Rational people tend to act out of self-interest, and politicians are no different. It is therefore understandable that Julia Gillard should have sought to prolong her time as the head of the government by seeking to protect Thomson.

Similarly, it is perfectly legitimate for the Coalition to apply pressure to the government and Thomson as it seeks to take over the reins of power.

However, as deputy opposition leader Julie Bishop cogently stated in the House of Representatives last week, it seems inconceivable, as the Prime Minister and her frontbench colleagues have sought to argue, that parliament has no role to play when there are such serious findings against one of its members.

While the findings of Fair Work Australia that Thomson used union credit cards to pay for prostitutes make for salacious headlines, far more serious are the allegations that he misused more than $270,000 of Health Services Union funds to support his 2007 federal election campaign. The Australian Electoral Commission may well have some difficult questions to answer, as some of the allegations involving Thomson’s campaign funding were referred to the AEC for investigation in August 2010. The AEC reported that it had investigated material in the public domain but was unable to find any evidence to support the allegations against Thomson.

It is therefore highly likely that in the near future the AEC may find itself under the microscope of Coalition scrutiny.

The other grievous allegation against Thomson is that he took part in an arrangement with a printing company to inflate the contracts awarded to it and received kickbacks from the company as a result.

This matter is under investigation by a NSW Police taskforce but, if proved to be true, the arrangement would certainly attract greater penalties than the misuse of union funds to pay for prostitutes. As to Labor’s oft-repeated claim that it has a history of respecting the presumption of innocence and due process, two instances spring to mind.

First, the approach taken by the then Labor opposition with regard to allegations against former governor-general Peter Hollingworth that as Anglican archbishop of Brisbane he failed to act against clergy involved in the sexual abuse of children.

There were no findings by an independent investigatory authority or similar against Hollingworth and no proceedings afoot, yet then Labor opposition leader Simon Crean led a ferocious attack on Hollingworth lasting months, calling repeatedly for his resignation as governor-general.

The attacks were not confined to the governor-general but were also directed to then prime minister John Howard. Labor accused Howard of having failed to adequately vet Hollingworth’s background before appointing him.

In parliament, Labor moved censure motions against the prime minister, accusing him of a cover-up about his knowledge of Hollingworth’s alleged actions or lack thereof.

In a fiery parliamentary session on May 26, 2003, Crean assumed the role of judge, jury and executioner by declaring: “The prime minister does not get it, because while he says this is a difficult issue, the proposition itself is very simple indeed. It is as simple as this: you cannot have people in authority who have covered up for child sex abuse. It is as simple as that. There is nothing difficult about it.”

A few days later, Hollingworth resigned as governor-general.

There is no doubt Hollingworth’s behaviour warranted scrutiny, but it is also fair to say that Labor, under the privilege of parliament, hounded him from office before any due process had been allowed to run its course.

Similarly, the Labor opposition did not wait for the report of the Cole royal commission into the Australian Wheat Board in late 2006 before prosecuting its case through the parliament. Howard and other cabinet ministers were subjected to constant parliamentary attack from Kevin Rudd and Kim Beazley, among other Labor figures. Censure motions were moved against the government and ministers.

At one point, Labor called for then deputy prime minister Mark Vaile not only to resign from his portfolio but also to resign from parliament, on the basis of alleged failings in his administration. This was despite the absence of any findings against him.

And Labor called for the resignation of foreign minister Alexander Downer, also before any findings had been made against him.

It mattered little to Labor that the royal commission cleared Howard and his ministers of any wrongdoing. No apologies were forthcoming, despite a year of constant character assassinations made in the parliament and through the media.

By the standard federal Labor has set for others, the Prime Minister should have required Thomson to resign from the parliament.

At the very least, Labor should not count his vote but arrange a pair, as the Coalition did previously to avoid accepting the vote of disgraced Labor senator for Queensland Mal Colston.

The most troubling aspect of the Thomson saga is that the Prime Minister has shown no leadership on the issue, which again calls into question her moral compass. Gillard clearly believes that clinging to power at any cost and in any circumstance is more important than being seen to take leadership on an issue that many people find repugnant.

Her recent and belated claim that she is repulsed by the behaviour of unnamed union leaders rings hollow.

It seems her instinctive response to the many crises engulfing her government is to first deny their existence, then, when cornered, to adopt an assertive and increasingly aggressive stance.

That approach may work in the byzantine world of the union movement and within the factions of the Labor Party, but Gillard appears incapable of rising to the task of national moral leadership.

Her failure to lead in the Thomson matter condemns the entire Labor Party in its hour of greatest need.

Ross Fitzgerald is the author of 35 books, most recently the political-sexual satire ‘Fools’ Paradise’.

The Weekend Australian, May 19-20, 2012, Inquirer p 15.

As National Party minister for Aboriginal and Islander affairs in Queensland, the flamboyant Bob Katter was extremely well thought of by indigenous Australians. Having become disenchanted with the National Party’s support of ”economic rationalist” policies, Katter has been a popular independent MP since 2001 for the vast federal North Queensland seat of Kennedy and is now leader of Katter’s Australian Party.

