The successor to Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke was Paul Keating, an entirely different kettle of fish.
After a prolonged battle for the leadership the two Labor leaders rarely spoke.
Keating, who came to power in 1991, could never see why a lower form of life like Bob Hawke should be top dog when clearly the position belonged to him.
Keating was one of those people where all the mastery is in the fight. They don’t know what to do when they get there.
He was famous for sneering lines like: “You’re nothing but a shiver looking for a spine to run up.”
There might be Keating Square and Keating whatever else out in the working class western Sydney seat of Blaxland from whence he came but Keating himself, preening around in two thousand dollar Italian suits, couldn’t wait to get out of there.
A disciple of multiculturalism partly perhaps because immigrants tended to vote Labor en masse, at the very first opportunity Keating escaped from Blaxland to the wealthy white Sydney enclaves of the Eastern suburbs, where his slim form and scathing wit were much admired.
And he could listen to his beloved Mahler without being called a wanker.
While Keating himself never completed High School, leaving at age 16, he had a masterful gift of the gab and held the country’s academics enthralled.
At one press conference at the Mitchell Library one woman piped up: “Mr Keating, Mr Keating, I’m an academic at Sydney University and I just wanted to say how much I adore everything you do. I agree with everything you say.”
Give us a break.
The rest of us are working.
Idiotically, Keating would go out of his way to insult the Fourth Estate.
He never worked out that the media were a conduit to the general public and he would be applauded or hung by them; but never ignored.
Keating might have had a wife and four children but we always thought he was gay, and were happy to believe the rumors.
Particularly after his divorce.
Would an ordinary Australian male rip out the floor of a bathroom because the tiles were a quarter of an inch off?
What other Australian male had such well-manicured hands?
We knew a lot about Keating’s private life because we all loved his gracious, charming wife Anita. We spent many long days staked outside her house in the heart of up-market Woollahra after the divorce was announced.
On one such day, feeling sorry for us as we stood shivering in the relentless rain just before Christmas, Anita invited us all in.
She knew perfectly well that some of us were already familiar with the house. During the long and exacting renovation of the house to its original glory we had often talked our way past the carpenter, plumber, electrician, tiler or whoever to get a shot of progress. A lot of them were naïve enough to let us.
Asking the mother of Keating’s four children about her errant husband and his various alleged escapades or the reason for the divorce was not something any of us wanted to do. And Anita was not the sort of person to kiss and tell, or take out her grievances in public.
Hard of heart but even harder of hearing, there were days when we just ignored the News Desk’s repeated requests to go and door knock her. Instead we huddled miserably inside the company cars as it poured rain day after endless day.
A lot of the photographers were either close to Anita, held her in high esteem or in some cases had even worked with her on various projects after she started Arts College.
None of us wanted to hurt her.
On the other hand a lot of us were happy to hurt Keating, the artful dodger, the great pretender.
But the paper always refused to take a picture of Keating and his alleged boyfriend, although we believed we knew exactly how to do it.
That’s an invasion of someone’s private life, the News Desk protested. We couldn’t do that!
Sure.
Now there’s a judgment call.
In newspapers high moral standards were cloaks of convenience which lasted for just as long as it suited whoever held the editorial reigns of the day.
Everyone knew how prickly and litigious Keating was; and how much a picture of him and his purported lover would have driven him to attack.
Keating brought color and movement to public life, giving stirring speeches while cutting a stylish figure across the political stage. He remained a hero to segments of the community for years after he left office.
He wasn’t a hero to the many journalists he had abused, bullied and attempted to intimidate.
My last encounter was pretty much par for the course.
Keating was giving a lecture on governance in one of the conference rooms at Sydney University to an assembly of local government mayors from around New South Wales.
He preened on about how a $90,000 a year salary just wasn’t enough for a local council worker to stand up to the temptations of a developer waving millions.
