell in the Australian Dictionary of Biography).

The peroration of Calwell’s speech came with devastating effect when he spoke — “through you, Mr Speaker” — to his Labor colleagues in parliament and that “vast band of Labor men and women outside.” Again, the balance, the rich vocabulary and the forceful argument are notable:

The course we have agreed to take today is fraught with difficulty.

I cannot promise you that easy popularity can be bought in times like these; nor are we looking for it. We are doing our duty as we see it.

When the drums beat and the trumpets sound, the voice of reason and right can be heard in the land only with difficulty. But if we are to have the courage of our convictions, then we must do our best to make that voice heard.

I offer you the probability that you will be traduced, that your motives will be misrepresented, that your patriotism will be impugned, that your courage will be called into question.

But I also offer you the sure and certain knowledge that we will be vindicated; that generations to come will record with gratitude that when a reckless government wilfully endangered the security of this nation, the voice of the Australian Labor Party was heard, strong and clear, on the side of sanity and in the cause of humanity, and in the interests of Australia’s security.

This warning and prediction, too, were fulfilled. The drums did beat, Labor’s motives were misrepresented and its patriotism impugned, and its anti-Vietnam position contributed mightily to its landslide defeat the following year. That was the price Labor had to pay for its principle. But vindication did come, albeit after seven years, when Whitlam won power in 1972 and a generation of young voters identified Labor as the party of sanity and humanity.

When Graham Freudenberg was finally honoured by the NSW branch of the Labor Party at a fundraising testimonial in June 2017, the drumbeat speech was front and centre of attention. In a moment for the ages, Bob Hawke paid moving tribute by quoting those words from the Calwell speech. Astonishingly, they sounded as fresh in Hawke’s voice as they had in Calwell’s — and there lies a final insight into Freudenberg’s success as a speechwriter.

I worked alongside Graham when I was writing speeches for Bob Hawke in the 1980s and early 1990s. We shared a broom closet in the old Parliament House, though fortunately Freudy spent a lot of time in Sydney, writing for Wran, and anyway was a night owl, so our hours did not overlap much. We divided the workload, with Freudy taking responsibility for Hawke’s more formal speeches while I churned out the daily grind.

I had written precisely no speeches for anyone before I joined the prime minister as a speechwriter, yet with great self-confidence I dared to edit Freudy’s words, sharpen his arguments and generally lift his tempo. So perhaps some creative tensions were inevitable in the early days. I was a young bull and he was the old bull — though both of us were expert in the production of bullshit (as we joked later; he used a euphemism).

I saw it as my job to write the speeches Hawke himself would have written had he the time and opportunity to do it. I tried to make my words sound as much like Bob Hawke as possible, employing his vocabulary and his arguments and structuring it all so the speech moved along to achieve what he wanted for a specific audience. I particularised. Freudy generalised. In addition to all the work to suit the leader and the occasion, he had an added ability to elevate his words to a higher plane of thematic generalisation, of historical sweep, of moral strength.

This is why he was a great speechwriter, the best. And this is why Hawke in 2017 was able, without irony and with grave respect, to quote Freudenberg’s text for Calwell in 1965. Those voices are silent now, though, worryingly, the drum still beats. •

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This model of data-driven grassroots mobilisation has played a growing role in state and federal elections over the past decade, and is recognised as a formidable weapon in Labor’s armoury. But the overlap of the NSW and federal election campaigns over the next few months will test whether the party can sustain the effort — and re-energise its teams of organisers and volunteers — at a critical time.

NSW voters will elect a new government on 23 March. A fortnight later, prime minister Scott Morrison is expected to announce an 18 May federal election. Labor’s officials, field directors and volunteers will need to turn around, having won or lost the state election, and do it all again for the federal campaign. Can they pull it off? How many volunteers can they recruit, and how many conversations can they conduct?

The idea behind Labor’s grassroots mobilisation model is simple. By gathering and analysing voter data, Labor seeks to identify and locate “persuadable” voters and then send trained volunteers to meet them on their doorsteps or speak with them by phone. This hybrid — technology-intensive and labour-intensive; highly mediated but personalised and conversational — is derived from the successful micro-targeting campaigns of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

According to proponents of the model, the days of “air war” campaigns built around saturation advertising on network TV are gone. Volunteers are back, in a data-empowered “ground war.” Evidence from the United States suggests that a one-on-one conversation with an uncommitted voter, especially in person, can be a highly effective method of making converts to the cause. But because this campaign model needs a vast labour force, it is relatively inefficient: it requires a long lead-up time to recruit and train sufficient numbers of volunteers; and persuasion, inevitably, is a hit-and-miss task.

Why the attraction then? As one Labor campaigner says, “It’s something we can do that the Tories can’t.” The party has traditions of collective mobilisation and community organising, and has accumulated the necessary data, organisational know-how and confidence to mount significant grassroots persuasion efforts. And it can draw on the ever-replenishing ranks of Young Labor members for the all-important field director role.

All of this was in evidence recently in a park in the western Sydney suburb of Kings Langley, where Labor’s NSW branch was officially launching its ground war and showcasing new state leader Michael Daley. Present were the campaign bus, balloons, printed placards, candidate posters, t-shirts, caps and merchandise, all in the party’s red-and-white colours. Shadow ministers and local members mingled with unionists and party members — and two dozen or so Young Labor activists, the heart of Labor’s fieldwork campaign. It was a rare outing in the sunshine for these field directors, who are more likely to be hovering over a Campaign Central screen in a darkened call centre.

Kings Langley is in the Liberal seat of Seven Hills, which has been held by former police officer and local councillor Mark Taylor since 2015. Taylor’s 8.7 per cent margin makes it “safe Liberal,” according to election analyst Antony Green. But the presence of Daley, the campaign bus, and the Young Labor contingent underlines the fact that Labor sees Seven Hills as a winnable seat deserving of grassroots campaigning.

Introducing Daley to the crowd, Labor’s candidate for the seat, local solicitor Durga Owen, put it this way: there are just six weeks left until the state election on 23 March, and that means “forty more days of phone banking, five more weekends of doorknocking, forty more early mornings at the train stations getting the message out.” Deputy leader Penny Sharpe had the same message for the volunteers who had “literally embedded themselves in their local communities” for the duration of the campaign.

Forty days sounds like a decent final surge, but in fact Labor’s fieldwork program rolls out over a twelve-month cycle. Although the party doesn’t routinely provide information about the mechanics of its fieldwork, we know quite a bit about it thanks to a report last year on Victorian Labor’s troubled fieldwork effort during the 2014 state election. Ombudsman Deborah Glass released party documents and interview transcripts from her investigation into Labor’s innovative but, as it turned out, deeply improper use of parliamentary staff allowances to help fund its fieldwork.

According to Glass, the state Labor Party began its fieldwork campaign for the November 2014 Victorian election a full year in advance, when it advertised for, appointed and trained some two dozen field directors. From early March 2014 — thirty-eight weeks from election day — these field directors “embedded” themselves in target seats, assembling voter lists, recruiting volunteers and building the local campaign infrastructure. It was a four-phase process, the first three building the local field organisation through “list and organisation building” (twelve weeks), “community engagement and team building” (nine weeks) and “team training” (six weeks). Volunteers — typically, Labor supporters with the time and enthusiasm to do the actual voter contact — were recruited and trained in the use of Labor’s online network of campaign data, Campaign Central, and in how to conduct conversations with target voters. Only then was the organisation ready for the final phase, “persuasion” (eleven weeks). In Victoria this phase began in mid September 2014, running up to and through the campaign.

Assuming that the NSW branch uses a similar fieldwork model, Durga Owen’s volunteers in Seven Hills are already five weeks into the “persuasion” phase. Five down and six to go. In no sense was the Kings Langley event a “launch” of the volunteer effort. They’ve been hard at it for quite a while.

This coincidence of timing, with a federal election following so closely on the heels of a state election, is unprecedented in the modern era. All the states bar Queensland now operate on fixed four-year terms, but federal elections remain on an errant three-year cycle, with the precise date dependent on prime ministerial calculation. The fieldwork model thrives on certainty of timing, allowing a long build-up of campaign organisation and resources to provide a big volunteer effort leading up to election day.

While the fieldwork veterans of last November’s remarkable state election triumph in Victoria have had the Christmas holidays to recover, NSW Labor is essentially required to conduct two parallel fieldwork operations, with the federal campaign running a few weeks behind the state and only really cranking up once the state campaign has finished.

The logistical and political challenge posed by this clash is well understood among party officials and candidates. It’s a concern that federal grassroots efforts in New South Wales are effectively being masked by the state efforts. At the electorate level, some state candidates have tried running joint doorknocking exercises with their federal counterpart. But electorate boundaries don’t neatly correspond, and a target state seat might not fall within a target federal seat. The messages can also become confused: fieldwork is ultimately about local promotion of local candidates, and not every voter is ready to separate and sequence messages about two different candidates representing two different oppositions under Michael Daley and Bill Shorten.

More fundamental is the question of how much of the organisation assembled for the state campaign will be available, let alone ready and willing, to saddle up for the federal campaign? The risk of burnout is high, among field directors as much as volunteers. Doorknocking and phone banking is, by all reports, tiring, tedious and even demoralising work. The rewards are few; no more than one in five contacts yields a useful conversation, let alone a converted vote.

If it’s true that fieldwork is “something we can do that the Tories can’t,” then it is equally true that the overlap of these elections will selectively disadvantage Labor at the expense of parties relying on mass media (TV ads) and social media to get their message out.

There is also the question of just how large the pool of available volunteer labour is. When does the fieldwork model reach its limits? Labor is already effectively competing for left-leaning volunteers with the union movement, Get Up! and the Greens, all of which mount their own versions of fieldwork campaigning. Independent candidates and members in federal seats are also actively recruiting volunteers, unhindered by having run a state campaign beforehand; among them, Kerryn Phelps, Cathy McGowan and Rob Oakeshott use the NationBuilder web tool to do so. (On the other hand, Labor has a big advantage over independents who have not assembled the voter data that underpin micro-targeted campaigning.)

If the 2016 federal election campaign represented the biggest grassroots efforts in Australian history, it also represented a loss. For Shorten, 2019 is a must-win. The question is whether Labor’s fieldwork effort in New South Wales will have the energy and resources to mount an even bigger grassroots effort than three years ago. •

The post Too much grassroots activism — and too little time? appeared first on Inside Story.

Second time around, the nervous neophyte of 1996 was replaced by a more calculating politician, ladling out a still-potent brew of scares to her loyal, angry supporters. She railed against her “false” imprisonment, the “trumped-up charges” that had put her in “maximum security.” She blamed Australia’s “decline” on globalisation, bewailed the “destruction of our farming sector” and, most memorably, reworked her claim about Australia being swamped. Where it had been a flood of “Asians” in 1996, she substituted a contemporary target: “Now we are in danger of being swamped by Muslims, who bear a culture and ideology that is incompatible with our own.”

Wait a minute, says Hanson biographer Kerry-Anne Walsh. Let’s look at the facts. The charges against Hanson were not “trumped up.” Her conviction by a jury on charges of fraud (relating to the registration of her political party) and dishonestly obtaining cheques from the electoral commissioner of Queensland to the value of around $500,000 led to a sentence of three years’ jail. After eleven weeks this was overturned on appeal. Her assignment to the maximum-security wing at Brisbane Women’s Prison had been for her own protection, and besides, she herself admitted later that conditions inside were “pristine.” “There was air-conditioning, exercise bikes, a personal trainer…” she confided to shock jock Ray Hadley. “We had fantastic meals, our washing was done for us, we just had to keep our cells clean. There was a library, television in our cell, education facilities.”

Walsh dissects Hanson’s other claims in similar fashion. Using data from the OECD, the Department of Agriculture, the 2016 census and other authoritative sources, she demonstrates that the Australian economy has benefited from globalisation, that production in the farming sector is at record levels, and that Muslim adherents constitute just 2.6 per cent of the population.

Walsh’s conclusion: Hanson’s speech was “a fraudulent call to arms to the blinkered and ignorant, based on distortions. Hanson is the mistress of fake news and alternative facts.” Confronted by evidence that her claims are inaccurate, she digs in. “This is quintessential Hanson,” Walsh comments.

So, no, this is not the authorised biography.

Kerry-Anne Walsh is an experienced reporter who clocked up twenty-five years in the Canberra press gallery before setting up a communications consultancy. She doesn’t mind taking sides or dishing out criticism, having turned her guns on the media in her 2014 book The Stalking of Julia Gillard. She declares she did not set out to write an “on the one hand, on the other” treatise about Hanson, and she has delivered.

What she has done, and it is a service to us all, is to collate and document Hanson’s words and actions through a long political career.

Retrieved from Hansard, newspapers, TV transcripts and websites, here is the full archive of awfulness: Hanson’s words of self-pity and narcissism, of vilification and jaundice, of inconsistency, ignorance and incoherence. Here are the minders: John Pasquarelli, David Oldfield, David Ettridge and James Ashby — though it is never clear if she ran them or the other way around. Here are the cameos of colourful Queenslanders: Joh and Flo Bjelke-Petersen, Mal Brough, Peter Fisher and the very peculiar Malcolm Roberts, dual citizen and self-styled “living soul.” Here is the chronology of taxpayer-funded election payouts to Hanson’s various political entities, including as an independent candidate: an aggregate of more than $8 million over the twenty years up to 2016. Here is the evidence of how the One Nation movement was ruthlessly transformed into a personal autocracy, “a business disguised as a political party.”

It is a freewheeling narrative, delivered with a neat turn of phrase (“James Ashby is to controversy what cow dung is to blowflies: he attracts it in swarms”).

As Walsh draws out the patterns in Hanson’s career, its remorseless logicbecomes clear. Whether they be with husbands, donors, enthusiastic rank-and-file supporters, staffers, One Nation party officials, endorsed One Nation candidates, or even the aforementioned minders, so many of Pauline Hanson’s personal and political relationships have traced the same trajectory, from trust to bust. One feels sympathy for the loyalists — retirees, pensioners, small businesspeople — who put their faith in Hanson and devoted their time and efforts to her movement, only in many cases to be pitilessly thrown out of the organisation by a high-handed executive acting in Hanson’s name — and given an earful on the way out. Two individuals named affectionately by Hanson in the Senate maiden speech, a staffer and a party official, were disposed of shortly afterwards. The pattern recurs: “People were useful, up to the point when they weren’t; then they were adversaries, never to darken her sunshine again.”

With Mark Latham now officially on Hanson’s side, as the lead One Nation candidate for the NSW upper house, one can only believe that this relationship, too, is doomed for a messy end. (Reviewing Hoodwinked in the Australian Spectator, Latham dismissed it as a “book of insults” and — pot, kettle — criticised Walsh for not disclosing her “allegiances and bias.”)

And that’s Walsh’s conclusion. Hanson’s career has displayed “an unerring ability to hoodwink her apostles into believing she has nothing else on her mind but their welfare.” Her anger, however, has less to do with the plight of the average Australian and more to do with “personal revenge and misplaced victimhood.” She is not an anti-politician, but rather a politician like any other, with a brand to maintain:

She relies on… keeping alive the image that she’s a battler. Even though every shred of evidence points to the reality that she long ago ceased to be that person… She’s permanently fed up, sick and tired of mainstream politicians, always standing up for “the people.” But the reality of her parliamentary record shows she does deals with the government that end up screwing the battler; she negotiates cynical preference deals that defy her anti-politician persona; and she only stands up for “the people” when she is standing in front of them in campaign mode.

This book would have been doubly valuable with an index and proper citations. In the absence of these tools, the many references that Walsh has rescued from obscurity risk returning there, and much of the utility of her effort will be lost to those future researchers who wish to delve into this populist phase of Australian politics. Perhaps citations could be posted on the publisher’s website?

Why? Because there will be many in the future who will reflect on our contemporary dilemma of democratic politics. We know that our national campaign finance laws need urgent reform; they lag far behind those of our European peers and even many Australian states, in terms of integrity and transparency. Yet genuine reform efforts founder on partisan grounds.

The reform challenge is made more difficult by the rise, at a time of growing public disillusionment with the major parties, of micro-parties. Some of these may of course reinvigorate the language and practice of democracy; but there are others, built entirely around the image of a leader, that do not appear to care about their members, let alone the public interest. Impervious to mainstream critique (indeed, seemingly energised by it) and incapable of reasoned debate, they use fear and vilification to promote populist “us versus them” solutions, uncritically reported by a hamstrung media. And we reward them with a seat in parliament — not once, in this case, but twice. •

The post Archive of awfulness appeared first on Inside Story.

Morrison showed he was comfortable, to say the least, talking about emotions; the speech was a veritable lovefest. “I love Australia,” he declared. “Who loves Australia? Everyone. We all love Australia. Of course we do. But do we love all Australians? That’s a different question, isn’t it? Do we love all Australians? We’ve got to. That’s what brings a country together.”

The prime minister might be surprised to hear an entirely different voice, from the other end of the political spectrum and on a different intellectual plane, also arguing for the primacy of love in politics. University of Chicago philosopher and lawyer Martha Nussbaum, author of this powerful analysis of the Trumpian crisis in American politics, The Monarchy of Fear, insists the way forward lies in love: not romantic love or even friendship, but a love that “simply consists in seeing the other person as fully human, and capable of some level of good and of change.”

They have little in common, our blokey Pentecostal PM, and Martha Nussbaum, winner of the prestigious Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy in 2016. She is a prolific, informed and immensely readable philosopher and classicist. The Monarchy of Fear, her twenty-third book, continues her advocacy for the humanities and the arts, and her exploration of what she has called “political emotions.” She wants us to choose policies and institutions that “produce love, hope and cooperation, avoiding those that feed hatred and disgust.”

Indeed, Nussbaum’s vision of love in politics is more inclusive, more reasoned and more instrumental than Morrison’s. Not for her the nasty hint of exclusion in Morrison’s definition of “all” Australians: “whether they’ve become an Australian by birth ten generations ago, when my ancestors came… or if you came last week, if you’ve chosen to be here in this country.” Was this an unconscious act of delineation? Perhaps an error caused by speaking off the cuff, televangelist-style? But to judge the prime minister by his actual words, he does not include Indigenous Australians or detained asylum seekers among the loveable. This despite his insistence that loving each other “is what brings a country together.” The contrast with Nussbaum is strong.