As it happens, Katter’s parliamentary office in Canberra features a large version of the cover of my biography of former Queensland Labor premier and federal treasurer E.G. ”Red Ted” Theodore. It also boasts a photograph of federal Country Party stalwart, and arch protectionist, John ”Black Jack” McEwen.

Katter’s well-researched and idiosyncratically expressed general history of Australia makes clear that Theodore and McEwen were, and are, his two great economic and political heroes.

But it is Theodore who evokes most praise. Indeed Katter argues that, had Theodore not had to stand down as federal treasurer during the Great Depression because of the Mungana mines scandal, his proto-Keynesian economic and fiscal measures could have saved the jobs of tens of thousands of Australians.

In 1930, Theodore was sent the first copy of John Maynard Keynes’s A Treatise on Money to arrive in Australia. In the House of Representatives he prophetically maintained that Keynes’s book would be ”accepted as a textbook that will stand for 50 years as a guide to the intellects of the nations on this subject”.

That Katter regards a ”Labor man” – Theodore – as his prime economic, fiscal and political hero is not as surprising as it might seem. His father, Bob Katter snr, who held the seat of Kennedy for 24 years, was originally an ALP supporter until the great Labor split in the mid 1950s, which Katter’s book features in detail. After many Catholic Laborites deserted the ALP, Katter snr joined the Country Party, later to become the Nationals. It also explains why Katter jnr is still a strong supporter of trade unionism and ”rural socialism”. Significantly, before entering parliamentary politics, Theodore had co-founded the influential Australian Workers Union, which helped keep Labor in power in Queensland from 1915 to 1957, with the exception of two years during the Depression.

As Katter points out, the two politicians Paul Keating most admired in Australian history were maverick NSW premier J.T. (”Jack”) Lang and Theodore – who hated each other with a passion. While Lang’s ”plan” for dealing with the Depression was to repudiate Australia’s debt to English bondholders, Theodore hoped to expand the economy through the issue of credit to farmers and small businessmen, which could be redeemed after the Depression.

Unfortunately, Theodore’s Fiduciary Notes Bill was not only defeated in the Senate, but the defection of the Langites coupled with the defection of Joe Lyons and his supporters cost Labor its parliamentary majority.

The federal election in December 1931 saw Theodore lose his Sydney seat of Dalley to a Lang candidate, thus ending his parliamentary career. Katter shares my belief that Theodore was the most talented politician never to be prime minister of Australia.

The title of Katter’s quirky but quite absorbing and sometimes controversial history of Australia comes from a time in 1988 when, as a minister in the short-lived Queensland government of Mike Ahern, he had to entertain the king and queen of Spain. At dinner, the three discussed Australia’s white settlement and our prisoner and immigrant forbears. This prompted Queen Sofia, who had read Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore, to remark: ”What an incredible race of people you are.”

Born in Cloncurry in Queensland and now resident in Charters Towers – which was once so important for gold mining and investment it was widely known as ”The World” – Katter with his trademark cowboy hat is one of Australia’s best known parliamentary ”characters”. What has not been so apparent until now is his great love of Australian history.

A key thrust of Katter’s often fascinating narrative is concerned with what he regards as lost economic opportunities for ”good development”. This especially applies to the scheme of Dr J.J.C. Bradfield to divert some of North Queensland’s ”massive annual floodwaters” and ”turn it gently inland onto Queensland’s great rolling treeless black-soil plains”.

Katter supports Bradfield’s vision of an inland North Queensland no longer hot, hard, dry and deeply eroded by the ”short, fierce wet”. Instead the ”training of the rivers” would see the area become ”a mosaic of green strip farmlands with riverbanks protected from the ravages of flood-borne weeds and the annual ever-worsening erosion of those banks”.

Fittingly, given his previous ministerial responsibility for indigenous affairs, Katter writes movingly about the first Australians, native title and early indigenous resistance to white invasion.

Bob Katter appears with Kevin Rudd at the Sydney Writers’ Festival next Sunday at 2.30.

AN INCREDIBLE RACE OF PEOPLE
Bob Katter
Murdoch Books, 464pp, $39.99

Sydney Morning Herald, May 12 – 13, 2012, SPECTRUM p 36.

This year’s centenary will most likely reinforce White’s standing as an Australian icon, but we need to remember that, as a writer, he toiled away for years in private obscurity. White’s first two great novels (‘The Tree of Man’ and ‘Voss’) attracted acclaim from the cognoscenti in the mid-1950s. He won the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award, in 1957, for ‘Voss’.

But White did not really become a truly public figure, known and revered by many Australians who may never have read anything he wrote, until the early 70s.

The obscurity ended after two notable events. White was awarded the Nobel prize in 1973. And a year earlier Gough Whitlam was elected prime minister after Labor had been in opposition federally for 23 years. With a dashing new PM and a new world-famous author, Australia at last seemed to many progressives to have made a clean, if belated, break with its unheroic colonial past. White was ready to deploy his new-found prominence on Whitlam’s behalf. In 1974, after an early election was called, he spoke at a rally at the Sydney Opera House in support of his political and cultural hero, who went on to be re-elected. A year later, glory turned to rage when John Kerr dismissed Whitlam and replaced him with Malcolm Fraser. What White regarded as “a brave experiment” had ended. After Whitlam stood down as Labor leader in 1977, White addressed a farewell rally in Canberra at the Albert Hall.

