OPINE: Truly delicious
By Bob Carr, Former NSW Premier
Howard's downfall was the juicy result of his psychological dependency on his Praetorians.
Date: 06 February 2008
"DON'T get too close to that crowd from Quadrant," instructed a glowering, red-bearded Paddy McGuinness. He sat behind a lager or a port, I a glass of aerated water. The year of the exchange is fixed in my memory as 1976 or 1977, when I was an employee of the Labor Council of NSW, and Quadrant, to me, had some lustre and cachet.
Remember that time - 1976 or 1977 - and recall that a large part of the earth's surface, including a great deal of Europe, was ruled by one-party Marxist-Leninist dictatorships. In Quadrant's pages, Richard Krygier and Owen Harries were holding aloft the anti-totalitarian banner.
Obituaries can be excessive, sometimes ludicrously so, especially when the media mourns its own. As the above exchange confirms, McGuinness was not there first. Quadrant's anti-communism was too unfashionable for him. He did not lead the shake-out in political and economic wisdom in this country. He was not Australia's foundation neo-con. This, however, is an argument for another day.
McGuinness's contribution was a different one and, to those of us in the Labor Party, deliciously counterproductive. He was part of a group - I call them the Angry Right - who locked John Howard into policies that ensured he was, by early 2007, seen as out of touch and out of date: climate-change denial, support for George W. Bush in Iraq, loss of workers' rights.
For 10 years, whatever Howard did or said he would be supported by a group of columnists, spread across the Australian media, none more bottled-up angry with Labor than McGuinness. If their - if his - prime minister was under criticism, they locked shields and unsheathed short arms. "This shall not pass!" they seemed to be declaring any time their man was attacked.
No prime minister has had a Praetorian Guard like it, a body of opinion-makers so fiercely and one-sidedly and resolutely in his camp. They were Howard's adulators. Malcolm Fraser, John Gorton, Harold Holt and Robert Menzies: none of them had been able to count on such consistent support from a group of commentators. And even in the end, when the electorate wanted Howard to ratify Kyoto and wind back the commitment in Iraq, the symbiotic link with the Praetorians made it impossible for the emperor to shift. And they fed and nurtured and consolidated his attachment to the orthodoxies that did him in.
As I said, delicious.
I first glimpsed this sitting in the audience when Howard addressed a dinner of the Centre for Independent Studies in May 2006. Again, the date: he was riding high. The ascension of Kevin Rudd was yet to come. And it was an appreciative business audience, including McGuinness.
That night, among other things, Howard scorned the possibility of climate change. He praised the writings of Keith Windschuttle, whom he was shortly after to appoint to the ABC board and who now edits Quadrant. "He could get away with this," I remember myself thinking. "His programs's now more trenchantly conservative. Yet poll figures don't lie. He could score another term with an explicitly rightist, not centrist, agenda."
Around this time foreign minister Alexander Downer was being forced to sound shrill defending Iraq, but the Praetorians were encouraging Howard's Bushite view of the world, even as the Iraqi adventure wobbled and veered. There were always those encouraging trends in Anbar province. It was still hard to see Iraq as a negative in an Australian election as it proved in Britain and the US.
Six months later, Howard turned up for another anniversary festival for his right-wing support base.
At the Quadrant dinner in October 2006 he again rehearsed and celebrated the triumphs of the Right, to push-button applause from a hard core group of climate-change deniers (McGuinness holding to this almost as long as he held to his pro-smoking line), supporters of Work Choices and, with honourable exceptions, grim advocates of the Iraq war.
There was only one thing wrong: the electorate had moved. Those irritating non-Quadrant readers. Those working-class Howard supporters from 1996, 2001 and 2004. They were deciding by big margins that Australia should ratify the Kyoto Protocol, withdraw from Iraq and dump Work Choices.
Yet his psychological dependency on his Praetorians - always there, always so flattering and nurturing to John and Janette - made it impossible to shift. Howard was trapped. Still their pin-up, Howard was now seen by a majority of the electorate as out of touch, too old, a man of the past, not the future. With Rudd impressing them, they were shifting. McGuinness and his allies had won their man to their program, but their program had lost Australians.
McGuinness was haunted by ghosts. I always had this feeling in conversation with him. Women from the Push days, his Labor Party buddies from the past, above all the imaginary leftists who seemed to occupy a large part of his mental space. The truth is, in reality they barely existed. But he's given them the last laugh anyway.