She proposes, moreover, some general strategies to express love in practical public policy. Morrison’s speech was over before he had provided any detail on how he might translate his love into policy, or how it should shape his behaviour as leader. For Nussbaum, a decent society must learn how group hatred can be minimised by social efforts and institutional design. Mainstreaming schoolchildren with disabilities, for example, has been shown to alter how people see and feel about one another.

More provocatively, she calls for mandatory three-year programs of national civil service for young Americans, during which they would “do work that urgently needs doing all over America,” such as providing care for the elderly and children or building civil infrastructure. The essential feature is that young people would be sent away from their own neighbourhoods into different regions, so as to break down the isolating barriers of race and class and promote a sense of the common good: “The two problems are connected: because people don’t meet one another across major divisions, they have a hard time thinking outside their economic or racial group toward a sense of common purpose.”

Underpinning the idea are the benefits of young people seeing the diversity of people in their country, as soldiers did during the second world war, “only my young people would be trying to help, not kill.” Here then is one idea of a leading philosopher to “bring a country together.” She knows, of course, that it is wildly unrealistic, politically impossible. “But if people don’t talk about it, it certainly won’t be possible. So I put my cards on the table.”

It is a symptom of the times that this most powerful critique of the Trump presidency rarely mentions the man. This is deliberate and pointed. The Monarchy of Fear should not be confused with insiders’ accounts like Bob Woodward’s Fear or Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. Nussbaum doesn’t get near the White House and doesn’t do gossip. No one has leaked anything to her. As a philosopher and classicist, she is fine with this. Her approach is to see through the individuals — the president, those who voted for him, and those who did not — in order to analyse their underlying emotions. This, rather than policy prescription, makes up the bulk of her penetrating analysis.

Nussbaum’s central argument, providing the tension that animates the entire book, rests on a simple and powerful contrast: a monarchy operates on fear while a democracy operates on trust. In a monarchy, the subjects fear the monarch above and the enemy outside; their fear of punishment and their yearning for security make them both compliant and servile. Democracies, by contrast, operate on trust: citizens need to trust each other if they are to place their future in each other’s hands.

The intellectual foundations of this critique lie not in political science or sociology but in moral philosophy and, more surprisingly to this reader, psychology. Specifically, Nussbaum argues that monarchic fear originates in the earliest moments of infancy. She uses the vivid simile of the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, for whom the newborn, “like a sailor cast forth from the fierce waves, lies naked on the ground, unable to speak, in need of every sort of help to stay alive… And it fills the whole space with mournful weeping, as is fitting for one to whom such trouble remains in life.”

Birth introduces the human newborn to “painful solitary powerlessness,” and early infancy is “the stuff of nightmare” because — unlike any other mammal — the human newborn experiences a long period of complete helplessness and vulnerability, utterly dependent on others for food and warmth and shelter. Nussbaum concludes that fear is “genetically the first among the emotions.”

This fear has consequences. The infant quickly learns that to survive it needs to command the service of others: “The only way you can get what you need is to make some other part of the world get it for you.” This “imperious baby” is the proto-monarch, mastering its fear through intense narcissism and external control — but only enjoying fleeting reassurance before returning to insufficiency and terror.

Over time, of course, we grow up. Episodes of comfort give rise to feelings of love and gratitude, and we come to realise that other people are not slaves but have their own feelings and wants. As Nussbaum argues, this involves “a move out of monarchy in the direction of democratic reciprocity.” The bulk of her book elaborates on three dangerous emotions that she identifies as secondary outcomes of primary infantile fear: anger, disgust and envy. America, she believes, has fallen victim to them all. Fear can hijack legitimate outrage and protest, transforming them into a “toxic desire for payback.” Fear also infuses disgust — the aversion to mortality and embodiment — with strategies of exclusion, subordination and hate crime. Envy, too, is at large, stoking animus within the nation and presenting necessary social cooperation as a zero-sum game.

All of these damaging emotions contribute to the toxic brew of sexism and misogyny. Hostility to women in the United States, she argues, is driven partly by fear-blame: some men fear that women have refused their traditional roles as helpmeet, have taken what’s “ours,” and need to be disciplined. It is driven by fear-disgust: some men experience anxiety about body fluids, birth and corporeality, leading to vilification. And it is driven by fear-envy: some men see the educational and employment successes of women as marginalising them and cutting them off from the good things in life.

Here we see the strengths of a study of political emotions: the clarity and precision of her definitions, the breadth of her scholarship spanning ancient and contemporary political philosophy, and the sensitive insights she brings to discussing the range of potential responses to these damaging emotional forces.

There is much here that is relevant to recent and future Australian politics. In particular her critique of the politics of envy as practised by both left and right has strong echoes in our partisan debates, where the right fantasises about latte-sipping elites, Indigenous entitlement and ABC conspiracies, while the left targets bankers and big business. Contemplating our electoral landscape, with its simplistic tax-cut-versus-tax-increase binary, Nussbaum’s warning about zero-sum politics has loud resonance.

A Goldwater libertarian as a teenager, and a young woman who progressively embraced the political ideals of the New Deal, the social inclusion of the performing arts, the social justice of Judaism and the commitment to inquiry and dialogue in a leading academic institution, Martha Nussbaum dispenses her critique in a non-partisan fashion and without attacking individuals.

Yet she recalls that election night in 2016 — when she was in Kyoto to receive her award from the Inamori Foundation — as a moment of anxiety, then alarm, and then grief and a deeper fear for the United States, its people and its institutions. The first draft of what became The Monarchy of Fear was written then and there, and published as a blog post, in Australia of all places, by Scott Stephens, editor of the ABC’s Religion and Ethics website. (More recently she has written another blog post for Stephens on the Brett Kavanaugh hearing.)

“We rarely think clearly when we are thinking about ourselves and our own immediate time,” Nussbaum explains. This is another reason why she does not mention the name of the president too often. Instead, she turns to the past, and especially to the classical past, where she finds “historical and literary examples that we can discuss together without partisan defensiveness.”

She is not the first to use the classics as a sort of safe zone in discussing politics; Shakespeare made a career of it. But Nussbaum has a particular skill in bringing to contemporary relevance the debates and insights of ancient philosophy and politics. Socrates appears, of course, with his commitment to the dialogic method and the merits of the “examined life,” as does Thucydides’s analysis of how populism and the rhetoric of fear helped undo the Athenian democracy.

There is Aeschylus, too, whose Oresteian tragedy Nussbaum sees as a depiction not just of the emergence of democracy and law in Athens but also of the transformation of the spirit of retribution. “Like modern democracies,” Nussbaum comments, “the ancient Greek democracy had an anger problem.” In the play, the “Furies” — animal embodiments of anger and vendetta — are transformed into the “Kindly Ones” (Eumenides). It is significant, she says, that they are not caged or banished, but given voice and a home beneath the Acropolis, where they serve as instruments of justice and human welfare.

Anger, in other words, should be resisted in a democracy because it leads to retribution; far better is the philosophy of non-violence or, as she puts it, “non-anger,” exemplified by Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. Like King, she separates the doer from the deed, denouncing the latter while recognising the former is always capable of growth and change.

But her favourite among the classics is Lucretius, the Roman philosopher-poet of the first century BC. Lucretius has been enjoying a bit of a revival, partly because of Stephen Greenblatt’s 2012 Pulitzer prize-winning The Swerve, which traces the accident of history that saw the sole surviving ancient copy of Lucretius’s remarkable De Rerum Natura saved from oblivion in the fifteenth century.

Lucretius informs much of Nussbaum’s argument about fear and envy. But there is a larger sense, too, in which she finds him of contemporary relevance and urgency. Living through “the beginning of the long decline of the Roman republic into tyranny,” Lucretius was an acolyte of Epicurus, and sought to explain his very Greek, pleasure-loving, emotions-based philosophy to his more rigid rational Roman contemporaries. The Romans, of course, tended to favour the detached denialism of Stoics like Cicero, Seneca and emperor-turned-meditator Marcus Aurelius.

In this endless and unresolvable debate between pleasure and denial, engagement and detachment, Nussbaum sides with Lucretius: “If you don’t have love for others, then the life of Stoic detachment or even cynical despair will make more sense than the life of hope, with its many demands.” A philosopher, that is, must love and be engaged in public life. •

The post What’s love got to do with it? appeared first on Inside Story.

A meticulous report by Victorian ombudsman Deborah Glass revealed that the Labor Party’s 2014 state election campaign was built on the deliberate manufacture of dodgy timesheets designed to con the taxpayer into paying for a big slice of the party’s electoral fieldwork.

This “artifice” — to use careful ombudspeak — is embarrassing for Labor and expensive as well, given it has had to repay the $388,000 in public funds it misused. It also creates the suspicion that Labor’s adoption of Obama-inspired fieldwork, with its democratising overtones of volunteerism, grassroots engagement and door-to-door voter persuasion, is an improbable and unaffordable fiction.

But the biggest cost to Labor surely comes with the publication of a series of internal emails, training materials and manuals. The documents, acquired by Glass as part of her investigation and published as appendixes to her report, represent a large part of Labor’s campaign know-how — a precious acreage of intellectual property accumulated over more than a decade in Australian elections, incorporating sophisticated practices modelled on US Democratic Party fieldwork.

Those responsible for the artifice — including former Victorian state secretary Noah Carroll, now Labor’s national secretary — might well conclude that their clever funding idea ended up draining the party of precious funds and damaging its reputation and campaign competitiveness. The Liberals’ Victorian president Michael Kroger and, across the border, Australian Conservatives leader Cory Bernardi, both of whom admire and want to emulate Labor’s fieldwork structures, now have an unexpected treasure trove of new information about Labor’s techniques.

For sheer scale and intrusive intent, Cambridge Analytica’s scraping and deployment of fifty million Facebook accounts amounts to one of the biggest dirty tricks in electoral history. It was only exposed thanks to a remarkable combination of very contemporary and extra-systemic events.

There was the courageous, if somewhat shame-faced, whistleblower Christopher Wylie, one of the co-founders of CA. There was the even more courageous and dogged investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr of the Observer in London, working in a now familiar model of cross-border journalism with the New York Times. And there was the covert news camera footage that brought to light more stunning claims about CA’s electoral work by a too-smart-by-half CEO Alexander Nix, now forced out of the company.

By contrast, the Victorian Labor scam was exposed by some reassuringly old-fashioned methods: a parliamentary reference to an ombudsman, whose investigators followed the paper trail and asked precise questions in formal interviews.

It is a simple tale that began with a job advertisement. In November 2013, a full twelve months before the next Victorian election, the assistant state secretary of the Labor Party, Stephen O’Donnell, sent an email advertising for “outgoing, passionate, hardworking people” to work as field organisers and regional field directors on Labor’s campaign.

The job, O’Donnell said, could be very stressful and “isn’t remotely glamorous.” It would require long hours, starting off with a forty-hour week and ramping up to a seven-day-a-week push in the final month of the campaign.

On 19 December, after shortlists, tests and interviews, some two dozen applicants were selected and received an offer of employment from then state secretary Noah Carroll. Carroll informed them they would be appointed to a “full-time fixed-term position” from early March up until election day on 29 November, “with terms and conditions provided in the ALP (Victorian Branch) Staff Enterprise Agreement.” The pay for the nine months was around $47,400 plus 9 per cent super.

But when the new organisers turned up at Labor’s office in Melbourne for their first training session in March 2014, they got some unexpected news. The then opposition leader in the Legislative Council, John Lenders, told them they would also be employed as casual electorate officers by the Parliament of Victoria.

As Deborah Glass notes drily in her report, “This was the first time the Field organisers had been made aware of this arrangement… Reactions to the announcement varied from acceptance to disquiet.”

The novel arrangement reflected some urgent behind-the-scenes scurrying about as Labor, having offered the full-time positions, worked out how to pay for them. Lenders and Carroll came up with the 60–40 solution, whereby Labor would pay 60 per cent of the salary costs while the Parliament of Victoria would pay 40 per cent. In effect, the field organisers were to be paid for two days’ work per week as electorate officers employed by a member of parliament.

And so, in that first week of training in March 2014, Labor’s field organisers were handed, along with their Labor-branded red hoodies and t-shirts, some “folders of partially completed timesheets” stating they would be spending Wednesdays and Thursdays working as electorate officers. They were asked to sign the timesheets but leave the date blank. The sections requiring the name and signature of the MP were also left blank.

As Glass observes, “The roles of a field organiser employed by a political party and an electorate officer employed by the parliament are plainly different.” But because there is a notional overlap — both roles would be able to perform “research and community engagement” — the 60–40 scheme could have been legitimate if, on those two days a week, the employees were being clearly instructed in electorate work by their MP employer. Glass found:

For at least eighteen field organisers who were paid as casual electorate officers, this separation of roles did not happen in practice… During 2014, most participating MPs had limited contact with the persons they had nominated as their electorate officers, and neither these members nor their staff directed their day-to-day work activities.

These artificial arrangements turned on a tap of parliamentary money that would contribute $387,842 to Labor’s campaign in the lead-up to the 2014 election. It also created a parliamentary paper trail that Glass and her investigators were able to track with certainty.

As scams go, it was nowhere as racy as Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook grab. It was populated by an all-too familiar cast of actors: the villain (a scheming head office), the enablers (compliant blind-eye-turning MPs), the weapon (a sheaf of blank timesheets), the dummies (eager young activists). And, of course, the prize: a bucket of public money.

One thing we do know about political parties is that the provision of public funding, far from allowing them to clean up their act, has typically opened them up to more temptations, more irresistible sources of funding for their insatiable campaigning.

But what is novel and intriguing about this particular arrangement is the entanglement of the field organiser role. Over the last ten years or so, the field organiser has emerged as a major actor in Australia’s electoral landscape. Field organisers operate at the heart of the so-called Obama model of election campaigning, which employs data and volunteers to target persuadable voters.

The Obama model required hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of volunteers to canvass voters in battleground states — voters who had been individually targeted through sophisticated data analysis. The volunteers’ job was to find those people, knock on their door or call them on their phone, and engage them in “persuasive conversation” on behalf of the Obama campaign. This practice of conversations-based, volunteer-led fieldwork draws in turn on older left traditions of community organising, trade union organising and civil rights activism.

Under the Obama model, it is not the candidate and not the volunteers who make it all work, it’s the field organisers. One of the abiding paradoxes of organisational theory is that grassroots volunteers need centralised managers; collectives produce leaders; flat organisations generate hierarchy to provide coordination and direction. In a fieldwork organisation, the field organisers are the invisible link people in the middle. They recruit, train, and performance-measure the grassroots volunteers and are, in turn, managed by a regional field director.

Labor has steadily been importing this fieldwork model into Australia since 2010 — earlier, if you count the ACTU’s influential 2007 “Your Rights at Work” campaign. After the defeat of Kevin Rudd’s Labor government by Tony Abbott in 2013 — in which Labor’s fieldwork was credited with staunching the flow of votes away from the party — Victorian Labor immediately began focusing on the next state election, due in November 2014. It planned to use fieldwork to help opposition leader Daniel Andrews knock over the Liberals’ hapless Baillieu–Napthine government.

The vehicle for this campaign would be the Community Action Network, or CAN, a grassroots volunteer movement that would bring fieldwork to the marginal seats of suburban and regional Victoria. Its acronym deliberately evoked Barack Obama’s famous campaign battle cry, “Yes We Can!” while neatly avoiding Labor’s own, tarnished, brand. O’Donnell’s job advertisement was seeking field organisers to staff and operate the CAN.

So what exactly is a field organiser? According to O’Donnell’s job description — one of the many Labor documents now made public — they would be “the face of Victorian Labor in communities across Victoria”:

The primary responsibility of the field organiser is to recruit, manage and train volunteers to organise their communities and neighbourhoods into teams that persuade and motivate voters through making phone calls and doorknocking.

The outgoing, passionate and hardworking field workers would be “part of the most exciting and innovative campaign to happen in a generation.”

According to another important document published by Glass, “Field Organiser Roles and Responsibilities,” field organisers are also responsible for feeding their voter data back into “Campaign Central,” Labor’s database of voter information:

If it’s not in Campaign Central, it doesn’t exist. You may not leave the field until all data generated by your campaign has been entered into Campaign Central.

Field organisers also had to complete a daily “qualitative report” about the campaign, and dial in to a weekly statewide conference call of field organisers. Their performance was further managed, and measured, by their immediate superior, the regional field director, or RFD. They would get “Daily Priorities” emails from RFDs, and respond with daily check-ins. Field organiser performance was measured against targets for the number of volunteers recruited, teams assembled, training sessions and strategic briefings for volunteers.

If this makes fieldwork sound like the tightly managed performance measurement you might see in a major corporation, it is. KPIs abound and everyone is held to account: RFDs manage field organisers, and field organisers manage volunteers.

Despite CAN’s participatory public face, the internal documents make it clear to field organisers that this network is in reality “a vertical structure that communicates with a clear chain of command.” Nothing is left to chance. At the pointy end of the fieldwork effort, for example, is the conversation between a volunteer and a voter. After all the data analysis, targeting, training and outreach, what is actually said when a volunteer talks to a voter on the doorstep or phone call? Here’s the Labor chart reproduced in the ombudsman’s report:

As Glass puts it:

A persuasion conversation is a meaningful conversation between a trained volunteer and an undecided voter about Labor’s values and accomplishments. In all persuasion conversations, our goal is to establish a connection between the Party and the voter through the volunteer.

So here’s the script, the “4 Ps of Persuasion”: probe (work out what matters to the voter), point to values (establish a connection with the Party), pivot (to Labor’s plans and accomplishments) and punch (to highlight differences between Labor and the Liberals).

Volunteers are encouraged to draw on their lived experience as Labor activists to persuade voters. “Use parts of your story to connect to the voter,” the script urges.

In this, Labor’s debt to the intellectual guru of US fieldwork, activist organiser-turned-Harvard academic Marshall Ganz, is clear. Ganz developed the training courses in narrative technique that have influenced many Obama fieldworkers and, in turn, Labor’s CAN. According to Ganz, the interlinked stories of “self, us and now” form a powerful catalyst for action to reinforce the committed and to mobilise the undecided — included the undecided voter.

It’s all a long way from Cambridge Analytica’s international swashbuckling, but Labor has shown that when election results are at stake the pitfalls can be hard to avoid.  ●

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But the dramatic output of that fledgling wartime democracy, Athens, was also essentially political and civic: the audience sees itself on stage and witnesses the consequences of its own decisions. This production demands attention because of its compelling and devastating representation of failed leadership. It’s also a portrait of our contemporary political crisis; and it will, I hope, eventually make its way to Australia.