Once he evolved into a public figure, there was no turning back for White. Fame, he found, had its obligations. All kinds of people whose business it was to generate publicity started to solicit him for product endorsements.

White’s engagement with the publicity machine had its awkward moments. A handful of White letters held in the National Library of Australia make this abundantly clear. In October 1977 White agreed to come to Canberra to launch the fourth volume of Manning Clark’s ‘A History of Australia’. The novelist and historian shared an admiration for Whitlam, and for each other.

Original correspondence, which can be read in the National Library, shows White reacting with alarm at the prospect, as the event drew nearer, of having to launch Clark’s book. It is quite an experience to witness the Nobel laureate in such a tizz.

The event, down to arranging White’s airfare to Canberra, was organised by Peter Ryan, Clark’s publisher at Melbourne University Press and, after 1993, his latter-day scold and critic.

Well before the day of the launch (March 6, 1978) a worried White contacted MUP to find out what exactly was expected of him. He told Ryan he had never launched a book before and had kept well away from other authors’ launches. He was quite a novice in such matters.

Whatever Ryan advised did the trick. Although White found public speaking stressful, the launch (in the Canberra Club) went off well — with the novelist’s endorsement of Clark and his book receiving widespread media coverage. White was quoted as saying “the evil powers, though formless and only too loathsomely powerful, will be routed by the flood of light he lets in”.

After the ordeal was over, White wrote a letter of thanks to Ryan, noting that Clark’s book was selling well and expressing the hope the launch had contributed to this success. Clark’s publisher, for his part, was keen to maintain such a profitable connection.

A good chance to bond further came in the autumn of 1980 when MUP published a biography of Ludwig Leichhardt by writer Elsie May Webster. Ryan was keen to promote it.

Was not the author of ‘Voss’, a novel known to be based in part on the life of Leichhardt, bound to look kindly on a book about the tragic Prussian explorer? Ryan, motivated by this thought, sent a gift copy of Webster’s scholarly tome to White.

But the gesture, though well meant, was a faux pas, as White made amply clear in a waspish reply to Ryan.

White had, he told Ryan, “groaned” when Webster’s book arrived. The publisher did not seem to realise there was a limit to the novelist’s passion for Australian explorers. He was, it was clear, quite Voss-ed out. “I can hardly endure to read another book about an explorer,” White hissed.

But worse was to come. White went on to tell Ryan he was getting ready to plough through the Webster biography but had given up in disgust when a subsequent mail delivery contained a card from MUP inviting him to the launch of the book.

Ryan’s postcard indicated that, of all people, Fraser, the great post-Whitlam Dismissal bugbear of White, had been asked to perform the launch at the National Press Club in Canberra.

White concluded his letter with a catty farewell. He told Ryan that “if she will submit to Mal, Elsie is not my whirlwind” (her biography was called ‘Whirlwinds in the Plain’). Clark’s publisher, by having anything to do with Fraser, had well and truly blotted his copybook in White’s eyes.

The years when progressive Australians revered Fraser lay far in the future. In 1980 he remained, for White and many others, Whitlam’s unloved nemesis.

Ryan’s Leichhardt launch had to go ahead in the face of the anti-Fraser fatwa from White. As matters turned out, the prime minister was absent as well. He was winging his way to Africa to try to nut out a deal with rebellious Rhodesia (the future Zimbabwe) and had to be represented by David Thomson, Fraser’s minister for science and the environment and, for good measure, federal member for the seat of Leichhardt.

White may have boycotted Ryan’s latest launch but Clark attended it. White was convinced Clark was failing to maintain the anti-Dismissal rage of 1975. Two months later he told Clark he had been “terribly disappointed” to discover the historian had attended a public function at which Zelman Cowen, Kerr’s successor as governor-general, had also been present.

The relationship between the unambiguously gay White and the allegedly bisexual Clark was complicated and, it seems, highly sexualised. White chided Clark: “You say repeatedly you are coming to see me. You never do, or if you do, you bring one of your children to act, I feel, as a shield.” Some time after, the historian wrote in his diary: “Alas, my being received back by Patrick White did not last for long. I have again offended him. This hurts me, because I am still in love with him.”

Although White’s letter to Ryan repudiating the Leichhardt launch was rather disrespectful to the publisher, such was the novelist’s fame that there was no question of Ryan tearing it up. Anything produced by White was preserved as a more or less sacred object. White’s wish for all his correspondence to vanish — “Letters are the devil, and I always hope that any I have written have been destroyed” — was again ignored.

The publisher hung on to the bitchy missive and kept his other White letters as well. To ensure their preservation they were included in material Ryan later donated to the National Library.

The White-Ryan letters are a genuine find. The correspondence is among the more comic of the cultural gems buried in institutions such as the National Library. They deserve to be better known if we are to celebrate White’s centenary year in all its shame and glory.

Ross Fitzgerald is the author of 35 books, most recently the satire Fool’s Paradise. Stephen Holt has co-written with Fitzgerald a biography of journalist ‘Alan “The Red Fox” Reid’.

