Troy Bramston - Paul Keating: The Big-Picture Leader

PAUL KEATING

Troy Bramston has been a senior writer and columnist with The Australian newspaper, and a contributor to Sky News, since 2011. He was previously a columnist with The Sunday Telegraph .

Troy is the author or editor of seven previous books, including Looking for the Light on the Hill (2011), Rudd, Gillard and Beyond (2014), and, with Paul Kelly, The Dismissal (2015).

Troy has worked as a policy and political adviser, and speechwriter, in government, opposition, and the private sector. Troy lives in Sydney with his partner, Nicky, and two children, Madison and Angus.

To Nicky Seaby

Scribe Publications
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First published by Scribe 2016

Copyright Troy Bramston 2016

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

ISBN 9781925321746 (Australian edition)
ISBN 9781925307849 (e-book)

A CiP entry for this title is available from the National Library of Australia

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In the end, its the big picture which changes nations and whatever our opponents may say, Australia has changed inexorably for the good, for the better.

Paul Keating

2 March 1996, Bankstown

CONTENTS

PART I

THE YOUNG LION: 194469

PART II

THE KEATING ASCENDANCY: 196983

PART III

DOING THE PL CIDO DOMINGO: 198391

PART IV

THE BIG-PICTURE LEADER: 199196

PART V

THE LION IN WINTER: 19962016

Preface

ONE week before Julia Gillard wrested the prime ministership from Kevin Rudd in June 2010, I spent several hours with Paul Keating at his office in Sydneys Potts Point. The office is located on the top floor of a striking sandstone building constructed in 1831. After ascending the creaking wooden staircase and being ushered into Keatings office, I sat with him at a round wooden table scattered with reports, newspaper clippings, and correspondence. It was like being transported back to the classical-revival era of pre- and post-revolutionary France, surrounded by dark-red walls, Greco-Roman columns, collectable French Directoire clocks, candelabra, and Egyptian statues. We spoke, principally, about the art of political oratory. Keating was generous with his time, and the conversation soon drifted into politics, policy, and personalities. He surveyed the contemporary political scene, and his judgements proved to be prescient. I sat utterly transfixed as he gave voice to his private passions, the policy issues that still drove him, and political debates from the past. We also discussed the purpose of leadership in public life. Leadership is about two things: courage and imagination, he said.

I asked which former prime ministers he most identified with. He paused for a moment and said, None. He then asked what I meant by identified. I posed the question a different way, asking who had inspired him. Again, he said, None. Keating then explained, If by inspired, you mean vesting in you some creativity to imagine a bigger and better whole, then none. He added: Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt are the only leaders that have ever inspired me. He said, Remember that speech I gave at the National Press Club in 1990, when I said that Australia had never had a great leader like the United States? Well, we havent.

That so-called Plcido Domingo speech was an extended rumination on the purpose of political leadership, and it set out criteria for Keatings political career to be judged against. The question of leadership dominated Keatings public life. It characterised how he viewed politics, what he wanted to achieve, and how he wanted to be seen. Indeed, Labors campaign slogan in 1996 was simply, Leadership. This biography, therefore, is also a study in political leadership. What is important is not just what Keating achieved, but also how he led. A recurring theme of this book is how political power is obtained, how it is used and, inevitably, how it is lost. It is a topic that I began studying in a 1997 honours thesis, examined again in a 2004 masters thesis, and have continued to explore in many books and hundreds of articles and essays. The key to understanding Keating, whether as an ambitious young politician, a reforming treasurer, or a visionary prime minister, is his conception of leadership and political power. The two are inexorably linked.

SINCE that interview in June 2010, I have had the opportunity to talk to Paul Keating occasionally on the telephone, to correspond with him by email, and to interview him at length many times for The Australian newspaper and for several previous books. But whenever I asked Keating if he would cooperate for a new biography about him, he waved the suggestion away. Indeed, he brushed it off for a decade. Eventually, I began working on this book without Keatings consent or cooperation, in 2013. But I had been thinking about this project since 1996, when I stood in the auditorium of the Bankstown Sports Club and watched Keating concede the election but at the same time emphatically defend the big picture.

Keating dislikes biographies, and he is unlikely to write a full-life memoir. He did write an important book about foreign policy, Engagement: Australia faces the Asia-Pacific (2000). And he did sit down with Kerry OBrien for a series of autobiographical interviews broadcast on the ABC which was later expanded into a book. But this was not a biography. There are four previous biographies of Keating: by Edna Carew (1988, 1992); Michael Gordon (1993, 1996); John Edwards (1996); and David Day (2015). Paul Kellys The End of Certainty (1992) and The March of Patriots (2009) chronicled Keatings years as treasurer and prime minister in discerning detail. Don Watsons Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (2002) also provided an utterly captivating insider portrait of his prime ministership. I have benefited from their research and insights. But Keating has not cooperated with a biographer in more than two decades.

Nevertheless, after repeated requests, he finally agreed to a limited series of interviews for this book. He also made available several items from his personal archives.

In addition to Keatings cooperation, this book draws on new primary sources: cabinet minutes, decisions and notebooks; departmental files; several politicians personal papers; state and federal Labor Party archives; federal caucus minutes; and previously unpublished personal diaries. These have not been fully available to, or used by, previous biographers. I also obtained a number of internal party documents dealing with campaign strategies, polling, and focus-group research that are not all available in public archives. I have accessed files and photos from the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton presidential libraries, as well as United States diplomatic cables from the 1970s. I have also undertaken more than 100 new interviews.

THIS book tells the story of an extraordinary life that transformed politics, economics, and society in ways that nobody least of all a working-class boy from Bankstown could have ever imagined. To leave school at the age of 14 and to become prime minister three decades later was a remarkable achievement. My task has been to chronicle, analyse, and interpret Keatings political career, with glimpses into his private life, and to reveal and explain more than we have previously understood about him. Everyone sees what you appear to be, wrote Niccol Machiavelli, but few really know what you are. To many, he remains an enigma: a statesman and a brawler; a political animal and an aesthete; a factional numbers-man and a policy intellect; a crude debater and a supreme orator; and a man in private who is unlike his public stereotype. I try to unpack this bundle of paradoxes.