This production, presented by Almeida Theatre, started out in cosy Islington, in London’s inner north, but was such a success it transferred to the West End, where it is pulling in a bigger crowd despite its gruelling three-plus hours’ running time.

Icke has taken Aeschylus’ original trilogy – Agamemnon’s triumphant return from Troy and his murder by Klytemnestra; their son Orestes’ murderous revenge on Klytemnestra; Orestes’ madness and, at the end, his reconciliation with the new democratic order – and added the prequel, the story that triggers this cycle of violence: Agamemnon’s decision, a disastrous miscalculation, to murder his own daughter Iphigenia.

Here is a country preparing for war, and a military leader checking and rechecking the meaning of the ambiguous but compelling advice he has received. The advice – it appears as a “prophecy,” but we should think of market research or military intelligence, urged and interpreted by his security advisers – is that Iphigenia’s murder is a necessary sacrifice to secure victory in war.

Agamemnon’s failure as a leader is not that he unwittingly does something wrong. He knows it’s wrong, monstrously wrong. But he still does it. Why? Here is the real pathology. He feels, as the leader, that he alone is capable of doing it; only he has the mental toughness to take the tough decisions. This is the real pathology: the lonely anaesthesia of power, the narcissism of leadership, allows an utterly wrong action to be taken precisely because others might succumb to human weakness.

In scenes of heartbreaking intensity, Klytemnestra attempts to dissuade her husband: we watch her entreaty and begging, their kissing and embracing, their arguing and shouting, their grappling and struggling, and the throwing to the floor – an awful cycle of domestic violence. And in a moment of lucid clarity, she realises that this is not the husband-father she is fighting but the national leader, and she tells him: you were going to do this all along.

We see their son, the already troubled Orestes, disturbed from his sleep by his parents’ struggle. And then, complicitly, we see the beautiful, innocent Iphigenia – who, in Aeschylus’ original version, is sacrificed on an altar, in a distant offstage place and in the distant past – murdered as she sits on her father’s lap and trustingly swallows the pill he gives her, washing it down with a sweet liquid.

So there’s no shortage of cathartic emotion. But the political dimensions are equally powerful. Agamemnon tells his wife that there will be a “statement” – that the child will be said to have died of natural causes.

Icke, a twenty-nine-year old rising star of British theatre, has essentially done his own translation of the play (“I have a bit of Greek so I could stagger my way through,” he told an interviewer), cast a brilliant ensemble led by Angus Wright (Agamemnon) and Lia Williams (Klytemnestra), and staged a weirdly ancient world of blood and spin.

Agamemnon is a shirt-sleeved politician, striding about the stage with an entourage of media-savvy advisers, delivering his lines in TV interviews and televised speeches as if he and his team are professional actors. In Almeida’s twin production of Euripides’ Bakkhai, Pentheus is shown as a similarly shirt-sleeved politician – intense, clever and foolish – trying to stand against the tide of cultural change represented by the rise of the Dionysian fervour, and resentful that he is losing the female “demographic.”

But the confidence of these leaders masks arrogance, and their self-absorption makes them blind. They make errors of judgement – miscalculations that turn out to be not only fundamentally wrong but also irrevocably destructive of everything they were trying to preserve: country, family and even self.

These are generic portraits, of course. But watching them, I couldn’t help feeling I was being shown a smiling Tony Blair, that flawed giant who still casts a long shadow over contemporary British politics.

A shirt-sleeved Blair features on the cover of the latest Private Eye magazine. Against the backdrop of the marathon Chilcot Inquiry, which continues its investigation of his decision to commit British troops to the US invasion of Iraq in 2001, the magazinehas the former prime minister slyly suggesting, in response to a question about the inquiry’s timetable for reporting, “How about never? Never would work for me.” With the rising tide of refugees flooding over the EU levee banks from the failed states of the Middle East, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Blair has paid a much higher political price in Britain than Howard has in Australia for the decision to invade Iraq.

Meanwhile, the British Labour Party has chosen a new leader who stands as the antithesis of Blair and the “what works” pragmatism of his New Labour project. Jeremy Corbyn can never be elected prime minister. But that seems to be precisely the point: for rejectionist “Jacorbyns” – the phrase is Simon Schama’s – mere electability is not enough. •

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Cooney, who served as Gillard’s speechwriter for a “thousand days of despair and hope,” offers a new explanation. In her speech to the National Press Club in July 2011, Gillard volunteered a self-description of “the shy girl” from Unley High who brought “a sense of personal reserve” to the public profession of politics:

The rigours of politics have reinforced my innate style of holding a fair bit back in order to hang pretty tough. If that means people’s image of me is one of steely determination, I understand why.

“Personal reserve” is a useful protective screen for any politician. According to Cooney, though, it was much more than this, and not all of it good for the prime minister’s political efficacy. He suggests her reserve served as “a kind of bridge” between Gillard’s background and her political purpose as prime minister, giving her the sense she had more in common with “the kids in the back row” of the Unley classroom than with the “established and complacent faces” in the National Press Club audience.

In Cooney’s argument, this provided a constant reminder to Gillard of what she felt to be her unique political responsibility for the former, but also exaggerated her sense of isolation from the latter. Moreover, it became a heavy barrier to Gillard’s wider task of communicating with Australians who could never know her private self – as Cooney, from his vantage point within the prime ministerial circle, felt he could. Voters who only saw her media performances found her dour, wooden or mechanical. For a prime minister who is inextricably tied up in the business of connection, explanation and persuasion, this was a crippling disability. As Cooney notes with regret:

If you keep telling people popularity doesn’t matter to you, they can be inclined to reward you by agreeing… Sometimes you just have to make them smile; to say something they like hearing… Most of the days she was in office, giving the people everything of her life and services, Julia Gillard just couldn’t give them that.

Prime ministerial speechwriters occupy a very privileged position in contemporary democratic politics: close to the action and close to the leader, but protected from most of the political gunfire. Proximity provides insight into the exercise of great national power, as well as the responsibility of explaining, to the people in whose name it is exercised, the calculations and aspirations that inform it. Quite lacking in executive authority, the speechwriter and other advisers have the capacity through advice and influence to shape political outcomes: they are not principals but “policy midwives and policy grave diggers,” as I described them in my own account of life on the inside as Bob Hawke’s speechwriter between 1987 and 1991.

This privileged perspective no doubt explains the emergence of an odd little sub-genre in the rapidly expanding universe of Australian political literature. Alongside the autobiographies, policy tracts, insider narratives by journalists, and scholarly studies of political leadership, there is now a small series of books about former Labor prime ministers written by their speechwriters.

Cooney’s memoir – affectionate, partisan, thoughtfully articulate and with a nice touch of gallows humour – is the latest entry. His account is not as morbidly hilarious as James Button’s speechless experience with Kevin Rudd. He is more discreet than Don Watson’s recollections of a bleeding heart in Paul Keating’s office. He lacks the sheer whimsy of John Edwards (okay, an economic adviser not a speechwriter), who revealed Keating’s belief in the beneficial health effects of zenithal weightlessness experienced while bouncing on a trampoline.

Cooney’s memoir makes no scholarly contribution to the study of oratory, as does former Beazley speechwriter Dennis Glover; nor is it an anthology of our greatest modern speeches like the one edited by Keating speechwriter Michael Fullilove (which includes no fewer than eight Keating speeches). And, like all of us, Cooney falls short of the certain grandeur of Graham Freudenberg, whose grand narrative of the rise and fall of Gough Whitlam is a true work of history that continues to resonate after the death of its subject.

Yet The Gillard Project is a substantial contribution, exemplifying the principal claims to authority of this genre while also – I observe as a reviewer, but also as a contributor to the genre – displaying its characteristic weakness.

First, as Cooney’s acute analysis of Gillard’s “personal reserve” suggests, speechwriters are well placed to provide insight into the character of the leader and the course of events in their office and their government. Their accounts provide tiny capsules of contemporary political practice – artefacts of a way of political life, like oyster shells on a midden.

Their narrative authority derives from personal experience of “what really happened” – partial and subjective, of course, but sympathetic and informed. Working with the political leader over extended periods, striving to capture the very words and phrases that will best express their policies and win their arguments, speechwriters contribute to, but also see through, the wax and polish of the public persona to glimpse something of the personality beneath. Not their deepest soul, perhaps, but certainly their political character – whether or not they are figures of integrity, of energy and purpose, of intelligence and consistency; whether their “project” is fair dinkum or a sham.

A particular joy of the speechwriting gig is its almost infinite scope. Speeches traverse the whole landscape of government, travelling wherever the prime ministerial interest extends – which it does, into every important policy debate, every key economic issue, every defining social issue. Prime ministers speak to interest groups and community groups in every part of the country, they lead the campaign in every election, they speak on behalf of the nation in mourning and celebration, and they promote Australia’s interests and convey Australia’s identity in foreign capitals and international forums.

Details have changed over the decades – the issues, the technology, the media – but the job is essentially the same, and so the genre, from Freudenberg to Cooney, has become somewhat repetitive. Like a Scandinavian police procedural, there are only a certain number of locations and scenes in which the action can take place. Cooney’s book has got most of them: the Prime Minister’s Office, the Lodge, Kirribilli, the VIP jet, the hotel rooms at midnight in foreign capitals; a relentlessly rolling schedule of keynotes, launches, statements, set pieces, addresses and commemorations, with countless drafting sessions, staff meetings, staff drinks, gaffes and tiffs and what-ifs – and hours upon solitary hours in a “windowless” office in Parliament House.

When Cooney beats himself up for a full chapter about his “we are us” debacle (Gillard’s speech to the Labor national conference), I recall our own disastrous “child poverty” error at the 1987 election campaign launch. When Cooney travels with Gillard to Washington, where she addresses Congress for the sixtieth anniversary of the ANZUS treaty, or to Beijing to announce a strategic partnership, I recall Watson’s account of Keating’s nostalgic trip to Ireland to address the Dáil, or Hawke’s address in the Kremlin during the Gorbachev years, or our all-night drafting session in a Seoul hotel before he launched the APEC initiative. And these accounts in turn descend from the ur-narrative, Freudenberg’s account of Whitlam’s momentous visit to China as opposition leader in 1971.

All Cooney’s book lacks is a couple of election campaign stops – he was appointed after 2010 and the whole show was cancelled before 2013 – but he does have a charming and reassuring new location, the ocean off Bondi on a fine summer afternoon as the end drew near, where Gillard staff and Rudd staff could be found “bobbing up and down in the water drinking beer” – a model of unity which, he points out, caucus should have emulated.

Against these authoritative strengths, however, there is the generic weakness of all books by speechwriters. We are too in love with words, including our own words; we invest them with a power beyond all reason.

What is a speech? An arcane format that scarcely survives elsewhere in government, business or society. There was a good reason the press office was never too fussed about the speeches in Hawke’s day: they knew that what counted was not the forty-minute speech but the quick doorstop afterwards – the grab, not the exegesis. But speechwriters live and work in a tradition of political rhetoric; it’s a romantic world in which political causes are advanced through argument and persuasion, thesis and antithesis, framing and positioning, conducted by a prime minister who is passionate and articulate and who cares.

That world is, of course, not the real world, where politics operates as usual through numbers, factions and deals and where the best arguments can lose out to the basest slogans. So accounts by speechwriters are necessarily misleading.

And of course this romantic pathology seems to be peculiarly virulent on the Labor side of politics. That, after all, is the most obvious characteristic of this speechwriters’ genre: we are us, as Cooney might say, we male Labor speechwriters. Where are the accounts by Fraser’s people, or Howard’s? Can we expect anything from Abbott’s people at some time? It might be shame or it might be forgetfulness, but with the exception of David Barnett and Pru Goward’s admiring biography of Howard, no Liberal staffer has broken into print with their recollections, their insights, their advice.

But perhaps they don’t inhabit that romantic world. Cooney’s book provides the public with a valuable insight into the workings of a Labor prime minister’s office. The Liberals, by contrast, may be adhering to the old unwritten rule about what stays on tour when you go on tour. •

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Alinsky, a radical activist who emerged from 1930s Chicago, has been largely forgotten in Australia, especially perhaps within the Coalition, which he would undoubtedly have numbered among the “enemy.”

But Rules for Radicals, written just before Alinsky’s death in 1972, stands as the foundation text of what has become known as “community organising” – building the capacity of marginalised communities to take collective action to improve their living conditions. Unexpectedly, Alinsky has also become a guiding influence in electoral campaign management, as political parties and candidates adapt the principles of community organising to the electoral contest.

For this reason it is possible to trace a direct line of descent from Alinsky, via community organising, to US president Barack Obama, and from there to the electoral success of the newly minted Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews.

Consider the modest flat in the back streets of the Melbourne sandbelt suburb of Seaford, hired by the Labor Party as the war room for its campaign to win the marginal Liberal-held seat of Carrum. The living room was converted into a phone bank, equipped with computer screens linked to the Labor Party’s database of undecided voters, and staffed for weeks by hundreds of volunteers.

With due allowances for the new technology and the Australian electoral context, the scenes inside that rented flat exhibit the hallmarks of classic Alinsky-style community organising: its formalised top-down structure of community organisers, its emphasis on recruiting and training volunteers, and its strategy of mobilisation through storytelling and conversation.

Labor leader Daniel Andrews talks to members of Labor’s Community Action Network in Geelong.

Similar scenes were repeated in twenty-five other marginal seats selected by the Labor Party. Labor won twenty of them, including Carrum. It is understandably eager to take credit for this latest success of its micro-targeting campaign strategy – and to put the frighteners up the Coalition. Media reporting since the campaign has reflected this agenda.

But beyond the partisan struggle, there is a bigger story emerging here. Political parties are supposed to be dying, or surviving as hollowed-out shells. Members have been leaving in droves; branches are closing; partisan attachments are withering; political efficacy – the sense that “I can make a difference” – is declining around the world, and the whole electoral contest is seen as an increasingly irrelevant exercise in spin and manipulation. Academic research, media commentary and internal reviews within the parties themselves all support this dominant view.

But if parties are dying, no one told the 5000+ Labor volunteers slaving away in the flat in Carrum and in the other marginals. If this is the age of disillusion, how did Labor persuade its volunteers to make half a million phone calls and knock on more than 170,000 doors in the course of an eight-week campaign? Presumably, these volunteers thought they were making a difference. So is there a pulse still in the political parties?

Saul Alinsky’s aspirations for community organising were summed up in his assertion that while Machiavelli had written The Prince “for the Haves, on how to hold on to power,” he had written Rules for Radicals “for the Have-nots, on how to take it away.”

The book reflects his lifetime developing, practising and teaching community organising – from the working-class “Back of the Yards” district of his native Chicago in the late 1930s, through African-American communities in the northeast and Mexican-American farm workers in California, into the 1970s. The Industrial Areas Foundation he created in 1940 continues as the largest and oldest US network of church and community groups devoted to leadership development and citizen-led action. Alinsky’s work was less about the big social movements of the times – civil rights, the Vietnam protests, feminism – than about the local level: how can people living together in marginalised communities be mobilised to improve their living conditions?

To answer that question, his starting point was the insight, quintessentially American, that each individual has his or her own self-interests. People can be mobilised to act if they recognise they are acting in their own self-interest. But this doesn’t happen spontaneously; it needs to be organised.

Alinsky’s method therefore placed a heavy burden on the community organiser, who had to get into the community, listen and learn about all these individual preferences, and develop a strategy to aggregate them into non-violent collective action that will achieve change.

For Alinsky, then, it was all about identifying and training the right individuals who could do the organising. They needed to be strategists. So his book sets out twelve “rules” for effective action. Alinsky asserts these rules with authority and craftiness, like an American version of the military sage Sun Tzu (author of Art of War). “Power,” he states in the first rule “is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.” Lacking money, the Have-nots have to build their power from their own flesh and blood. The second and third rules: “Never go outside the expertise of your people” and “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” In other words, don’t cause fear and confusion in your own ranks; cause them in your opponent’s. This is pragmatism, not dogmatism; he subtitled his book: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.

Twelve years after Alinsky died, a young African-American college graduate named Barack Obama arrived in Chicago to start work as a community organiser. Obama spent three years with the Developing Communities Project, a coalition of churches and union groups seeking to revive manufacturing jobs on Chicago’s South Side. He also worked briefly as a trainer for the Gamaliel Foundation, an Alinsky-inspired group named after the rabbinical scholar who taught St Paul. Without mentioning Alinsky, Obama recalls in his autobiography, Dreams From My Father that he was directed to interview people to “find out their self-interest”:

Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power. Issues, action, power, self-interest. I liked these concepts.

Twenty years later, organising his presidential campaign, Obama adapted some of the key organising principles and practices of community organising. His campaign was built on a tight hierarchy of field staff: paid “organisers” at the state and county level, who recruited volunteers as “precinct captains,” who in turn recruited other volunteers, by the hundred, who were grouped and trained in functional tasks such as doorknocking, phone calling and events. These volunteers were treated as valued contributors, not drones, and provided with extensive training; the staff philosophy, as recorded by campaign manager David Plouffe, was “Respect. Empower. Include.”

Importantly, the volunteers were mobilised less by any appeal to hard and fast policies than by the appeal of Obama’s values – hope for change, trust, aspiration for social equality and opportunity – and his storytelling about his “improbable journey” to prominence.

One of the architects of this campaign structure was another community organiser, Marshall Ganz, who in 1964 had abandoned his Harvard undergraduate degree to join the civil rights movement in Mississippi. Ganz had then worked for sixteen years alongside Cesar Chavez with the Mexican-American farm workers in California, only returning to Harvard in 1991 to complete his undergraduate degree. His doctorate thesis about community organising became a prize-winning book, Why David Sometimes Wins. Ganz is now a Harvard professor whose course, Leadership, Organizing and Action, attracts activists from around the world.

Among the thousands of volunteers working within Obama’s 2008 campaign structure was a small group of Australians who had travelled to the United States to get involved, and who were inspired and energised by what they found. One of these self-titled “Aussies for Obama,” Stephen Donnelly, returned four years later, after Obama’s re-election in 2012, to meet with Obama campaigners about best practices in electoral organisation.

Stephen Donnelly is now the Labor Party’s assistant secretary in Victoria and organised – there is no better word for it – the network of volunteers who powered Labor’s campaign to its own improbable victory.

The nuts and bolts of this grassroots organising campaign are simply described. Donnelly organised the state into five regions, each of which contained four, five or six marginal seats. In each of the twenty-five targeted seats, Donnelly hired a field organiser, who then selected a volunteer coordinator and captains of three volunteer teams, responsible for doorknocking, phone banking and street stalls. Usually, there were two or three captains of each team – a bit of built-in redundancy because as volunteers they were not always available for work.