The Weekend Australian, May 12-13, 2012 Inquirer p22

Having recently re-read Wilding’s expose I thought I’d go to see and hear him at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival, which is being held from May 14-20.

Imagine my annoyance when I noticed Wilding was on at the same time as Frank Moorhouse. This seemed more than a bit careless since Wilding and Moorhouse have, over the years, attracted virtually the same audience: “The two parts of a pantomime horse”, as Martin Johnston rightly called them. So what sort of sloppiness would timetable Wildling and Moorhouse simultaneously?

Then I thought I’d hear the always-passionate independent MP Bob Katter Jr talk about his new and highly controversial history of Australia from 1890 to 2010, ‘An Incredible Race of People’. Even if that meant hearing his fellow Queenslander, the cruelly deposed ex-PM, Kevin Rudd, as the interlocutor!

But a large doubt remains.

At a time when our novelists, short-story writers and poets are increasingly marginalised, don’t our politicians get enough airspace? Why should they take the oxygen from often struggling Australian writers?

Then I looked at the glossy pamphlet for the Sydney Writers Festival. Predictably this picks out the highlights, almost all of which are authors from overseas – and disregards the rest of the writers from Australia, which must mightily annoy the latter and their readers.

This led to two other doubts: does promoting the overseas visitors and celebrities such as A. C. Grayling , who hail from what some regard as our former colonial oppressors, really fulfill the aims of our local stakeholders?

And is this the best use of Australian taxpayers’ money, which surely should be used to encourage emerging writers?

As Wilding’s leading character from ‘Superfluous Men’, Henry, so wryly argues, these days writers festivals are often part of the problem: “Full of people who don’t buy books. Devoid of real writers with any interest in literature and art.” And featuring often-wealthy celebrities who sometimes may not have even fully read the book published under their name!

But as Wilding’s fictional festival director concedes: this is “the way of the future”.

Yet the fact is that many of our best writers don’t relish or enjoy performing or pontificating in public. What they do, and do best, is write!

A mea culpa.

Over the years I’ve appeared at most of the large writers’ festivals in Australia – Sydney, Melbourne, Gloucester, Brisbane, Adelaide.

The reality is that, not being a writer at the top of the first eleven, all of my publishers keep insisting that I can’t afford not to.

In many ways, writers festivals are a contradiction. Reading and writing are solitary activities for often shy, private practitioners, many of whom don’t like festivals, or crowds, or people, even.

Yet, increasingly, their publishers’ publicists, who so often rule the roost, dragoon writers to attend as many festivals as possible.

Publicists know, or claim to know, that most writers these days only receive an interview if they are appearing at a festival. They also know that, even if circulation may be declining, a great many more people read newspapers – online or in hard copy – than ever turn up to writers festivals, where relatively few books are actually sold.

Increasingly, our publishers are coming to resemble our universities – run by bureaucrats and administrators who have little notion about what their essential “product” (books and knowledge) are all about.

And, more importantly, they seem to show little care or understanding of how writing should be esteemed and valued.

Recently there was much seemingly confected outrage from publishers and writers objecting to the feisty new premier of the Sunshine State, Campbell Newman, withdrawing state funding for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards.

The former lord mayor of Brisbane argued that the $244,000 per annum saving was part of the Liberal National Party’s promised economy drive.

Thinking about the matter, it’s hard to resist the rhetorical question: why shouldn’t literature take its share of cost-cutting, especially when most such awards in Australia seem to go to established writers and thus do not help our emerging writers, who really need assistance?

Emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University, Ross Fitzgerald is the author of 35 books, most recently the co-authored sexual/political satire ‘Fools’ Paradise’, set in a fictitious Mangoland.

The Weekend Australian May 5-6, 2012, Inquirer p. 24

Recently Christopher Lawford Kennedy, the only son of actor Peter Lawford and Pat Kennedy and nephew of John F. Kennedy, addressed the Canberra Press Club. Himself free of alcohol and other drugs for the past 24 years with the aid of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, Lawford Kennedy pointed out that ”for every $1 invested in rehabilitation programs it saves the community approximately $8.00” – which surely is an excellent return on investment by anybody’s standards.

Although relatively little attention is paid to the entrenched problems of addiction in Australia, there is some recent good news. In mid-April an Australian-based treatment centre dealing with the issues relating to alcoholism and compulsive gambling was officially opened in the western Sydney suburb of Fairfield. Its name is Oakdene House.

Dr Rob Hunter from Las Vegas, a renowned expert on addictions, addressed the attendees at the opening as official patron. Hunter studied under Dr Rob Custer, who was arguably the first clinician to recognise pathological gambling as a mental disorder. Hunter, who was responsible for opening the world’s first problem gambling centre in Las Vegas, attributes his 90 per cent success rate to a holistic approach to the treatment of problem gamblers.

”I can give the clinical therapy and counselling provided. However, I can categorically say that unless it is supported through 12 Step Fellowship programs such as Gamblers Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous, there is a significantly lower success rate.” In fact these days Hunter won’t treat clients who don’t attend 12 Step Fellowship meetings. And in a revolutionary move, although Hunter is not an addict himself, all the staff who work at his Las Vegas centre are recovering alcoholics and gambling addicts.