And he would be happy to talk to anyone who had questions afterwards. He would talk to the media last, he said, because that’s what he thought of them, as beneath contempt.
The State’s mayors were on a cosy junket to Sydney; the media had multiple jobs and tight deadlines to deal with. Not that Keating cared.
A little bit like Prince Charles, Keating was often given the opportunity to go on about one of his favorite hobby horses, urban architecture and in his case the glories of Paris and the ugliness of Australian cities.
It was, in a sense, a return to form.
His speech included lines like: “Developers are just brigands who build things.”
I wrote a piece which began with the observation that Keating had lost none of his bile.
The paper compounded my sins by running an editorial expanding on the theme that Keating needed to move on with his life, develop some humility and stop throwing barbs at everyone he regarded as his intellectual inferior, which was just about everybody.
We all thought it pretty funny that Paul Keating would wake up each morning with only one thought in his head: the man he hated most in the world, conservative leader John Howard, was running the country, the job that Keating regarded as rightfully his.
Keating could not understand why the mauling masses had failed to appreciate his brilliance.
He was incensed both by my story and the editorial.
Several days after their publication he rang at about five pm.
Anyone who knows anything about journalism and newspapers knows you do not ring a reporter at five pm.
At that time, every working journalist is on a deadline for the next day’s paper. Yesterday’s story might as well have been a lifetime ago.
Production takes precedent over all other considerations.
Contrary to expectations, with changes in technology deadlines became earlier rather than later. By the turn of the millennium we were under general orders to file by six or the paper would take wire copy or spike our efforts; didn’t much matter what the story was.
With a national newspaper like The Australian, published at multiple points across a vast country, every minute over the production schedule cost tens of thousands of dollars.
A soft, sibilant, whispery voice came down the line.
“Paul Keating here,” he said.
“Oh Paul, hi,” I answered, surprised, my head immersed in an entirely different place.
“Why did you write such a terrible story about me?”
“It wasn’t a terrible story,” I replied. “It was just a straight news story.”
“It wasn’t a straight story. There were many things incorrect. Let me take you through the points…”
“Paul, you’re notorious for abusing journalists,” I cut in on what was about to become a diatribe. “I don’t have time and I don’t have to put up with it. I’m not paid enough.”
I slammed the phone down and went on about my work.
My then micro-managing Chief of Staff, all of two meters away, looked at me quizzically and asked: “Who was that?”
“Paul Keating, he’s always abusing somebody,” I shrugged and then deliberately ignored my boss as well.
I had outlived a number of Chiefs of Staff; some good, some bad, some utterly indifferent. This particular one was somewhere between utterly indifferent and a pain in the ass. I did my best to destroy his sanity. He did not oblige.
After some frustrations he had given up trying to run the minutae of my working life, but he wasn’t used to journalists slamming the phone down on former Prime Ministers.
Keating, even more incensed now and with time on his hands, besieged the News Desk for days to come, demanding to speak to the Editor in Chief.
Every editor in the country knew what Keating was like; and this one had no apparent desire to deal with him.
The Australian’s Editor in Chief Chris Mitchell dodged Keating for several days before his secretary finally admitted he was in his office and put Keating through.
To mollify him, the boss gave Keating the opportunity to say what he wanted in a piece on the Opinion pages.
Everyone who read it had the same reaction: “What?”
The point Keating most wanted to make was that he hadn’t said the council system in Australia was corrupt; what he had said was that it was closely modeled on the corrupt borough system of the United Kingdom and as a result had many of the same flaws.
The opinion piece began, in classic Keating style, with a high handed insult.
The man who simply could not understand why he was no longer Prime Minister suggested that the only mistake he had made in attending the conference at Sydney University was not to have prepared a press release in advance, so that even the most simple minded of journalists could understand what he was saying.
OK Paul you’ve made your point. What was it you wanted to say exactly?
“You’re nothing but a shiver looking for a spine to run up.”
Hold the world in contempt and it will hold you in contempt straight back