This structure is pure Obama – not a total coincidence, as Victorian Labor hired three senior American campaigners from the 2012 Obama campaign. These three specialists – a database manager, an organiser and a trainer – were kept out of sight but provided critical new skills to the emerging Victorian organisation. Also in homage to Obama, Labor’s campaign structure was given a name (Community Action Network, as in “Yes, we CAN!”), and a staff philosophy, displayed prominently in call centres and campaign offices everywhere: “Lead. Connect. Respect.”

Message circulated by Labor’s Stephen Donnelly through social media to attract more volunteers to the campaign. It resulted in thousands of additional phone calls being made by volunteers espousing Labor values.

Most explicitly, Victoria’s campaign embraced the conversation-based and narrative-based campaign techniques espoused by Marshall Ganz, implemented by Obama and emulated by US Democrats and trade unions. Ganz asserts that effective political persuasion can best take place through conversation. Rather than bombarding undecided voters with TV ads and direct mail – essentially one-way traffic – a campaign organisation needs to listen to them, so as to understand their concerns (Alinsky would say, their self-interests) and to respond.

That response, moreover, shouldn’t come as fact-heavy policy announcements from the politicians but rather in the form of shared values and compelling stories from the volunteers – especially stories about why they have volunteered. It is easy to be cynical about a politician, but these volunteers’ stories are persuasive because they are entirely authentic.

Labor’s Community Action Network aimed to recruit 150 volunteers per seat – that is, nearly 4000 across the twenty-five seats. Over the last twelve months, Labor in fact recruited and trained 5500 volunteers. Of these, 45 per cent were not Labor Party members and had not been previously engaged in politics; volunteers recruited their own friends and family who recruited more friends, and so on. Over the last eight weeks of the campaign, these volunteers directed more than 500,000 telephone calls and doorknocked more than 170,000 houses. This intensity far surpasses Labor’s field campaign in the 2013 federal campaign, led by national secretary George Wright, which – over twelve months – racked up a then-impressive 1.2 million phone calls nationwide and 250,000 doorknocks

The selection of twenty-five seats illustrates the strategic simplicity of Labor’s task going in to the election. Its campaign was essentially defensive: only seven were Coalition seats targeted to win; the rest had Labor incumbents (though some of these had become notionally Liberal through redistribution). It didn’t win a landslide but enough to form government.

Without conducting independent research, such as exit polls, it is difficult to establish whether the volunteer campaign made a difference to the final result, let alone the difference in the knife-edge seats. (Labor has presumably conducted this kind of research but would be expected to hold the findings tightly.)

But it is possible to judge the professionalism of the campaign. A hallmark of professional election campaigning is its strategic efficiency: its capacity to identify a winning strategy, and to allocate its available resources in a rational way to implement it. It was not rocket science to identify the marginal seats. But Labor did some very clever things about focusing its available resources in those seats.

Notably, it drastically cut back its spending on direct mail, and redirected the funds into the field campaign. It made this decision, significantly, not on a gut feeling but on a return-on-investment approach based on trials that showed the effectiveness of conversation over direct mail in persuading undecided voters. Labor likewise was able to demonstrate the effect, in terms of voters persuaded, of hiring additional field organisers. Labor also invested in yet more database capacity, to power its ability to micro-target individual undecided voters. It honed its skills in online and telephone canvassing.

From a resource point of view, moreover, the services of energetic unpaid volunteers constitute the ultimate “Have-not” campaign asset.

After its federal debacles in 2010 and 2013, Labor seems to be recovering its capacity to conduct disciplined election campaigns focused on winning. Victorian Labor’s Community Action Network represents the most intensive effort mounted to date in any Australian election to replicate the Obama-style campaign and adapt it to the Australian party context. It sets the bar high for future campaigns.

A critical factor in Victoria was Daniel Andrews’s explicit support for the volunteer campaign and his willingness to have his own seat of Mulgrave as one of the target seats. The Greens are also working on similar grassroots organising campaigns and, as the Your Rights at Work campaign showed, the trade union movement is already ahead of the game. The Victorian Trades Hall ran a separate but entirely complementary field campaign alongside the Labor Party, highlighting public sector employees such as fire fighters, nurses and teachers. If Australia continues to follow the United States, where the Democrats still out-campaign the Republicans at the grassroots level, Labor’s expertise could play a decisive role in the 2015 federal campaign and beyond.

Of course there is nothing to stop the Liberals from organising along similar lines if they choose to make the investments; volunteering for election campaigns is no unique property of the left. But they’d better get a move on. It is Victorian Labor’s explicit intention to keep its CAN structure in place for future campaigns in which, it hopes, last month’s volunteers will become the captains, coordinators and field organisers of the future.

Saul Alinsky, of course, knew nothing of databases and micro-targeting. He may have been sceptical that a political party could effectively or honourably adopt his community organising methods for electoral purposes. He would certainly have been appalled at the radical right in the United States tagging him as a Marxist, and Obama’s community organising as an anti-American conspiracy.

On the other hand, he might have noticed that his book is getting read by a new audience, and that his rules for radicals are being pored over not by the left but by the right. The Tea Party appears, grudgingly, to recognise that there’s one good way to beat the left at its own game: read Saul Alinsky. •

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Put your eye to the tiny glass lens and you’d get a miniature image of the prime minister at work behind his desk. Sometimes Hawke was alone, attending to his paperwork or holding forth on the phone. More often, a meeting would be under way and you’d see, seated opposite him, whichever foreign leader, cabinet minister, public servant or staff adviser was occupying the attention of the government’s central figure. Once I saw the Pope in there.

The peephole is a reminder of the peculiar working environment of our prime ministers: even behind closed doors, they remain under surveillance; even alone, they are surrounded. It’s a reminder, too, of how proximity provides power. In the old Parliament House, no one was physically closer to the prime minister than the principal private secretary.

Two new books by political scientists Rod Rhodes and Anne Tiernan, The Gatekeepers and Lessons in Governing, provide a detailed picture of this group of highly influential prime ministerial minders, whom they describe as gatekeepers or, less satisfactorily, as chiefs of staff.

When I joined Hawke’s office as speechwriter in 1986, Hawke’s principal private secretary was Chris Conybeare. A diplomat and senior public servant whom Hawke had seconded from his department, Conybeare had an extraordinary ability to organise turbulence: to manage messy and volatile sets of ideas, documents and people into properly sequenced streams of advice and decision points. There would always be knots of ministers, public servants and staff waiting outside Hawke’s office; Conybeare could deftly untie them and redo them as a coordinated procession. He was across every policy issue and, while he was not political, he understood politics and worked in seamless tandem with the political adviser, then Bob Sorby. Hawke recognised Conybeare’s organisational supremacy by dubbing him the “Field Marshall.”

Sadly, Conybeare was not one of the “gatekeepers” involved in the two roundtable discussions on which these books are based. In late 2009, eleven former prime ministerial gatekeepers from the Fraser, Hawke, Keating, Howard and Rudd offices – but not from Gough Whitlam’s – were brought together in two roundtable discussions designed by the researchers to elicit “lessons” about how this job should be done.

Taken as a whole, they are a diverse and talented bunch of high achievers. David Kemp was a politics lecturer at Melbourne University who joined Malcolm Fraser’s staff on the back of an article he had written about prime ministerial leadership, and went on to serve as education minister in the Howard government. Sandy Hollway, another of Hawke’s principal private secretaries, later staged the Sydney Olympics. Paul Keating’s longstanding confidant Don Russell would go on to serve as Australian ambassador in Washington. John Howard’s trusted and long-serving adviser Arthur Sinodinos became a senator (and would eventually stand aside from the Abbott ministry). David Epstein, the savvy media operator, had led Kevin Rudd’s transition into office.

Many – Conybeare, Hollway, Russell and Sinodinos – were senior public servants, while others had explicitly partisan backgrounds: Epstein, Keating’s Geoff Walsh, a former Labor national campaign director; and Howard’s Grahame Morris, a former Liberal state campaigner director. Some served as the PM’s gatekeeper for a couple of months, most for a couple of years, and Sinodinos for nine years. Almost all of them are men, though Howard’s Nicole Feely was neither the first woman (John Gorton’s Ainsley Gotto gained that distinction in 1968) nor the most recent (Tony Abbott’s Peta Credlin). And while many of them were in their forties when they worked in the prime minister’s office, some were much younger. Jim Spigelman, later chief justice of New South Wales, was appointed by Whitlam at the age of twenty-eight (which puts in perspective the charge that Rudd’s Alister Jordan was too young and inexperienced, at twenty-nine, for the job).

Despite this diversity, Rhodes and Tiernan focus on shared characteristics. Just as prime ministers are different but ultimately similar in their exercise of their role, so it is for prime ministerial gatekeepers. By considering the individuals as part of a group, in a sequence, Rhodes and Tiernan are seeking to discern patterns and routines and “lessons” to illuminate the emergence within the Australian political system of a profession and of an institution: the head of the office of the prime minister.

Indeed, their principal concern is a lack of “institutional memory” about the gatekeeper role. Given high staff turnover, relatively frequent changes of government and partisan competition, every new gatekeeper seems to start afresh, and part of what Rhodes and Tiernan want to do is to help future occupants of the role with some advice from their predecessors. They even take a leaf from West Wing by asking their participants to set down their advice and wisdom in a memo to a hypothetical successor.

Their findings are sensible enough. Prime ministerial chiefs of staff, they say, have four key tasks: supporting and protecting the prime minister; coping and surviving; coordinating the policy agenda; and assisting in political management. In practice, of course, the job has more complexity and drama than those neat lessons suggest, and it is not surprising that they fail the reality check when Rhodes and Tiernan “roadtest” them against the experience of the Rudd and Gillard offices. In dysfunctional, stressed-out conditions, the lessons were, for different reasons, largely ignored or not implemented.

Rhodes and Tiernan’s roundtables produce much that is valuable and fresh. But mixing Labor and Liberal staff may have encouraged too much courtesy and needlessly smoothed too many sharp edges of opinion, contrast and rivalry. Nor is it entirely clear that the raw material is strong enough for two books, one aimed at a general readership and one with a more academic target, but with considerable overlap.

Problematic, too, is the authors’ insistence on the term “chief of staff,” a title that came into usage in the mid 1990s under Paul Keating but that is not easily retrofitted onto the “principal private secretaries” (or, in Kemp’s case, “director”) of earlier prime ministerships. Each title is, in fact, at once revealing but misleading. Principal private secretary, imported from Whitehall, may imply a public servant on temporary assignment in Parliament House, exercising clerical discretion and nonpartisan neutrality with a career commitment to the public service rather than to the prime minister. In practice, political nous and personal commitment to the PM were as important for the principal private secretary as policy expertise and administrative capacity.

The title chief of staff, by contrast – an import from Washington – conveys managerial responsibility for an increasingly large prime ministerial workforce. Conybeare managed a prime ministerial staff of seventeen. In Keating’s time there were thirty staff, and by the end of Howard’s time there were over forty; they now number in the fifties. Increasing staff numbers go hand in hand with increased responsibilities and influence. So the prime minister’s personal office has become centralised and stratified under the direction of the chief of staff who, atthe same time, has taken on a broad leadership role over the entire army of ministerial advisers. The whole effort is focused on prioritising the government’s policy agenda and imposing consistency on its public communications.

Despite this managerial overtone, the role has also become more politicised and more high-profile. From Don Russell onwards, the chief of staff has become the prime minister’s main political confidant – someone whose loyalty and trust is unquestioned, someone who can act as an authoritative proxy for the leader both in the corridors of government and in the party backrooms. The key for this role, regardless of the title, is a personal commitment to a specific leader. Indeed, building a long-term, trusting relationship with the politician is the critical determinant of success as a prime ministerial gatekeeper. Many of the most successful partnerships between elected leader and adviser appear to have started long before either of them set foot in the prime minister’s office: Peter Wilenski, Dale Budd, David Kemp, Don Russell, Arthur Sinodinos, Alister Jordan, Ben Hubbard and Peta Credlin had all worked with their future prime ministers in ministerial portfolios and/or as opposition leader.

Moreover, and perhaps unexpectedly, this intimately personal role, linked as it is to the fortunes and wellbeing of one elected leader, has not prevented chiefs of staff from building a successful post-PM career back in the public service or in elected office.

The title chief of staff, then, is a bit of a misnomer, an import from the US executive branch that sits uneasily in Australia’s parliamentary system and only catches one aspect of a complex and multifaceted role. If we were able to select a term that accurately captured the contemporary role, it would be something like prime ministerial enforcer. But that would throw up too many uncomfortable questions. From where is this force derived? And to whom is it accountable?

Surprisingly, Rhodes and Tiernan do not address the issue of accountability. Yet surely this influential role, relying solely on a personal relationship and operating in a legal vacuum, requires a robust framework to ensure accountability? The dilemma in a system dominated by the prime minister is that it is hard to identify any authority sufficiently robust to impose accountability. Once, the public service might have done this. The parliament’s efforts to do so, by seeking testimony from ministerial staff during the “children overboard” inquiry, for example, were rebuffed.

Back in the old Parliament House, the prime minister’s office has declined into museum status, and the peephole provides nothing more than a perve for visitors who discover it on their tour. But in the new Parliament House, the peephole was replaced by CCTV, providing continued opportunity for the senior prime ministerial staff to monitor this central site of Australian political power. •

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When the British Labour Party issued invitations to its fraternal parties in the Commonwealth countries to attend a conference in London in 1957, the Australians leapt at the opportunity. A trip to London must have seemed a respite, even a reward, after the frantic domestic politics of recent years. The three-man delegation was led by H.V. “Doc” Evatt, irascible, bruised but entrenched in the national party leadership. For party president F.E. “Joe” Chamberlain, the trip represented a return to the city of his birth – the city he had abandoned, jobless, in his twenties to chase a fortune in Western Australia. Making up the trio was the party’s federal secretary, Jack Schmella, the son of an Italian miner from Charters Towers.

In London, the job of looking after the Australians fell to a young British Labour Party official, just twenty-seven years of age. Cyril Isaacs had joined the party’s “Labour League of Youth” at the end of the second world war when he was just fourteen years old. As a schoolboy he had canvassed for Labour candidates in his home suburb of St Helier in West London – at the time, a rock-solid Labour area – and when he was seventeen he wrote to the Labour Party seeking a job. He started as a clerk in the party’s headquarters in Transport House.

Netta Burns, an Australian who later worked with Isaacs in Canberra, recalled him as “the office boy who handed me my money every week.” But Isaacs was on the rise. He won a year’s trade union scholarship to the London School of Economics, was promoted into Labour’s international department, travelled throughout Europe, and was then appointed personal assistant to Labour’s general secretary, Morgan Phillips. Along the way he managed to get himself elected, as a twenty-one-year-old, as an alderman on the local council.

Looking over the list of delegates for the Commonwealth Labour Parties’ Conference in 1957, he recalled being shocked to discover that proper accommodation arrangements had not been made for the Australians. “I’ve got the list of delegates, looked at it and, oh my godfathers!” he recalled. “I rang Morgan and said, ‘I’ve got to come and see you.’”

For his troubles, Isaacs was given the task of acting as the Australians’ host while they were in London. Chamberlain recalled that he “did a great job of looking after us.” The Australians might have been a handful, not least because Schmella took every opportunity – before the flight, on the flight, upon arrival in London and after the conference – to drink. Chamberlain, highly disapproving, later recalled how these London binges reduced the federal secretary “to a state of insensibility.”

The conference itself yielded little of note — apart, perhaps, from a difficult meeting with the Africans about the White Australia policy. Chamberlain and Schmella returned home via the United States, where Schmella’s drinking continued. Evatt, impressed by the diligent young Isaacs, invited him to come back with him to Australia via Israel, and join his staff in Canberra. “I was only going to come out for two years, to see what it was like,” Isaacs later recalled. “But then I met my wife and we married, and I stayed of course.” His marriage lasted more than fifty years. But his involvement in the Australian Labor Party – and not least his relationship with the powerful and complex figure of Joe Chamberlain – was shorter and much more tempestuous, as he became both an agent and a victim of Labor’s troubled path to a more professionalised approach and operation.

On arrival in Australia, Isaacs decided to change his surname. He may have been keen to put what he recalled as childhood bullying behind him, or maybe he had accepted advice that the name – despite its distinguished association with Sir Isaac Isaacs, chief justice and the first Australian-born governor-general – would set him back. Inspired perhaps by the popular science fiction writer John Wyndham, he chose the unambiguously English name Cyril Wyndham.

As Cyril Wyndham, he built a close relationship with Evatt and remained loyal to him throughout the older man’s political twilight. He didn’t fit in with the other staff, who, he felt, treated Evatt with shocking disrespect. The 1958 campaign, as documented by the political scientist Don Rawson, saw the Labor Party held back by a “serious” lack of personnel at the federal level. Reaching outside the office, Wyndham worked with the journalist Maxwell Newton, jointly drafting Evatt’s 1958 election policy speech. But the new chum was given an early taste of Labor campaigns, Australian-style, when he realised Evatt’s itinerary was effectively driven by the competing demands of the party’s state branches.

“There was one ridiculous occasion,” Wyndham recalled, “when Doc Evatt was speaking in Adelaide, then speaking in Brisbane, and then had to fly all the way back to speak in Hobart. I said, ‘What bloody nonsense. Why doesn’t he go from Adelaide to Hobart then up to Brisbane?’” In a federal structure, Wyndham discovered, “The left hand never knew what the right hand was doing. Western Australia could say one thing and New South Wales the other. There was no coordination.”

When Evatt at last relinquished the leadership and quit federal parliament for the NSW Supreme Court in 1960, Wyndham was the only Evatt staffer taken on by the new leader, Arthur Calwell. But perhaps the chemistry wasn’t right; by the end of the year, and with the support of Calwell and Chamberlain, Wyndham threw his hat into the ring for the election of state secretary of Labor’s Victorian branch.

As a newcomer lacking any factional or union power base, Wyndham presented himself as a loyal and talented but independent outsider. Decades later, he recalled his job interview with the party’s state executive. Wyndham recalls one “nasty individual,” a prominent trade unionist, asking him:

“What’s the difference between a servant and a vassal?” I said, “A servant has the courage to tell his employer, no – or to advise he is going the wrong way.” [But] he wanted a vassal. Yes, yes, yes! He wanted somebody who would just do as they were told and not ask questions.