Hunter spoke at the opening of Oakdene House about the social and economic cost of addictions. He pointed out that approximately 60 per cent of the patients he treats have dual or multiple addictions. Moreover, in his opinion, the pathological gamblers he deals with are genuinely suffering from an illness. ”Just recently”, he said. ”I treated one of the kindest, most caring family men you could wish for. Yet after gambling three pay cheques in a row, his wife had to leave him and take the children”. Unfortunately the end results of untreated pathological gamblers are ridiculously insane actions and decisions based on virtually no thought at all. Attempting to discuss sane and responsible behaviour with a person in the depths of addiction is virtually impossible.

Significantly, Hunter’s data demonstrates that the success rate of his clients who are ”forced” to attend therapy by the police or the courts is almost the same as those who attend voluntarily. This demonstrates my long-held contention that, in regard to addiction, there is no wrong reason for doing the right thing. Thus it does not matter if people attend AA or GA to placate the police or their family. What matters is that they do attend. Also it doesn’t matter why alcoholics stop drinking or addicts stop gambling or using drugs. What matters is that they do. And as AA and GA are by far the most successful agencies countering addictions, I often say to alcoholics and other addicts, ”Why not avail yourselves of the best?”

Like the Las Vegas Problem Gambling Centre, Oakdene House’s ethos revolves around treatment and counselling and working with the 12 step programs. Oakdene House is a registered not-for-profit charity offering its services at no cost. Its sole purpose is to attract people who seek help, whose lives have spiralled out of control owing to alcohol and gambling. The centre’s philosophy is that the diseases of alcoholism and compulsive gambling have no absolute cure, but that addicts can learn to recover from addiction, one day at a time. Their treatment plan is based on complete abstinence and the philosophy of AA, NA, and GA.

Oakdene House’s liaison officer, ex-South Sydney footballer Tom Simpson – himself a recovering alcoholic and gambling addict – says that ”abstinence is one thing, but we seek for our people to have long-term recovery and that’s where the 12 step programs come in”. Oakdene House recognises the important role that medical science has to play in mental disorders such as these, but emphasises the need for 12 step programs, which recognise that addiction is a health problem and not a moral problem.

So while the politicians, health officials and others under the media spotlight debate the interconnected issues of addictions, the folks at Oakdene House are getting on with the business of doing something practical about it. More power to them.

For details see www.oakdenehouse.org.au.

Professor Ross Fitzgerald is the author of 35 books, including his memoir My name is Ross: An alcoholic’s journey published by NewSouth Books: Sydney.

‘The Canberra Times’, April 30, 2012, page 9.

This is not to say we don’t have them and one of the best known, particularly if you’re a Victorian, is the Baillieu family. They are obviously cognisant of their own place in the scheme of things because they commissioned this fascinating biography, by Peter Yule, of the person who founded what Yule regards as Australia’s greatest and most diversified business empire.

Born at Queenscliffe, Victoria, in 1859, the second son of 16 children, William Lawrence Baillieu rapidly earned a fortune as an auctioneer and investor during Melbourne’s land boom of the 1880s. But he lost it all during the disastrous crash of the early 1890s. Financially if not psychologically, he soon recovered. Through canny investments in gold mining, real estate and shares, Baillieu founded the Collins House group, which by 1914 was probably the most powerful economic force in Australia.

Yule points out that Baillieu’s greatest achievements were in mining and the metals industries. After World War I, along with redoubtable financier William S. Robinson, he guided the Collins House companies through difficult economic times, using the huge income generated by the mines he controlled in Broken Hill to invest in a host of new manufacturing and other lucrative industries.

Yet despite his financial successes, Baillieu’s catastrophic fall in the crash of the 1890s had a lifelong negative impact on this otherwise intrepid entrepreneur. It was a dark shadow that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

As Yule explains, Baillieu “never again borrowed for speculation in land or shares”. While he did take risks in establishing new industries, only once thereafter did he risk the family’s capital. This was with Electrolytic Zinc when he had “the security of a long-term contract with the British government” rather than being involved in, as Yule aptly puts it, “the froth and bubble of the land boom”.

In the first two decades after federation in 1901, “Big Bill” Baillieu had considerable influence on the conservative side of politics. As Yule explains, it was “widely believed that non-Labor politicians, both state and federal, acted at his bidding”. Certainly in 1917 he played a key role in the establishment of the Nationalist federal government headed by W.H. (Billy) Hughes. Indeed his close relations with the so-called “Little Digger” and with other senior Australian parliamentarians led to charges that Baillieu had undue influence over them.

Fortunately Yule was able to interview Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, who not only recalls Baillieu being at her wedding but also throws light on his decision to successfully back her husband Keith Murdoch (against other rivals) to run the Melbourne Herald. If Baillieu’s intervention hadn’t occurred, it is inconceivable that Keith Murdoch’s son, Rupert, would now own and control the largest media empire in the world, which includes News Ltd, the publisher of this newspaper.

Replete with illustrations, thoroughly researched, amply footnoted and with a very helpful index, Yule’s portrait of this energetic Melburnian and Australian man of business is well worth reading.

The intrepid W.L. Baillieu died in 1936. Two years later a refugee boy named Henri Aram arrived in Sydney. Having fled with his Jewish family from Hitler’s Berlin, Aram would also proceed to make his mark on our financial sector.