That was not how Wyndham saw his contribution to the Australian Labor Party. Industrious, capable and dedicated, he would seek to serve the party as a whole, even if that meant warning against going the “wrong way.” Wyndham’s predecessor as state secretary, Jack Tripovich, “just did as he was told, and as a result became a member of the Upper House.” By contrast, Wyndham well understood that “servants” who speak truth to power, who put the right way ahead of the easy way, risk losing the lot. But for the time being Wyndham was in favour, defeating twelve candidates to be elected to the post.

Labor’s electoral record in Victoria was dismal. In the 1961 federal election, the party had won big swings in every state except Victoria, and fell short of government by a single seat. In Victoria, the splinter Democratic Labor Party had captured 15 per cent of the primary vote, carrying many former Labor votes over to the Coalition via second preferences.

The following year, however, when the sitting Liberal member for the state seat of Broadmeadows died, Wyndham orchestrated Labor’s by-election campaign. It featured, alongside the usual political fare, the cream of Labor’s TV talent – quiz show champion Barry Jones (later Labor’s federal president) and “Uncle” Doug Elliot, a Labor MP and commercial spruiker on the popular World of Sport program. “Great fun, that campaign was,” Wyndham later recalled. “Much to everybody’s surprise, we won it.”

While Wyndham was energetically establishing his credentials in Melbourne, the national party was continuing to edge ever closer to setting up a full-time head office in Canberra. Despite many false starts, stumbling blocks and backward steps, this remained an elusive goal. Jack Schmella had been an honorary part-time federal secretary, continuing on as Queensland state secretary. When Schmella died at the age of fifty-two, party president Joe Chamberlain seized the opportunity to become national secretary – an unprecedented move which signposted the rising influence of the secretary’s role in the Labor organisation. He too remained as state secretary; Labor’s national head office shifted from Brisbane to Chamberlain’s home base of Perth.

For all his jealous protection of his own powers as a state official, Joe Chamberlain had become convinced that the party as a whole needed a full-time salaried secretary. As federal president he developed a proposal which he presented to the federal executive and, in April 1961, to federal conference. “It is generally conceded that grave organisational weaknesses exist,” he admitted, “with no real central administration to provide for long-term planning in presentation of policy and establishment of good public relations.”

The previous part-time secretaries had managed the routine administrative tasks, he wrote. But it had been impossible for them to attend to all the important policy matters, let alone maintain a firm and continuous relationship with the parliamentary leadership. Again, it came down to the problem of money – state branch money:

If £40,000 to £50,000 a year [$1 million to $1.3 million in today’s money] was available for our purpose we could of course proceed to establish a national administrative centre consisting of a number of experts in administration, public relations, research, a librarian and all that goes with the modern requirements of a political organisation.

However as we are called upon to initially examine the project on the basis of seeking financial support from the state branches, it would at this stage be quite without profit to set out in any detail any such ambitious proposal. It should be looked upon as a target for the future.

The immediate practical approach must be on the basis of what is a reasonable financial approach to the states?

In Chamberlain’s more modest proposal, Labor would pay its federal secretary a salary of £3000 ($80,000), while also paying for a “female secretary and assistant” and office expenses. Even this would entail quadrupling the levies paid by the states, according to their membership numbers, to belong to the federal party. Chamberlain’s report was shot down: New South Wales and Victoria – which, as the largest states, needed federal support least, and would have had to pay the most – opposed it, although some of the smaller and needier states were supportive.

All this happened as Chamberlain was moving to replace Schmella as secretary. Years later, in his posthumously published autobiography, Chamberlain insisted he was motivated only by the needs of the party and had “lost the desire to sit in the cold corridors of power in Canberra.” But that retrospective explanation is belied by the speed with which he moved to fill Schmella’s shoes, which, he acknowledged, had sparked accusations that he wanted to “feather [his] own nest.”

Yet his proposal was deferred, not defeated, and Chamberlain continued to push the idea. Throughout 1962 the state branches finally came on board, and in January 1963 the position of a full-time salaried Labor federal secretary was advertised. Cyril Wyndham was encouraged to throw his hat into the ring and the executive unanimously selected him from a field of five. Joe Chamberlain did not contest the position, but the old Londoner clearly supported the young Londoner as his replacement. Others in the party were just happy to get the old Londoner out of the national office. Wyndham recalled:

I should never have left Victoria. In fact when they were saying farewell to me … [they] said, “Are you sure you’re going?” and I look back and I think to myself, I wish I’d said “no.” But it’s no good living in the past.

Wyndham was appointed by executive in May 1963, confirmed by conference in July, and told to start work on 1 October. On 15 October, Prime Minister Menzies called an early election for 30 November. The Victorian branch of the Labor Party, having just lost its state secretary, found itself unprepared for the campaign; it asked the federal executive to defer Wyndham’s start date, so that he could remain in Victoria and direct the local campaign. Thus Labor conducted its national campaign for the 1963 election without a national secretary – an unprecedented example, even for this centrifugal party, of federal decentralisation. Wyndham recalled that towards the end of the campaign he was driving from Victoria’s La Trobe Valley to Melbourne:

There was a police officer flagging me down and I thought, “What have I done wrong?” “Sorry Mr Wyndham, urgent phone call for you.” “Where can I take it?” “Come in here and take it here.” I phoned – I’ve forgotten who I phoned now… President Kennedy [had] been shot. And I thought, “That’s us, we’re finished. No way, no way, can we win this election.”

Menzies won what was to be his last campaign with a comfortable majority: the Liberals won seventy-two seats to Labor’s fifty. Wyndham and his wife moved to Canberra, and he opened Labor’s first national office in January 1964. Newspaper headlines nicknamed him “Cerebral Cyril,” Labor’s “Mighty Atom,” “the Cockney Sparrow,” “a new broom for an untidy party.” The Melbourne Sun explained:

The “mighty atom” tag comes from a combination of his slight build and tremendous vitality. He never seems to walk anywhere, but prefers to go at a half-run. His conversation is similarly quick, to the point and unfrivolous… Looking older than his age, with deep-sunk eyes, pale and thin complexion and thinning hair, he regularly astounds people with his energetic organisational ability.

A profile in the Australian Financial Review, edited by Maxwell Newton, was equally flattering but concluded with an insightful caution:

Cyril Wyndham is inclined to resent criticism – personal, or of the party – and to worry about it. This tendency has made his job in Victoria a wearing one. As federal secretary he will become a much bigger target. His friends are hoping he curbs, or loses, the worrying habit.

Wyndham established Labor’s national headquarters in Ainslie Avenue in central Canberra; they were recalled by one journalist as “a small, ratty office suite at the top of the world’s most ancient lift.” The party’s “grand plans for an adequately staffed national secretariat” to support Wyndham were never delivered. In 1967 the full staff complement was “Cyril plus two” secretaries.

But Wyndham lived up to the “mighty atom” billing. He was an impeccable shorthand typist and minute keeper, and immediately improved the party’s administrative efficiency. He analysed voting statistics to trace shifts in popular sentiment at national and state level. A fluent pamphleteer, he articulated the party’s case against communism and the National Civic Council, both at the direction of the federal executive, and promoted the party in lengthy articles in public journals. He wrote speakers’ notes, “to see that everyone was speaking the same language in Western Australia and New South Wales.”

He also became an articulate internal critic of party attitudes and structures – showing the courage that he had advocated years earlier, no doubt, to advise his employer about right and wrong. In a speech to the Young Labor Association in 1965 he attacked those who “prevaricate our policy, indulge in the futile exercise of factional strife, and behave like a collection of political delinquents.” In 1968 he reportedly told the Labor Women’s Organisation that aspects of the party were “ridiculous, absurd and criminal.”

Most ambitiously, he embarked on the difficult and dangerous task of reforming Labor’s antiquated national decision-making structures. The so-called “Wyndham Plan” was a wide-ranging proposal to enlarge and reconstruct the federal conference and the federal executive, provide rank-and-file members with direct input into the federal party, improve party finances, and broaden the party’s appeal to women and young voters.

Under the existing rules, it was the executive, not the popularly elected parliamentary leaders, who essentially determined party policy – as had been dramatically highlighted in March 1963, when a special national conference was held to deal with the Liberal government’s proposal for a joint US–Australian military base at North West Cape in Western Australia. Arthur Calwell and his deputy, Gough Whitlam, had addressed the thirty-six delegates at Canberra’s Hotel Kingston, urging them to accept the base, but they had no say in the conference’s deliberations, and no vote. Instead, Calwell and Whitlam were photographed outside the hotel at midnight as they waited to hear the outcome.

The Daily Telegraph’s front-page splash condemned the incident as “the all-time nadir of Labor parliamentary leadership.” Menzies coined the “faceless men” tag to deride the powerful and anonymous figures whom he accused of running the Labor Party. A key element of the Wyndham Plan was to include the parliamentary leaders on the federal executive.

This, however, would have diluted the power of the paid state branch officials. Wyndham later described his job as to “stop the states from bickering” but that was only half of it. Wyndham’s plan placed him at the intersection of powerful fissures within the party: between traditionalists and modernisers; between the Left faction, which dominated the executive, and the Right; between the party organisation and the parliamentary leadership; and between the state branches and the emerging influence of the federal structure with its full-time secretary.

In particular Wyndham was squeezed between powerful individuals. His erstwhile promoter Chamberlain, with his power base in Western Australia, his reliance on “the book” of party rules and his mistrust of parliamentarians, represented the archetypal Left traditionalist who stood to lose from reform. Chamberlain opposed the Wyndham Plan. Whitlam – moderniser, parliamentarian – vigorously supported it. The plan was debated at the 1965 federal conference – and was shelved. Wyndham changed tack, attempting to force change on the state branches from below, by directly appealing to rank-and-file members. But the executive ordered he be “kept away” from branch members; Netta Burns, his secretary, recalled that Wyndham was barred from travelling outside Canberra without the executive’s permission.

Labor’s electoral debacle of 1966 no doubt further weakened Wyndham’s position; he certainly felt he was made the scapegoat. Following Menzies’s resignation, the Coalition parties under Harold Holt won nearly 60 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote and held two-thirds of the seats in the House of Representatives. It was the end of the road for Calwell, who was soon replaced as leader by Gough Whitlam. Wyndham had been one of Whitlam’s closest collaborators; after 1966, however, their relationship began to deteriorate. The ostensible reason was a disagreement about a proposed redistribution but there were personal niggles as well. Wyndham bristled at what he described as Whitlam’s “casual and offhanded treatment” when he tried to have a discussion with the leader about campaign finance; Whitlam was “still too arrogant.”

More generally, Wyndham was increasingly frustrated with the whole party: its archaic structures, deep factionalism, petty squabbling and resistance to reform. Newspaper columnists were taking note of the tensions in Labor’s head office, describing Wyndham as “a professional among amateurs,” a “frustrated reformer,” and “the little Englishman, who… worked like a drover’s sheep dog to rehabilitate the ALP.” Privately, Wyndham was scathing about his employers on the executive, writing in March 1969:

[Jim] Keeffe as the Federal president is a wretched individual; incompetent, cheap and admirably described as a “crumb,” [Victorian state secretary Bill] Hartley is gross, also incompetent, and I am sure has not the slightest idea of what democratic socialism is about. [Queensland state secretary Tom] Burns is a larrickin [sic]. Chamberlain the albatross around everyone’s neck and a leech, sucking us dry of energy and creditability.

In another note, he described these and other members of the executive as a “power cabal” that dominated the executive and the party:

The clique, with which I will not grace the name of left-wing since they are simply a power cabal, insulates itself completely from public and party opinion. It hears and sees only what it wants to hear and see, of course it deludes itself into believing that they are the purists, the upholders of principles and great defenders of the party. Anyone who so much as crosses their path must pay the penalty of their vindictiveness and jealousy. The clique is able to dominate party affairs because no one else will challenge their supremacy.

For their part, Netta Burns recalled, the clique “made it impossible for him [Wyndham] to stay.” The executive commissioned an audit of Wyndham’s management of party funds from mid 1967; discrepancies were allegedly discovered. Wyndham was said to have wasted, misused, or even misappropriated party funds, variously in order to hold party meetings in “luxurious” surroundings, or to cover his travel costs while on party business, or to pay a garage bill for his wife’s car. Wyndham later explained that he “came a cropper” because he had used party funds to help Whitlam pay for a dinner with the federal executive on a visit to Sydney:

We had the executive to lunch somewhere in Sydney. The meeting was in Sydney. [Gough Whitlam] said to me, “I suppose I’d better pay for these bastards.” Now I knew he was stretched. So I said, “OK, I’ll go halves with you.” Now I had no allowance, so it had to come out of party funds, and that was half my problem… They purported to find that I’d been rifling funds, which I hadn’t. I’d been helping Gough out.

Whatever the actual charge, Wyndham defended himself stoutly at a finance committee meeting, reading out a four-page statement that declared he had “lived on a razor edge ever since the Secretariat was created.”

Having, therefore, carefully consider[ed] my position and my own self-respect, I have reached the conclusion, regrettable and distasteful as it is to me, that I no longer wish to serve in my present capacity. I accordingly tender my resignation as from the moment I complete reading this statement.

Taciturn, unhappy, exhausted, Wyndham resigned as federal secretary in March 1969 to take up the vacant state secretary’s role in New South Wales. But the vendetta against him had further to run. The auditor’s report was debated at a two-day meeting of the executive in May; Wyndham was found to have provided “misleading” answers and was unanimously censured. Refusing to defend himself in the media or the defamation courts, Wyndham took himself and his wife to Norfolk Island. When he failed to report for duty in New South Wales the following week, he was dismissed from his role as state secretary. The assassination of the party’s first paid full-time secretary was complete; politically, his career was “finished.” He was thirty-nine years old.

Yet the smear campaign continued. Alan Reid reported that Wyndham’s enemies continued to “feed out” highly damaging material against him; Netta Burns stated that scurrilous leaflets were circulated at the party conference in Victoria in June. Wyndham was badgered by lawyers and friends to mount a complaint, but this would have been inflammatory in an election year; he loyally kept his mouth shut.

Wyndham’s only defender was his old press gallery contact, Maxwell Newton, who had become publisher of an influential Canberra newsletter. Newton issued a statement that Wyndham had been “ill-treated, maligned and smeared” by members of the executive and offered him a job; Wyndham worked for a decade as editor of the Daily Commercial News. He then lived in retirement with his wife in Newcastle until his death in July 2012.

With Wyndham’s appointment, Labor at last had its own version of the Liberals’ federal director Don Cleland. But it had taken the party nearly twenty years to catch up. By then, of course, the Liberals had even more resources. Wyndham’s salary was £3000 a year in 1963; the Liberal federal director was getting “something over £4000 a year” in 1961. The Liberals’ head office had been staffed from its inception with a substantial professional team.

How are we to explain the impressive rise and shameful demise of Cyril Wyndham? Was it purely the result of his own character – his energy and enterprise, his reformist instincts, his prickly resentment of criticism, his refusal to be a vassal? Or were more complex institutional factors at play?

In selecting a youthful outsider as their first full-time salaried officer, the state officials on federal executive may have thought they had someone they could push around, or at worst ignore. The job came with a troubled history and an ambiguous standing within the Labor Party. Perhaps Wyndham thought the new elements of this job – the salary, the full-time hours and the Canberra office – would overcome the problems his predecessors had faced. Instead, the parts of the job that did not change – the lack of resources, the uncertain authority, the entrenched power of the state branches – proved to be more influential in determining how he did the job and, ultimately, how long he could survive in it.

Having spent decades arguing about whether to follow the Liberals’ example and pay their national officials, Labor engaged in protracted contests about who should serve and under what conditions; more often than not, the result was high turnover, exhaustion and traumatic disruption.

In this sense, Wyndham’s career is an object lesson in the inherent tensions between institutions and the individuals who work within them. Wyndham believed it was his job to advise the party that it was going the wrong way; he was ignored and eventually kicked out. But his demise unexpectedly opened the door for a party official, Mick Young, whose efforts did succeed in professionalising both Labor’s and Australia’s election campaigns. •

This is an edited extract from The Professionals: Strategy, Money and the Rise of the Political Campaigner in Australia by Stephen Mills (Black Inc. $29.99).

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Rudd, Gillard and Beyond thus joins a teetering tower of titles dealing with various aspects of what went right and what went wrong between 2007 and 2013. Already more than a dozen books have been written by frontbenchers (Chris Bowen, Jim Chalmers, Maxine McKew, Andrew Leigh, Lindsay Tanner, and Carrs Kim and Bob) and pundits (Barrie Cassidy, Peter Hartcher, Jacqueline Kent, George Megalogenis, Aaron Patrick, Anne Summers, Kerry-Anne Walsh), and more are on the way.

Bramston’s book coincides with the arrival of Philip Chubb’s forensic take-down of Labor’s carbon pricing scheme. Julia Gillard’s memoir is en route, as is Wayne Swan’s, though the Rudd entourage is apparently content to provide background briefings without committing to an authoritative version of events. It was in this crowded field that Bramston, a News Limited journalist and former Rudd staffer, found himself with both an opportunity and a problem.

The opportunity was that someone – who? – leaked him an email Gillard wrote to Rudd and his chief of staff Alister Jordan just a few days before her challenge. This is Bramston’s scoop. Gillard tells Rudd she is “desperately concerned” about the government’s lack of progress on asylum seekers, and sets out in detail the stuttering efforts of the prime minister’s office to address it. It rings oh so true. Gillard was clearly aware of the government’s problems and on the evidence of this email was trying to fix them; this is not, by itself, evidence of a leadership challenge or conspiracy.

The problem for Bramston is that Gillard chose not to be interviewed for this book, leaving a hole in his sequence of prime ministers and leaving him victim to Rudd’s one-sided critique of his deputy. Thus, in narrating the critical events after the failure of the UN conference at Copenhagen, Bramston asserts:

Rudd believed he could win an election in late 2010 and increase the government’s parliamentary majority. After he ruled out an early election, he was urged to dump the [Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme] by Gillard and Swan, and the scheme was shelved in April 2010.

In the same uncritical vein, he quotes Rudd nominating his two “errors of judgement” as:

One is to have succumbed to the council [sic] of others to defer the emissions trading scheme rather than have the opportunity to explain to the Australian people how we would handle it in a second term. The second is to have been such a trusting bastard.

Compare this self-image of a trusting PM let down by his deputy and treasurer with the altogether more critical, detailed and nuanced analysis in Phil Chubb’s book. Chubb, who interviewed many of the participants including Gillard (on the record) and Rudd (off the record), describes a different post-Copenhagen Rudd: a prime minister “paralysed by indecision,” “agitated and angry” and hampered by “chaotic” work habits, at one point suffering a “meltdown” like a “debilitating panic attack.” Far from wanting to explain carbon pricing to the Australian people in 2010, he embarked on a frantic, pointless and endless tour of national hospitals during which the CPRS was abandoned rather than deliberately dropped. “Kevin Rudd,” Chubb concludes, “was the architect of his own defeat.” By the time Gillard sends her email, in other words, the prime minister was already incapable of responding strategically to her alarm bells.

So Labor’s history wars roll on, robust, sometimes nasty, and inconclusive. Either there was a loyal deputy trying methodically to rescue a paralysed leader, or there was a strategic leader who received bad advice, was denied the opportunity to press on with carbon pricing and was brought down by a plot. Bramston hasn’t been able to resolve this dilemma.

But it’s important to resolve. Bramston concludes his book by recommending organisational reforms to Labor’s candidate selection, national conferences, branch membership, trade union participation and so on. But if Labor imploded because of the personal psychological weaknesses of the leader, which is essentially Chubb’s thesis, then all of Bramston’s sage advice is irrelevant; indeed, the party may need greater not less opportunity to replace leaders who are underperforming or out of control.

Bramston’s account is strong on the inner workings of the parliamentary party and some of its factional manoeuvring. A pro-Gillard group under Rudd apparently dubbed themselves “Knights Templar,” while a pro-Rudd group under Gillard called itself the “cardinals.” Bramston records all this without exploring how such silly, self-regarding play-names might possibly be reconciled with the serious obligation of members of parliament to serve the people. In fact, the people get short shrift in Bramston’s account, except as numbers in voting intention polls; apparently rebuilding the Labor Party is a top-down process, and bottom-up pressure groups such as Open Labor or articulate factional voices (such as the Left’s Challenge magazine) have no role. Likewise, the Rudd–Gillard drama appears to have taken place without reference to the role of the media in promoting, exaggerating or selectively reporting leadership instability and policy failures.

Looking to the future, Bramston argues that Labor needs to “return to the mainstream centre” with a new policy agenda. Bill Shorten must learn the lessons of defeat and not get “trapped” into “defending policies that failed or were deeply unpopular.” But did Labor in government fail because it was too far off to one side? Carbon pricing was the mainstream in 2007, as the rapture that greeted Rudd’s signing of the Kyoto protocol shows. Climate change denialists are not in the mainstream; they are extremists. On border protection, Labor’s problem was that it veered too much to the centre of the road in pursuit of those tough-minded voters from western Sydney – a “mainstream” position that allowed Labor to be perpetually outflanked to the right by the Coalition and to the left by the Greens.

In tactical terms alone, Labor might be better off hanging tough on carbon pricing, softening its border protection position to fend off the Greens, and defending its health and education credentials at the expense of the Coalition. The post-budget polls underline the policy dilemma. Labor’s primary vote has crept back ahead of the Coalition’s – an astonishing turnaround so soon in the electoral cycle, perhaps repudiating the narrative of the last six years in which Rudd and Gillard were said to have lost Labor’s heartland. At the same time, however, Labor’s comfortable two-party preferred lead must be read against the startling fact that minor parties (Greens plus “others”) now attract fully 25 per cent of the electorate. This is the existential crisis facing both Labor and the Coalition: have they lost a quarter of the electorate for ever? The only upside for Bill Shorten is that at least he is in opposition, a safe haven in which he can get his and his party’s act together. •

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Hawker’s “campaign diaries” reveal little to suggest that he ever accepted Wright as the director of the Labor campaign – and much to suggest that he regarded himself as the campaign’s primary strategic decision-maker, second only to Kevin Rudd himself. The “rebellion” in his title refers to Rudd’s three-year destabilisation against Julia Gillard and her colleagues – but by extension it also refers to Hawker’s rejection of the centralised authority of Wright’s head office.

Just why there should be competition among Labor’s campaign managers to take credit for what was, at the end of the day, a heavy election defeat, needs explaining. Part of the answer is that Labor is engaged in its own history wars: did Rudd save Labor’s furniture, and if he did, is that sufficient to justify his rebellion? On this level, Hawker is unashamedly spinning for Kevin, and the book should be seen as nothing more than a print version of his many TV appearances before and since 7 September.

But there is a bigger issue at stake as well, the question of the best way – the most effective way as well as the normatively most acceptable way – of organising election campaigns in Australian politics.

Wright’s comment represents the orthodox Head Office perspective, developed by the major political parties in this country over four decades: that election campaigns are won and lost with a centralised and well-resourced party organisation, led by a national campaign director who works hand-in-hand with skilled and disciplined parliamentary leaders in developing and implementing effective strategies of persuasive, targeted and consistent campaign messages.

But if Hawker is right, then campaigning in Australia – or at least in the Labor Party – has made a decisive shift into a new era, where elections are run by external consultants retained not by parties but by individual candidates. In this view, head office can run the field operation but the strategy lies with the leader and his coterie. Hawker doesn’t describe his employment status, but it seems clear that after Rudd’s return to the prime ministership he became a ministerial staffer or consultant – that is, he held no authority in the campaign other than informally as Rudd’s advisor.

There are further differences between these rival Labor campaign managers. Wright’s primary responsibility is to the party as an institution, regardless of who fills the parliamentary leadership; Hawker was operating, in this campaign, with an “all care but no responsibility” attitude as a short-term visitor whose first loyalty was to Kevin Rudd. Wright represents the old-fashioned view that if you lose, you take it on the chin, you don’t complain, and – except in the internal review process – you don’t blame your own side. Hawker seems to stand for a new practice of washing your dirty linen in public.

These differences can be discerned in many points of Hawker’s narrative.

For example, Hawker the Rudd staffer records making many executive decisions – commissioning market research and designing ads and the like – which are normally the domain of head office. As a Rudd staffer, he makes clear he was unimpressed with Wright and his campaign headquarters, or CHQ: head office’s lack of campaign preparedness, he says, prevented Rudd from pulling the election date back into August. Similarly, he cites the damning judgement of political consultants from the United States: “our field and CHQ operations are second rate.”

Most tellingly, he records two occasions where he directly overruled Wright on matters of campaign organisation. In mid July, when Labor’s online ad agency had misbehaved by, in effect, selling access to the prime minister, Hawker records:

I told George Wright that I thought he would have to sack them, but George thought otherwise, and just had them change the account manager. I knew that this would not be enough. In the upshot… I insisted that he get rid of them. Kevin agreed with this approach…

There was a more serious dispute the following week, over an unnamed strategic adviser in campaign headquarters:

Today the most difficult thing I had to do was tell George that one of our strategists had to go from his job due to poor communication issues. George was clearly unhappy and I’m sure it stretched the friendship… [The next day, Wright] came back with a proposal for a committee to oversee the work of the field operations. I said that this would not work and we need to restructure … I told him [George] earlier in the day we need a flash audit over the weekend and a report back to the leadership group on Monday. I also told him I want to strip up to a third of the personnel out of CHQ and place them in local campaigns. In my experience, we tend to overpopulate the CHQ and under-resource some field operations. He pushed back on the actual number and expressed some frustration at the way things are now happening…

It is not at all surprising, given all this, that the internal fissures eventually broke out into the open. Halfway through the campaign proper, in a front page story in the Australian Financial Review, journalist James Massola reported “tensions” between Labor’s head office and Rudd’s travelling party. Rudd was failing to cut through the daily media cycle, and “snap decisions” were being taken by “a small group of confidantes around the prime minister.”

Hawker’s reaction was to blame head office. “There are a number of people in CHQ actively leaking against Rudd” – motivated, he concludes, by the “unhealed wounds” of the Rudd–Gillard battle. They “were more than happy to attack the campaign from within, notwithstanding the damage it would do to our cause.”

All this sniping merely serves to confirm the validity of the oldest lessons in the campaign handbook. Political disunity is death. Strategy is singular, not plural. Specifically, when Labor’s campaign management is split between Head Office and the Leader’s travelling party, disaster looms. That was the experience of Labor’s last election defeat in 1996, and it was the experience, in reverse, of the successful Liberal campaign in 2013. Brian Loughnane, who was George Wright’s counterpart as Liberal Party national campaign director, ran a campaign that was unified around a single long-term strategy in which, to put it bluntly, the national campaign director disciplined the party leader, not the other way around. Peta Credlin – who as Tony Abbott’s chief of staff is the counterpart in this story of Bruce Hawker – did not spend most of her time developing alternative campaign strategies, and was able to corral her parliamentary leader into the party strategy. Perhaps it helped that Loughnane and Credlin are married. Of course we are unlikely to find out how the Liberals did this, because another characteristic of recent Liberal campaigns has been the insiders’ reticence about – indeed, refusal to reveal – the ins and outs of campaign management. No dirty linen or internal sniping here.

IN CLAIMING that Gillard supporters in head office sabotaged Labor’s campaign, Hawker is making a very serious accusation. He does so without providing any proof of his suspicions. He also fails to note the irony: that when it comes to internal destabilisation, he did as much as anyone to bring about the Rudd Rebellion – notwithstanding the damage he did to Labor’s cause at the time.

It is worth recalling, for example, the events of February 2012, when Kevin Rudd, in Washington, abruptly resigned as foreign minister and returned for a caucus showdown with Gillard. Hawker was working as a paid consultant to the Queensland Labor Party during then-premier Anna Bligh’s doomed re-election campaign. Rudd called him, but not Bligh, to give advance warning of his move. Hawker hit the media, urging – as a state Labor employee – that federal caucus overthrow the prime minister.

This was hardly helpful for Bligh, who promptly stood him down from her campaign. But it also represented an unusual trespass by a paid consultant into the responsibility of caucus. It is a shame Hawker ignores this incident in his book, because it is emblematic of how his loyalty to Rudd surpassed any sense of obligation to elected leaders Bligh and Gillard. In Hawker’s view, there is only one set of loyalties. While he describes himself as the loyal party member, those who stuck by Gillard are “suicidal”; while he is the experienced campaign consultant, they opt to “stick with the faith healers.” Gillard relies on unrepresentative “faceless men” in the factions and unions, claims the unrepresentative campaign consultant. Hawker approves of Rudd campaigning “with a vengeance” in Geelong and undertaking a “triumphal march through Sydney’s western suburbs,” but when Gillard’s poll numbers continue to droop, he resorts to the Jeremiah-like wail: “How much longer are we going to allow these self-appointed custodians of the Labor Party to take us down this course of destruction?” (emphasis added).

It is not clear who appointed Hawker as Labor’s custodian. His own explanation, offered at the time of his “trespass,” is that he was entitled to intervene in a leadership decision because he was a longstanding member of the Labor Party and an experienced Labor campaign manager – and besides, caucus should not have this power to elect leaders. It was a disingenuous argument then and now, as he failed to acknowledge his privileged access to the media and the extent of his Rudd allegiance.

If it is true that a campaign consultant carries a comparable public responsibility, or political risk, to an elected MP, then this marks a shift in Australian political culture. Hawker’s book is all about how an unelected campaign consultant exercised significant influence within the Labor Party.

IN TELLING this story, Hawker provides some new insights into the rush and pressure of contemporary election campaign, where state-of-the-art technology meets political reality. He takes the reader on board the VIP flights and into the leadership group meetings; we dial into early morning staff hook-ups, read poll results and see the media pack at close quarters. It will be of interest to campaign specialists and to Liberal opposition researchers.

But someone has to say this: as a diarist, Bruce Hawker is no Alastair Campbell. At their best, diaries make compelling reading because they capture events and personalities in action. They are candid, authentic, immediate and, most important, unspoiled by knowledge of how things would pan out.

Hawker’s text, by contrast, betrays too much evidence of self-censorship or editorial redaction. How else do we explain his clunky description of an unnamed someone as “a senior Rudd supporter from caucus” – or of the “reporter at the Australian,” the “senior ALP official,” the “Rudd team member,” or “a newspaperman”? Why does he use passive language to reveal he “received information about the party’s polling,” without revealing how (or from whom) he acquired this sensitive information? He warns us in the introduction that he has removed some names “to protect their privacy.” I think a responsible editor would have marked such changes with square brackets. But the deeper problem is that it is not clear why Hawker extends his cloak of invisibility over some people but not others – why he is happy enough to name and criticise some Labor politicians, campaign staff and journalists but not others. Perhaps he is just perpetuating the unhealthy cycle of anonymity between Rudd supporters and the media that characterised the Rudd rebellion. Whatever the cause, it does not make for a good diary.

Reading Alastair Campbell, you emerge with a sense of having heard, seen, walked with and understood Tony Blair. Reading Bruce Hawker, you learn surprisingly little about Kevin Rudd. There is no extended dialogue, no insight into political ambition, no wrestling with complexity, no wit. Rudd emerges as both highly intelligent and microscopically focused on one issue at a time, capable of astonishing endurance interspersed with petty temper tantrums. Hawker said his job, in part, was “to keep Kevin on an even keel,” and he does this admirably with jokes, tall tales and war stories. One day on the campaign trail, they sang jingles from old cigarette commercials; another time “Kevin and I got into a recitation of the silliest scenes from various Barry McKenzie movies.” Honestly, you had to be there.

Between the lines, you can discern some of the problems Hawker had in dealing with his boss. We thus get a plausible explanation of Rudd’s weird performance in the first leaders’ debate, in which he appeared distracted, shuffling notes during his opening presentation and sounding under-rehearsed. Having spent all of the Saturday embroiled in two candidate preselection problems, which really didn’t require his total attention, Rudd spent most of the Sunday preparing for the debate in his room alone. Come Sunday night, he was under-rehearsed! Amazingly, given the importance of the debates in contemporary campaigns, Hawker ruminates in his diary that campaigning is so intense that “you have very little free time to prepare for important events like debates.”

There are a couple of typos, including that most unspellable of journalist names, Max Uechtritz (Hawker opts for Uetrich). There is also a small but astonishing error. Following his complaint about the self-appointed custodians, Hawker approvingly quotes a former Liberal Party leader: “These are, as Malcolm Fraser once observed with respect to John Gorton, ‘reprehensible circumstances’ warranting drastic action.” Wrong! Fraser invoked reprehensible circumstances not when he was pulling the rug from under Liberal prime minister Gorton in 1971, but when he was preparing to do the same to Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam in 1975. Reprehensible circumstances, Fraser said, would be sufficient grounds for the Senate to block supply. Besides the error, it is regrettable, to say the least, for a Labor loyalist to quote Fraser on the Dismissal – especially as a precedent for removing another Labor prime minister in 2013. Then again, maybe there is a theme here: the book’s title seemingly invokes the Rum Rebellion – Australia’s only military coup against civilian authority.

Hawker played an important role in the 2013 campaign and has an important story to tell. But he, and we, would have been better served if he had saved the diary writing for another day. If he really wanted to tell his story, perhaps he should consider recording an interview with the Oral History unit of the National Library of Australia. A sympathetic but insistent interviewer might encourage him to abandon spin, eliminate redaction, adopt candour, acknowledge different points of view, and fill the gaps that mar his account. •

The post A rum rebellion appeared first on Inside Story.

WHEN Kevin Rudd called the 7 September election while Labor was still trailing in the polls, campaign historians might have assumed he was trying to do a “Hawke 1987” – build on his pre-campaign momentum, make every week a winner, and ride home over the top of a flagging opposition.

But if recent press reports of tensions and divisions within the Labor campaign are to be believed, Rudd might be heading for a “Keating 1996” – a tired government with a disorganised campaign rolled by a relentless, disciplined and elusive opposition. Of course, if Tony Abbott were to lose the unlosable election next month, he would make “Hewson 1993” look like a positive triumph.

Historical parallels like these are not only interesting but also instructive. When it comes to understanding contemporary election campaigns, the past is a useful guide – not least because the campaign directors of both parties devise strategies and tactics based on what they know has, and hasn’t, worked before. The party that learns best, and adapts most rapidly, and is most professional, will tend to be best placed to win. The party that forgets what it takes to win – forgets the disciplines of how to run a centralised, well-organised campaign – is asking for trouble.

This is why the reports of bickering and finger-pointing between Kevin Rudd’s advisers and national secretary George Wright and his staff in Labor’s campaign headquarters are not only bad signs in themselves. If true, they indicate that Labor – which pioneered so many aspects of professional election campaigning – appears to have forgotten some key lessons.

Alongside the history, understanding a campaign also requires a sense of what is different this time around. When the history of the 2013 campaign comes to be told, it will be clear that some features are quite distinctive. In fact, from the strategic point of view, it’s already possible to discern three ways in which this campaign differs from any we have seen before.

First is the issue of minority government. No government has faced the people in such a weak position as Labor does now – weak in the polls, but weaker still in terms of parliamentary seats. Under Julia Gillard, Labor was facing the prospect – unprecedented for any major party – of entering a campaign knowing it had absolutely no chance of winning a parliamentary majority in the House of Representatives. Gillard would have campaigned to “save the furniture” (shoring up its safe seats by appealing to the party faithful) and to “go down with guns blazing” (laying down a policy legacy for the future).

Under Rudd, that dire outcome seems to have been avoided. But the electoral arithmetic has not changed. Lacking a majority, the government campaigns without the usual advantages of incumbency in key marginal seats. Moreover, having relied on a growing number of independents, Labor cannot just run a defensive campaign to hold on to its existing seats; to win, it must go on the offensive and somehow take seats from the opposition. Yet the polls suggest that even defending the core – in western Sydney and elsewhere – is no easy task.

Labor’s strategic dilemma works in happy reverse for the Coalition: counting the independent seats, it already has a majority. It can campaign defensively to hold this position while having the option of focusing maximum firepower on picking off selected Labor-held seats.

Second is the issue of leadership instability. Amid all the commentary about the rising tide of leadership instability over the last decade, one important implication has been overlooked: it is almost impossible to plan a campaign when the leader changes at short notice.

Both parties spent most of 2013 planning campaigns around a Gillard–Abbott contest on 14 September. Rudd’s last-minute resurrection has forced major rethinking. This must have posed difficulties for the Liberals, who are facing a tighter contest against a less vulnerable opponent. But as the governing party the bigger strategic challenge is Labor’s. No prime minister has ever won a majority after entering the Lodge so soon before calling the election. (The closest thing to a precedent is Julia Gillard’s 2010 campaign, which produced the hung parliament – hardly a happy example.)