Ghosted by journalist Michael Visontay, the fascinating life of the now 90-year-old financial guru has been given a strong contender for this year’s worst book title. Undies to Equities – what were the publishers thinking!

The talented Visontay previously ghosted Anh Do’s memoir, The Happiest Refugee, which last year picked up a number of prestigious literary awards, annoying those who argue that such prizes should not be given to ghostwritten publications.

Be that as it may, the ever-generous Aram makes it clear that, without Visontay’s input as a researcher and writer, no autobiography could have been produced at all. In ghosting Aram’s life, Visontay has done his subject proud. He tells a passionate story of a boy who, having lived through the rise of Nazi Germany, arrived in Sydney on the eve of World War II. After initially being declared an enemy alien, and starting with almost nothing, Aram soon founded a thriving underwear business – hence the book’s unfortunate title! He then became a hugely successful stockbroker and financial adviser. Later on, Aram, who was also involved in municipal and other politics, became something of a media celebrity whose public advocacy for seemingly lost causes is remembered with gratitude by many Australians.

By far the most touching parts of this quirky book deal with Aram’s adoptive grandfather, Moritz Sachs, affectionately known as “Onkel Mor”.

After the Nazis plundered most of his wealth, Onkel Mor gave most of his remaining savings to enable Aram’s family to flee the Nazi terror. Without this act of timely generosity, most of Aram’s family would most likely have been among the millions of other Jews murdered in the concentration camps. It is pleasing to note that, after finally locating his grave, in 1998 Aram and some friends and relatives gathered in a Berlin cemetery to erect a memorial to Onkel Mor.

Replete with a number of illuminating, and often touching, black and white and coloured photographs, Aram’s captivating book also has a helpful index, which is so often missing from books published in Australia today.

William Lawrence Baillieu
By Peter Yule
Hardie Grant Books, 423pp, $65 (HB)

Undies to Equities
By Henri Aram, with Michael Visontay
Rosenberg Publishing, 240pp, $29.95

Ross Fitzgerald is emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University. His most recent book is the co-authored political satire Fools’ Paradise. The Weekend Australian April 28-29, 2012 Review p22.

Designed to deliver a two-vote turnaround in the House of Representatives, with the former speaker Harry Jenkins returning to the government benches and the Coalition losing Slipper to the Speaker’s chair, it was a political fix destined to blow up in the PM’s face.

But despite intense media speculation surrounding the numbers in the House of Representatives, any consideration of the voting patterns of the so-called independent members show their support for the Labor government is unwavering.

So it was particularly fascinating to hear the media reports that emerged during the last sitting week before the end of the first parliamentary session this year about how upset the government is becoming by the opposition’s tactical dominance in the House of Representatives.

Anthony Albanese, the leader of the government in the House of Representatives, reportedly told the Labor caucus that the tactics of his counterpart, the opposition’s chief parliamentary tactician, Christopher Pyne, surrounding questions and the use of suspensions of standing orders, enabling the parliament to stop and debate a central issue of importance, were really getting up his nose.

For an opposition this is quite an achievement, because no one should be under any illusions about how our parliamentary system operates and just how heavily it favours the government.

In the Australian parliament, the government of the day has supreme power over parliamentary operations, over standing orders, over procedural decision-making: almost nothing can happen without the government giving it the go-ahead.

By contrast, the opposition may only ask a handful of questions, they must follow the daily program set by the government and in order to have a right of reply on any matter not on the government’s set agenda, they must suspend proceedings in an attempt to debate urgent matters. This action is called a suspension of standing orders and it is the only true opportunity for the opposition to put forward a view without the government’s explicit approval.

When a suspension is moved, the government could accept the proposed debate, which is a tactic often employed under previous governments, as it allows the prime minister to directly repudiate the opposition’s view. The present Prime Minister mostly scurries from the House of Representatives when a suspension is brought on, leaving it to others to defend the government’s position. Sources within federal Labor privately concede it is a tactic that plays into the opposition’s hands.

Some might argue that, in the present parliament, Gillard’s supposedly “minority” government doesn’t have these supreme parliamentary powers. However, an examination of the numbers and voting patterns prove otherwise. With the notorious defection of Slipper to the crossbench to take the Speaker’s chair, the federal government effectively has an absolute majority in the House of Representatives of 76 seats to 73 seats, with Adam Bandt, Robert Oakeshott, Andrew Wilkie and Tony Windsor acting like members of the Labor caucus in all but name alone and Wilkie supporting the government on most occasions.

Now that scandal has engulfed the Speaker, Slipper’s continuance in the chair may or may not permanently have an impact on the numbers, but irrespective of this, the unfailing support of these so-called independent members of parliament will continue to prop up the government.

Even in light of this scandal, and its clear indictment on the judgment of the Prime Minister in appointing Slipper, Windsor has already indicated his unwavering confidence in the government.

Even before Gillard switched her speakers from Jenkins to Slipper, when the opposition has attempted suspensions of standing orders, the two so-called independents, Oakeshott and Windsor, and the Greens’ Bandt have supported Labor unfailingly, allowing them to avoid scrutiny and further debate on crucially important matters.

Consider their voting records on motions concerning the member for Dobell, Craig Thomson. Six suspensions of standing orders have been moved by the opposition in an attempt to seek an explanation from Thomson over the allegations surrounding him, or for the Gillard government to provide an explanation about this potentially very serious matter. On each of those six occasions, Bandt, Oakeshott and Windsor voted to protect Thomson from scrutiny.

Never has there been a clearer example of their lack of independence. While suspensions invariably fail due to the government’s allies – Bandt, Oakeshott and Windsor – the government has also taken to regularly abusing question time.

Question time is the only opportunity for the opposition to put unfettered questions directly to the relevant minister, and with so many troubles besetting the government they have taken to refusing to answer opposition questions entirely. On dozens of occasions on serious matters surrounding the involvement of the Prime Minister’s office in the Australia Day riot, on the conduct of the member for Dobell, the failure of their border protection policies and on the carbon tax, the government dodges the answer or attacks the opposition.

It has become so deliberate that the Speaker of the House has sat down some of the most senior ministers, including the Prime Minister, in the middle of their “answers”. As of the end of the last parliamentary session, the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and other senior ministers had been sat down on 12 occasions for not being relevant to the question asked.

Picture it. The Speaker of the House is so appalled by the Prime Minister and her gang of ministers using question time to throw mud that he forces then to clam up and sit down. There could be no greater condemnation of a government intent on traducing our democratic processes in an attempt to cling to power than a government that regularly refuses to even attempt to answer questions in question time.

With more than 12 months of historically low polls, the Gillard Labor government is facing a crisis in the lead-up to the next federal election. Failing to debate the issues Australians care about exacerbates the problem.

Ross Fitzgerald’s latest book is the co-authored political satire Fool’s Paradise.

The Weekend Australian,  April 28 -29, 2012

Parliamentarians don’t take interest declarations seriously, ROSS FITZGERALD writes

The Canberra Times, April 21, 2012

In Queensland, Labor finished with a meagre seven out of 89 seats at the March 24 election; the worst result of the three states. But the next test for the Labor party is not three years away; it is on April 28 when local government elections are held across the state.

Hardly having had time to lick its wounds, the ALP will be fighting to get a bridge head in Australia’s largest local government, the Brisbane City Council, with a greater population and budget than the state of Tasmania. Its full-time councillors represent wards similar to state members and have almost as much presence in the city and state.

When Premier Campbell Newman retired as lord mayor to make his successful bid to enter state politics, his deputy mayor Graham Quirk took over. The Liberal National Party controls both the lord mayoralty and 15 of the 26 council wards.

With its 10 Brisbane councillors, the ALP has more representatives at City Hall than it does in the state parliament, hence its importance. A Brisbane businessman, Ray Smith, is running for the mayoralty for the ALP at probably the worst possible time and circumstances imaginable for him. Notwithstanding the thrashing handed out to state Labor, it is unlikely the anti-Labor feeling has been totally extinguished in Brisbane.

The Quirk-Smith contest will come down to a well-funded LNP campaign running on its eight-year-old record at City Hall and an ALP pitch based on Smith’s successful skills as a businessman with a new plan arguing for political balance in Queensland. Smith’s biggest problem will be to overcome the toxic Labor brand.

Historically the Brisbane City Council has been the base for the Labor party when it was in the political wilderness. This is particularly true under former lord mayor Clem Jones in the 1960s and 1970s during the Bjelke-Petersen years when the ALP was out of state government and only had three years of the Whitlam government between 1972 and 1975.

With the Labor party likely to be out of state government for a generation and the Gillard government facing defeat next year, the Brisbane City Council election offers the only hope for the Labor party for the foreseeable future. If it fails to win a majority of councillors and loses its bid for the lord mayoralty, Queensland will have wall-to-wall Liberal National party governments with little or no opposition.

On the same day as the local government elections there will be a by-election for the state seat of South Brisbane, vacated by former premier Anna Bligh. Its only relevance is whether the ALP will have to wear the unpleasant tag of the ”six pack” or not.

The LNP is throwing everything it can at the seat to try to drive another nail into the dead Labor carcass but despite becoming marginal at the state election the people of South Brisbane are very unlikely to give Premier Newman another seat to add to his existing 78. The real interest on April 28 will be on the result at City Hall.

In an extraordinary move, Dr Heather Beattie, wife of former Labor premier Peter Beattie, has nominated for the inner Brisbane city ward of Central. The previous Labor candidate for the ward resigned the day after the state election and the defeated member for the local state seat Grace Grace was prevented from running for council because her state poll had not been declared. Dr Beattie, a former professor of nursing, was forced to throw her hat into the ring to try and save Labor from a meltdown amidst the post-state-election shock.

It is a high stake move which has big risks for the ALP. The ward was only just won by Labor at the last council election by a little over 100 votes when popular local councillor David Hinchliffe was the Labor candidate; Hinchliffe is now retiring. The Central ward covers almost the same boundaries as Peter Beattie’s former seat of Brisbane Central, which Labor lost at the recent Queensland election, losing every polling booth.

Courageous as Beattie’s bid is regarded in Labor circles, in the current political climate, Labor may well be defeated in the ward. If so, this would further contribute to Labor’s electoral despair just over a year out from the forthcoming federal election.