For the most part, prime ministers and – with the exception of Bob Hawke in 1983, who served just a few weeks – opposition leaders have been in place for two or three years. They have become familiar to the public, they have sorted out their policy priorities, and the party organisation has been able to plan an electoral strategy around them. But while Abbott is able to talk about the stability of his team and the consistency of his message, Rudd Labor is still reintroducing itself to the electorate. Most of Rudd’s activity has been about clearing the policy decks for the election; there has been no sign of any sort of agenda for the third term.

How quickly the Labor campaign was able to shift from a Gillard (save the furniture) strategy to a strategy about the new-old Rudd remains to be seen. But campaigns under new leaders tend by necessity to be improvised – recall Latham in 2004 – and this in turn creates tensions between the new leader and the party’s head office. This may be what is happening inside Labor now.

TO EXPLAIN why this is serious requires a short detour into party headquarters. Since the 1970s, Labor’s national secretary and the Liberals’ federal director have invariably been appointed as national campaign directors. The point of having a national campaign director is to get all the state branches, all the volunteers, all the marketing agencies, all the MPs, all the candidates, and the entire parliamentary leadership – including, most importantly, the leader – singing the same song.

The job is partly a logistic one: getting all the party’s resources focused on the goal of victory, and coordinating the ever-growing array of campaign activities from TV advertising and social media to debate negotiations and polling-day bunting. Getting these logistics right requires more than just a good brain for detail. It needs strategic overview, so that all the detailed pieces are assembled into a coherent plan and contribute to the goal of that parliamentary majority.

In the most successful election campaigns, the campaign director has also been the chief strategist. Of course he or she works in a team – with the market researcher, the ad agency, the leader’s office, some of the state secretaries. But for Bob McMullan (Labor’s campaign director of Hawke’s victories in 1983, 1984 and 1987) and for Andrew Robb and Lynton Crosby (the Liberals’ campaign directors of Howard’s victories in 1996, 1998 and 2001), developing and executing the campaign strategy was their responsibility and the most important part of their job.

The iron law of election campaigning is that successful campaign organisations have just one campaign director. There will be many egos, but a consistent campaign message requires the discipline of a centralised campaign organisation.

In 1996, by contrast, prime minister Paul Keating was permitted to indulge the fancy that he knew more about campaign management than the actual campaign manager, party secretary Gary Gray. As Pamela Williams wrote at the time, Keating insisted that his “instincts” were superior to anything the “ad agency or focus group” could throw up, and demanded more negative advertising. Gray refused: he thought it was misdirected and regarded Keating’s unpredictability – his nickname was Captain Wacky – as fatal to his efforts to run a consistent strategy. Keating stuck with his own instincts and went down in flames.

Political leaders like Keating – and perhaps Rudd, given that the polls suggest he is the only thing standing between Labor and annihilation – have a tendency to regard themselves as their own best source of campaign advice. Keating told Gray, “I cannot have a position where my instincts as party leader run for three years but not in the last week of the campaign.” A professional campaign manager would reply: the weeks of the campaign are precisely the time when instincts and intuition and improvisation should give way to dispassionate calculation and focused effort to win over the key voters.

Keating’s preference for instinct was supported and facilitated by his group of personal advisers, led by Don Russell, who had returned from the embassy in Washington to work with Keating. Russell admired the US practice where, as he told Pamela Williams, the president appoints the campaign manager. Australia’s system of having a party official as campaign director was “weird.”

Interestingly, Rudd may have taken this to the next step by appointing a political consultant to his personal office. Veteran campaign consultant Bruce Hawker is a trusted loyalist and experienced campaign manager in his own right. In appointing him, Rudd has created a non-formal, personalised advice structure along the lines of a US presidential campaign. If there are divisions between the campaign director and the leader’s entourage, this innovation would allow the leader to “go it alone” rather than knuckle under the party’s campaign structure.

THE third distinctive strategic factor in 2013 is the long shadow cast by Barack Obama – or more precisely by his campaign team led by David Axelrod. Labor has set about emulating the Obama team’s intensive field organising program. It has imported personnel and talent to build up a structure of volunteers, phone-banks and databases designed to target swinging voters more precisely than has been possible before and to reach them more intensively. It is also designed to raise “high-volume, low-value” donations from party supporters.

Hence, we see George Wright appearing in a video to supporters in the first week of the campaign. This was unusual and innovative in a number of respects. Party officials usually keep a low profile, leaving the politicians to do the public work. They also keep the campaign headquarters out of the limelight. But in this video Wright stands in the campaign call centre, discussing two subjects that are usually taboo – the marginal seats he’s targeting (or some of them at least) and the success he’s had with donations. The reason for these disclosures is tactical of course: he is trying to mobilise volunteers to join the party’s elaborate fieldwork organisation.

It remains to be seen whether an American practice designed to “get out the vote” in a handful of battleground states can be adapted effectively to Australia’s compulsory voting regime in twenty or more marginal seats. Indeed, it’s unclear whether enough volunteers can locate and persuade enough swinging voters to make it worthwhile.

But it does seem that if the leader’s office is getting involved in campaign strategy and execution then the campaign HQ has become the new focus of fieldwork organisation.

Meanwhile, in the opposition camp, the Liberals are keeping things on the professional straight and narrow. They, too, have a parliamentary leader who can go off message faster than you can say “sex appeal.” But the campaign strategy devised by the party’s federal director Brian Loughnane, now directing his fourth election campaign, appears to be holding. Loughnane is not making videos about marginal seats or appealing for donations. On previous form, there are almost certainly US Republicans at work somewhere in the Liberal campaign, but their presence has not been leaked to the media.

In short, the Liberals appear to be running a traditional, highly centralised and professional campaign, as they have done since the 1990s. There are few innovations. Indeed, for the Abbott campaign, 1996 – “Howard 1996” – might prove to be the relevant historical parallel. •

The post Rudd 1987 or Abbott 1996? appeared first on Inside Story.

As campaign slogans go, it was as near to perfect as they come. Informal, strong, urgent and memorable. Two words: a perfect fit to the political climate, a perfect encapsulation of a political strategy and a perfectly simple tag to sustain an entire marketing campaign. Short enough for a badge or T-shirt, but with enough meaning to support the policy speech. And good enough to sing.

The iconic slogan that took Labor to office forty years ago originated with a report handed by the party’s advertising agency to its NSW branch in December 1971. The report was encased in a plain black cover bearing the words, “It’s Time.”

Before 1972, political parties didn’t really have national campaign slogans. Each state branch was free to concoct its own way of rallying the voters, and local candidates might have their own catch-cry as well. Labor’s federal secretary, Mick Young, who had ridiculed how Labor had had “more slogans than candidates” in the 1969 election, was determined that things would be different in 1972. There would be one single message that would animate the campaign in every state and on every piece of advertising. And by campaign, he didn’t mean a three-week burst prior to election day; he meant a sustained, year-long effort of persuasion and promotion.

So when the NSW state secretary, Peter Westerway, received the agency report with its short, sharp slogan, he passed it on to Young. Young liked it but was worried it might hold some unforseen negative connotation, so he commissioned market research to test the slogan with 1100 voters in four capital cities. It passed with flying colours. “It generates a feeling of urgency that it’s time to change to a Labor Government,” the researchers reported.

Its genius lies in its declaratory strength combined with an infinite flexibility. It’s time! But for what? As the ad agent who hit on the phrase, Paul Jones of Hansen Rubensohn–McCann Erickson, put it, “You say, ‘it’s time,’ and they’ll fill in what it’s time for. It’s time to bring the diggers home [from Vietnam]. It’s time to stop strikes, fix education, whatever is important to the individual.”

This set the tone for the launch of the slogan in early 1972 on a confetti of bumper stickers, badges, T-shirts and skivvies. Then came the “It’s Time” anthem, which formed the basis of Young’s national TV advertising campaign, in August 1972 – fully four months from election day. Sung by a chorus of showbiz celebrities, the anthem’s meaning is entirely open-ended. It’s time for freedom, for moving, for loving, for caring. It’s time for old folks and time for children. Explicit meanings – time to change government, time to vote Labor – could be left unsaid; the anthem doesn’t even mention Labor or Gough Whitlam. Young’s strategy, simply put, was to create a national mood for change. “It’s Time” conveyed hope, anticipation and excitement without the burden of specific policy commitments. Moreover, as Jones had said, “there’s nothing to disagree with.” “It’s Time” simply could not be attacked (and the Liberals’ effort to do so, with the dismal “Not Yet,” just proves the point).

At the time, Young believed it was the best slogan since federation. Forty years on, it’s impossible to think of anything to knock it off that perch. It works on the emotions, unlike Hawke’s rationalist “Reconciliation, Recovery, Reconstruction” (1983). It suggests a more effective strategy than Hewson’s “Fightback!” (1993). Try fitting “Don’t Change Horses in Midstream” (Labor, 1987) on a badge. And unlike the vacuous gerunds (Gillard’s disastrous “Moving Forward” in 2010) or the to-stand-in-front-of nouns (Howard’s bizarre 1987 “Incentivation,” Keating’s 1996 “Leadership”), “It’s Time” forms a grammatically correct sentence. The only slogan that comes close was Fraser’s “Turn on the Lights” (1975); but “It’s Time” is simpler, non-metaphorical, more direct, more upbeat.

Labor’s 1972 campaign was distinctive in more than its slogan. It was the first recognisably modern, professional, national election campaign. It was a transformative event in Australian electoral politics, the birth of modern election campaigning. Young acknowledged, in a speech in the 1980s, that the campaign had changed the face of election campaigning in Australia. But even he might be surprised by the extent to which contemporary politics still swings along to the rhythms of that remarkable campaign.

To understand its significance one must track back to Labor’s murky organisational politics of the mid and late 1960s, which nearly prevented Young’s election as Labor’s federal secretary. It was just three years before Labor was to win office, but the party did not remotely look capable of governing itself, let alone the country. Whitlam’s heroic contribution to the transformation – rebuilding the platform, reforming the party through intervention in the recalcitrant Victorian branch, renewing links with voters – is well-known through accounts such as Graham Freudenberg’s A Certain Grandeur and Ross McMullin’s official party history The Light on the Hill.

Less well-known is the turmoil in the back room, where the party’s head office also needed a complete refit to prove itself capable of managing a successful election campaign.

Young’s predecessor had been the “cockney sparrow,” London-born Cyril Wyndham. Labor’s first full-time national secretary, Wyndham had set up the party’s headquarters in the national capital – though that is perhaps too grand a term for the dingy rented office in Civic, the loyal staff of two, and the shoestring budget. An articulate and fluent party spokesman, Wyndham was a reformer allied to Whitlam. But he lived to regret his move to Canberra. His plan to democratise the party’s decision-making had, almost predictably, been shelved by the factions and the state branches.

In particular, Wyndham’s erstwhile mentor, the Western Australian secretary Joe Chamberlain, had turned against him: the archetypal left traditionalist and party bureaucrat, Chamberlain stood to lose from reform. By 1969 the knives were out: in an appalling set-up, Labor’s federal executive conducted an audit of party finances that found a number of administrative errors by Wyndham. Frustrated, Wyndham resigned without explanation in March 1969. (After a long retirement in Newcastle, Wyndham died in July this year; his death passed without comment from the Labor’s head office.)

The head office vacancy came at a bad time, with the party facing a national conference in August and a federal election by the end of the year. Moreover, Chamberlain saw it as an opportunity to extend his already prolonged and influential career in the party. Already sixty-nine years old, he was another Londoner who migrated to Perth after the first world war to find work. He had climbed the ladder of the labour movement to become Labor’s WA secretary in 1949 and went on to serve as federal president in the late 1950s and federal secretary before Wyndham.

So when federal executive met to elect Wyndham’s replacement, Chamberlain put his hand up. Mick Young, South Australia’s party secretary, had only been a member of the executive for twelve months and regarded the idea of electing Chamberlain “at his age, and with his views” as an “absolute political disaster.” More in the spirit of protest, Young decided over dinner to contest the ballot himself. The contrast was sharp – a generational battle, a factional battle, a hard-line traditionalist against a pragmatic moderniser, a Whitlam enemy against a Whitlam supporter, a party bureaucrat steeped in rules and procedures against a new breed campaign professional. Chamberlain didn’t think the Labor Party should necessarily try to win elections and did not mind it when they lost; Young had already helped Labor topple one long-term Liberal regime – Playford’s in South Australia – and was determined that Labor should govern nationally.

On this occasion, the veteran insider had miscalculated. When the secret ballot was held, one of the Tasmanian delegates unexpectedly opposed Chamberlain. The vote tied at seven each. A second ballot was held. Still seven each. But Chamberlain knew he was beaten and withdrew; Young was elected unopposed. The meeting broke up and delegates drifted off, leaving Young to lock up. He found himself late at night, standing on the footpath of Ainslie Avenue, wondering what he had got himself into.

Better-known as the burly shearer, the knockabout bloke with a “shock of black hair and a face that was a map of Ireland,” in journalist Alan Reid’s description, Young was a shrewd reader of character and, just as importantly, of opinion polls. In two state elections in South Australia, he had worked in the party office that supported Don Dunstan by using – for the first time in Australia – market research and television advertising. He took the same approach in preparing for Whitlam’s 1972 campaign.

In mid 1971, according to future Labor minister Neal Blewett, a “group of wealthy Whitlam supporters” donated $5000 for a national survey on Whitlam’s image. Young used the results by giving Whitlam more exposure to female voters through talkback radio and daytime TV, and implored him to speak in shorter, simpler sentences – straightforward tactical ideas, but innovative for the time, and clever. Young organised for a mini-campaign of policy announcements by Whitlam and his shadow ministers during November and December, which generated free news coverage – not all of it positive, but successful enough and, as Young said, “completely right in concept.” This was all a precursor to the “It’s Time” campaign itself, driven and tested by market research, centrally produced and nationally disseminated, its message integrated across all media outlets, making an entirely emotional pitch after an era in which advertising had been largely policy-based appeals to voters’ hip-pockets.

But the transformative impact of Young’s campaign relied on more than clever use of an advertising agency. After the failure of Wyndham’s efforts to reduce the power of the state officials, Young’s real success lay in the organisational arrangements he put in place to manage this campaign. “To win federal government,” he recalled in a speech in 1986, “we had to run a properly coordinated national campaign.” The biggest hurdle was the “jealousy and suspicion that existed between the national office and the state branches,” which had led each branch to run its own campaigns.

What was needed was a framework for coordinating and centralising campaign authority – and Mick Young was just the man. In January 1972 he was appointed to a newly created post: Labor’s national campaign director. Previously, each state secretary had been campaign director within the boundaries of that state; now there was one, at the centre. Labor also set up a national campaign committee – again, a first – through which Young developed and implemented the campaign strategy, co-opted the state branches, coordinated the activities of Whitlam and the shadow ministry, and directed the ad agency and market researchers. The national head office, shut down after Wyndham’s ouster, was reopened and strengthened with the hiring of professional journalists and PR consultants.

In the event, campaigns in New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria were almost entirely directed from the centre. In Western Australia, Joe Chamberlain still held the reins of power but was ill as well as pessimistic and rarely attended the national campaign meetings; as Blewett notes, the national committee directed sufficient funds across the Nullarbor to ensure broad national consistency. Only Queensland insisted on running its own campaign, with its own signage and messaging. Marginal seats remained the prerogative of the states, but these campaigns too were closely supervised from the centre, with campaign visits by Whitlam and the shadow ministry carefully focused on the key winnable electorates.

Young was also on top of the campaign budget in a new way. Labor had never spent money like it was spending on this campaign. He set an aggressive fundraising target of $250,000 – five times the national budget of the previous campaign, in 1969 – and, next to Whitlam, was at the forefront of fundraising appeals to business. He also exercised tight control over spending, ordering the ad agency to spend nothing without his explicit authorisation and thus ensuring the party only spent what it raised.

Young transformed the way campaigns were managed. He integrated market research and television advertising better than anyone had done previously, practising on a national stage the skills he had acquired at the state level. He built a national campaign strategy – creating, over months, a national mood for change, and projecting a uniform message into living rooms across the nation. The technology for a national campaign had been available for some years; Young was the first to exploit it by overcoming the state parochialism that had stood in its way. Never had an ALP campaign so fully justified its adjective Australian. Young also put campaign resources into the seats where they were needed – based on national electoral needs rather than parochial state perceptions. He developed Labor’s campaign resources – its campaign skills and know-how as well as its financial resources – and dragged fundraising into the modern era.

The Liberal Party certainly recognised Young’s achievement. The “It’s Time” slogan, according to deputy leader Phillip Lynch, was “the brightest and most bouncing baby ever conceived and brought forth within the marriage of advertising and politics.” Shattered by their first election defeat in a quarter of a century, the Liberals eased out their federal director, Bede Hartcher, and allowed an energetic McKinsey management consultant, Timothy Pascoe, to reorganise head office before handing it over to an experienced journalist and PR specialist, Tony Eggleton, who became the third federal director in the space of a year. Recognising that they, too, had become fragmented by state boundaries, the Liberals openly copied Labor’s ideas and appointed Eggleton as national campaign director for the 1975 campaign. State officials were brought into line, television advertising was put on a national footing with a single agency and a single campaign message – and the professional campaign model was under way.

The enduring influence of the 1972 campaign is marked in other ways. Newspapers competed by reporting rival opinion polls. A new genre of post-election books by journalists emerged, pioneered by Laurie Oakes and David Solomon’s The Making of an Australian Prime Minister. Academics, led by Sydney University politics professor Henry Mayer, who edited Labor to Power, began a stream of campaign documentation and analysis that has continued almost unbroken to this day. (Mayer’s collection includes two gems: an account of Young’s campaign by Neal Blewett, who was then a young academic from Flinders University, and a quirky perspective on advertising written, under a pseudonym, by Paul Jones.)

The most remarkable indication of 1972’s transformative impact, however, comes from looking at election outcomes. Since the Liberal Party was formed in the mid-1940s, it has contested twenty-six elections with Labor. Nine of the first ten were won by the Liberals in coalition: after Ben Chifley’s victory for Labor in the early days of peace in 1946, Robert Menzies won seven on the trot, Harold Holt won a landslide in 1966, and John Gorton got home in 1969. For more than two decades, Labor’s grand aggregate of successful electoral campaigns stood at zero. One-sidedness seemed to be a chronic feature of the Australian electoral landscape.

All that changed in 1972. Labor’s win was a breakthrough in itself, but it also represented the end of that one-sided pattern. Including 1972, Labor won seven of the next ten elections: Whitlam two, Hawke four and Keating one, against Fraser’s three. Having mastered the art of winning from opposition in 1972, Labor mastered the art of winning from government in the 1980s. One-sidedness was replaced by an almost exact parity between the two major parties. Indeed, on the fortieth anniversary of “It’s Time,” it is remarkable to note that since 1972 the two parties have governed for nearly the same amount of time. Labor has been in office for twenty-one years and one month, and the Coalition for eighteen years and eleven months. In percentage terms it comes out at 52.7 per cent for Labor and 47.2 per cent for the Coalition – as finely balanced, almost, as a Newspoll. The hung parliament resulting from the 2010 election, of course, only underlines the delicate balance.

Mick Young died in 1996 of leukaemia. For all that he stands as Australia’s first campaign professional, one suspects he would be uneasy about campaigning today. He always emphasised that market research was no substitute for policy. He would recognise the strategic, technical and financial imperatives of the contemporary party contest between his latest successor as national secretary, George Wright, and his Liberal counterpart, federal director Brian Loughnane. But as they prepare for the 2013 clash, he might remind them, as he said in 1986, that the greatest lesson of the It’s Time campaign was that “something of substance has to be there before it can be sold successfully to the public.” •

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Sick of negative political ads? Turned off by the screaming match that election advertising has become? Had enough scare campaigns about inflation and the cost of living? Thanks to the restoration of a remarkable collection of water-damaged gramophone records, more than sixty years old, you can now experience the political advertising your grandparents listened to. Make up your own mind if they enjoyed a higher level of electoral discourse than we do today.

A collection of thirteen gramophone records was recently exhumed from the University of Melbourne Archives. Damaged by dirt, water and sheer old age, the 33rpm discs were cleaned, conserved and digitised and are now on the archives’ website. That they can now be downloaded as MP3 files is a remarkable story of survival in itself. More than that: these rescued recordings plunge us back into one of Australia’s most important and innovative – and expensive – political advertising campaigns.

These are campaign advertisements, but not as we know them today. Broadcast on radio in 1948 and 1949, they formed part of the Liberal Party’s long-running campaign to weaken the Chifley Labor government. Adapting the popular format of a radio serial into a sort of political satire, the fifteen-minute broadcasts ran twice-weekly for about twenty months in the lead-up to the 1949 election campaign. In total, about 200 episodes went to air on more than eighty commercial radio stations in every state. Many of the scripts have survived, but the broadcasts themselves were believed lost until these gramophone records, containing twenty-two episodes, came to light. Their existence allows us to experience the complete aural environment of the original broadcasts – voices, accents, music, sound effects – and appraise once again a pioneering propaganda campaign that helped defeat Labor and install Robert Menzies as prime minister.

The star of the show – host, commentator and animating spirit – was “John Henry Austral.” Played by actor Richard Matthews, Austral is a complex figure. With his smooth voice, educated accent and cool cynicism about life under the Labor government, Austral is the embodiment of the Liberal Party’s political philosophy and values. To have a fictitious persona, rather than a politician, as party spokesman was itself unusual – indeed, Austral rarely endorsed or even named any Liberal politician. Instead, as his name suggests, Austral’s political affiliations arise from his national identity: his is the voice of common sense, home-spun wisdom and native morality; he speaks repeatedly of “your land – and mine”; and the show’s theme song is a soaring orchestral version of “Waltzing Matilda.” Austral’s accent is cultivated – he might be a solicitor or doctor, and like any professional he assumes that his client-audience will defer to his authority. But the effect is moderated by an easy Australian vernacular, and he seems careful not to speak down to, but to share his concerns with, his fellow-citizens, “lovers of democracy, lovers of Australia”:

The air is thick today with plans and blueprints for social reconstruction. In all walks of life there are enthusiasts with ready-made answers to all the questions. And “isms” are two a penny. But – healthy sign as this may be – it doesn’t itself mean that problems are solved. We can argue till we are blue in the face about the merits and demerits of a planned economy, bureaucratic controls, nationalisation of this or that. But we’ll never get away from the fact that development of any country depends at bottom on the character and outlook of its people.

That said, Austral is a determined and, to modern ears at least, slightly sinister propagandist. He pulls his punches against “the amiable Mr Chifley” and his predecessor, “the late John Curtin,” but unreservedly damns their “socialistic government,” with its “repressive officialdom,” “political oppression,” “regimentation” and affiliation “with a minority which owes its allegiance to a foreign, anti-British, anti-Australian power.” Most of the episodes end with what in marketing terms is his “call to action”: sometimes he invites listeners to write to him with their comments; more often he reminds them about the impending election:

We complain about high taxes – but keep electing the blokes who stand behind them. It’s time to stop grumbling and do something! Our opportunity is just around the corner. Let’s make the most of it!

Joining Austral is a diverse cast of characters who act out the daily dramas that are the principal stuff of these ads. The point of this campaign was to undermine confidence in the Labor government by illustrating the difficulties and anxieties of life under Chifley. Food prices were rising. Shoppers queued. Essential goods were still rationed through coupons, just as they had been during the war. A black market thrived, “dragging decent people down into the mud” and “degrading this land of ours – your land, and mine,” as Austral reminds us. Teenagers wasted their evenings. And somewhere not too far away, the communists were secretly plotting their revolution.

These themes were all deftly conveyed in little scenes: men discussing black-market whisky in a pub, wives chastising their husbands in the living room for going on strike, teenagers lounging on a street corner, shoppers quizzing shopkeepers about the groceries. Through clever use of accent and tone, the actors underline the political message. A soap-box speaker loudly condemns big business with a rich working-class accent: “Why should rich men loll in luxurious idleness while you toil and sweat?” His critic responds with the facts, in an upright, prim voice: “Big business is owned by small shareholders.” Austral asks us, “Who do you choose to believe: men of calibre or the ill-informed spielers of socialism?” The communist plotters, of course, all mutter and splutter in heavily accented (German? Russian?) tones, and call each other comrade with a capital-K.

And then there are the women. Almost without exception, the women characters are heard in the home or the shop. These are not income earners but mothers and wives. But it is precisely from these roles that, in Austral’s world, they derive practical wisdom and moral authority which in turn gives them a legitimate and in fact powerful political voice. Managing household budgets, they understand the impact of inflation; they are the “chief sufferers” of strikes because (they argue) such disputes cause price increases; raising children they understand education policy. In the privacy of the living room, they cajole and persuade their husbands with common sense and moderation – while reminding them not to drop ash on the carpet.

The political strategy is clear. John Henry Austral represented the middle class in all its solidity and anxiety. He speaks as they do, promotes their values, articulates their concerns and unflinchingly attacks those who threatened them: communists, indolent workers, and centralised planners in Canberra: “Unless we produce more and keep on saving our savings, all our over-centralised economic planning cannot save Australia from disastrous inflation!”

Six years before the Austral broadcasts, before the Liberal Party had been created and while the second world war still raged, another radio broadcast had invoked the middle class in a similar way. Former United Australia Party prime minister Robert Menzies, leading a fragmented and dispirited opposition, delivered his landmark statement of political values, “The Forgotten People”:

The time has come to say something of the forgotten class, the middle class, those people who are constantly in danger of being ground between the upper and nether millstones of the false class war; the middle class who, properly regarded, represent the backbone of this country… the kind of people I myself represent in parliament: salary-earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on.

As the political scientist Judith Brett has observed, although there is an attractive quality about Menzies’s praise for the family and the home-centred life and his defence of values beyond the material and utilitarian, it also has a hard unforgiving quality, a smug sanctimony and an authoritarian moralising reminiscent of a headmaster or vicar. Like “The Forgotten People,” the John Henry Austral series embodies a mix of inclusive and exclusive values, extolling a society made up not of classes or organisations, but of families in their homes and consumers in their shops; a society in which ideology shrinks before individual moral character; a society of freedoms rather than rights. Big business is nothing more than the small shareholders who own it, while organised labour is a collection of conscientious working Australians under the sway of union officials or organisers who are ignorant rabble-rousers, many of them communists.

Like Menzies’s broadcast, too, the John Henry Austral series constitutes a political strategy dressed as a disinterested statement about national interest – a party-political statement that does not mention parties. Where Menzies had spoken to the middle class in 1942 about the long term, John Henry Austral had an immediacy about his message to them, explicitly focusing their attention on the electoral opportunity which in 1948 lay just ahead of them. In one episode, Austral asks, “And who is the public?” His rhetorical question is met with an anthem of responses, the voices of the Forgotten People:

I, the housewife and the mother of a family.
I, the factory worker.
I, who work in an office, or nurse in a hospital.
I, the clerk – the bank teller – the man at a desk or a counter.
I, the school teacher – business executive – doctor – dentist – family man.
I, the man on the land, whether farmer, grazier or labourer.
I, the returned soldier.
I, the woman who also served.
I, the wharf labourer, miner, sleeper cutter, the trade unionist everywhere!

The political strategy behind these broadcasts is pursued relentlessly and consistently – but also with a light touch. Entertainment was a necessary path to instruction, and the audience gathered around the wireless sets was presented with diverse offerings of historical fare – such as pioneer stories about John Batman and John Forrest – as well as what we might think of as comedy sketches. To convey the impact of price rises, for example, Austral introduces a story about “the strange adventures of Mr William van Winkle.” This “highly respectable” man falls asleep in 1937 – only to wake up eleven years later. A kookaburra laughs at him as he struggles with his long beard and when he gets to the barber shop, he is astounded to find the cost of a haircut has risen; train fares and greengrocer prices have doubled as well. He tells his solicitors that he is living in a “nightmare” and, as they explain the modern economy, with its producer subsidies and black markets, they smoothly reassure him that we all get used to that feeling. Finally as he works out what has happened to him, Mr van Winkle tells anyone who will listen, “I’ve been asleep for ten years – but you’re all still asleep!”

In another elaborate story about rising prices or, as it was understood then, the falling value of the pound, Mrs Buyer goes shopping in 1908 in “Mr Golden Quid’s Emporium” (the series was strong on eponyms). She orders a long list of household goods. Mr Quid tells her the price of each – adding up columns of shillings and pence in a miraculous feat of mental arithmetic that gives a handy reminder to modern listeners about the virtues of decimal currency – and informs her that her basket of goods will cost seven shillings. But then, in a trick of time travel achieved through simple sound effects, Mrs Buyer is transported four decades into the present day, 1948. She walks into the same shop, “but imagine her surprise when, instead of the sovereign-like figure of Mr Golden Quid, she was confronted by a thin and weedy gentleman with a paper-like complexion and a green wrinkled look.”

This papery Mr Quid – modern listeners may need reminding that the £1 note was green in colour – is surly, his service is truculent and his prices strike Mrs Buyer as astronomical. Her basket of goods now costs – after more mental arithmetic – sixteen shillings and seven pence! And this includes coupons for the butter and the tea! Mrs Buyer cannot pay, so Mr Quid goes through her shopping and throws out most of her goods, including chopping the leg of lamb (now, mutton) in half right there on the counter. “There,” the new Mr Quid declares with malicious triumph, “is seven shillings of goods at present-day values. You can’t have been here for forty years – certainly not for the past eight” – that is, since Labor came to power.

Perhaps the strangest episode to modern ears is the one promoting the Liberal Party’s idea of funding community centres “for the advancement of culture and the awakening of public spiritedness among our younger men.” In this sketch, four young men meet after work and are bored: they do nothing more edgy than smoke cigarettes and go to the pictures. But the joke is that their fathers all fear they are up to mischief or, in the exasperated words of one of the lads, having “the odd spot of marijuana, or whatever they call it.” Later that evening, quizzed by his father, another one declares:

Well, I met the lads. First thing we did was to have a shot of cocaine all round. Then while Bill and Tom went off to one of those houses – you know – Dick and I went to the back door of the Trumpeters Arms and sank six double brandies in quick succession, prior to murdering a policeman and doing a couple of hold-ups. Then we went home.

This kind of humour is not what we expect in a political broadcast these days – whether from the Liberal Party or anyone else.

How these disc copies of the broadcasts survived is not entirely clear. Indeed, it’s not clear why they were made in the first place. They have lain undisturbed in the archives of the University of Melbourne and it is only recently that their unique status has been recognised; certainly no other major collecting library possesses anything like this. They were packaged (as this photo, courtesy of the University of Melbourne Archives, shows) for the post in Phillip Street Sydney, home of the Macquarie Broadcasting Network and its production arm Artransa, and addressed to station 2GN in Goulburn, New South Wales. It seems unlikely that the discs were distributed to every station for the original broadcast; perhaps this collection was assembled after the campaign was over and distributed in this more durable format. Even so, it is an odd sample, covering the first five episodes of the series, broadcast in February–March 1948 as well as a selection from much later, in 1949.

And did the discs ever reach Goulburn? A one-shilling railway freight stamp stuck on the package suggests they did. But at some point, somehow, they ended up with Richard Casey, federal president of the Liberal Party, and – according to another sticker on the package – he sent them off to London to an acquaintance, the prominent Australian businessman Sir Clive Baillieu. Casey and Baillieu had overlapped in Washington during the war, Casey as Australian ambassador and Baillieu as a British government representative on the purchasing commission. Perhaps the discs never made it to Goulburn, but were handed back to the Liberal Party whence Casey thought they would make interesting listening in London. After Baillieu died in 1967, the discs made their way back to Australia and were ultimately handed over, soiled and travel stained, to the archives which are accessible, after all, in the university’s Baillieu Library.

Dick Casey was the brains behind the Austral campaign. Gallipoli veteran, diplomat, member of parliament and then wartime governor of Bengal, he had tried unsuccessfully to return to politics via Liberal preselection for the new party’s first electoral contest in 1946. He settled for the federal presidency. A convert from his Washington days to the emerging practice of Public Relations, Casey saw merit in a series of radio talks that would run not during the election campaign but well before the campaign, aimed at shaping public opinion at the very time it was not actively focused on an electoral choice. Moreover, Casey turned out to be a brilliantly successful party fundraiser. Using his connections into the business community in Australia and London, and riding the tide of alarm at Chifley’s bank nationalisation plans, Casey raised huge sums – at least £250,000 – and could fund a lavish campaign. Precise figures are not possible, but the Canberra journalist Dick Whitington later reported claims that Casey had raised £1 million and had spent £800,000 on the 1949 campaign. Adjusted for inflation that is a campaign budget of $40 million in today’s terms, which would buy a very competitive quantity of market research, TV advertising and campaign websites.

Casey’s biggest contribution to the campaign, however, was poaching Labor’s entire advertising agency to run the Liberal campaign. South African born, Sim Rubensohn had successfully run his own commercial advertising agency in Sydney, the Hansen–Rubensohn Company, since the late 1920s. By the early 1930s he had won the account to manage political advertising for the state Labor Party and, in short order, for federal Labor as well. He was well connected, shrewd and good at his work. Advertising was a sometimes murky business: in a sensational court case in 1935, it emerged that Rubensohn had assisted police in arresting an advertising salesman, Douglas McConnell, in possession of a brown paper parcel containing 500 £1 notes, in Rubensohn’s own office. McConnell was charged with inciting Rubensohn to bribe an alderman of Sydney County Council to win the council’s advertising account; he was ultimately acquitted. Rubensohn’s advertising for the Labor Party had attracted the admiring attention of Menzies who, after the Liberals were defeated in their first federal election in 1946, bemoaned his party’s lack of a “clever set of advertising tradesmen at work in the centre” like Labor had. Salvation was near at hand, however: with bank nationalisation, Rubensohn split from federal Labor; when Casey heard of the row, he was quick to offer him the Liberal Party account.

It is not clear who was more shocked at the switch. Chifley, initially at least, accepted the departure of Labor’s ace with remarkable equanimity; the Liberal Party state branches, on the other hand, were nervous about taking on a new and unknown talent “at the centre” of the party and beyond the reach of their parochial interests. For Rubensohn’s part, the deal was irresistible. Like Casey, he was convinced of the political merits of a long-run radio series and believed he could not only knock over Chifley’s bank plans but perhaps also win lucrative concessions for his other clients from a new Liberal government. And he negotiated a 15 per cent commission on all campaign outlays. In a peculiar display of egotism or arrogance, Rubensohn took to illegally parking his luxury car in the street outside his city office; within three years he had racked up 183 parking fines.

If Rubensohn was the successful “suit,” then his “creative” was also critical to the success of the agency. Pip Cogger, an Englishman who had been wounded in Mesopotamia while serving with the Royal Field Artillery, had decided to switch to copywriting while convalescing in a London hospital in 1919. He made his way to New Zealand and thence to Sydney, telling journalist Gavin Souter in 1953 that he had served as “advocate-in-written words” for virtually everything “from the damnation of Communism to the deification of deodorants.” Rubensohn and Cogger were to switch back to Labor almost immediately after the Liberals’ 1949 triumph, and Rubensohn continued to manage Labor’s campaigns until finally eased out in 1974. But for now, Cogger had the task of crafting the mellifluous, ardent words of John Henry Austral and the varied dialogues of the shoppers, housekeepers, farmers and pioneers who populated his world.

IT SHOULD be pointed out, though it is perhaps obvious, that the John Henry Austral campaign was launched entirely without the benefit of market research. No focus groups were hurt in the development of the Liberals’ strategy. Nor was there any targeting of marginal seats. Aiming for the unconverted majority middle class was as targeted as things got in the 1940s, as the Liberal Party’s federal executive noted in early 1949:

Propaganda should not be designed to please those who will support us anyway. It need not waste time trying to wean diehard Labor supporters from their allegiance. It should be aimed at the greatly expanded middle class.

The John Henry Austral campaign should not be held up as some paragon of virtuous political communication. It played on emotions rather than the rational mind. It was deceptive in presenting its little dramatisations as factually accurate. It was negative in its own sly way. And Austral was as remorseless a propagandist as they come, wedging his opponents at every opportunity. But looking back at the campaign from the great distance of more than sixty years, and listening once more to these sounds, one significant merit is apparent. This advertising represented a concerted, extended effort to present voters with a coherent and complete worldview – a political philosophy. John Henry Austral was middle-class, market-based, anti-communist, anti-Canberra and nationalist because that was the view and ideal of the Liberal Party he represented. At a time when party campaign advertising has abandoned platforms to focus almost exclusively on manoeuvring over short-term issues and attacking the character of rival leaders, that is not a bad example to look back on. •

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