If Labor pulled off a miracle and won a majority of wards and the lord mayoralty, its mayoral candidate Smith would go down alongside Campbell Newman in the state’s history as a master politician.

The chances of that are slim but the Brisbane City Council election will again be determining whether the Labor Party in Queensland is a viable political force or not in the state. Hence this should not be regarded as just another council election.

The reality is that, just like Peter Beattie in bygone days, the political fate of Dr Heather Beattie will have national ramifications.

Professor Ross Fitzgerald’s latest book is the co-authored political satire Fools’ Paradise set in a fictitious Mangoland. Canberra Times, April 13, 2012

Labor’s Queensland massacre – where a maxi cab would be more than sufficient to carry what’s left of the entire state party – only brings the daunting challenge ahead into sharper focus.

The Prime Minister needs to push back her own election date to as late as possible next year, to give her the time and space to continue throwing darts at the opposition, hoping she can burst the Tony Abbott bubble that seems set to overwhelm the ALP.

The question now is whether she will be given the time. Already many in the party view her as a liability and mutterings of an alternative are again being canvassed as the only hope of electoral salvation.

The outcome in Queensland has the Coalition at fever pitch. Minority government in Canberra has already frustrated the opposition for 18 months. They cannot only smell victory; many can almost taste it. The remarkable result in the Sunshine State will only reinforce the sense in the Coalition that victory is deservedly theirs.

Waiting another 18 months for the opportunity to put his case to the Australian people will require more stamina than the Opposition Leader, a noted marathoner, has yet displayed. But that race can’t be run successfully without discipline from and by his team, some of whom have a habit of speaking across each others’ portfolios and offering unguarded advice on any range of topics.

The recent troika of speeches by Abbott, his Treasury spokesman Joe Hockey and finance spokesman Andrew Robb demonstrates that senior Liberals are singing from the same song sheet and are determined to put their economic credentials on line.

Summarising the Coalition’s essential economic and fiscal policy, Hockey said: “Our goal is to live within our means and to ease upward pressure on interest rates and the exchange rate.”

It’s interesting to note the growing push within the federal Coalition to gain traction on another of its long-held markers of fiscal performance, a structural budget position.

Following warnings by Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson that “surpluses are likely to remain razor-thin without deliberate efforts to significantly increase revenue or reduce expenditure”, this newspaper editorialised on March 12 that “the bigger challenge is to repair the structural deficit”.

It is little more than a year ago since Andrew Robb somewhat grandiloquently called it “Labor’s dead cat on the table”.

Simply put, the structural budget position is the overall position of the budget, adjusted for the economic cycle. A largely unexplained factor in any Gillard government presentation of the state of its budget is the blow-out of the underlying structural deficit.

In the context of the massive revenue stream from the mining boom, Robb explained that when the boom subsided, “the spending commitments remain, and huge budget deficits and greater debt reappear. In other words, structural deficits result from unwise overspending in the good times.”

In 2010, Treasury officials worked up a comprehensive paper on structural deficits highlighting that once the current forward estimate period concluded and GFC fiscal stimulus was unwound, the federal budget would still be in structural deficit.

It was advice apparently not welcomed by the federal ALP. With the generally sound and hardworking Treasurer, Wayne Swan, determined to report a surplus in 2012-13, the findings, say the opposition, could undermine whatever numbers are forecast in the May budget. A year ago Hockey told the National Press Club: “In government we will commit to publishing estimates of the structural position in the budget papers every year.”

He noted that Chile had used a structural budget position for 12 years and Britain had followed suit in the past two years.

According to the opposition Treasury spokesman, not only were we lagging behind world-best practice in our measurement and assessment of fiscal performance but, should commodity prices and the terms of trade unexpectedly decline, Australia could be very exposed.

“In the current very favourable circumstances of generational highs in the terms of trade and close to full employment,” he said, “Australia should ideally be running very large budget surpluses. This would allow money to be put aside for a rainy day.”

At the forthcoming federal election, trust will be a key factor in the minds of voters. Gillard and senior members of caucus say: “Trust us on our economic record.” They also point to the Coalition’s growing list of promises, which they claim are uncosted and are economically exorbitant.

But trust is a two-edged sword for Labor, and there is little cut-through, with voters still white hot with anger over Gillard’s pre-election no-carbon-tax promise.

While the Treasurer is likely to live up to his promise and deliver a relatively small surplus next month, senior members of the Coalition may well respond with the mantra, “deficits-surpluses: it’s all in the structure “.

One of the main challenges as we approach next year’s federal election is for Labor and the Coalition to sell to the Australian citizenry their own versions of what is the most appropriate overall economic and fiscal direction, as we face what could still be a turbulent economic future.

Given that we now have a presidential style of political leadership, this will almost certainly be decided by the general perception of whether the Labor Prime Minister or the Leader of the Opposition is the stronger and more capable political and economic leader. This decision, in its turn, may well be determined by whether Gillard (or whoever is then PM) or Abbott is thought to be willing and able to look beyond the three-year election cycle.

Ross Fitzgerald’s most recent book is the co-authored political satire Fools’ Paradise, set in a fictitious Mangoland.